This Disaster Has A 1.5% Chance Of Decimating Human Race

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Imagine you lived in one of the great Mayan cities during its heyday, when food was plentiful and it seemed like the good times were there to stay. And then imagine that same city empty, a ghost town wrapped in the vines of the jungle that has enveloped it. Or what about the fall of the mighty Khmer empire and the ancient city of Angkor, said to be the largest pre-industrial city on earth. Imagine what its demise would have looked like. Civilizations have fallen, entire cities emptied of their people, completely abandoned. Sometimes this was partly due to climate changes, catastrophic agricultural practices, war with neighbors and sometimes a bit of all those things. But what about the entire human race? Could the Earth itself become a giant ghost town full of monuments and buildings reclaimed by nature? Our question today is not an easy one to answer. You don’t have to try too hard to find articles written by serious scientists that tell us we are on the verge of collapse due to forthcoming catastrophic changes in the environment. But even if we imagine the worst, some humans will likely pull through and keep the race going. On top of that, there are people whose views are more in line with a sudden oncoming doomsday, and other people that are far more optimistic even though they do believe we are heading into hard times. Let’s now have a look at what some of those people are saying. It won’t be news to you that a lot of people are saying that humans have caused a great depletion of the world’s natural resources, or what the Guardian called just recently the “Earth’s natural life-support systems.” This was taken from a United Nations report compiled over three years and released in 2019 that warned us that “nature is being destroyed at a rate tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past 10 million years.” That report said destruction of our eco-systems has led to the loss of countless species and some about to become extinct. We have to act now, said that report, or there will be trouble. This was the conclusion: “The health of the ecosystems on which we and other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.” It didn’t, however, tell us the human race will end, only that things will get tough, and soon. It’s hard to feel afraid of imminent collapse as you sit alone with a Cappuccino and a streamed song playing in the background, the sun out, the birds singing, the wind rustling the leaves outside your window, but as Jared Diamond points out in his book, Collapse, the reason why civilizations fell was often because they didn’t read the writing on the wall. Imagine one day an Easter Islander saying to his buddy, so it looks like we’ve cut down all the trees, eroded the soil, and eaten all the animals…what now? According to Diamond, some of them ended up eating each other! Live Science, citing a paper written by Australian academics, has one of the bleakest outlooks and says that global warming could actually end the human race as we know it by 2050. That paper issued the stark warning that the warming of the globe could soon cause a “near- to mid-term existential threat to human civilization.” It claimed that while climate scientists are on the right track with regards to taking global warming seriously, most have been too reserved in telling the public just how bad it is. They said just a small rise in average temperature would have worse consequences than first thought. Because some governments have failed to take climate change seriously, by 2050 the temperature could rise by 5.4 F (3 C). When this happens the ice sheets go, the rainforests dry up, there is massive drought as well as floods and this creates a feedback loop that just makes things worse and worse. “Thirty-five percent of the global land area, and 55 percent of the global population, are subject to more than 20 days a year of lethal heat conditions, beyond the threshold of human survivability” the authors wrote, so you can probably forget about your 2050 iced-Cappuccino. It said extreme weather and eco-system collapse would kill off much of the world’s population quickly, but no doubt the wealthy could survive for a while. Nonetheless, with a world in chaos the paper tells us that it will soon mean “the end of human global civilization as we know it.” That’s probably not the best thing you’ve heard when watching our shows, but it’s likely not something you have ignored. As people presently take to the streets around the world shouting about global warming, a poll in the UK this year revealed that more than half of adults in that country believe global warming could end the human race soon. Polls aren’t always an accurate representation of reality due to who’s been polled and how many people ticked the box, but it’s clear that a lot of Brits feel for one reason or another that we are on the verge of collapse. NASA writes that not believing in climate change is about as foolhardy as you can get and its own website provides lots of easy-to-understand evidence of things heating up. The big picture, says NASA, is that humans have accelerated global warming due to our habits and ignorance, and most extreme events are yet to come. The world has experienced lots of periods of climate change that have led to catastrophe in the past, but the question is, is just how bad will the next few decades get and can we intervene and slow down global warming. You could fill a library with the research on this topic and read articles about imminent catastrophe on the internet for the next year, and we just cannot provide you with every argument and hypothesis. All we can say is that there are experts out there who believe environmental devastation and human collapse is coming. There are of course people that will tell you that global warming is a conspiracy theory either to promote ideology to gain power or for financial gain, or maybe they’ll tell you scientists just want more funding. But if you look at the consensus of the scientific community from all over the globe you’ll see the experts almost totally agree that humans have caused potentially life-threatening global warming. We should mention the academic and author Jared Diamond again, who has spent a considerable amount of time in his life studying environmental problems and the collapse of societies. In a very recent interview he said, “Today, the risk that we’re facing is not of societies collapsing one by one, but because of globalization, the risk we are facing is of the collapse of the whole world. He added, “I would estimate the chances are about 49 percent that the world as we know it will collapse by about 2050.” If we don’t change the way we live, he said, the game could soon be over for many people. So, this is the big issue regarding the end of the human race, but there is more depressing news , because even if we somehow fix climate change, there’s still a number of other ways that human civilization could be destroyed. This comes from left field, and perhaps shouldn’t be you foremost concern when it comes to the death of everyone, but the takeover of artificial intelligence is not just something out of science fiction, but something leading scientists have talked about. Artificial intelligence is everywhere, so let’s call the dangerous thing super artificial intelligence. The author Yuval Noah Harari has said that AI doesn’t need to have consciousness to become dangerous. How could we program consciousness anyway when we don’t properly understand it? For him, AI will result in what he calls a “useless class” of people. Many humans won’t have a place in the world, but this won’t end the race. It may look something like a dystopian sci-fi movie, though. Then we have the words of one of the world’s most renowned scientists, Stephen Hawking, who once said, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate.” As we said, such sentiments aren’t only talked about by people with far out imaginations. Nick Bostrom, one of the leading experts in the field of AI currently working at Oxford university, has said that machines pose a bigger threat to mankind than global warming. He believes that before we know it there will be an “intelligence explosion” and machines will design machines and we will lose control. He said such superintelligence will perhaps start by controlling financial markets, but a worse case scenario is perhaps AI hacking weapons after deciding that a species that might destroy the planet does not use sound logic, so it must go. Other experts see such views as being over the top, but the rise of AI is taken seriously by tech leaders and that’s why ethics committees have been formed. Tech wizard Elon Musk is certainly taking a possible AI-apocalypse seriously, saying in an interview, “With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. You know all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he’s like, yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon? Doesn’t work out.” So, there’s another end to the human race. Different dates have been offered up as to when artificial intelligence will get super-intelligent, but most of the doomsday crowd have said sometime between 2030 and 2050. On the bright side, maybe this intelligence could save the planet. 2050, though, is certainly starting to sound like a bad year. Many of our viewers will be having their mid-life crisis about that time, so let’s hope things won’t be as bad as some people say. But let’s say the computers don’t enslave us by 2050, there’s also the chance that Earth will be hit by an asteroid at some point that causes massive damage. It’s happened in the past and it will happen again, it’s just a matter of time. The European Space Agency said that an asteroid could hit the Earth this Fall, but the good news is it isn’t anywhere near as big as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs and there is only a 1-in-7,299 chance of it hitting us. The bad news, according to the space agency, is that it could flatten an area larger than London. According to Live Science, astronomers only know about a small fraction of asteroids moving about the universe so something could always just pop up. NASA watches over potentially hazardous asteroids all the time, but also says, “given the current incompleteness of the Near Earth Object catalogue, an unpredicted impact – such as the Chelyabinsk event – could occur at any time.” The Chelyabinsk event being a meteor explosion over Russia in 2013 that we had no idea about prior to it entering the atmosphere. NASA also adds that no known weapon could stop something like this from hitting Earth. It’s an outside chance, but an asteroid impact that destroys human life could certainly happen. We can’t give you a timeframe for this now, but when or if the time comes you will know. Then there’s the threat of nuclear war, but we’ve managed to avoid it to this point and we don’t think it will happen. We might have some bad habits, but mindlessly destroying each other en-masse to the point of it being global suicide just doesn’t make sense with the concept of mutually assured destruction. We might be ignorant and selfish at times, but most experts think we are not that crazy. Let’s hope they’re right. The World Health Organization has put together a list of catastrophes that could wipe out a chunk of people, but it wouldn’t be all people. It’s said about 75,000 years ago a massive super-volcanic eruption killed off a lot of early humans, but the WHO gives just a 0.001 percent chance of that happening again anytime soon. But if one should go off the ash could block out the sunlight and that would lead to summer going missing, which would reduce farm yields and cause mass starvation. A global pandemic the WHO gives a higher chance of happening at 1.5 percent, but again, it wouldn’t wipe out everyone. Let’s remember, though, that the 1918 Spanish Flu is thought to have killed around 50 million people or roughly 3% of the world’s population at the time. But what if some new kind of super virus came along, is that possible? Well, this is what Kevin Olival, a disease ecologist from the EcoHealth Alliance, told the BBC in 2018, “I think the chances that the next pandemic will be caused by a novel virus are quite good.” In fact, many scientists have said they don’t rule out the possibility of new disease causing havoc on the planet. Still, enjoy your coffee, because it’s unlikely you will be felled by a super virus of unknown origin any time soon. We’d love to know what you guys think about all of this, so please tell us in the comments. Also, be sure to check out our other episode Could the Black Death Happen Again? Thanks for watching, and as always, don't forget to like, share and subscribe. See you next time.
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Channel: The Infographics Show
Views: 576,606
Rating: 4.8071027 out of 5
Keywords: the infographics show, disaster, natural disaster, human race, science, educational, volcano, earthquake, asteroid, climate change, global warming, NASA, Civilization, humanity, end of the world, human extinction, history, animated history, animaton, animated, cartoon
Id: QMFPtCSekxM
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Length: 11min 10sec (670 seconds)
Published: Fri Aug 09 2019
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