Assidragon on 10/11/2016 at 15:32
Our whole society is built on basic goods not being too scarce. Should food get expensive enough, then you have the gradual breakdown of society as people slide into poverty or go unfed.
And agriculture is fragile. If the average temps increased 5C, then our crops would simply stop working. The change in rain/wind patterns, the temperatures... those plants simply wouldn't work. And even if they did, they would have to face a whole slew of fungi/bacteria/other pests they are simply not suited against. We would need to chem the everloving crap out of everything just to keep the yields stable. IF we could keep the yields stable. Granted, people could start using different crops... but there's a reason most people today survive on potato, wheat and rice. Those plants can maintain enough yield to keep people fed. Using anything else as base means either using more land (not really feasible), or getting less for everyone.
Anyway, less and more expensive food. Once that happens, there's little point in wondering about technology; no-one will care about solar panels or internet when they are on the streets, besieging empty shops and government offices. Think of Venezuela, even if that was due to mismanagement.
Now, outright and complete extinction isn't possible just because of that. There are solutions to societal breakdowns - martial law, forced labour, you name it. At that point we're unlikely to have the technological base to affect climate however; geoengineering would be a stretch even right now, and this is with "optimally" functioning logistics behind. Almost everything we have today requires an incredibly complicated logistical chain behind it. Almost everything we use requires multiple steps of processing and rare chemicals/elements; once gears of society begin seizing up, those complicated things will be either gone or prohibitively expensive to use.
For example, how would you fly airplanes if you can't procure jet fuel or spare parts to keep the engines maintained? Heck, take internet. Without a steady supply of parts, how long would we have access to our digital data? Machines fail, and chip manufacturing is a pretty finicky process. Or talk about the fiber connections that form the backbone...
Anyway, groups could make it, but with the reduced access to technology, they would be at the whims of nature. With larger portions of the world unchecked, I don't see why another specie more suited to the new environment couldn't emerge. Granted, there's a lot of IFs in this theory... but if our doom arrives, I can only see it slowly creeping up on us, without most people ever being aware of it until it's too late (and even then blaming the wrong yet more in-the-face factors). I would also like to mention that as far as I care, once our civilization breaks down, I would consider humanity done for. With all the pillaging we have done to this planet, I don't think we would get another shot at getting back to this level of advancement.
So 95% to physical survival, and about 5% to meaningful survival, if you ask me. And the more news I read, the more I think I'm being way too generous there.
tl;dr: totally agree with Abysmal above.
Renzatic on 10/11/2016 at 18:00
One of the things that makes any prediction of human extinction over the course of thousands of years a difficult thing to do is the pure amount of intelligence and processing power available to us allows us to circumvent events that would be the doom of any other species on the planet.
This isn't to say it could never happen, it very well easily could. It's just that, barring a sudden event that wipes all life from the planet, you'd have to present a set of circumstances that consist only of an ever lengthening chain of fail states in the environment to produce odds of our extinction that are greater than 50/50. Whatever it is that'd kill us off, it'd have to first start with a total collapse of civilization, a near complete loss of knowledge, and an environment that slowly and consistently becomes more hostile to our needs over time with nearly no chance for improvement.
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory) Consider the Toba Extinction, and the accompanying Genetic Bottleneck Theory. We've come close to being driven to extinction once before. The Toba event is theorized to have wiped out almost all of the Homo genus, save for we Sapiens, which were reduced to a population of around 50,000-100,000 members. If it's true, we survived a near total ecological disaster that all but decimated our food supplies in our most primitive state.
The bar for our extinction is an incredibly high one.
faetal on 10/11/2016 at 18:06
It is a high bar, yes. No one has refuted that. Don't forget that our intelligence is costly. Read up on gluconeogenesis during starvation metabolism. Brain won't settle for less than the good stuff when the going gets tough.
Renzatic on 10/11/2016 at 18:12
True, though we were sporting about the same hardware ~75,000 years ago as we are today, and even then, a near complete decimation of our ecosphere wasn't quite enough to wipe us out.
faetal on 10/11/2016 at 18:15
There has been no mass extinction event from warming within the last 75k years. Near complete decimation of our ecosphere? When?
Assidragon on 10/11/2016 at 18:17
Quote Posted by Renzatic
One of the things that makes any prediction of human extinction over the course of thousands of years a difficult thing to do is the pure amount of intelligence and processing power available to us allows us to circumvent events that would be the doom of any other species on the planet.
People really overestimate the limitations of this ability, though. Just because we can think in abstract concepts and plan ahead, it doesn't stop us from pulling an Easter Island every now and then. We've made a really astounding number of cockups, and so far the only luck was that Earth has enough resources for the disasters to be mitigated. Once we reach the bottom of that barrel though...
Hell, few other species on the planet had ever thought "(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign) let's kill all the sparrows because those birds suck", then see millions of them die in a locust-induced famine because... surprise, all those birds were dead and not eating insects. They could get them re-imported from another continent, but again, this was only possible because there were reserves to tap into (namely, sparrows in another continent).
Let's face it, humanity does an astounding number of stupid decisions that seriously damages the environment. And the amount of damage said environment can absorb is rapidly shrinking.
Quote Posted by Renzatic
This isn't to say it could never happen, it very well easily could. It's just that, barring a sudden event that wipes all life from the planet, you'd have to present a set of circumstances that consist only of an ever lengthening chain of fail states in the environment to produce odds of our extinction that are greater than 50/50. Whatever it is that'd kill us off, it'd have to first start with a total collapse of civilization, a near complete loss of knowledge, and an environment that slowly and consistently becomes more hostile to our needs over time with nearly no chance for improvement.
The thing is, you don't need a lot of factors coincide to do that. Merely the environment becoming hostile will be sufficient. Again, modern agriculture is the founding stone of our soceity. Take that away, and the whole thing caves in on itself. Yes, that wouldn't cause an extinction in itself, but it'd take away the majority of what had made us succesful. After that, our chances are much "fairer", so to say.
And this is not accounting for the possible side-effects of a societal collapse, like an outright nuclear war over the last resources of the planet. MAD hardly applies once you realise you may die to thirst/hunger anyway.
faetal on 10/11/2016 at 18:20
From what I can gather from the current state of this topic - everyone agrees that it's unlikely humans will go extinct after a ME event, however some people agree it is possible, but there is a lot of scepticism over how it might happen.
Starker on 10/11/2016 at 18:36
I don't think anyone here thinks that it's impossible.
I personally think that a complete loss of knowledge is unlikely even by the time we start starving to death en masse. Even thousands of years ago we had a small number of people who could read and write when people in entire regions could be wiped out by successive famines and plagues. Such people will almost certainly be protected and fed by ruling elites.
faetal on 10/11/2016 at 18:59
I think using our history as a template for a hypothetical post ME event future is not useful.
If we are fighting for basic survival, then maintaining our knowledge may not be practical or possible.
The modern scientific method and structured archiving of knowledge is only really a few hundred years old and without the internet and distributed archives, suddenly knowledge resides on paper, which degrades over time (1000 years will easily do it) and people, which tend to die.
I can easily imagine it happening under harsh enough circumstances. If you can't, why not?
faetal on 10/11/2016 at 19:02
To get an idea of how environmental factors can affect things like this, compare two regions on earth today which have abundance and scarcity and their relative levels of tech development and knowledge transfer.
Now apply that to a post ME event in which scarcity is the default human state (remembering that we're talking about the harsh scenario, not one where everything except blind pigs and pineapple fields dies out).
