Daily Archives: 2010/06/30 09:16 am

Australian scientist sez: Humans will be extinct in 100 years. I sez: that long?

unknownskywalker:

Eminent Australian scientist Professor Frank Fenner predicts Homo sapiens will not be able to survive the population explosion and “unbridled consumption,” and will become extinct, perhaps within 100 years, along with many other species.

He said he believes the situation is irreversible, and it is too late because the effects we have had on Earth since industrialization (a period now known to scientists unofficially as the Anthropocene) rivals any effects of ice ages or comet impacts.

Fenner said that climate change is only at its beginning, but is likely to be the cause of our extinction. “We’ll undergo the same fate as the people on Easter Island,” he said. More people means fewer resources, and Fenner predicts “there will be a lot more wars over food.”

Easter Island is famous for its massive stone statues. Polynesian people settled there, around the middle of the first millennium AD. As the population grew the forests were wiped out and all the tree animals became extinct, both with devastating consequences. After about 1600 the civilization began to collapse, and had virtually disappeared by the mid-19th century. Evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond said the parallels between what happened on Easter Island and what is occurring today on the planet as a whole are “chillingly obvious.”

While many scientists are also pessimistic, others are more optimistic. Among the latter is a colleague of Professor Fenner, retired professor Stephen Boyden, who said he still hopes awareness of the problems will rise and the required revolutionary changes will be made to achieve ecological sustainability. “While there’s a glimmer of hope, it’s worth working to solve the problem. We have the scientific knowledge to do it but we don’t have the political will,” Boyden said.

Source: PhysOrg.com

Haven’t some people been saying we’re going to go extinct since the beginning of time?

That’s not to say I disagree with Frenner—I can definitely see us killing ourselves off  but then again, my specialty is writing science fiction—so I can imagine a lot of things happening.