The scientific consensus is that there is a relatively low risk of near-term human extinction due to natural causes. The likelihood of human extinction through humankind's own activities, however, is a current area of research and debate.
But even without such dramatic doomsday scenarios, astronomical forces will eventually render the planet uninhabitable. Somewhere between 1.75 billion and 3.25 billion years from now, Earth will travel out of the solar system's habitable zone and into the "hot zone," new research indicates.
“Using only the information that Homo sapiens has existed at least 200,000 years, we conclude that the probability that humanity goes extinct from natural causes in any given year is almost guaranteed to be less than one in 14,000, and likely to be less than one in 87,000,” the researchers write in Scientific Reports.
New genetic findings suggest that early humans living about one million years ago were extremely close to extinction. The genetic evidence suggests that the effective population—an indicator of genetic diversity—of early human species back then, including Homo erectus, H.
In 100 years, many species could go extinct or be highly endangered. Krill, blue whales, hawksbill turtles, and ringed seals, among others, are at risk of extinction in the next century as their food and habitats disappear. Visit Business Insider's home page for more stories.
Since 1880, average global temperatures have increased by about 1 degrees Celsius (1.7° degrees Fahrenheit). Global temperature is projected to warm by about 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7° degrees Fahrenheit) by 2050 and 2-4 degrees Celsius (3.6-7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100.
For the latter, some of the many possible contributors include climate change, global nuclear annihilation, biological warfare, and ecological collapse. Other scenarios center on emerging technologies, such as advanced artificial intelligence, biotechnology, or self-replicating nanobots.
The controversial Toba catastrophe theory, presented in the late 1990s to early 2000s, suggested that a bottleneck of the human population occurred approximately 75,000 years ago, proposing that the human population was reduced to perhaps 10,000–30,000 individuals when the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia erupted and ...
Humans have certainly had a profound effect on their environment, but our current claim to dominance is based on criteria that we have chosen ourselves. Ants outnumber us, trees outlive us, fungi outweigh us. Bacteria win on all of these counts at once.
But even if that common ancestor still existed, the fact that evolution is the result of both random mutation and a process of natural selection imposed by environmental conditions, means it's highly unlikely that it would ever retrace its steps in quite the same way.
Genetic studies have demonstrated that humans are still evolving. To investigate which genes are undergoing natural selection, researchers looked into the data produced by the International HapMap Project and the 1000 Genomes Project.
Nine human species walked the Earth 300,000 years ago. Now there is just one.
So, will humans survive the next hundred years? Yes, definitely. But we will transition to a very new way of living and it won't be by our own choice or design. The collapse of our modern way of life will see us forced to change.
Unless we modify our collective behaviour and reduce our ecological footprint, it is possible that our activities will also lead to our own extinction. However, life on Earth would continue without us and biodiversity would return.
We will likely live longer and become taller, as well as more lightly built. We'll probably be less aggressive and more agreeable, but have smaller brains. A bit like a golden retriever, we'll be friendly and jolly, but maybe not that interesting. At least, that's one possible future.
The current world population (as of March of 2022) is estimated at 7.9 billion. Therefore, 1% of the world population would be about 79 million people.
With a world population at approximately 7.8 billion, one percent would be about 78 million. 78 million people is one percent of the total global population of 7.8 billion.
A recent book from Cambridge University economist Sir Partha Dasgupta develops a theoretically rigorous approach to this perennial question, finding that an optimal human population might range from 500 million to 5 billion.
In the last half-billion years, life on Earth has been nearly wiped out five times—by such things as climate change, an intense ice age, volcanoes, and that space rock that smashed into the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago, obliterating the dinosaurs and a bunch of other species.
Spread the word that the crisis is real. Reduce your carbon footprint. Support efforts to educate women in developing nations in order to slow population growth. Buy products from companies that limit deforestation by using sustainably produced palm oil, a major ingredient in food, cosmetics and soap.
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In a study from 2019, researchers found that cities in North America by the year 2080 will basically feel like they're about 500 miles (800 km) away from where they currently are – in terms of the drastic changes that are taking place in their climate.
Increases in average global temperatures are expected to be within the range of 0.5°F to 8.6°F by 2100, with a likely increase of at least 2.7°F for all scenarios except the one representing the most aggressive mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions.