SS: Obliteration of the entire human species is now a distinct possibility, according to the latest medical report card on our state of health worldwide.
A major new Lancet commission is the first international scientific study to project, based on current data, the likelihood of a human wipeout within the present century. Others, so far, have mainly treated it as a dangerous risk, though many scientists had sounded personal warnings based on their own research.
The threats referred to by the Lancet Commission include nuclear war, malicious use of AI and biological weapons, pandemics, obesity, child malnutrition, antimicrobial resistance, conflict, inequality, bad education and cuts to international health aid.
Absolutely hilarious considering it's the gravest and the most imminent threat and almost everything mentioned here is a direct consequence of anthropogenic climate change.
I think, they look at risks of total extinction of humanity. While climate change could wipe us all out and many other risks listed are derivative, humanity is unlikely to go extinct entirely from climate change before 2100, compared to the consequences of a global nuclear war, for example.
I disagree. Stupidity and greed (hyper consumption) are also root causes. Income inequality is underrated as a destabilizer and will lead to unrest, hunger and population movement like climate change - not on the same scale necessarily, but significant and on a different time scale.
Itâs the poly crisis that we should be worried about. People without work moving i n mass because there is no work and the water ran outâŚ
Stupidity and greed (hyper consumption) are also root causes.
If we're going there then no. It IS the root cause of climate change. No stupidity and greed unchecked, no climate change. Then all the rest follow in whatever order.
Also, lol for the AI. You listen to those techbroes monsters and it's "yeah, we're likely all gonna die in 6 month but if don't build it, CHINA will so i'm building the "let's all die machine" myself".
MOTHERFUCKER THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS, THAT'S NOT HOW THE WORLD WORKS AT ALL.
Diplomacy ? Nope, the word don't exist, never has, the concept is absolutely made up. We didn't manage to survive anything during the cold war using it.
The dudes never opened a single history book in their life, weren't taught anything but to code and watch terminator so now their persuaded by their own bullshit. It's exhausting.
What do you disagree with? The cause is human induced climate change? What do you think this means? Climate change is because of stupidity and greed, so I'm failing to see what you disagree with.
The initially suppressed report - that is out now in the public domain - prepared by the British intelligence services explicitly links the threat of nuclear war to ecosystem collapse brought about by human induced climate change.
Honestly obesity certainly doesn't help anything. Having a lazy, out of shape populace who doesn't know anything about nutrition is only going to accelerate deaths when other conditions make life difficult
Oh I agree I don't think it's an extinction level threat lol, but it's going to accelerate the real threats by a million. We're gonna send our Gravy Seals to fight the water wars? We're gonna drag our fat ass parents and grandparents into the woods to survive off the land? Lol
Go look at the sea surface anomaly in zone 3.4 and tell me that's a "future centuries" problem. It's demonstrably going to look a whole lot like the apocalypse in South America. Shit, the Langtang Lirung glacier collapse probably felt pretty biblical as it annihilated over 7,000 structures, but I guess they're just living in the future centuries we keep hearing about.
They also forgot about microplastics in our bodies, their effects being difficult to measure as there isn't any control group free from them on the planet anymore.
My mom is a Geologist. I sent her a book about climate change for her birthday. She told me that it wasn't great because she's not going to be impacted
YESTERDAY a report came out saying the Thwaits glacier is literally cooking 2 times more than we thought. We are fucked - within the average redditors lifespan.
I wonder how the world will be if extinction becomes a for sure thing. Will it cause people to act more violently or consume even more (because they have nothing to lose)? Every year the PPM of carbon dioxide goes up, up, up and itâs hard to imagine it going down.
You're witnessing it. It's been like this since we gained consciousness. Some people will cope with sublimation, religion or denial. There is no question that humans will become extinct.
Even without climate change and warfare, the sheer mechanism of evolution means what we are today will cease to be at some point and a different us will exist.
That will continue for a billion or so years until the sun brings the final curtain down on all life on this planet.
When you think about it, even if life were to survive our actions, it's unlikely another species like us will have the time to emerge on this planet. Our deeds and our stories will slip into the very cosmic night that we came from.
Yep. And we are reaching the only outcome of the crafting simulation that we live in that is possible. This was all predetermined from the start. Some think tank ran some simulation of humanity(I don't know by what peramiters) 1 million times, on the planet earth from the dawn of time and it always gets us to this point. Agriculture, fossil fuels, synthetics, computers.
I was wondering recently at what point we could have stopped in development and not destroyed the earth? And how that would have happened and what life for humans would have been like forever more? Before oil? Before coal? Before animal domestication? Before any kind of agriculture? It would mean our civilization would never have existed. So weird to think about. The only way this could have not happened would be if humans were actually a whole lot smarter, smart enough to actually care about far off generations and know for sure that they were dooming them and not just a few âweirdosâ nobody would listen to, but a majority of people. Even now, when itâs already too late, we are still those weirdos, not the majority.
it seems that you read The Last Messiah by Peter Wessel Zapffe,
if not I suggest that you and everyone that sees my comment to read it, it's a short very potent philosophical essay on how humans deal with the truth of life; of its purposelessness and our mortality.
I mean. I kinda' winged this sentence but what I meant was that since we became self aware, basically.
But... the gradual process by which early hominins transitioned from acting purely on basic instinct to developing complex self-awareness, symbolic thought, and abstract reasoning.
This shift is widely known as the Cognitive Revolution, which peaked roughly 70,000 years ago in Homo sapiens, though its evolutionary roots stretch back millions of years.
And what I was alluding to is that EVERYTHING is uncertain. We've realized that since day one which is why we have all of these varying ontological outlooks. One thing is certain though, our personal stay here is finite, we don't know what happens afterwards and it is reasonable to assume that human kind will one day disappear.
Kinda' abstract and existential but extinction is a sure thing for the individual so it bleeds over into everything else like into the collective as well.
Hope I explained what I was trying to say decently enough.
Even magpies have self awareness (as we see it). Dolphins have self awareness. All of the other great apes have self awareness. Why wouldn't early human ancestors have it from the very start?
The idea that any animal acts only on pure instinct is so cartesian, and it's been shown to be false repeatedly over the past three to four decades. It was actually proven false earlier by a few scientists, like Jane Goodall, but that proof has only become more mainstream science since about the 1980s. It has really been upended since the 1990s.
I think the biological world is far more conscious and far more intelligent than western anthropocentrism has given it credit for. Not only do other animals "reason," have real cultures, deep devotion to each other, compassion, and empathy, chimpanzees have real language and dogs understand symbols. I'm not convinced that humans are anywhere near as "reasoning" and unique as we've held since Christianity put forth that we're at the top of the biological pinnacle, made in gawd's image, and special among all creatures that exist. I don't deny our exceptional talents, but when it comes to living creatures acting only on pure instinct, that is a failed idea. Many people who lived and worked closely with animals never believed it.
It's so unintelligent not to be able to see the intelligence at work in the biological world. But it was standard in science for more than three hundred years. It's dumbfounding. That shows you how little original thought a lot of people, at least in this culture, have. It explains why the most we get out of our best science these days regarding Nature as a whole is "faster than expected."
I clarified my earlier comment, which rambled, because my main point was inquiring the identification of which hominins ever acted purely on animal instinct. How is it possible that animals like ravens (2 - 3 million years) and dolphins (10 million years) have been around in their present form with the cognitive abilities described, but early hominins did not have such abilities?
Or, are you saying that all early hominins had these cognitive abilities - self awareness, reasoning, and understanding symbols - but their immediate predecessor(s) did not?
As far as human behavior changing, I agree. This is it. What you see is what you get. I wish it was up to self awareness, reason, and the ability to understand symbols. I suspect the weakness is emotional, however, not cognitive. While modern science recognizes sentience and cognition as intertwined in humans, they are separate functions of human internal experience.
I'm not sure how "early hominins transitioned from acting purely on basic instinct to developing complex self-awareness, symbolic thought, and abstract reasoning" when chimpanzees have been around for 500,000 years, and they have "complex" self awareness, abstract reasoning, and understand symbols.Â
Which hominins do you think acted purely on basic instinct?
The whole "behavior isn't going to change" works both ways. If plenty of other animals have those exact abilities, like ravens and African grey parrots, Australopithecus had them also.
I don't know what "complex" self awareness is. Not to mention that all thought and reasoning are "abstract."
Ok but the point they were making that you were replying to is whether people will act more violently or consume even more because they have nothing to lose. Donât think thatâs been happening since we developed abstract reasoning.
My point was people are just doing what they do because the end is always near and that's how people behave by default. Nothing would get worse and people wouldn't consume more or be more violent unless we were on a diffinative at end date and I'm kind of different about that unless it was sine 20 year thing where stockpiling resources to ensure living in comfort until the day comes congress into play.
But thinking about the future and not caring are what got us here in the first place and honestly it's the only physical conclusion that become of humanity. We live in a "crafting simulator" essentially and this outcome was inevitable since the day we were cuddling in caves and fires.
wood>stone>pottery>steel>oil>electricity>rubber/plastics/synthetics>computers>planet fucked up = game over.
There is no way humanity takes on another trajectory with the building blocks we had to build with.
The night the CD in the atmosphere, the lower the nutritional value of vegetables and brain development will decrease in utero. Just two things off the top of my head.
Under nourished, and lower IQ will be the future trend
The pinnacle was the 2022 heatwave, if there are historians around to historize that will be remembered as the first moment of the downfall of what we know as contemporary humanity. At least that's what I think, I certainly felt that way when I was at the same state park that same time of the previous year. I was totally acclimated to what Tennessee considers "hot" in 2021 because I spent the previous 22 years living in Florida, but I heard everyone who lived there moaning about how hot it was. The heat of 22' was absolutely oppressive. Previously alive wooded areas of the park were alive with birds making noise and crickets trying to fuck; 2022 was dead silent, the only noise was me realizing that a tick tried to crawl into me arse.
instructions unclear, we blamed it on the removal of sulfur in maritime commerce vessels (still a good thing, still contributed to warming, but a convenient excuse was just what humanity needed, like a fking drug addict living paycheck to paycheck; can't stop taking the drugs because he needs his job.)
I wouldn't say it contributed to warming, it was masking the warming that was already present.
Kinda like plopping a couple of ice cubes into your drink; it'll give temporary reprieve from the warmth in the air heating your drink but once fully melted that regression to the mean will happen.
Exactly this, CEOs donât plan long-term but for fast gains, politicians only plan 4 years or so into the future, and so on. Itâs evident that the powers that be donât expect shit to last so they want everything they can get as soon as possible.
In a moment of unusual honesty, while feeling frustrated, Trump said,âArghh, weâre all going to die anyway. â
They know. My part of Toronto had a humidex of 29 yesterday, smashing the record for that day by several degrees. đŽđŽđŽ
Ever play Majoras Mask? When the whole population knows the world will come to an end in 3 days, everyone reacts differently. Some flee immediately, seeking shelter in vain. Some stay and try to keep going as if nothing is wrong at all. Some slink away and cry. Some just get hammered.
I donât mean the general public â I mean the titans of industry. The comment above mine was about profits. The extremely powerful have been profiting in reaction to knowing the truth about the climate since, in my view, about 1972. This led to the Reagan Era, IMO.
Coincidentally â but not really, if you kind of get the Jungian nature of this all â Bowieâs âFive Yearsâ came out in 1972.
I would put the year of 'knowing' at 1965 (earlier could also be argued).
"The Mauna Loa measurements, begun in 1958, showed a clear annual cycle. The growth of plants in the northern spring and summer reduces the level of carbon dioxide; the decay in autumn and winter increases it. But there was also a clear rising trend year on year. By the 1960s the measurements provided the first unequivocal evidence that excess carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels was building up in the atmosphere. In 1965 a report headed up by Revelle outlined for President Lyndon Johnson the threat of rising carbon dioxide and its potential climate impactsâŚ"
Yeah, I think human extinction is often a bit of a red herring when talking climate change. Societal collapse is a much more immediate and likely threat than human life completely dying out. A loss of 99.5% of the global population still leaves more people than existed during the stone age. Whatever bleak future awaits life on this planet, I imagine some humans somewhere will claw on to existence for quite some time.
Yeah, they (along with many others) seem to have the mistaken impression that property rights will survive the collapse of society instead of acting like their vast wealth entirely depends on a functioning government to defend it.
Remember when The Workers Handbook said human population will be below 2 billion by 2050 and extinct by the end of the century? The guy could be right on the money.
Since becoming collapse aware I figured near term human extinction should be in the conversation these days but then again the mainstream conversation is still stuck in soft denial over climate change.
The Workers Handbook was what made me collapse aware almost a whole year ago now. I shared a post about it in here or maybe collapse support (deleted now I think) and I got told by a bunch of people that he was over-exaggerating and it won't be that bad. But I had a feeling he wasn't far off being correct right from the first time I read it and I've watched things get progressively worse and worse at a faster rate over the course of the year and its been terrifying quite frankly.
Since becoming collapse aware I figured near term human extinction should be in the conversation these days but then again the mainstream conversation is still stuck in soft denial over climate change.
Once human extinction takes its seat at a non existent table for the mainstream conversations to happen, it's going to be too late.
Ya think the lancet commission would have better jargon and possibly use more realistic possibilities ie loss of gebtic diversity the drop in sperm count microplastics & planetary degradation, famine not âbad education, conflict, and inequalityâ sound more like a political campaign promise than anything scientific
Humans are already going extinct. Even if all the factors mentioned by the Lancet Commission didn't exist, human being would still go extinct. The Commission have left out the population decline which is happening; it is irreversible and will eventually lead to the humans going out with a whimper.
the ecological destruction has become so dire that the effects cannot be reversed even if humans disappeared today. The consequences are that a whole lot of life will die and go extinct, and this includes humans.
Hmm, but it might be possible that after a population decline that it will grow again, even with less resources available. I guess OP had another reason in mind, though.
One of the most important reasons of population decline is birth control and women's rights. The actual boom of backwards-conservative politics could easily reverse that trend. Also, when kids mortality goes up because of poverty, birthrates will climb again. I can't see the irreversibility. Live will get harder, but not impossible for a while.
My best guess is that obese people just contribute to the problem, but don't cause it entirely.
-they eat more food
-the struggle to do the same workload as a non obese person
-they are less capable of helping others because they get tired quicker.
-more likely to be dependent on the state
-more likely to need expensive healthcare
All of these issues are problems. Imagine if everyone is obese and a forest fire happens....
The only people getting pregnant around me now are people who should have been warned by doctors about the dangers of carrying while severely overweight or obese đ
Can someone explain to me how ai can wipe out humanity before 2100? I genuinely don't understand this recent fear of ai as a threat human existence, and not the wealth extraction tool for billionaires it currently is.
AI being used to create antibiotic resistance pandemics, either by governments or hackers, isn't faux hype. It's as dangerous as letting AI control nuclear systems.
If you think this wonât break society via mass layoffs and job automation the likes of which the world has never seen then you are naive. Thatâs more dangerous than anything.
Morning! Im not an MM engineer but have a lot of experience testing integrating AI tech and rolling it out for a very large company. This is why itâs a big treat. It can do most aspects of work better then people. In the year Iâve been using it. Itâs gone from âehhh, waste of time. Iâm just correcting everythingâ to âholy shit, I just made it scrape my teams conversation, validate my bs convo with a coworkers entire data assumptions and compare those against leading experts opinions, where those differ change my info. Sum it up, put it in a 2 page white paper for funding request, email it to the blank team, then build me out 3 cliff notes to share. 1 for team members, one for my boss, and one for a change management team. Then build out a power point no more then 5 slidesâ and it will execute that 10/10. Maybe 9/10 but it depends heavily on what models your company can afford. I literally asked it to build me an iPhone app that does âblankâ and can do âblankâ for work and it did it in 10 min.
it will lead to massive job layoffs everywhere in every industry. All call centers, all fast food order takes, almost all coding roles, teaching, management, hr, like literally think of a non-manual role and AI will take it over in the next few years.
we canât trust our eyes. For all of human history we have been able to say I saw blank. That was enough to make it true. Thatâs gone now and people donât realize. Ai video generation will be so good within the next year thatâs itâs indistinguishable from reality. We live in a work where that will be weaponized by all political parties, police, really anyone. Imagine a neighbor doesnât like you and makes a fake video of you vandalizing something and there is zero way to prove it was or was not you. Couple this will mass AI surveillance.
zero privacy period. Ai is ingesting EVERYTHING. There will be a day in all our life times when you will look a person up and see everything we have ever done, posted, or google searched. Like your entire life will just be scraped and stacked against you.
it will be integrated into every weapons system, flight controls, food plant operations, hospital diagnoses, medical advice, parenting advice, schooling, and politics to name a few. It will leave a wake of unemployed bodies which will collapse society. We have no way to stop it.
The main issue is between robotics and AI 75% of all high paying roles will cease to exist in the next 20 years. These roles are not creating equal roles to backfill those gaps and most of what AI can do replaces coders, designers, and most under educated.
TLDR: AI will lead to job cuts and unemployment the likes of which the world has never seen. No one will trust anything they see with their eyes and this will be manipulated and weaponized to push politics or lie and start massive wars/unrest. Economies will collapse along with education(see current middle school testing results). This will lead to war, famine, and rapid climate change which fuels everything above. Itâs not going to be skynet and terminators. Itâs going to be presidents posting fake videos of white people being beaten by immigrants with claims of it being real and no way to prove it fueling massive protests etc. just think of what living in a world where you canât trust your eyes and everyone is trying to create chaos then consider the average intelligence of the people you interact with daily. We are Fâed
I find it hard to believe that humans wouldnât just pull the plug on the electrical grid, or bomb the hell out of every data centre or whatever, if AI really became a threat to humanity.
Exactly - they have pretty obvious off switches. I'm not saying they can't wreck the fuck out of society before someone pulls said plug, but extinction? That word has more weight than most people give it.
Exactly. Humans survived thousands of years without electricity, we will again.
Edited to say, obviously there wonât be 9 billion of us, and only the strongest will survive, but we wonât go extinct.
I find the combination of AI and drones, both being accessible and widespread, is terrifying. My intuition is that it's a question of time before a large-scale drone attack on civilians happens. What happens after that? Retaliation? Im afraid it will never stop. No more outdoor public gatherings. Horror.
I think one catastrophic use of AI or trusting AI with important military goals could easily cause more destruction within the next 5 years than climate change. It's a sprint race compared to a marathon, only difference is the speed and time at which it finish line is hit.
Climate change is like the walls slowly closing in with no escape while everything else kills most of the population first. Incorrect usage of AI is up there. I've already seen idiots lose entire hard drives because they for some reason thought it was a good idea to give an agent access to their entire PC. We also saw those catastrophic strikes on a school in Iran which was supposedly determined as a target by AI.
More likely we make a machine sophisticated enough to complete complex tasks and someone stupid enough to give it a vague goal and access to things it shouldn't have at all, much like how the US military gave it control to missile strikes which ended up blowing up school children.
During a task it could decide the quickest way to solve it's problem is by doing something catastrophically bad like obtaining information it should have, deleting important databases, launching nuclear strikes due to a false error like a flock of pigeons tripping some sensor, etc.
It's more we made the paperclip machine and it decided to turn everything into paper clips than we built Ultron.
I agree that human-directed disaster with these tools is the most likely scenario. Honestly I would prefer that too if compared to the ramifications of permanent disempowerment to an AI.
That said, why do you doubt gen AI will reach superintelligence? Look at the maths problems it solved recently and rate of advancement. Itâs so much more capable than just a few years ago.
It's not super intelligence because it's not intelligent. It supposedly solved those math problems because OpenAI was purposely stealing user information from professors already working on the problems using their service. They were attempting to undermine them for recognition and clout just like every other AI bro grifter. Everything the AI knows is just stolen human intellectual properties. These machines are nothing without the real intelligence.
Theoretically we could build the same machines running right now out of common materials like steel and ultimately get the same results as we are getting now, but the problem is this machine would span gigantic distances and require materials we'd never be able to gather. It's only because we build microprocessors with transistors so small that any of this is remotely possible, but at the end of the day it's still a machine solving extremely complex matrices till it finds and answer. That's not intelligence, the intelligence is us making the machine that appears to be mimicking intelligence.
Last night at dusk I saw a massive meteorite blazing through the atmosphere. It broke apart into 10 or 20 dark orange fragment over the space of about 10 seconds. It was the biggest one I have ever seen, or closest one. I found myself hoping that it was really actually far away and actually big enough to create an extinction event. I waited to hear a loud bang or see a shockwave spreading out over the land, but nothing happened. I felt slightly disappointed.
The orange color, the fact it went through the sky, and it was quiet suggests you've just seen some space junk reentering from orbit.
Large meteors usually come into the atmosphere in a steep angle, they are very bright bluish-white or green and the rapid deceleration when they reach the denser atmosphere almost always cause them to explode at the end which usually cause a bang 1-2 minutes later when the sound reaches you.
Nope. PNW. I looked up a meteorite reporting site and it showed that people up around Missoula, MT saw the same thing at about 8 pm on the same night. That's 400 miles NE from me, so I guess it was pretty far away. I did see a rocket lauched from about 250 miles away one time right at dusk in southern AZ. I think it was being launched from Vandenberg AFB or one of the other bases in SoCal. It lit up the sky for a long time. The bright light moved upwards fairly slowly, but it left a wide trail of multicolored light behind it that srayed in the sky for over 20 minutes. I didn't find out what it was until a few days later. It was pretty impressive. I imagine that would be what an ICBM would look like being launched.
Would this not be assuming that future policy changes and tech (meaning not using ai like satan) couldnt stop this? I mean, bold to assume anyone does the right thing but you get it.
There is plenty of literature out there to support the idea that Earth may become a hothouse planet with very little if any life left on it at all. It is not just the amount of GHGs being pumped into the atmosphere that is important, but the rate at which GHGs are being pumped into the atmosphere that is important as well. We could be well beyond the point where what ever humans do will not stop what will happen. Earth will take us on a ride.
Feedback loops ... like how many planetary boundaries have been breached ?
Just look around. What about this has the potential to get better?
Our hope in this future is contingent on some miracle and we're so certain this miracle is coming we're not even the least bit concerned about the future as it is now.
EVERYONE with hope for the future believes there will be some sudden shift in technology and energy that saves us from ourselves... I feel like I can hear the crickets where I'm waiting for the gasps of horror that we're basically watching a bomb tick down and our entire plan is "don't worry about the bomb. It hasn't gone off yet or we'd all be dead, so there's still time"... a bomb we have never learned the first step of how to diffuse, though there's been some really inspiring science fair posters! But instead of worrying about this or just stepping back from the bomb, we're all the ones that are going to survive in some magical world with fewer people.
... while everything we're still doing ensures that future doesn't exist for anyone.
But that's no problem! It's not like we're in the middle of an extinction we didnt cause so if we can make it worse, of course we will fix it, right? The thing we're all ignoring and generally insisting there's nothing we can do, and this is all fine. The bomb still hasn't blown up so it's all fine. Might even be a dud! It's not but we can pretend!
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u/eliquy 2d ago
Lol "climate change is definitely only a worry for future centuries" seriously