Earlier this week a fun interview (and by 'fun' I mean 'depressing') of Frank Fenner was conducted by The Australian. In it, Fenner outlines how humans are doomed, and exactly how soon he thinks our species (along with most others) will disappear completely.
"We're going to become extinct," the eminent scientist says. "Whatever we do now is too late."And then this gem:
Homo sapiens will become extinct, perhaps within 100 years," he says. "A lot of other animals will, too. It's an irreversible situation. I think it's too late. I try not to express that because people are trying to do something, but they keep putting it off."
If you ask me, lately, I'd have to agree with Fenner that it's too late. But conversely, I don't really see humanity going extinct unless this entire planet does; we are too adaptable and resilient to just die off.
I can imagine (and consider the imaginings quite feasible) a point where global chaos erupts and the human population rapidly diminishes to less than 5% of current. But even if some sort of supervirus emerged, a small percentage of the population would be immune. Will Smith's character, Dr. Robert Neville, in "I Am Legend" puts it pretty accurately: a deadly virus would kill about 90% of the population immediately, or 6.3 billion. Of the remaining, only 0.002 percent would be immune completely, the rest would probably be weakened enough by the virus/bacteria that other things would kill them.
So assuming the worst case: susceptibility to the virus/bacteria means death from the virus or from side-effects (think dehydration-death via diarrhea-inducing parasites), you're still left with a human population of 14,000,000. That's a lot of people. Sure, they'd be scattered in pockets (the genetic immunity would be hereditary and thus isolated groups of related people would all survive), so you would quickly have a scenario where the entire world collapsed into chaos, but small villages would survive. And suddenly they'd have a bounty of resources, making their destruction more difficult.
However, a 99.998% deadly virus is pretty damn unlikely. One of the deadliest virii of all time, responsible for the Spanish Flu Pandemic, had a mortality rate of 10-20%.
In any case, I've mentioned before that we could be far, far past the point of no return in terms of environmental instability. And that could make things real hard for our species. But I just don't see us dying off completely, as long as there is life on this planet.
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