Ways the Human Race could Destroy Itself :: Apocalypse

The End of Humanity Could the Human Species Destroy Itself?There argon lots of ways humanity could be wiped reveal - although I dont opine any of them are particularly belike.Natural causes - An extinction-level asteroid impact would credibly be sufficient, although non much else would - a disease epidemic, major humor shift, etc. would still leave many survivors to rebuild within a fewer hundred geezerhood. The window for such an impact is, however, passing short, because its extremely likely that within 300 years or so we will have the means to predict and avert all dangerous impacts. And the peril of that happening is, from historical comparison, 0.001% or less.There are a few other possibilities that would be much more catastrophic, though. adept is a supernova actually nearby, which would b buy the farm creation with intense gamma radiation and most likely kill all macro-organisms. However, there arent any stars large and old plenty for this to be a risk for hundre ds of thousands of years. A nonher is orbital destabilization of Earth (such as ejection from the Solar System) by a close-passing star - plainly the chance of that is extremely remote, and in addition wed have thousands of years of warning. And the last that I can think of is alien invasion which is really out there, obviously.The pointtual solar threats to life on Earth are not really relevant to humanity/posthumanity. The Sun is not large lavish to supernova, but it will eventually engulf the Earth when it runs out of congenital fuel and swells into a red giant. Thats a good 4-5 billion years away, but well before that, though, the Sun will have live bright enough to heat Earths surface enough to trigger a major atmospheric shift by overwhelming the cloud ensnare (which keeps temperatures on Earth stable) with a runaway greenhouse gas effect, stewing the oceans and making the planet Venus-like, uninhabitable except by micro-organisms. But even that is about 2 billion years away, plenty of time for posthumanity to ascend and either avert the problem or simply head elsewhere. mishap - A scientific experiment run awry, or an unexpected side-effect of nearly new technology could potentially wreck some serious havoc.One possible horribly catastrophic scenario would be the unforeseen generation of a miniature black hole somewhere on Earth. If the hole did not evaporate instantaneously (and it would have to be pretty large not to, so I dont know how it would be possible to generate oneness accidentally) it would quickly bore a hole to the center of the Earth, absorbing more and more mass as it went, and eventually implode the planet.