HN Explorer

Ask HN: What's your personal pet theory on how humanity manages to end itself?

4 points by Zircom ↗ HN
Some of the discussion on a recent post about genetically modified mosquitos got me thinking about this again, so was curious on what HN thinks will end the world.

I honestly think eventually advancements in genetic engineering and biology will lead to more and more potent bioweapons until someone manages to make one that ends it all.

I've always had this thought in my mind since I was young but now personally seeing COVID spread across the globe in a matter of weeks/months has just reaffirmed this belief and I really think it's only a matter of time before someone bioengineers a virus to kill everyone on the planet. If something can supposedly spread from a wet market(or lab if that's more your speed) in China to the entire world through pure chance (or accident) how hard can it be to do it on purpose once the technology is mature and advanced enough?

But I'd love to hear HN's takes on this and your own theories on how we meet our self-inflicted extinction.

22 comments

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trinovantes
We raise cost of living so high that our species slowly go extinct from self-celibacy. There's a rising number of people in Asian countries in their 30s/40s that have never been in a relationship and that's probably the endgame for all societies.
giantg2
That's highly unlikely to lead to extinction.
h2odragon
We will teach bears to make fire; and watch with fuzzy joy as they band together and begin burning cities. It wont matter at first because they'll be attacking our "Enemies" or at least "those deplorable people over there"... but then the Bear Paratroops come and no one is ready.
cercatrova
Well at least if they're in the US they're exercising their constitutional right to bear arms
mytailorisrich
At the moment, unless Earth suffers an extinction-level cataclysm like an asteroid we won't go extinct: we are absolutely everywhere and we have technology that allows to survive pretty much anything else.
JoeAltmaier
The will to procreate has died out. Negative population growth is the norm now. So won't end with a bang (heh) but with a whimper.
mytailorisrich
This is a good thing at the moment. We will be much more sustainable and have a better quality of live if we can be a few billions fewer, which will actually be good for our long term survival.
derbOac
People who know me probably think of me as a pessimist, but I don't really see society ending itself. There's too many people and something would kick in. Large scale problems or conflict, sure. But I think society will end with an astrophysical event before anything self-inflicted.

If I were forced to choose though, I'd probably say nuclear warfare. It's just too powerful and will eventually proliferate and there's too many psychosocial risks behind their use.

BurningPenguin
I think we are too many to go entirely extinct. Our ancestors survived an ice age, after all. We may go back to the stone age or at least middle age level of tech, but the species itself will survive. As long as the surface of earth is somewhat survivable, humanity will keep on going somehow.

What i actually think might happen is some form of evolution. Probably combined with technology. Genetic and bionic modifications will become normal and at some point in the far future, there won't be a homo sapiens anymore. Idk how to call it. Homo Machina or something? That might even get rid of certain limits of our bodies, so that a sudden extinction will be more unlikely. Can't kill what can live on almost any (solid) celestial body.

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crate_barre
Starvation was highly scaleable tactic the Nazis used. Just pile people up and let them starve and also freeze to death (another scaleable tactic).

Food shortages could cause this but it would also cause riots/conflict before anything. Lack of heating could also do it. It won’t be an extinction level event, just a culling.

I foresee that before all else. It won’t take much, just sudden infrastructure shocks.

cercatrova
I doubt we'll go extinct. We lived through a bottleneck where there were only 3,000 to 10,000 people on the planet around 70,000 years ago. And that was when we were technologically irrelevant. Now, with billions of people and good technology, there is next to no way we'd go extinct.
telesilla
Agreed. We could starve ourselves out of existence but only in the case of a multi-decade event.
soueuls
It's indeed possible that we kill ourselves. But we are getting closer and closer to space travel. I would say a few more centuries.

Once we reach that point, humanity will spread wide, exploration will start all over again. It will then be fairly hard for our species to disappear.

JoeAltmaier
We are headed to zero population right now - all countries (but 1 or 2) are headed straight for negative population growth. So in a couple centuries, we die out.
AnimalMuppet
1. If the population seriously crashes, eventually the technology level will also crash. Once birth control and abortion are no longer technologically as easy as they are now, well, people still like having sex. So there's going to be a lot of kids again, once the tech to prevent them is not as ubiquitous as it is now.

2. Once the population craters, the resources available to each person go up. In that kind of environment, populations typically grow.

But:

3. This assumes that the reason the population crashes is people choosing not to have kids. If it crashes due to environmental reasons (estrogenoid pollution, say, making males less eager to have sex and less able to reproduce), then my arguments don't work.

true_religion
Humanity will end itself in a blaze of glory trying to break through the dimensional barrier to enter a new universe as our home reality approaches heat death. This heat death will occur billions of years early due to humanity overusing the resources.
PixeledOne
Global Climate Change / catastrophes We are ending ourselves right now, and taking the rest of the species on this planet with us.

Read the IPCC report

synicalx
I feel like the most human way for us to die out would be one of two things; apathy or aggression. Either way we'll make the planet uninhabitable, through nukes or warming, and slowly starve to death while also dying in freak weather events. We probably won't go 100% extinct, but I feel like we'd do enough permanent damage to the planet and get our numbers down enough for it not to matter.
gcheong
After so many years we realize we still haven't solved any of the most important problems plaguing our species and so people just stop having children, deeming it too cruel to continue to produce more people forced to live a life just for the sake of an experience their parents want to have. We go out with a whimper rather than a bang.