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Climate disaster coverage makes me think about how, as much as I love to think that our species will be 8B+ strong for millenia and eventually make it to the st

Climate disaster coverage makes me think about how, as much as I love to think that our species will be 8B+ strong for millenia and eventually make it to the stars, that would mean that I am born among the first few percent of humanity. It seems more likely that my random sample is from somewhere in the middle, and if an ~equal number of humans will be born after me as before, then at our population growth/levels, we don't have much time left until extinction or a population collapse from which we never recover. I don't know that there's anything helpful in this thought, though - can I increase my odds of being born in the earliest percentile of the species by my actions?

Ekaros 5y ago
Humans are extremely resilient species which has already adapted to all but one or two areas in world, namely poles. Humans won't go extinct, that is just not going to happen anymore.... Now civilizations as we see them today might, but I think they entirely deserve it.
- DennisP 5y ago
  You're probably right but if we start with a large reduction in livable habitat and food production, mix in a few pandemics driven by poor health and overcrowding, and consider that a situation that stressed makes nuclear war not so unlikely, then I'm not completely confident. Particularly if we get to the more severe outcomes around five or six degrees C.
- riffic 5y ago
  > Humans won't go extinct I see this statement frequently made on discussion forums like this, and I'd like to tell you this is a tremendously arrogant belief to hold.
- time_to_smile 5y ago
  This is a laughable claim. Human's have existed only for a very short while and during one of the most stable periods of climate in this history of the planet. I understand denial is necessary to cope, but when you really understand the scale of the changes coming it's hard to image anything other than extinction happening. All of the magic humans have done is not because of our innate abilities but because or our access to abundant energy. First in the form of solar energy harvesting through agriculture, later through fossil fuels. Unfortunately we pushed the system too far.
  - nervlord 5y ago
exfascist 5y ago
bee_rider 5y ago
I guess if you believe in quantum immortality, then you would assume that you are actually likely to be toward the average observer who never dies. Perhaps we'll achieve medical immortality some time in the next couple decades, and then decide to stop making so many humans.
gmm1990 5y ago
I don't see why population collapse implies the end of the human race. It seems like it would be more sustainable medium term to have less people. Endangered species come back from numbers in the thousands maybe even less. I'd imagine once population levels reached anywhere near those kinds of levels there'd be a change in poplulations willingness to have children.
- magneticnorth 5y ago
  I'm just meaning sort of statistically - if we somehow knew only another 100B people will be born, then either we continue along our current growth and burn through 100B in a thousand years or so, or the species lasts for millenia but the total number of those people is only 100B, so the population never got huge again. This is really just kind of an abuse of statistical thinking - you're not wrong at all that populations recover, but in our case if that happened we're back to saying that we were born in the first 5% of humanity, which I'm saying is likely not the case.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jsharf 5y ago
There's some misunderstanding probability going on here. For example, if the population stays at 8B between now and infinity, and we assume a uniform distribution of % chance you're born at any time, then it's just as equally likely that you'd be born at the beginning as at the end. There's no higher chance that you'd be born in the middle, whatsoever. Now actually the population is likely to grow, so if anything it's much more likely that you'd be born towards the end. That begins said, some people have to be born first and of course if they thought this way, they might say things like "oh what a coincidence, this is highly unlikely" or "It's far more likely due to exponential growth that any one person exist towards the end of humanity, so therefore this must be the end", but of course, this thought could have been had by cavemen 1000's of years ago and they'd be wrong.
- magneticnorth 5y ago
  I think we agree - I wasn't meaning to imply that I'm surely in the middle, mostly trying to be more clear about how unlikely it is to be early. Another way to put it is to say that there's only 5% chance I'm in the first 5% of people, and 50% chance I'm in the last 50% (assuming uniform distribution, which, who knows). If I'm in the last 50%, then we don't have much time left. And yes, if everyone has these thoughts, then about 5% of people will be wrong when they think that surely they aren't in the first 5%. (And I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that "between now and infinity" is hyperbole - percentiles of a uniform distribution like this don't make sense if there will truly be a countably infinite number of people. )
terran57 5y ago
I too, used to think that we'd be a species that would head to the stars, but it appears that will be just one of a long line of species that cannot get past the great filter of Fermi's Paradox.
- njarboe 5y ago
  We could have already passed the great filter. Maybe going from single celled life to multicellular life is extremely rare. It did not appear on earth for 2-3 billion years after the appearance of single celled life. The creation of single celled life could also be great filter. Good evidence of that comes about a billion years after the formation of the Earth. And then there is a species that can escape its home planet. Apart from some single celled life on rocks ejected by impacts (not going to colonize the galaxy with those rare events), that took another billion years after multicellular life evolved. But, as Elon Musk emphasizes, we should get life into the solar system now. We don't know how rare life getting to this stage is and how likely it is to regress and never recover the capability. And in any case, current theory suggests that the sun will expand in the next few hundreds of millions of years making Earth uninhabitable to current life on Earth. Not very long compared to the 4.5 billion years Earth has existed.
  - brimble 5y ago
    > And in any case, current theory suggests that the sun will expand in the next few hundreds of millions of years making Earth uninhabitable to current life on Earth. It's the brightening, more than the expansion, that'll do it. It'll ruin the carbonate/silicate cycle in a few hundred million years, progressively forcing plants into worse and worse metabolic pathways, so reducing the total energy available to the biosphere, until finally plant life is basically wiped out. IOW, 700-900MY from now, is the end of large fauna on planet Earth, followed soon after by the end of nearly all smaller fauna, too, and all or nearly all plants. Back to single-celled and very simple multi-cellular life, until most of that's killed a few hundred million years later, too, by the loss of all surface water. There will be little or no life left on Earth way before the sun significantly expands. Barring significant geo-engineering efforts.
- 5y ago

Ekaros 5y ago

Humans are extremely resilient species which has already adapted to all but one or two areas in world, namely poles. Humans won't go extinct, that is just not going to happen anymore.... Now civilizations as we see them today might, but I think they entirely deserve it.

DennisP 5y ago
You're probably right but if we start with a large reduction in livable habitat and food production, mix in a few pandemics driven by poor health and overcrowding, and consider that a situation that stressed makes nuclear war not so unlikely, then I'm not completely confident. Particularly if we get to the more severe outcomes around five or six degrees C.
riffic 5y ago
> Humans won't go extinct I see this statement frequently made on discussion forums like this, and I'd like to tell you this is a tremendously arrogant belief to hold.
time_to_smile 5y ago
This is a laughable claim. Human's have existed only for a very short while and during one of the most stable periods of climate in this history of the planet. I understand denial is necessary to cope, but when you really understand the scale of the changes coming it's hard to image anything other than extinction happening. All of the magic humans have done is not because of our innate abilities but because or our access to abundant energy. First in the form of solar energy harvesting through agriculture, later through fossil fuels. Unfortunately we pushed the system too far.
- nervlord 5y ago

exfascist 5y ago

bee_rider 5y ago

I guess if you believe in quantum immortality, then you would assume that you are actually likely to be toward the average observer who never dies. Perhaps we'll achieve medical immortality some time in the next couple decades, and then decide to stop making so many humans.

gmm1990 5y ago

I don't see why population collapse implies the end of the human race. It seems like it would be more sustainable medium term to have less people. Endangered species come back from numbers in the thousands maybe even less. I'd imagine once population levels reached anywhere near those kinds of levels there'd be a change in poplulations willingness to have children.

magneticnorth 5y ago
I'm just meaning sort of statistically - if we somehow knew only another 100B people will be born, then either we continue along our current growth and burn through 100B in a thousand years or so, or the species lasts for millenia but the total number of those people is only 100B, so the population never got huge again. This is really just kind of an abuse of statistical thinking - you're not wrong at all that populations recover, but in our case if that happened we're back to saying that we were born in the first 5% of humanity, which I'm saying is likely not the case.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

jsharf 5y ago

There's some misunderstanding probability going on here. For example, if the population stays at 8B between now and infinity, and we assume a uniform distribution of % chance you're born at any time, then it's just as equally likely that you'd be born at the beginning as at the end. There's no higher chance that you'd be born in the middle, whatsoever. Now actually the population is likely to grow, so if anything it's much more likely that you'd be born towards the end. That begins said, some people have to be born first and of course if they thought this way, they might say things like "oh what a coincidence, this is highly unlikely" or "It's far more likely due to exponential growth that any one person exist towards the end of humanity, so therefore this must be the end", but of course, this thought could have been had by cavemen 1000's of years ago and they'd be wrong.

magneticnorth 5y ago
I think we agree - I wasn't meaning to imply that I'm surely in the middle, mostly trying to be more clear about how unlikely it is to be early. Another way to put it is to say that there's only 5% chance I'm in the first 5% of people, and 50% chance I'm in the last 50% (assuming uniform distribution, which, who knows). If I'm in the last 50%, then we don't have much time left. And yes, if everyone has these thoughts, then about 5% of people will be wrong when they think that surely they aren't in the first 5%. (And I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that "between now and infinity" is hyperbole - percentiles of a uniform distribution like this don't make sense if there will truly be a countably infinite number of people. )

terran57 5y ago

I too, used to think that we'd be a species that would head to the stars, but it appears that will be just one of a long line of species that cannot get past the great filter of Fermi's Paradox.

njarboe 5y ago
We could have already passed the great filter. Maybe going from single celled life to multicellular life is extremely rare. It did not appear on earth for 2-3 billion years after the appearance of single celled life. The creation of single celled life could also be great filter. Good evidence of that comes about a billion years after the formation of the Earth. And then there is a species that can escape its home planet. Apart from some single celled life on rocks ejected by impacts (not going to colonize the galaxy with those rare events), that took another billion years after multicellular life evolved. But, as Elon Musk emphasizes, we should get life into the solar system now. We don't know how rare life getting to this stage is and how likely it is to regress and never recover the capability. And in any case, current theory suggests that the sun will expand in the next few hundreds of millions of years making Earth uninhabitable to current life on Earth. Not very long compared to the 4.5 billion years Earth has existed.
- brimble 5y ago
  > And in any case, current theory suggests that the sun will expand in the next few hundreds of millions of years making Earth uninhabitable to current life on Earth. It's the brightening, more than the expansion, that'll do it. It'll ruin the carbonate/silicate cycle in a few hundred million years, progressively forcing plants into worse and worse metabolic pathways, so reducing the total energy available to the biosphere, until finally plant life is basically wiped out. IOW, 700-900MY from now, is the end of large fauna on planet Earth, followed soon after by the end of nearly all smaller fauna, too, and all or nearly all plants. Back to single-celled and very simple multi-cellular life, until most of that's killed a few hundred million years later, too, by the loss of all surface water. There will be little or no life left on Earth way before the sun significantly expands. Barring significant geo-engineering efforts.
5y ago