Current Events > Have you ever heard this before? Humanity came very close to extinction 900K..

(+) Yeah! (+)

similar was hypothesized to have happened 50,000 years ago when toba erupted

Odd, forgot to mention HOW tf did humans (dont think religiously rn) survive mass extinctions at all?

assume the earliest humans are 360,000 years ago
there have been 5 MASS extinctions within the earth as we know/assume

scientists state 98% of ALL species died out

something stands out and also doesnt make sense

edit: the earliest human ancestors are between 2 and 6 million years ago
my brain hurt
o.0

Beveren_Rabbit posted...

are humans able to breed with other human species?

Neanderthals and Desnovians. There is some Desnovivians dna in Aborigines. So at some point there was a southern migration from Russia, built boats or swam. Who knows. That one amazes me

OriginalPlain2 posted...

assume the earliest humans are 360,000 years ago
there have been 5 MASS extinctions within the earth as we know/assume

scientists state 98% of ALL species died out

something stands out and also doesnt make sense

The last mass extinction being 66 million years ago might have something to do with it. We're a relatively new species.

vycebrand2 posted...

Neanderthals and Desnovians. There is some Desnovivians dna in Aborigines. So at some point there was a southern migration from Russia, built boats or swam. Who knows. That one amazes me

Yeah, we tend to assume they were stupid. Actually, we have no idea how many of them compared to us for the most part, there is no reason to believe they couldn't speak or build boats.

I know the hobbits of the south pacific made advanced (for stone tools) arrow and spear heads and made musical instruments such as bone flutes. They weren't just smaller sized humans either, but a completely different offshoot.

Serious_Cat posted...

The last mass extinction being 66 million years ago might have something to do with it. We're a relatively new species.

There have been minor ones like the ice age animals sabertooths, mammoths and the like.

Turbam posted...

Just think, we're all related to those 1,280 breeders

All living males can be traced to a single male, Y-chromosomal Adam.
All living females can be traced to a single female, Mitochondrial Eve.

The anthropology of all great ape species ancestors and links are spread across a really really long timeline.

OriginalPlain2 posted...

Odd, forgot to mention HOW tf did humans (dont think religiously rn) survive mass extinctions at all?

assume the earliest humans are 360,000 years ago
there have been 5 MASS extinctions within the earth as we know/assume

scientists state 98% of ALL species died out

something stands out and also doesnt make sense

edit: the earliest human ancestors are between 2 and 6 million years ago
my brain hurt
o.0

what? i don't get your post

Serious_Cat posted...

The last mass extinction being 66 million years ago might have something to do with it. We're a relatively new species.

We are doing a 6th one right now...

In a way, it's kind of sad that the extinction didn't happen. I wonder what the earth would be like now.

DoctorPiranha3 posted...

In a way, it's kind of sad that the extinction didn't happen. I wonder what the earth would be like now.

really? you don't think very highly of humanity?

Funny how this topic comes up today.

I was literally thinking yesterday about what a broken mess the human body is, and how it was supposed to survive without our knowledge of medicine.

We have so many stupid bodyparts getting hurt for no reason at all, and without any chance of recovering (like appendix or teeth).

The temperature we are comfortable with is just a tiny spectrum, and overall we are extremly fragile for our size.

But somehow we were able to survive anything, and got the big brain moves and tools to still come out on top.

Foppe posted...

We are doing a 6th one right now...

I think that can largely be attributed to human attempts at survival though.

Smallville posted...

really? you don't think very highly of humanity?

I think highly of the introspection and communication skills humanity is capable of, but not fondly of basically destroying so many habitats and contributing to a heating earth

Foppe posted...

All living males can be traced to a single male, Y-chromosomal Adam.
All living females can be traced to a single female, Mitochondrial Eve.

This is factually not true. Most people can be traced back to a few females, usually called the seven daughters of Eve, but it is not all living people.

indica posted...

This is factually not true. Most people can be traced back to a few females, usually called the seven daughters of Eve, but it is not all living people.

The seven daughters of Eve is a semi-fictional novel.

indica posted...

This is factually not true. Most people can be traced back to a few females, usually called the seven daughters of Eve, but it is not all living people.

hwo many yrs ago is this eve that they estimate?

Smallville posted...

you guys have any idea or guess when this could happen? i mean like this climate change scenario you're talking about

Scientists have been making predictions and warnings since the 60s/70s. Or at least, that is when they started making them with a real timeline attached (people theorizing or warning that carbon emmisions could do stuff pop up in earlier decades and even with an occasional one up to like a century earlier, but we are focusing on when the calculations for how bad it would/could be really started).

Things so far have met or exceeded the WORST of the predictions. The ones that got labeled as alarmists, and mostly shoved aside so that media could report the more conservative estimates. So any time you see one of those stories about things happening faster than expected, part of the reason is that people wanted to believe so bad that it would take longer than it did.

With regards to "when the bad stuff happens" there are several breaking points for human society in response to the weather stuff.

1. Food. Insert saying about how revolution is 3 missed meals away, etc. But it is an actual concern that some of us may get a dry run for after the mess of the current set of weather issues (unmasking the aerosol effect from clean ship fuel, El Nino, and the accelerating methane releases) combined with the Ukraine-Russia war messing with two notable food growing countries while some other countries are getting bad harvests from the wacky weather. You may have already noticed that food prices have increased significantly.
2. Peak oil. We use energy for basically everything, and oil is the densest means of energy we are currently willing to use (see: how many people freak out over Japan slowly releasing water that is less radioactive by volume than a banana, and multiply that NIMBYism by... a planet, and the fact that it has caused nuclear research to stagnate to the point where it will still take a decade to build a new nuclear plant, making it all but impossible to rapidly fill in a power gap with it). Eventually, we do have to address this, and the reserve estimates for coal assume we DON'T use it to replace oil once it stops being viable. Renewables have a lower energy density than oil too. And civilization keeps wanting more energy.
3. Soil. Many farming areas have used intensive monocrop agriculture with so many pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers (typically made from mined resources), with many farming areas at or approaching the point where it is no longer possible to grow food WITHOUT artificial nutrients and water (groundwater is also being depleted in many areas quite rapidly).

Put these together and you get two convergent paths. The first being that food growth eventually just has a bad enough year or two that we hit a big starvation event even in developed nations (it doesn't need to be the whole population either, even, say, just 10% of the population actually starving instead of dying other ways would probably cause big issues). The second being that the energy needed to grow the food, and to transport the food and the things required to grow food, simply isn't available due to declining oil and a lack of a backup supply that can be easily swapped out (you can't just magically swap out all the cargo ships and trucks with some electrical based systems overnight, nor their support infrastructure).

In the end, I suspect richer nations will survive longer, at least so long as the money kings are able to continue convincing the world that money has more value than the ever-dwindling resources that people would trade for it. And that this "money collapse" when people start finally saying "no, our nation will not sell you resources we don't even have enough of for ourselves anymore," will initially start occurring nation by nation, perhaps even over several years, before reaching a critical point where a bunch of former food exporters start at least heavily rationing their exports all at once. It is probably around this time that wars start to really break out over access to other countries' foods.

The "when" of it is harder to predict, since there are so many factors. But assuming we don't start seeing the first wave of it next year due to a bunch of stuff aligning, it could start as early as the early 30s.

Other thing: capitalism will kill us. And before I continue, I must note that capitalism DOES NOT refer to exchanging money for goods and services. Capitalism is a system that really focuses on being able to assign value to things like stock and ownership in a company as a whole, beyond just the items and equipment a company has (which then essentially becomes a detached form of collateral). This goes up to and includes imagined wealth on thoughts of how well something COULD be in the future, a good example of which being basically any company, or things like cryptocurrency. And it has one key feature: that is must go up or bad things happen.

Before capitalism, people in Europe were still using money to buy and sell things, could still (depending on the nation) own property, and generally do most of the things a normal person might use money for, only that instead of investments they stored some up or put them into the early national banks. As early capitalism started getting going, we got some major red flags during things like the South Sea Bubble, which was essentially a stock market scheme that at its peak got so huge that its total worth was at a point where there wasn't enough money in all of Britain to actually support the stock price.

No matter how many rules and safeguards you add, capitalism is still something that seeks to get bigger by whatever means it can. This is because the only way for capitalist elements to get more money is for people to believe that a payout of some form more valuable than their initial input will result. Typically, in the form of more money or value, though occasionally this can be a physical thing like, say, a new development or refurbishing something that needs an overhaul (though this is usually related to increasing the value of something that already exists, like a particular area of property).

So what is the problem? Well, things cannot increase forever. And I think we are starting to approach something pretty bad.

I call it "economic starvation." And I use this to refer to when companies are getting high profits while the wealth divide between the rich and poor is increasing and the number/living standards of the middle class is decreasing. It says to me that there is simply not enough "increasing" left to satisfy the greed of "everything must go up" that capitalism and the greed associated with it needs. And that we are now making up for that by basically burning up all but the highest class to fill in the shortfall.

If the economy was a living body, it is now in a state of autophagy, i.e. it is eating itself to keep itself alive because there is not enough outside "food" to do so. For living things, this eventually results in ever more essential systems and organs shutting down until the organism finally dies from starvation. For a society, these systems start off with things like less road maintenance or shutting down smaller, less used airports and other such systems of convenience.

indica posted...

This is factually not true. Most people can be traced back to a few females, usually called the seven daughters of Eve, but it is not all living people.

I'm more than happy to concede to a better source, but Wikipedia tells me that while most people can be traced back to one of seven females, they all had a common ancestor.

Serious_Cat posted...

I'm more than happy to concede to a better source, but Wikipedia tells me that while most people can be traced back to one of seven females, they all had a common ancestor.

When was this though?

Smallville posted...

When was this though?

About 150k years ago, according to estimates.

DoctorPiranha3 posted...

I think highly of the introspection and communication skills humanity is capable of, but not fondly of basically destroying so many habitats and contributing to a heating earth

You wouldn't have approved of cyanobacteria poisoning the atmosphere with oxygen and extinguishing most other organisms a few billion years ago. (They then evolved into plants.) But this is what life does; it's always changing the game, paving the way for whole new paradigms of possibility.