And some think it will come sooner rather than later. In , eminent Australian virologist Frank Fenner claimed that humans will probably be extinct in the next century thanks to overpopulation, environmental destruction and climate change. Of course, the Earth can and will survive just fine without us. Our cities will crumble, our fields will overgrow and our bridges will fall.
Before too long, all that will remain of humanity will be a thin layer of plastic, radioactive isotopes and chicken bones — we kill 60 billion chickens per year — in the fossil record. In the mile exclusion zone surrounding the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine, which was severely contaminated following the reactor meltdown, plants and animals are thriving in ways they never did before. The speed at which nature reclaims a landscape depends a lot on the climate of an area.
In , when Europeans first saw the rainforests of Brazil, they reported cities, roads and fields along the banks of major rivers. After the population was decimated by diseases that the explorers brought with them, however, these cities were quickly reclaimed by the j ungle. The ruins of Las Vegas are certain to persist far longer than those of Mumbai. Plant and animal species that have formed close bonds with humanity are the most likely to suffer if we disappear.
The crops that feed the world, reliant as they are on regular applications of pesticides and fertilisers, would swiftly be replaced by their wild forebears. Insects are mobile, reproduce quickly and live in almost any environment, making them a highly successful class of species, even when humans are actively trying to suppress them.
The bug explosion will in turn will fuel a population increase in bug-eating species, like birds , rodents, reptiles , bats and arachnids , and then a boom in the species that eat those animals, and so on all the way up the food chain. But what goes up must come down — those huge populations will be unsustainable in the long term once the food that humans left behind has been consumed.
The reverberations throughout the food web caused by the disappearance of humankind may still be visible as much as years into the future, before things settle down into a new normal. Some wilder breeds of cows or sheep could survive, but most have been bred into slow and docile eating machines that will die off in huge numbers. And they document pretty compellingly that extinction rates were already extremely elevated in [the year] , and are just getting worse and worse.
Read about a study that says extinction rates are a thousand times higher because of humans. People have been debating whether we really are in the throes of a sixth mass extinction. What is your opinion? What is clear, and what is beyond dispute, is that we are living in a time of very, very elevated extinction rates, on the order that you would see in a mass extinction, though a mass extinction might take many thousands of years to play out.
Are there habitats or species—or groups of animals that you think are especially vulnerable to the changes that are going on? Island populations are very vulnerable to extinctions for a couple of reasons. They tend to have been isolated. New Zealand had no terrestrial mammals. Species that had evolved in the absence of such predators were incredibly vulnerable.
A staggering number of bird species have already been lost on New Zealand, and a lot of those that remain are in deep trouble. So, places that have been isolated for a long time. Those are very vulnerable. Species that have a very restricted range, that exist only in one spot in the world, those tend to be extremely vulnerable. The human component of this story—the fact that we appear to be responsible for the sixth extinction—what is some of the best evidence for our involvement?
There are very few, if any, extinctions that we know about in the last years that would have taken place without human activity. There are thousands and thousands of scientific articles that have been written about this. We loaded it with hunting. We brought in invasive species.
We are now changing the climate, very, very rapidly, by geological standards. The adaptation of organisms in response to pollutants is a complex phenomenon. Research indicates that negative effects induced by pollution often worsen over multiple generations , although the coping mechanism vary in different species. The rapid depletion of natural resources and biodiversity is not a normal evolutionary race that nature is used to. While some species can certainly adapt to the changes taking place in our environment, humans are no longer a mere species that follows Darwinian evolution but a much larger force that has come to drive evolution on this planet.
Studies have shown that for most species, evolutionary adaptation is not expected to be sufficiently rapid to buffer the effects of environmental changes being wrought by human activity. And our own species will be no exception to this. While there is no proof that we will destroy ourselves, there are clear indications that we ignore the effects at our own peril. For example, some of the mass extinctions in the Earth's history are related to acidification of oceans.
The oceans may be acidifying faster today than they did in the last million years, primarily due to human activities. Can the species we share the planet with adapt fast enough to cope with the new world we are creating for them? Widespread degradation of ecosystems threatens the conditions of life on Earth, in particular the long-term survival of our own species. Our impact on the planet is much is deeper than carbon footprints or global warming. It points to a future where the effects of anthropogenic matter will take over — if it hasn't already — the identity of the Earth and its life.
In the face of this, humans themselves might lose out in the evolutionary race. Eliminating materials like concrete or plastic or replacing them with alternatives is not going to address the fundamental problem with human attitudes and our unparalleled appetite for more. This is exactly where materialism can seamlessly transform into a known unknown risk factor in global catastrophe. The myriad of ways in which it can turn this planet into a mundane world is something our civilisation has never experienced before.
In the absence of a fully secure evolutionary shield, we could depend on our intelligence to survive. Nevertheless, as Abraham Loeb, professor of science at Harvard University and an astronomer who is searching for dead cosmic civilisations puts it, "the mark of intelligence is the ability to promote a better future". The story of Bhasmasura in Hindu Mythology offers an eerie parallel to the impact of materialism.
As a devotee of Lord Shiva , he obtains a boon from Shiva, which empowers him to turn anyone into ashes with a mere touch on the head. Immediately after gaining this magical ability, he tries to test it on Shiva himself.
Shiva manages to escape, the story goes. But humans may not be lucky enough to flee from their own actions. Unless, we offer a different vision rooted in reduction of consumption, the flames of our own materialism might consume both us and our Pale Blue Dot.
Join one million Future fans by liking us on Facebook , or follow us on Twitter or Instagram. If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc. Could humans really destroy all life on Earth? Share using Email. By Santhosh Mathew 21st May
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