VIDEO: 10 Things That Will Happen When Humans Go Extinct

Humans will go extinct at some point. That is almost 100% sure.

How will the world look like then?

Will there even be a world to remain behind after we’re gone?

This video presents ten things that will supposedly happen when humanity goes extinct.

According to Wikipedia, the likelihood of human extinction in the near future by wholly natural scenarios, such as a meteorite impact or large-scale volcanism, is generally considered to be extremely low.

For anthropogenic extinction, many possible scenarios have been proposed:

Human global nuclear annihilation, biological warfare or the release of a pandemic-causing agent, dysgenics, overpopulation, ecological collapse, and global warming; in addition, emerging technologies could bring about new extinction scenarios, such as advanced artificial intelligence, biotechnology or self-replicating nanobots.

The probability of anthropogenic human extinction within the next hundred years is the topic of an active debate.

Human extinction needs to be differentiated from the extinction of all life on Earth and from the extinction of major components of human culture.

Because human extinction is unprecedented, speculation about the probability of different scenarios is highly subjective. Astronomer Martin Rees gives humanity a 50-50 chance of extinction during the 21st century.

Nick Bostrom argues that it would be “misguided” to assume that the probability of near-term extinction is less than 25% and that it will be “a tall order” for the human race to “get our precautions sufficiently right the first time”, given that an existential risk provides no opportunity to learn from failure.

A little more optimistically, philosopher John Leslie assigns a 70% chance of humanity surviving the next five centuries, based partly on the controversial philosophical doomsday argument that Leslie champions. The 2006 Stern Review for the UK Treasury assumes the 100-year probability of human extinction is 10% in its economic calculations.

In 2010 Australian virologist Frank Fenner, notable for having a major role in the eradication of smallpox, predicted that the human race would be extinct in about a century.

Some scholars believe that certain scenarios such as global thermonuclear war would have difficulty eradicating every last settlement on Earth.

Physicist Willard Wells points out that any credible extinction scenario would have to reach into a diverse set of areas, including the underground subways of major cities, the mountains of Tibet, the remotest islands of the South Pacific, and even to McMurdo Station in Antarctica, which has contingency plans and supplies for a long isolation.

In addition, elaborate bunkers exist for government leaders to occupy during a nuclear war. Any number of events could lead to a massive loss of human life; but if the last few, most resilient, humans are unlikely to also die off, then that particular human extinction scenario is not credible.

Milankovitch cycles describe the way that the earth moves and how the climatic changes vary depending on where the earth is in space. The orbital shape of the earth causes changes every 100,000 years. The axial tilt of the earth “wobbles” and alters the climate every 41 thousand years.

The axial precession is the process in which the climate will change in terms of how the earth rotates about its own axis. David M. Raup did find that every 26 million years, there will be a mass extinction.