Humans Are In Decline And Doomed For Extinction, New Book Argues

Some 300,000 years after we first emerged on the savannas of East Africa, Homo sapiens, our particular brand of bipedal hominins, is in danger of disappearing from the face of the Earth, a new book argues. But not necessarily for the reasons one might readily imagine.

Sure, there’s always the threat of global nuclear war and a massive planet-killing asteroid or cometary impact. But in his new book, “The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire: Why Our Species is on the Edge of Extinction,” author Henry Gee, a senior editor at the venerable scientific journal Nature, argues that like all species, we humans are destined to disappear from the planet.

That’s simply the way nature works. Perhaps the only solution to this quandary, Gee writes, is to move offworld in great numbers. Trouble is, it’s a decision that we need to make within our lifetime, he asserts, or at least within the next couple of centuries.

Such pronouncements are hardly reassuring given the current state of humanity’s access to space. Despite all the hype about moving into low-Earth orbit and beyond, for those of us who grew up with NASA’s Apollo program, human spaceflight seems to suddenly be treading water.

But “The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire” offers a savvy summary of the rise of Homo sapiens from a population bottleneck in East Africa. Yet as Gee notes, due to several flukes of evolution, we humans are inherently ill-equipped to deal with the ravages of communicable disease.

For almost the entirety of its history, Homo sapiens has been extremely rare, Gee notes. Tiny bands of people, spread thinly over Earth’s surface, living a subsistence existence barely a meal from starvation, two meals from extinction, he writes.

In fact, we’re a species that almost didn’t happen and when we did, we emerged as bipedal hunter-gatherers. But on numerous occasions, we very nearly disappeared.

But starting roughly around 100,000 years ago, Homo sapiens managed to break out of Africa, and came to encompass the entire Earth, something that no other species had ever accomplished, Gee writes.

The crux of the book, however, is as Gee writes, whatever the cause, the extinction of Homo sapiens will come relatively soon, in geological terms – within the next 10,000 years. Even without the asteroid impact, the dinosaurs would have died out, sooner or later, because that’s what living things do, he notes.

If you apply this logic to modern humans, Homo sapiens is also marked for extinction, Gee asserts. But if we migrate into space, we have the potential to flower and flourish perhaps for many millions of years, he notes.

Ancient Human History

Ambitious in scope, it’s heartening to know that serious tomes are still being written in this anxious age. The book is fascinating because it serves up a vast menu of tidbits about our ancient human history that will be novel to most readers.

Here are three:

— Some 26,000 years ago, hunters and gatherers kept starvation at bay by taming plants and farming predictable crops rather than relying on increasingly unpredictable forage, writes Gee. Yet agriculture’s effects can be felt today in a range of diseases and health problems that afflict humans, from tuberculosis to parasitic infestations to diabetes, he notes.

— Evolutionary theory suggests that species succeed when they have sparring partners, writes Gee. When the competition is eliminated, stagnation sets in and a species becomes more subject to circumstances of the external environment, as well as forces acting from within, he notes.

— It takes a civilization of millions to create a literate, technological civilization, Gee notes. Isaac Newton devised his theory of gravity when he was one of only 500 million people, he writes. But by 1905, the year Einstein published his special theory of relativity, the world population had trebled to more than 1.6 billion, writes Gee.

But there’s trouble ahead.

Humans are threatening Earth’s basic systems processes, Gee notes, particularly with the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the rate of species extinction and the amount of nitrogen removed from the atmosphere for human use.

Does this mean curtains for humanity?

That depends on how clever humans become in editing the human genome, Gee writes. Such gene editing might remove undesirable traits or adapt humans to conditions hitherto unachievable by natural means, such as being able to breathe underwater, or survive unaided in other extreme conditions, Gee writes.

The Many Brains Scenario

If humans do not capitalize on the currently vast reservoir of brains that a large population offers, the colonization of space will falter and sputter out, Gee writes.

Our Long Legacy

It’s been pounded into our heads that the asteroidal impact that wiped out the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago paved the way for the rise of mammals and eventually we humans. But in truth, Homo sapiens are just one of many species of hominins. That is, the distant ancestors to Homo sapiens that first emerged on the savannas of East Africa some 7 million years ago.

Bipedalism, the ability to walk and function on two feet, appears to really be the key to the development of our technology and space-faring society. Yet as Gee points out, to date, there are still only suppositions, rather than conclusive evidence about why hominins made the transition to a bipedal lifestyle.

But the road to bipedalism had to be a tough transition. For animals used to walking on all fours, it’s a wholly unnatural way to move. That’s why bears trained to do so for brief periods find themselves in circus acts.

The gist of all this is that we Homo sapiens and our continued existence here are a complete fluke.

The Bottom Line?

Either Homo sapiens will decline and fall to extinction within the next 10,000 years or make a concerted effort to expand into the universe, and live for millions of years, writes Gees.

Forbes5 Reasons Humans Should Never Become MachinesBy Bruce DormineyForbesWhy Dinosaurs Would Have Never Built SpaceshipsBy Bruce Dorminey