The End of Humanity
Everything has an end. Every organism eventually die, every planet will eventually die, the universe will come to an end after an eon of eons, and time itself will end, too. This means that the human race is bound to come to an end at some point, but how will it come to an end? Will we survive until our planet or the universe comes to an end? What are the possible reasons we might die sooner than we think? There are a number of alarming possibilities that the human race may be significantly damaged or wiped out completely, here are a few of the surprising or, at the very least, non-obvious ones.
Super-Volcanoes
Let’s start off with a unique cataclysmic event. We usually do see volcanoes as extremely dangerous, but definitely not reaching the magnitudes possible to bring an end to humanity. Supervolcanoes are volcanoes that have a Volcanic Explosivity Index of 8, meaning that it would produce a mega eruption and release more than 1,000 cubic kilometers of deposits. The most recognized and alarming supervolcano as of now is the Yellowstone Caldera, with an elevation of 9,203 feet, and measures 30 by 45 miles. The Supervolcano is predicted to erupt roughly 10,000 years from now. Although this is way past our lifetimes, it is dangerous for the future human race, we obviously want to survive and thrive for many years to come. A question you may be asking is: But what makes it so dangerous? In simple words, when the supervolcano erupts, it will release immense amounts of toxic ash, spreading all over most of North America. This noxious ash is dangerous for two reasons, 1) it will affect the air we breathe and cause it to be harmful towards all organisms, killing plants and animals along with us, and 2) block sunlight as it spreads throughout the globe and essentially cause the planet to cool, dropping by several degrees; an example of how it would look like is if some places were snowing during the summer. This one eruption is enough to stop the growth of crops, kill many humans, animals, and plants, and cause trillions of dollars in damages. There are many other supervolcanoes that dwell on our planet and a lot of them are yet to erupt.
Population Collapse
Here is the one that we likely have not been expecting. The ideas of an asteroid impact and global warming and pollution have been clouding one big problem, the ever-growing population. As of right now, our population is about 7.6 billion. The maximum carrying capacity, the amount of humans our planet can support with all the resources it has, is 11–12 billion. To put that into perspective, we are more than halfway there. Our planet only has a limited amount of resources, which means that there is a capacity to which the Earth can supply resources to. If we reach that carrying capacity, the earth will collapse, not being able to supply the demand of the many people. A perfect fictional visualization of population collapse is the blockbuster movie Avengers: Infinity War, where the main antagonist, Thanos, proposes an idea, to wipe out half of the universe’s population. He did this to prevent other planets from suffering the same fate as his home planet, Titan, did. A topic I would also like to discuss about is the birth rate at the global scale. There are two ways the population could be growing, exponentially or in a logistical pattern. One prediction for the growth of the human population is exponential, with the rate at which people are reproducing growing, but that does not seem to be the case, as of today, the birth rate is slowing down. The reason for this is because having children is not as profitable as it has been in the past. Before, having many children used to be similar to an asset. They would help with your work and manage your work in the future. Also, they could be married off to richer families to gain profits. But now, they are similar to a liability, the USDA put the cost of raising a child from birth to age 18 at $233,610 for a middle-income family with two kids. This information shows us that the human population is not rapidly growing at the same rate as it was before, turning 1 billion to 7 billion in a matter of only a century. It gives us a new insight about how far away or close population collapse is.
Pandemics
We all saw this coming after 2019. The world had been plagued, a deadly virus that arose in Wuhan, China, spreading around the globe and taking the lives of many, as well as affecting the society. These tiny, “semi-organisms”, have broke havoc around the globe for millenniums. The coronavirus is just one of the deadly viruses to have made history. The Bubonic Plague that killed nearly a third of Europe during the mid 1300’s is just one example of how dangerous viruses and bacteria are. If contagious and lethal enough, these tiny monsters can result in dark and horrific times for the human civilization or even wipe them out.
Citations
Images —
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/196496/coronavirus-pandemic-could-have-caused-40/
Information —