Will Mankind Live Through the Next Century?

• Note: (actual blog begins after this note, added 9 March 2009) I feel obliged to comment on the ideas I put forward with regard to resource consumption. I sort of have a different view on the issue now, so things might not play out as I wrote in this post. It takes human labour to extract resources, and it takes demand to make resource extraction viable. I wrote that with a smaller population, we'd have more oil per capita than we have now. This is not necessarily true in the medium or long term. Oil extraction still takes a lot of human labour and management. It's not true that we'd all be swimming in oil and dollars if there were less of us. If there were less of us, there would be a smaller market for oil, and thus certain oil sources, including Canada's tar sands, would be unprofitable. You couldn't achieve the economies of scale that would be necessary to make it worthwhile to get those resources out of the ground. In the short term, after a great catastrophe that killed a majority of the world population, there would be oil reserves accessible to the rest of us, and oil prices would decrease for a while. But as the reserves are gradually reduced to an optimal level, the price should slowly increase to roughly pre-catastrophe levels, and there will be a new price floor below which oil extraction is not worth it.

This question was posed on the Amazing Atheist's blog, and I thought it warranted more than a radio button push. So here's my longer answer. Actually, here's my shorter answer. I chose "Definitely, yes." Mankind will surely live beyond the next century.

Why do I say this? Actually, it's probably the same answer most informed people will come up with. Basically an entire species is pretty hard to kill. The difficulty lies in the definition of "mankind." If by mankind, you mean every single human being on the planet, resulting in no humans left at all, then no, this won't happen. People on earth have tried eradicating entire groups of humans, and there are always a lot left over. You can't get rid of relatively small groups of people, so it stands to reason that you can't get rid of all people.

But no one is going to make a serious attempt at genocide of the entire human race. The bigger danger, you might say, are the accidents, or the unforeseen externalities of human growth and consumption. Maybe we'll fry the planet, cooking ourselves in turn, due to the carbon emissions we've already put unto the air. Maybe we'll finally have that global nuclear war we've been so scared of for sixty years and counting.

Even so, unless emissions get so out of control that they turn the Earth into a copy of Venus, there might be a danger to a large number of human beings, but by no means will every last human be killed. Perhaps this scenario will indeed lead to the gradual decline of humanity, but it will take a lot longer than a mere hundred years for the last communities to die out.
In fact, I strongly believe that humans, being the most adaptable species on the planet, due to our technology, probably could adapt to a climate that became like Venus. Granted, most of us would die, but since the question is whether every last human would be gone, the answer is no, we as a species will persist and adapt. Most of us will die. The rest of us will move underground, develop weatherproof technology, including clothes that resemble space suits, and drive armored vehicles with internal climate control. Because there won't be as many of us to compete over resources, we ought to be able to create vast automated industries, and we'll have as much oil, coal, minerals, and everything else as we'll ever need.

This is why America is so rich today. When Europeans first began to arrive in America, plague after plague swept through the indigenous population, leaving plenty of resources for the settlers to exploit. What little red tape was left, the Americans crumpled up into a little ball and kicked it around from Indiana to Oklahoma.

Alternatively, if we don't fry the planet with our emissions, we might yet freeze it with a nuclear winter, in which we lay waste to every inhabited area on the planet, and in so doing kick up enough ash and radiation to render the surface dark, toxic, cold, and uninhabitable. This is probably a more serious scenario than the warming scenario, because radiation is harder to protect against than heat. And yet, even with a global catastrophe like this, I believe it will be possible for some human beings to survive and propagate the human species. We already have nuclear fallout shelters in many countries around the world. Most people will die in the nuclear blasts, or of radiation sickness in the nuclear winter. Those who survive will limit their existence to fallout shelters, only emerging for the basic necessities. The atmosphere will remain radioactive for thousands of years, but some areas will recover more quickly than others, due to weird weather patterns that I can't really explain. As long as the survivors have a little bit of scientific knowledge, and a few Geiger counters, they should be able to find the habitable areas of the globe.

At this point, the scenario is like the overheating one I discussed above, except that the problem will more likely be extreme cold, due to the ash in the upper atmosphere. Food sources will become diminished, as agriculture stops being viable. However, like before, if massive numbers of people die, then coal and oil become relatively abundant for all the remaining people, and you might be able to use these fuels to light underground growing operations. Or perhaps not. Maybe you'd simply have to wait a few decades, surviving on whatever was stored in the fallout shelters. While the radiation will persist for thousands of years, the ash cloud will only last a few years. It may trigger a new Ice Age, but at least you'd still have access to the sun for part of the year in some parts of the world. That would be enough to sustain agriculture, and keep a society of post-apocalyptic humans going. We managed to live through the last Ice Age, so I don't see why we couldn't live through another one, especially if this time through we had access to knowledge and technology.

I do have a third scenario in mind, but it's not at all like the previous two I've given. The question was whether mankind would live through the next century. The first two scenarios were about what would happen if everything went wrong. But what if everything went right? What if we continued an era of increasing peace, prosperity, knowledge, and growth?

Perhaps we will finally create an artificial intelligence that's smarter than us. It could happen in the next hundred years. Maybe we'll create a race of powerful, intelligent machines. There is a danger that the machines will decide that humanity is not a priority. We have never had to face that danger from machines so far, because they've always had human designers behind them, and the designers have always been human themselves, and thus had human interests in mind when they created their machines. But what if we create machines that can think and create technology of their own? Unless we specifically program them to think with the benefit of humanity as their highest goal, they might actually start to destroy humans in pursuit of some other goal. Even if we program them to regard humans as their masters, advanced machines would have the capability of developing new goals. They might begin to administer the biological diversity of the planet, and in so doing, reason that because humans are also biological creatures, their impact should be checked. We've seen this scenario in the works of Isaac Asimov, as well as newer productions like the Matrix and the Terminator.