A fifty-fifty bet
Context: "Although we may well bring about our own demise as a species, it probably won't be the end of life on earth. Not everything will die. What life forms survive will continue to evolve and fill the niches we once occupied."
I'm a little more optimistic about the future.
Sure, we're going to have to abandon many or most coastal cities over, say, the next five hundred years. (We should have begun decommissioning New Orleans the moment Katrina was over. Miami, you are next.)
And yes, we are seriously overdue for war/plague/famine/pestilence to reduce our number from eight billion to, say, one billion.
And yes, if industrial civilization fails to keep up its energy flow (petroleum, I am thinking of you), re-starting industry will be difficult to impossible — limiting us to medieval-scale technologies for the remainder of human existence.
And, finally, yes, we could die out entirely.
If I were a betting man, I'd give you three to one against human extinction. Then again, we do have a large number of nuclear weapons, and God only know what kind of viruses and bacteria and chemical weapons, and it seems that every weapon gets used sooner or later.
Okay, maybe human extinction is a fifty-fifty bet.
In the News
![How to Pump and Dump Your Planet Without Really Trying is a 1967/2021 American musical industrial training film based on the 1961 military program of the same name, which in turn was based on [REDACTED]'s 1952 Presidential Emergency Action Documents.](/w/images/thumb/c/c2/How_to_Pump_and_Dump_Your_Planet_Without_Really_Trying.jpg/107px-How_to_Pump_and_Dump_Your_Planet_Without_Really_Trying.jpg)
How to Pump and Dump Your Planet Without Really Trying is a 1967/2021 American musical industrial training film based on the 1961 military program of the same name, which in turn was based on [REDACTED]'s 1952 Presidential Emergency Action Documents.
Fiction cross-reference
- A Mars-like environment here on Earth, with cities everywhere
- Dystopian second amendments
- Extract it all, let God pay the bill
- Gnomon algorithm
- Gnomon Chronicles
- How to Pump and Dump Your Planet Without Really Trying
- I find extinction events arousing
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Nonfiction cross-reference
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- Comment @ Facebook (16 March 2026)
