Will We Go Extinct?

Hell yes!

Abso-fuckin’-lutely!

Homo sapiens will definitely be extinct some day.

We could be extinct pretty soon or it might take a long time, but all species eventually die out. There is no reason to believe we will be the exception.

Some fear we will be extinct in the relatively near future - maybe within a few hundred years. It is certainly possible. We are doing a fantastic job of destroying the environment on the only planet we know of where we can survive. Between environmental spoilage and the increasing risk of concomitant nuclear self-immolation provoked by climate change induced famines and massive population displacement, there are solid reasons to doubt our species will survive its technological adolescence. We may soon add our own voice to the deafening silence that is the hallmark of a cosmos bereft of technological civilizations.

But the cosmos is a very exciting place. There are so many other ways we can become extinct.

A planetary catastrophe, regardless whether man-made or arising from natural forces beyond our control, could eliminate our species with total finality. We could prove to be an evolutionary dead end leaving no descendants whatever.

But even if we survive our technological adolescence and survive for a protracted period, Homo sapiens will still become extinct. There is no question about it.

We are descended from Australopithecus afarensis. But Australopithecus afarensis is, nevertheless, extinct. Evolution has no ultimate goal or ambition. Nor does it stop. If we survive long enough, our remote descendants will be too unlike us to be considered Homo sapiens just as we too unlike Australopithecus afarensis to be considered members of that now extinct species.

But even if we do have descendants in the remote future, there is no guarantee our distant descendants will be a space-faring interplanetary species. Whether by natural or man-made environmental destruction, our technological house of cards could come tumbling down. In that case, we might revert to living the same sort of short, brutish, lifestyles on the knife edge of extinction (like most of our ancestors did).

And evolution will continue to mold us.

Rather than being an interplanetary species riding unimaginable technologies across interstellar space, it is equally likely (maybe even more likely) that our remote ancestors might be like tarsiers perched high in the canopy of a future rain forest on an unrecognizable planet Earth, eating insects in the night, blissfully unaware of the stars overhead while awaiting the next cosmic cataclysm.

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