We Might Be On The Verge Of Extinction, But People Don't Seem To Care
At one point in the recent past, our biggest fear of a human extinction event came from nuclear war, or biological warfare. Now itĄ¯s ourselves. We just havenĄ¯t been able to stop polluting until our world is on the brink. Worse, we donĄ¯t seem to care.
At one point in the recent past, our biggest fear of a human extinction event came from nuclear war, or biological warfare. Now it's ourselves. We just haven't been able to stop polluting until our world is on the brink. Worse, we don't seem to care at all.
According to new research from the University of Oxford, the probability of the entire human race going extinct at at any point in history is one in 14,000. That's mostly considering natural phenomenon like supervolcanoes and asteroids.
That's actually not a very lot of safety room in the grand scheme of things. Out of all the species that have existed in Earth's history, they estimate 99 percent are now extinct. So we could pretty much go anytime. And compound those numbers for all the changes we're affecting on the environment with our pollution.
Then there's another study to consider, also from Oxford earlier this year but a different research team. They asked more than 2,500 people in the US and UK to rank three possible scenarios from best to worst: status quo, a catastrophe that wipes out 80 percent of the human population, and a catastrophe that makes us go extinct.
Quite obviously, people ranked those three best, intermediate, and worst in that order respectively. However, when asked specific questions about it, it seemed people were more concerned about an incident that would kill 80 percent of the world rather than everyone. "When asked in the most straightforward and unqualified way," the researchers wrote, "participants do not find human extinction uniquely bad."
And yet, when compared to an animal species like zebras, people were more worried about all of them disappearing. So maybe the real issue though, is that people aren't really thinking about the human race dying out. It's almost like they don't really believe that can happen .
People were thinking more about the few people left behind if 80 percent of humans died, rather than the loss of our entire population. And that's a problem, because it's up to people to think about this outcome. After all, they're the ones that need to dwell on it and affect change. Otherwise we'll all we doomed as we try to not think about being doomed.