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Comment by more_corn | Hacker News Reader

lol, you think we’ll live a hundred years let alone a couple billion? Given our pathological inability to solve even the most basic and obvious existential risks, I give odds of seeing the end of humanity in my lifetime at around 50%.

I mean we still put forever chemicals in our food containers. There’s a segment of the population that aggressively opposes efforts to save humanity from global warming (the earth abides but humanity is quite fragile). We’ve had at least six known near misses in nuclear annihilation. We’ve been utterly unable to stamp out obvious misinformation, lies and utter bullshit in public discourse (so we can’t even talk about the real problems with anything approaching consensus on facts)

The good news is we really don’t have to worry about the timeframes where the death of our star would cause problems.

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>lol, you think we’ll live a hundred years let alone a couple billion?

I probably won't be around in 100 years, but I'd place the odds of human extinction in that time frame at approximately 0. 1 billion is right out though. If there are descendants, they almost certainly won't be homo sapiens.

Which makes the moot, because why do we care if X life is in that future reference frame or not. There will be life somewhere.

> I give odds of seeing the end of humanity in my lifetime at around 50%.

This is not well-reasoned.

Climate change, even in its most hysterical worst case scenarios, could make large areas of the planet uninhabitable, and cause massive migrations, wars, and famines. But it won't kill everyone.

Forever chemicals, even if you believe they're responsible for reduced fertility, haven't sterilized humans. We're not in the Handmaid's Tale yet, and if we were, it's pretty clear there would be resulting cultural shifts to address fertility.

Nuclear annihilation is not possible with current arsenal levels. You would need millions of high yield detonations to accumulate lethal levels of radiation planet wide. Nobody has that many nukes. There's enough to make large areas uninhabitable, but it won't kill everyone. Nuclear winter could cause famines, but isolated groups can use existing technology for indoor farming.

There are some things that could kill us off entirely (asteroid), but none of the things you mentioned are going to do it.

> lol, you think we’ll live a hundred years let alone a couple billion? Given our pathological inability to solve even the most basic and obvious existential risks, I give odds of seeing the end of humanity in my lifetime at around 50%.

How old are you?

50%, probably not.

0.1%? Probably. And that's probably the highest that number has been in millennia.

You did mention "the end of humanity in my lifetime" after all.

> lol, you think we’ll live a hundred years...

... Yes? Do you really, seriously think that eight billion people can so easily disappear within a couple of generations and there won't be anyone left for the population to start growing again?

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