What will end mankind

While the future projections of warming are clearer than ever in this report, and many impacts simply cannot be avoided, the authors caution against fatalism. A tipping point refers to when part of the Earth's climate system undergoes an abrupt change in response to continued warming.

For political leaders, the report is another in a long line of wake-up calls, but since it comes so close to November's COP26 global climate summit, it carries extra weight. Follow Matt on Twitter. Image source, EPA. Mass evacuations as wildfires spread across Greece Time nearly up to stop climate catastrophe - Sharma Research shows millions more at risk of flooding A really simple guide to climate change. IPCC report key points. Global surface temperature was 1. Image source, Justin Sullivan.

Drought in California has seen water levels in Lake Oroville drop to record lows. Protesters urge action by politicians as the clock counts down to November's COP26 climate summit in Glasgow. Can temperature rise be kept below 1. This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The number of humans has increased from around million people to over 7.

More than plant and animal species have become extinct because of human activities over that period. As the human population grows, other species have less space to roam. Sea level rise means even less land, and rising temperatures will send many species migrating to better climates.

A major challenge today is getting people to stop doing things that create problems, like burning fossil fuels that contribute to climate change. This is one global problem that requires countries worldwide and the people within them to work toward the same goal. Technology will no doubt improve over the next years, too. To keep doing the same things and expect someone else to fix the mess later would be a risky, expensive gamble.

So, the Earth in years may be unrecognizable. Or, if humans are willing to change their behaviors, it may persist with its vibrant forests, oceans, fields and cities for many more centuries, along with its most successful residents, humankind. In , a team of scientists in Japan found a strain of bacteria from bottle recycling facility that can break down and metabolise plastic. On the other hand, this finding shows the subtle and powerful ways in which human actions are changing the life on this planet.

The adaptation of organisms in response to pollutants is a complex phenomenon. Research indicates that negative effects induced by pollution often worsen over multiple generations , although the coping mechanism vary in different species. The rapid depletion of natural resources and biodiversity is not a normal evolutionary race that nature is used to.

While some species can certainly adapt to the changes taking place in our environment, humans are no longer a mere species that follows Darwinian evolution but a much larger force that has come to drive evolution on this planet. Studies have shown that for most species, evolutionary adaptation is not expected to be sufficiently rapid to buffer the effects of environmental changes being wrought by human activity.

And our own species will be no exception to this. While there is no proof that we will destroy ourselves, there are clear indications that we ignore the effects at our own peril. For example, some of the mass extinctions in the Earth's history are related to acidification of oceans.

The oceans may be acidifying faster today than they did in the last million years, primarily due to human activities. Can the species we share the planet with adapt fast enough to cope with the new world we are creating for them? Widespread degradation of ecosystems threatens the conditions of life on Earth, in particular the long-term survival of our own species. Our impact on the planet is much is deeper than carbon footprints or global warming. It points to a future where the effects of anthropogenic matter will take over — if it hasn't already — the identity of the Earth and its life.

In the face of this, humans themselves might lose out in the evolutionary race. Eliminating materials like concrete or plastic or replacing them with alternatives is not going to address the fundamental problem with human attitudes and our unparalleled appetite for more.

This is exactly where materialism can seamlessly transform into a known unknown risk factor in global catastrophe. The myriad of ways in which it can turn this planet into a mundane world is something our civilisation has never experienced before. In the absence of a fully secure evolutionary shield, we could depend on our intelligence to survive. Nevertheless, as Abraham Loeb, professor of science at Harvard University and an astronomer who is searching for dead cosmic civilisations puts it, "the mark of intelligence is the ability to promote a better future".

The story of Bhasmasura in Hindu Mythology offers an eerie parallel to the impact of materialism. I could be relatively early, if humanity has a long, populous future ahead. This claim will be true for the people in the second half of the list the shaded area. Is it true for me? Demographers have estimated the total number of people who ever lived at about billion.

That means that about billion people were born before me. Currently, about million people are born each year. At that rate, it would take only about years for another billion more people to be born. A sharp decrease in the birthrate could postpone doomsday. It might mean a global catastrophe leaving a handful of post-apocalyptic survivors.

There has been speculation about how future technology might change the human condition. Genetically or digitally enhanced humans could live for centuries and have few children. Yet even this does not seem to offer an easy out.

What the doomsday argument says, fundamentally, is that the human future is not so long and populous as we generally think. Will we resolve our differences, save the planet, and go on to explore the galaxy?

Criticisms of the doomsday argument are legion. An illustration: Alice has no idea whether a coin toss will land heads or tails. She assigns both the same 50 percent chance — using the principle of indifference. Ben happens to know a trick coin is being used, and he says the chance of heads is percent. Both Alice and Ben are being reasonable; they just know different things. Goodman objected that one could, in principle, have any sort of knowledge about our position in the human timeline.

The chance of me existing is 1, times greater with 2 than 1. That gives me reason to think 2 is more likely to be right. Should you accept the self-indication assumption, it cancels out the doomsday argument.

That is an appealing prospect, but philosopher Nick Bostrom has raised compelling objections to the assumption.