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How are humans going to become extinct?

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Re: How are humans going to become extinct?

#41

Post by lutusp »

edavison1 wrote: post #35
lutusp wrote: post #15

A quote: " ... international policymakers must pay serious attention to the reality of species-obliterating risks." Are these people all completely ignorant of evolution and science? No matter what happens in the future, one or another species-obliterating risk is a certainty. Here's why: 1. Our species has existed for about 200,000 years. 2. On that basis, and given our present knowledge of biology and evolution by…

Eh. I dunno whether I am just optimistic, but let's try to remember that certainty isn't part of the scientific vocabulary; almost by definition science never seeks to provide a final answer on any subject and remains open to further inquiry/falsifiability. So. I believe one of the reasons humankind is so awesome is that we have the capacity to be more than just a note in your natural symphony; we are constantly chan…

> Eh. I dunno whether I am just optimistic, but let's try to remember that certainty isn't part of the scientific vocabulary; almost by definition science never seeks to provide a final answer on any subject and remains open to further inquiry/falsifiability.

Yes, that's true, but my point isn't a scientific one, it's a mathematical one. Given enough time, the human species will disappear. It's an equation, not a theory open to empirical test -- but it's certainly supported by evidence from other species.

> ... and I think it's entirely up to us whether we continue to flourish.

This denies a role for nature, from which we sprang. Given that, if we "thrive" and are not outcompeted by some other species, then instead the form of our thriving will be to evolve to the point where present-day people wouldn't be able to recognize the outcome as human.

I say this based on the copious evidence buried in layers of rock that records billions of years of evolution of countless species, of which we are one.

> I guess I just think that human consciousness is so unique and cool that it is worth going to great lengths to preserve it, and to hell with what's considered 'natural'.

More New Age fantasy. When we try to improve on nature, because of our intellectual limitations we instead become nature's obedient servants.

Re: How are humans going to become extinct?

#42

Post by kamaal »

sentientmachine wrote: post #19
lutusp wrote: post #15

A quote: " ... international policymakers must pay serious attention to the reality of species-obliterating risks." Are these people all completely ignorant of evolution and science? No matter what happens in the future, one or another species-obliterating risk is a certainty. Here's why: 1. Our species has existed for about 200,000 years. 2. On that basis, and given our present knowledge of biology and evolution by…

Our planet needs to create at least one offspring with a good chance of sprouting a fresh batch of DNA based life on another planet before we send ourselves back into the stone age. If we don't, there are only so many shots left for us to become a space faring civilization again. If our species can't get off this planet. We may die as surly as an ant colony in the middle of the desert. DNA based life on this planet w…

>> Then the reason the universe was created will have been for nothing.

The whole universe was created for nothing. No one cast a magical spell for it to come to being. Nothing that is happening is happening for a reason.

Its just some laws of physics at play.

We came to be only through some minute chance.

Re: How are humans going to become extinct?

#43

Post by 9876543210 »

lutusp wrote: post #31
sentientmachine wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even then it would probably not end our species. Even if every country had nuclear weapons and simultaneously vaporized every square inch of land surface (very unlikely), there would be a few carnival cruises and people who escaped to underground bunkers to hold out for enough years to repopulate some place later. It would be 99% losses, but the tough ones would survive. It may take a few thousand years to get back t…

> Even then it would probably not end our species. Even if every country had nuclear weapons and simultaneously vaporized every square inch of land surface (very unlikely), there would be a few carnival cruises and people who escaped to underground bunkers to hold out for enough years to repopulate some place later. This is very, very likely, and there's even concrete evidence, based on the fact that the human race w…

The theory behind the Toba event is really interesting, and the wikipedia article does mention that a number of other species are implicated with similar apparent bottlenecks, but it seems curious that this event wouldn't have affected all living creatures universally.

Based on the description of the event, a 5-10 year volcanic winter, I'm trying to imagine how such a disaster might compare to the dinosaur's extinction scenario. Why would only some creatures suffer more devastating effects than others? Does this point to additional complexities in the chain of subsequent events in the post-eruption environment, such as species-specific plagues, and partitioned food-web collapses due to the loss of a keystone species?

Would plants and aquatic species expess such a bottleneck differently, when compared to primates and other apex predators?

Re: How are humans going to become extinct?

#44

Post by lutusp »

spingsprong wrote: post #37
lutusp wrote: post #15

A quote: " ... international policymakers must pay serious attention to the reality of species-obliterating risks." Are these people all completely ignorant of evolution and science? No matter what happens in the future, one or another species-obliterating risk is a certainty. Here's why: 1. Our species has existed for about 200,000 years. 2. On that basis, and given our present knowledge of biology and evolution by…

"1. Our species has existed for about 200,000 years. 2. On that basis, and given our present knowledge of biology and evolution by natural selection, it's reasonable to assume that, within another 200,000 years, we will have been replaced by another species who either successfully competed with us, or into whom we simply evolved over time. " When our species had existed for around 5 years, does that mean it was reaso…

> When our species had existed for around 5 years, does that mean it was reasonable to assume that within another 5 years, we will have been replaced by another species?

You're missing the point that our species didn't arrive that quickly. From the perspective of 199,995 years ago, assuming a certain amount of intelligence, our forebears would make a similar assessment -- that they had assumed their present form some hundreds of thousands of years ago. And we have copious fossil records to support the idea of a typical duration for individual species before they disappear.

In any case, it doesn't matter which numbers one chooses within wide limits -- the fact is that our species will disappear, no matter what we do, within, say, 500,000 years at the most -- meaning our descendants will not be recognizable to use, could not interbreed with us, and would not be obvious kindred spirits to us.

We're a transient species, and we're not in charge, nature is.

Re: How are humans going to become extinct?

#45

Post by kamaal »

salmonellaeater wrote: post #33
ilaksh wrote: post #11

I feel a medium-term or maybe even short-term threat (in the next 10-30 years) not of extinction necessarily but of becoming completely irrelevant. People like to jump to the conclusion that artificial super-intelligence will want to eliminate humans. I don't think that is a foregone conclusion at all. However, if (when) super-intelligent artificial general intelligence "arrives", that pretty much makes normal unaugm…

Even an AI with innocuous goals will destroy humanity[1]. It would have to have explicitly pro-human goals in order to be anywhere near 'safe.' [1] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer

Well actually, no!

There are a lot of things to this Armageddon-through-AI equation. Firstly this thing called 'energy'. A paper clip maximizer will long reach its demise before converting a maximum part of planet to paper clips, merely because it needs a lot of resources to produce energy, and maintain itself too.

In fact true AI would not destroy anything. Because true AI would know it doesn't have sufficient data to make any such decisions.

Re: How are humans going to become extinct?

#46

Post by ggreer »

lutusp wrote: post #38
ggreer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. I was explaining the position of Bostrom, Hanson, and others. I do not completely agree with them. 2. I think you have misinterpreted their position. Bostrom and Hanson know quite a bit about evolution. They know that evolution is undirected and would eventually result in an organism we wouldn't recognize, let alone value. But they both think that we are entering a time in which we will no longer be bound by evolu…

> I think you have misinterpreted their position. I understand it perfectly -- they're either as ignorant as their followers, or they're exploiting public ignorance. > Bostrom and Hanson know quite a bit about evolution. They either know nothing about evolution, or they're deliberately misleading their readers. Contrary to their writing, natural selection is not a race to the top, because it's not a race to any parti…

I don't have time to address everything you've laid out here, but I must say that you seem to almost willfully misinterpret my statements. Moreover, many of your rebuttals are simply incorrect on matters of fact.

Please, in the future, try to remember the principle of charity. Also, you might foster more productive discussions by sprinkling a little tact onto your comments.

Re: How are humans going to become extinct?

#47

Post by [deleted] »

ggreer wrote: post #46
lutusp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you have misinterpreted their position. I understand it perfectly -- they're either as ignorant as their followers, or they're exploiting public ignorance. > Bostrom and Hanson know quite a bit about evolution. They either know nothing about evolution, or they're deliberately misleading their readers. Contrary to their writing, natural selection is not a race to the top, because it's not a race to any parti…

I don't have time to address everything you've laid out here, but I must say that you seem to almost willfully misinterpret my statements. Moreover, many of your rebuttals are simply incorrect on matters of fact. Please, in the future, try to remember the principle of charity. Also, you might foster more productive discussions by sprinkling a little tact onto your comments.

[deleted]

Re: How are humans going to become extinct?

#48

Post by infogulch »

philwelch wrote: post #21
infogulch wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I blame the economists. They had to drop out of their math degree because they couldn't understand exponential functions... surprise surprise now we have earth-destruction level superpowers trying desperately to keep up an economy based on unsustainable exponential growth.

Most economics grad schools prefer you have a math degree, actually.

What? You're not going to take my ad hominem argument lying down? Fine, I'll just go back to youtube comments...

Re: How are humans going to become extinct?

#49

Post by kamaal »

lutusp wrote: post #26
ggreer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Bostrom and others talk about humanity, they usually mean humanity and its extremely advanced descendants. They expect some value drift. Robin Hanson puts it rather succinctly in http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/steps-up-the-ladder.ht... : Of course we should also wonder what we may become as we rise. We are no longer the foragers who began this climb, nor the farmers who climbed just a few floors below, an…

Okay, hold on a minute. When you say, "humanity and its extremely advanced descendants", when you link to an article containing the phrase "steps up the ladder", when you quote someone saying, "we should also wonder what we may become as we rise " [emphasis added], you're overlooking something basic about evolutionary theory that everyone needs to understand. And that is that evolution is not necessarily a progressio…

>>Evolution is not a plan with a goal, it is a blind algorithm that chooses survivors, regardless of the survivors' traits, with the single requirement that they are the fittest for the environment in which they find themselves.

Well that does sound like a goal driven algorithm to me. Except that you can't actually say if a move made by the algorithm will actually produce a acceptable outcome to the algorithm itself. Due to the sheer number of variables, the only option the algorithm has is to do a kind of A/B testing. To make changes to a smaller subset of subjects and see if they survive, if they do they do. If they don't, well then you can kill that test and move on more modifications.

Evolution is an optimization algorithm, which makes changes, tests and makes more changes/corrects based on feed back.

Re: How are humans going to become extinct?

#50

Post by lutusp »

9876543210 wrote: post #43
lutusp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even then it would probably not end our species. Even if every country had nuclear weapons and simultaneously vaporized every square inch of land surface (very unlikely), there would be a few carnival cruises and people who escaped to underground bunkers to hold out for enough years to repopulate some place later. This is very, very likely, and there's even concrete evidence, based on the fact that the human race w…

The theory behind the Toba event is really interesting, and the wikipedia article does mention that a number of other species are implicated with similar apparent bottlenecks, but it seems curious that this event wouldn't have affected all living creatures universally. Based on the description of the event, a 5-10 year volcanic winter, I'm trying to imagine how such a disaster might compare to the dinosaur's extincti…

> ... but it seems curious that this event wouldn't have affected all living creatures universally.

That's easy to explain based on the fact that some species tolerate temperature change better than others. Remember that the Toba event took place just as an Ice Age was beginning, so there were multiple stressors, affecting many species. The survivors were those that (a) could take shelter against the sudden cold, and/or (b) were naturally more resistant to the cold.

A similar partition happened during the asteroid-initiated dinosaur extinction event 65 million years ago -- some species were better able to deal with the sudden cooling of the global climate. Like the little mammals, who could take shelter underground, and from which we eventually sprang.

> Would plants and aquatic species expess such a bottleneck differently ...

Yes. Some of them are able to tolerate freezing conditions that would kill most land animals. As just one example, there are species of frog that can freeze solid, then recover when things thaw out.

https://www.units.muohio.edu/cryolab/projects/woodfrogfreezi...

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