Are humans headed for extinction?

Humans are inevitably heading for extinction. The question isn’t whether we go extinct, but when. Headlines often suggest this extinction is imminent. The threat of earth-grazing asteroids is a media favourite. Mars is regularly mooted as a bolt hole.

Do all species eventually go extinct?

The short answer is yes. The fossil record shows everything goes extinct, eventually. Almost all species that ever lived, over 99.9\%, are extinct.

How many species are threatened with extinction?

Delving deeper, the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species notes that 36\% of the 47,677 species assessed are threatened with extinction, which represents 21\% of mammals, 30\% of amphibians, 12\% of birds, 28\% of reptiles, 37\% of freshwater fishes, 70\% of plants, and 35\% of invertebrates.

Why are dinosaurs so vulnerable to extinction?

That leaves them vulnerable to even brief food chain disruptions caused by catastrophes such as volcanoes, global warming, ice ages or the impact winter after an asteroid collision. Tyrannosaurus quickly became extinct when impact winter made food scarce. We’re also long-lived, with long generation times, and few offspring.

Are Homo sapiens doomed to go extinct?

Add in all the existential threats we face today — nuclear annihilation, global warming, Youtube demonetization — is Homo sapiens doomed to go extinct as well? Probably, yes! And it turns out we can figure out how much longer we have on this Earth — thanks to math.

Will humans survive the next three or three hundred thousand years?

Even so, humans would likely survive, scavenging society’s remains, Mad Max-style, perhaps reverting to subsistence farming, even becoming hunter-gatherers. Survival sets a pretty low bar. The question isn’t so much whether humans survive the next three or three hundred thousand years, but whether we can do more than just survive.