[jobsfancy]

Can people stop doomsdaying ever?

[Gerribase]

After all the hype surrounding the pseudoscience of 2012, I've become a bit numb to "yet another" warning of doomsday, but when a scientist of Fenner's caliber goes on the record to say mankind will die off, it's hard not to listen. In my case, this would be affecting my "children's children's children". That's eerie for me.
If you don't recognize it, that's fine. If you do, isn't it?

[Sapremolz]

A "Frank Fenner" Google search yields his involvement with viruses and eradicating smallpox, before giving way to this.
A "Brian Wang" Google search is predominately Facebook information. A respected man, but not the definitive opinion, if there was one.
Naturally I don't know. I just found it interesting.

[ANCETPYNCTEXT]

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[trubreTab]

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[Ocqljudq]

Granted, we're not very good at looking after our planet, and we are in a dire predicament, but thinking we'll be extinct in less than a century is a little over the top. A "collapse of civilization" or "rapid population decline" might be a better forecast.
I go along with that.

On the other hand, extreme competition for resources could lead to large scale nuclear war, which the human race would be unlikely to survive. I think that was what Fenner had in mind, given his reference to food wars.

[AmfitNom]

Well if you kill yourself first, I'll kill myself after you...

[smokeberly]

I saw James Lovelock speak at the Hay Festival last month and he basically said that we're heading for a catastrophic collapse as well with the unspoken part that, basically, the vast majority of the world's population will die if we continue as we are.

Not to mention everything that's been written on the subject of Limits to Growth.

The interesting thing is that, even now, we have probably got the technological ability to pull ourselves back from the brink, but the political will just isn't there.

What's happening to Blue Fin Tuna right now is a handy comparison...

[flopay]

I'm certainly expecting to be extinct in 100 years.

[NikitahDE]

Humans will not go extinct. Did you guys learn nothing from star trek or so?!? Of course we will evolve into omnipotent energy balls flying around everywhere in the universe.

[Abedgebeefs]

Yeah, I'm going to go with that too. We survived the bloody ice age with nothing but spears and leather, I think we can survive GW with modern technology. There may be ugly times ahead (and the poor parts of the world will bear the brunt, natch), but we're not going anywhere unless an asteroid hits, like Laz said.

[seperalem]

If 99.999% of the population got wiped out we'd be down to about 65,000 people. If the mitochondrial evidence is to be believed, we bounced back from about 10,000 some 70,000 years ago.

[Eltabaco]

We're as adaptable as Brown Rats. We're staying.

[neeclindy]

.

[NanoGordeno]

What I finid scary is that our ancestors may have been reduced to about 10,000 or even as low as 1,000 copulating pairs!

No wonder we bounced back so quickly if all we were doing was shagging!

[bapimporb]

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[KellyLynchIV]

We've got until 2050 to reach Alpha Centauri or conquer the planet!

Or were you hoping for a cultural win?

Well won't China (unless it collapses) win since it will have the highest score in 2050?

[WFSdZuP3]

Yeah, I'm going to go with that too. We survived the bloody ice age with nothing but spears and leather, I think we can survive GW with modern technology. There may be ugly times ahead (and the poor parts of the world will bear the brunt, natch), but we're not going anywhere unless an asteroid hits, like Laz said.

How about a few gigatons worth of nuclear blasts?

[Patgaepx]

We've got until 2050 to reach Alpha Centauri or conquer the planet!

Or were you hoping for a cultural win?

culture FTW

[SimSlim]

Possible, but I can't imagine anybody would waste a nuke on Somalia, for example. Some of them would survive, as would Australian aborigines way the hell out in the desert, people in Nunavut, etc. Fallout can only cause so many problems. Albeit I don't know how plausible the supposed "nuclear winter" scenario would be...

I was thinking of fallout being the 100% killer, not the blasts themselves or the winter (although that too has the potential, or so some would have me believe). I have no real basis for these fears, only hearsay and being raised on stories such as "On the Beach".

Nuclear holocaust has featured in my nightmares recurrently over the years - I have a nasty one every decade or so. My last one involved hearing a radio report saying there had been a major series of detonations in the northern hemisphere, and that we should all kill ourselves now to save ourselves the days of agony dying of radiation poisoning (similar to "On the Beach") and me and my wife trying to decide if we should kill my daughters or not.