"Humanity is not sustainable. To maintain our lifestyle for the entire planet, you would need five more Earths..."
Will our civilization last forever? The answer is probably not. Eventually, in the very distant future, our Sun will devour our planet. Hopefully, by then, we will have found a way to escape this fate and colonize different worlds in deep space. By then, hopefully, humankind will become an interstellar species. But will we survive so long into the future? According to a group of scientists, things aren’t looking good for humans. During a CBS program called 60 minutes, Stanford University scientists talked about the global crisis and max extinctions. According to experts, things are looking good for humankind. Tony Barnosky, a Stanford biologist whose work involves using the fossil record to map changes in ecosystems over time, explained his work suggests current extinction rates are moving at about 100 times the rate typically observed in the known four billion-year history of our planet.
Civilization will end
According to the biologist, such a rapid population loss means the worst mass extinction episode since the dinosaurs is currently underway. The worst part? Humankind isn’t really aware of this. While Earth has repeatedly recovered from mass extinction events in the past, the vast majority of life existing on our planet at the time has not. Unfortunately, that may well include us humans—or, at least, the pitfalls of our technological civilization. According to the researchers, that grim reality means that even if humans manage to survive somehow, the far-reaching impacts of mass extinction — such as habitat destruction, failures in the natural food chain, soil infertility, and more —will cause modern human society to collapse. In other words, life as we know it will forever change. If humankind does not drastically correct this course, the havoc we are wreaking on the planet will be very unpleasant. It’s a grim warning but one that other experts share. Civilization could very well end.
“Humanity is not sustainable. To maintain our lifestyle for the entire planet, you would need five more Earths,” explained Stanford researcher Paul Ehrlich.
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