Stephen Hawking Warns of Mankind Wiping Itself Out

Stephen Hawking spoke of a multitude of manmade threats encircling the planet in a recent BBC lecture. But how real are the risks, and what hope is there of mitigation?

Stephen Hawking
(Photo by Intel Free Press)

By Jason Thomson
Physicist Stephen Hawking has said the chances of cataclysmic events which could affect the survival of humanity are soaring, and we have only ourselves to blame.

In comments while recording the annual BBC Reith lectures, the renowned physicist asserted that disaster befalling planet Earth in the next 1,000 to 10,000 years is a “near certainty”, and that increasingly the threats facing humankind are of our own making.

Yet he also insisted that humanity will likely survive, because by the time catastrophe strikes, we shall have colonized other worlds.

"However, we will not establish self-sustaining colonies in space for at least the next hundred years,” said Prof. Hawking, “so we have to be very careful in this period".

The threats Hawking specified included nuclear war, global warming, and genetically engineered viruses, proposing that progress in science and technology is in some ways a gamble, improving the lives of billions, but also introducing the means to end humanity.

Yet this is no new debate. The idea that man’s advancement could be his very undoing has been with us for decades, centuries.

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Could This Be Humanity's Last Century?: Many Predict Man Will Soon Merge With Machine

The Borg: From the Star Trek television series. The Borg represented a hybrid of humans and machines.

By Seth Shostak

OK, quick: Name a few important things that happened in the 11th century.

If you're not tenured in medieval studies, that may be tough, although several modestly notable events took place in those hundred years -- for example, the Battle of Hastings and the launch of the Crusades. When we look back a millennium, even the highest parapets of history become hard to discern. Nonetheless, those long-ago happenings dramatically altered the future.

But what about the 21st century? What will your kids and grandkids do that will still be important a thousand years from now?

Let me suggest that they may trump every previous generation. They may go beyond simply changing society, and possibly usher in the last act for Homo sapiens.

That may strike you as a less-than-sunny prospect, but only because you're missing the big picture. I'm not talking about the various self-destructive threats of the moment -- the ones that fill the papers and spark pontification on the nightly news. Yes, both terrorism and climate change are serious matters, but the former is manageable and frankly, so is the latter. Alleviating environmental catastrophe requires modifications of behavior. Hard, sure, but we're not talking about violating physics.

No, the three big things that I believe will take place in the 21st century are more profound, and not necessarily bad.

To begin with, we're finally going to understand biology at a molecular level. DNA's double helix was discovered a mere six decades ago, and now -- for hardly more than a kilobuck -- you can sequence the genome of your yorkie or yourself.

The relentless interplay of science and technology ensures that genomic knowledge will spawn a growing number of applications. Curing disease is one of these, and it's obviously desirable. But our efforts won't be limited to merely fixing ourselves; we'll also opt for improvement. You may hesitate to endorse designer babies, but hot-rodding our children is as much on the horizon as the morning sun.

Number two on my list of major 21st century developments is expanding into nearby space. We need more resources -- both acreage and raw materials -- unless we're happy to condemn our descendants to a limited lifestyle and unlimited war. You may worry about running out of oil, but that's not the resource that should really make you antsy. We're going to eat through the easily recoverable reserves of stuff like copper, zinc, and the platinum group metals in a matter of decades.

We can find more of these elements in asteroids, and already several companies are planning to do so. But nearby space could also provide unlimited real estate for siting the condos of the future. Everyone expects our progeny to establish colonies on the moon or Mars, but the better deal is to build huge, orbiting habitats in which you can live without a spacesuit. Think of scaling up the International Space Station a few thousand times. We can put unlimited numbers of people in such engineered environments, and sometime in this century we'll start doing that. The days of being confined to the bassinette of our birth are coming to an end.

The third thing you can expect before the year 2100 is the development of generalized artificial intelligence (GAI). In other words, machines that don't just play games like chess or Jeopardy, but can do the thinking required for any white-collar job, including all the ones at the top. And such machines won't necessarily be large. A synapse in your brain is a few thousand nanometers in size. A transistor on a chip is hundreds of times smaller. The hardware necessary for human-level smarts -- even today -- could fit in an iPad.

These are developments that -- over the long term -- will dwarf such quotidian concerns as politics, war, or economics.

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Sixty-Eight Elephants Massacred in Just the Past 60 Days in Democratic Republic of Congo

Photo by Caroline Granycome.

[Editor's note: The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) said this week that 68 elephants have been killed in Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the past two months, with AFP reporting 30 killed in just over two weeks. Armed Militants have aggressively moved into the poaching business to use money from illegal ivory to buy food, weapons and ammunition.]

By Lizabeth Paulat, Care2
A recent summit on elephant population and habitat has led to some dire predictions: the African elephant may go extinct within our lifetimes.

Putting the end date at just decades away, the African Elephant Summit, which hosted delegates from various Asian, European and African countries, focused on mitigating poaching and increasing elephant habitats around the continent.

The statistics presented are staggering. In the 1940s, there were thought to be around 3-5 million African elephants in the wild. These days conservation organizations are estimating only 500,000 to 700,000 elephants currently exist. The largest drops came during the 1980′s when the continent saw widespread turbulence. Rather than rising back up from the fall when stability took over much of the region, increased poaching has hastened the elephant’s population decline.

The summit highlighted the link between poverty, infant mortality and poaching, showing a correlation between desperate communities, and how susceptible they can be to engaging in the illegal wildlife trade.

Yet, despite these dire warnings, there is a small beacon of hope in the midst.

Uganda, which saw a dramatic loss in wildlife during the 1980 bush wars, has become an example to many African nations on how to reintroduce the species while combating poaching. In 1982 the population of elephants in Uganda fell to the drastically low number of 2,000. Today, that number has more than doubled with more than 5,000 elephants roaming freely and steady population increases.

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In the Age of Extinction, Which Species Can We Least Afford to Lose?

Top species on the extinction list: "Birds". (Screen capture from
YouTube video)

By Tracy McVeigh
The threatened extinction of the tiger in India, the perilous existence of the orangutan in Indonesia, the plight of the panda: these are wildlife emergencies with which we have become familiar. They are well-loved animals that no one wants to see disappear. But now scientists fear the real impact of declining wildlife could be closer to home, with the threat to creatures such as ladybirds posing the harshest danger to biodiversity.

Climate change, declining numbers of animals, rising numbers of humans and the rapid rate of species extinction mean a growing number of scientists now declare us to be in the Anthropocene – the geological age of extinction when humans finally dominate the ecosystems.

Last week a report from WWF, the Living Planet Index 2014, seemed to confirm that grim picture with statistics on the world's wildlife population which showed a dramatic reduction in numbers across countless species. The LPI showed the number of vertebrates had declined by 52% over four decades. Biodiversity loss has now reached "critical levels". Some populations of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians have suffered even bigger losses, with freshwater species declining by 76% over the same period. But it's the creatures that provide the most "natural capital" or "ecosystem services" that are getting many scientists really worried. Three quarters of the world's food production is thought to depend on bees and other pollinators such as hoverflies. Never mind how cute a panda is or how stunning a tiger, it's worms that are grinding up our waste and taking it deep into the soil to turn into nutrients, bats that are catching mosquitoes and keeping malaria rates down. A study in North America has valued the loss of pest control from ongoing bat declines at more than $22bn in lost agricultural productivity.

"It's the loss of the common species that will impact on people. Not so much the rarer creatures, because by the very nature of their rarity we're not reliant on them in such an obvious way," said Dr Nick Isaac, a macroecologist at the NERC Centre for Ecology & Hydrology in Oxfordshire. He says that recent work he and colleagues have been doing suggests that Britain's insects and other invertebrates are declining just as fast as vertebrates, with "serious consequences for humanity". "The really interesting thing about this work is that we are learning that it's not just about the numbers of species going extinct, but the actual numbers in a population; that's the beginning of a fundamental shift in our understanding," he says.

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