Human race will be extinct in 100 years

Hey I don't know if he is anywhere near right and I'm guessing nether does he. But one thing is for sure we are going to reach the maximum number of people that this planet can support eventually. There is a finite number we cannot stand shoulder to shoulder.

If we crack fusion we may be able to extend a few years but eventually food will become an issue.

The human race will be extinct in 100 years, a top scientist in Australia credited with helping wipe out smallpox believes.

Humans devouring natural resources and population numbers exploding daily have made microbiology professor Frank Fenner a pessimist.

"We're going to become extinct," Fenner, 95, told The Australian newspaper. "Whatever we do now is too late.

"Frank may well be right," retired Professor Stephen Boyden said, "but some of us believe there will come about an awareness of the situation (with the resulting) revolutionary changes necessary to achieve ecological sustainability."

Umm I am wondering why we don't have an "awareness of the situation" right now. Yes well some of us do but the majority do not, I agree. Switching out the lights for 1 hour each year is not doing it again I know its an awareness thing but where do we cross this line and say to the public even number houses cannot use electricity or you cannot drive your car on weekends - something like that.

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3


Is it really an irreversible situation.

MJ2





[edit on 19-6-2010 by majestictwo]

Al Gore is that you? Sorry your ten year prediction didn't pan out so now you have extended it to a hundred years and switched it to over population instead of global warming caused by cars. But sorry that will not pan out either. We only live on 10% of the land mass of earth and the earth has an over abundance. Scarcity is a construct of the Elitist to keep us divided and in poverty war and servitude. That is going to end in the next 10-20 years and hopefully sooner but way before a hundred.

So we need to stop spreading the lies of the elite and politically connected, that is the old and lets start looking to the new. There will be some major bumps in the road but life will go on!

[edit on 19-6-2010 by hawkiye]

Originally posted by hawkiye
Al Gore is that you? Sorry your ten year prediction didn't pan out so now you have extended it to a hundred years. But sorry that will not pan out either. We only live on 10% of the land mass of earth and the earth has an over abundance. Scarcity is a construct of the Elitist to keep us divided and in poverty war and servitude. That is going to end in the next 10-20 years and hopefully sooner but way before a hundred.

So we need to stop spreading the lies of the elite and politically connected, that is the old and lets start looking to the new. There will be some major bumps in the road but life will go on!

I'm not sure where you got this 10% figure from. We may (or may not) live on 10% of the earth but we need more than that for survival. In 1997 (or there about) we were using approximately 37% of arable land my guess is in this last 10 years its a lot more, in another 100 years even more.

But wait we need lots of water to make stuff not just to irrigate so you need to have a rethink because it won't be just you that goes down it will be you'r so called elite also.

Don't presume I agree with Frank Fenner I'm open. But one day we are going to reach the maximum number of people that this planet can support.

Over population is a myth we grow more food on less land then we did 30 years ago.

What do you mean when you say we are producing more food on less land?

Exactly that. Thanks to continuing increases in crop yields, the world's farmers are harvesting hundreds of millions of tons more grain each year on tens of millions acres less land than they did in the 1970s and '80s. For instance, according to USDA figures, the world was producing 1.9 million metric tons of grain from 579.1 hectares of land (a hectare is 2.47 acres) in 1976. In 2004, we got 3.1 million metric tons of grain from only 517.9 hectares of land. This is quite a jump.

This is not to say that we won't possibly need to dedicate more land to farming in the future. The point is, a rise in population is not always matched by a rise in the amount of land required to feed that population.

Download the data on world grain production from the FAO website.

overpopulationisamyth.com...

overpopulationisamyth.com...

reply to post by majestictwo

I have to agree with this Aussie scientist as I've been trying to tell people for over 20 years that this is where we are heading.. but they all laughed at me or looked down at me.

So maybe not in 100 years, but I don't give us much longer than that.

Everything we do, we do for an impermanent reason, based mostly on Greed. It means we are Users and abusers of a world that has seen millions of species die out, and to this world we are only another species, albeit with high notions of ourselves.

I also like to think that we already passed a point where we could have done anything to prevent the outcomes we are starting to experience.

I've warned often that we are on the demise slope as a species and that what we do is not sustainable and thus not viable long term.

reply to post by hawkiye

This is not to say that we won't possibly need to dedicate more land to farming in the future. The point is, a rise in population is not always matched by a rise in the amount of land required to feed that population.

Exactly my point we will "possibly need to dedicate more land to farming in the future". Eventually we won't have enough food and the scales will tip out of our favor. Remember we are thinking future here not present.

True at present "a rise in population is not always matched by a rise in the amount of land required" but things never remain the same. We are in a changing world and while we keep expanding the population it will continue to change.

To plod along expecting this planet will always provide is just unthinkable.

reply to post by majestictwo


You missed the point entirely we produce more food in less land now then we did 30 years ago DESPITE RISING POPULATION. Even if we need a little more farm land there is plenty of available land, far more then we can ever use in a hundred years.

Here is a guy who produces 6000 pounds a year of food on a tenth acre. urbanhomestead.org... With permaculture we can easily accommodate billions more people with plenty of land to spare.

The reason people are starving is not because there is not enough food but because of politics and greed.

We won't be extinct in a hundred years we are nowhere near capacity of the planet. That is an absurd statement! Hopefully will will have overcome most of the problems of today and have a more peaceful sustainable society and not a bunch of greedy evil elitist telling us we are nearing population capacity of the planet to justify thier murderous depopulation goals!

[edit on 19-6-2010 by hawkiye]

This is scaremongering of the highest order. As usual it comes from a 'scientist'. We have been having this kind of doomsday prediction for decades, especially with regards to climate change.

It is only a minority of scientists that indulge in this kind of thing. Their speciality may be something very specific. in this case it is microbiology. He is not a specialist in all fields that affect planetary resources; neither is he able to forsee that we have alternative resources. He forgets the old saying : "Necessity is the mother of invention". Humankind wil find a way. As yet none of us is worried. We all know that oil, etc is a finite resource. We also kow that oil (like coal) will eventually become obsolete.

I compare this kind of scaremongering to the global warming issue. With GW, the pessimistic scientists are forgetting that the earth alternately goes through an 'ice age' and then 'a warming'. It has nothing to do with human activity. It is the arrogance of some scientists who under-estimate the power of mother earth. Where I sit now in front of my PC , there was probable 100 feet of ice during the ice age and that was not caused by dinausaurs breaking wind or primordial man runnng around the planet.

These scientists are also incapable of stretching the time-scale and look back far enough to see how continents developped and how the planet went though major climate changes over 100,000 of years , let alone million of years.

As for the issue at hand, humans will adjust as they have always done. It may seem to some that a government is doing something sinister when it tries to educate its people of the benefit of birth control. It gets the NWO theorist going. However more that 40 years ago this was standard in some third world countries where many families had more than 12 children. They did not see it as a sinister project. In the modern age this 'birth control' factor is almost natural. Young couples with careers either do not want chidren or want a maximum of 2.

As necessity is the mother of invention, the depletion of natural resources will only speed up the development of alternative forms of energy.

I think that this guy is only trying to draw our attention to the scarecity of planetary resources. I seriously do not believe that he really means that we will be extinct in 100 years. I am sure that ,if questioned on TV , he will say that we will be extinct if we do not do this or that..

Basically he is just playing into the hands of the "save-the-planet mob".







[edit on 19-6-2010 by crowdedskies]

[edit on 19-6-2010 by crowdedskies]

Sigh. Once again, human beings have an over inflated ego of themselves and their impact on this planet. Most people have no concept of the sheer size and power of this planet compared to the tiny insignificant humans.

She can support many times the number of people already on this planet. We aren't even fleas on a dogs back compared to her, we're more like microbes on the flea's back.

Over population is a giant steaming pile of crap.

Originally posted by minute2midnight


Over population is a giant steaming pile of crap.

It most certainly is ............

Fewer than 30 percent of India's 950 million people have bathrooms in their homes or easy access to public toilets. The rest routinely relieve themselves in the open -- along roadsides, on farmland or in municipal parks. No more than 250 of the country's 4,000 cities and towns have sewer systems, and many of those systems do not have treatment plants.

The bulk of municipal sewage -- even from such major cities as Bombay and Calcutta -- flows untreated into rivers, lakes or the sea. Other developing countries in Asia and Africa have similar health problems because, like India, they cannot afford the heavy public expenditure needed to build sewer systems.

But diseases related to unsanitary conditions have been more prevalent in India because of its huge population, according to analysts.

link

Carrying capacity is one thing ....... quality of life and living standards -another.

Just a little notice. Do you know that in year 0 was about 7 bln people on earth?

This was posted as a joke, right?

Sort of like I went to Montana and all I did was discover Bigfoot, and spring producing deuterium oxide, and make contact with an alien race, but don't worry, they're only here for the Guinness!

This is a very possible future IMO.

I posted this in a thread called :The Shocking Reality of Modern Day Extinction.

It is more then OK it gets discussed in its own thread !

In my thread you will find a video about how we destroyed the oceans.
A number of extinct species all over the world which are merely the top of the ice berg.

We live in a new era these days that is called the Holocene and there is already talk about the Holocene mass extinction.

An extinction of a species sounds not so bad right ? But it spirals through the food chain.
When a key species get extinct there will follow a number of changes in the habitat it lived in . Google the wolves of yellow stone park.

Thank you for posting it It needs to be said we are on a down going course.

Over population is IMO a problem but not so bad they tell us. If we would alter our ways that is. As long as things stay as they are now...
This article could be right.

~ Sinter

Overpopulation is a myth.

Our problem is simple. I've said in a hundred times on the boards.

We need to learn to live in a a spreak out society. Not to cluster ourselves so that 80% of the population live in coastal areas on faults lines, or in Tornado alley, or in frequently flooded zones.

We have to make appropriate use of our land.

Right now were just being stupid. The earth BTW will take care of itself. We are hurting it yes, but we could never kill it.

There is plenty enough for us to house and feed our current population and we could probably double it before we got into any real trouble.

Technology is the way forward to solve these problems. That and renewable energy.

~Keeper

reply to post by tothetenthpower


I agree.

It is not overpopulation but our attitude that is a problem.
Greed and consumerism will kill us all.

Not sure the relevance here, but without intervention, The Aussie Scientist is right.

Intervention might set back things say 20 years....


Our individual minds can remember 20 years, if your older than 20 of course.

SO think, if 1/3 of the worlds pop experienced intervention tomorrow, and lets say you survived somehow and lived another 20 years.

Would you remember this converstaion? I am going to diarise it....

All of this "there are too many people" stuff is ridiculous.
Come back in 2000 years maybe, but certainly not now.

There is a huge difference between what we choose to use in terms of natural resources and what we need to use for survival.

People always seem to forget that you don't need meat to survive, you don't need a car, you don't even need electricity to survive.

You only need 1/4 acre of land to grow enough food for a family of four.

There is also a huge difference between an extinction event -- naturally occurring asteroid or comet wipes us out, Yellowstone eruption wipes out millions, etc. -- versus the implied "the government is going to wipe us out because of over population" theories.

Logically, it's safe to assume that the Earth will again have a mass extinction at some point as it has before. But it will have nothing to do with the number of people living here at the time.

Well... DOY!!!

Thank you, Captain Obvious! (and, the problem won't be overpopulation)

[Change the title to 10 years and you might get some opposition. ]


[edit on 6/19/2010 by SquirrelNutz]

I am just amused that anyone can say the earth will look after itself. Sure it will that's not the contention. We could kill ourselves and every living creature on the plant but Earth would survive.

Sure Professor Fenner will be way off the 100 year mark if we change and there is every chance we will. To start with we'll probably crack fusion reaction and even have it on line much sooner. That alone will stretch out the hundred years to... well lets guess 200 or more. Then we'll probably crack the transport problem and use hydrogen powered cars that use hydrogen from sunlight conversion... that should buy a few more years. We'll grow food where its never been grown it before.

In fact if we can do this Professor Fenner will be way off, with CO2 down we'll probably be too cold. and we'll be off the balance again. Humans interfere with the balance of everything mainly because of our population and because there are not enough people who care about being "Earth Neutral"

People were not talking about now but the future, okay 100 years is way off but what xxxx years will it be there is a limit if we keep populating.

Oh and just in.... 2010-06-19
Another finding

Scientists have sounded alarm bells about how growing concentrations of greenhouse gases are driving irreversible and dramatic changes in the way the oceans function, providing evidence that humankind could well be on the way to the next great extinction.

The findings of the comprehensive report: 'The impact of climate change on the world's marine ecosystems' emerged from a synthesis of recent research on the world's oceans, carried out by two of the world's leading marine scientists.

Could unbridled climate changes lead to human extinction?

and
Australian-US study finds oceans 'choking' on greenhouse gases

The findings have enormous implications for mankind, particularly if the trend continues.

The joint Australia-US study, published in Science magazine, has blamed climate change for a significant shift in the chemistry and physics of the ocean.

I suppose these guys are wrong too according to ATS scientists


.









[edit on 19-6-2010 by majestictwo]