Extinction
© Randall Carlson Newsletter June 2025
In the spirit of asking questions, I will ask this: Are human beings exceptional among the millions of species that have inhabited this planet and have gone extinct? Depending upon which estimates of the total number of extinct species that have ever existed, both terrestrial and marine, something like 99.99% of all species that have ever lived have suffered complete extinction. This might suggest that we have no reason for optimism with respect to the odds of long-term human survival.

A new book has been published this year by British paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Henry Gee, who is also senior editor of the scientific journal Nature. Inspired by Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gee has authored a work entitled The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire: Why Our Species is on the Edge of Extinction. In a review of the book author, cofounder and CEO of Genyro Inc. Adrian Woolfson has written that Gee "presents a sobering vision of humankind's future, as intriguing as it is unsettling. Despite our technological prowess and capacity for imagination, he argues, Homo sapiens is 'marked for extinction.'"

Gee attributes these diminishing chances of long-term survival of modern humans to "the rot" which "set in when we hunted down and extinguished Neanderthals, Denisovans, and the diminutive 'hobbit men' Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis. Suddenly, we had no competition, something as necessary for success as the 'irritating grit in an oyster' that creates a pearl."

I would be inclined to take issue with the idea that modern humans hunted down and exterminated our hominid competitors, being more inclined to believe that they succumbed to the same succession of natural catastrophes that extinguished so many of the other terrestrial mammalian species with which we recently cohabited this planet. Be that as it may, whatever might be its cause or causes, it is an apparent fact that Homo sapien sapiens is the sole survivor of the numerous hominid species that have recently occupied the Earth.

The review goes on to say that this extinction was compounded by "the invention of agriculture around 12,000 years ago and the selective breeding of high-yielding crops during the Green Revolution of the 1980s. The former transformed a dispersed species of hunter-gatherers — perpetually teetering on 'the edge of oblivion' -into a global population of billions. The latter allowed humanity to defy biologist Paul Ehrlich's apocalyptic predictions that the unchecked increase in global population would outstrip Earth's resources, resulting in widespread famine."

Gee goes on to say that despite the advent of genetic engineering we are unlikely to avert a food crisis. He then mentions a host of other potential threats to a sustained human existence. These threats include nuclear and biological warfare, artificial general intelligence, pandemics, volcanic eruptions and finally, asteroid impacts. The first two on the list are threats that are entirely within our ability to control, assuming we can raise up leaders whose vision looks beyond the Malthusian rationale for war and empire. That remains to be seen. There appears to be hope that a substantial portion of the human race is getting sick and tired of warfare and the lies that promote it, the human suffering it engenders and the appalling waste of resources that are its inevitable result. As far as AGI goes, that, I think, is an open question at this point in time. Pandemics can be limited by the astute application of human intelligence and authentic science. The last two on the list represent natural disasters that, I believe, have played the major role in species extermination throughout the history of life on Earth as well as causing the demise of earlier civilizations. The environmental consequences of large volcanic eruptions and hypervelocity impacts are profound, and can include the collapse of agriculture which, in turn, can lead to pandemics due to malnutrition and compromised immune systems. Another natural disaster not listed but, as we are learning, also poses a significant threat to civilization, is extreme solar events. More on this later.

As it stands now, we are vulnerable to the effects of these large-scale natural disasters. With impending advances, however, we can mitigate these effects to some degree. How, exactly remains to be seen. However, as the review notes: "The astonishing creativity of humans relies on their vast populations." Gee comments that "it takes a civilization of billions to create an Einstein." But, as Woolfson points out, "following an uninterrupted period of expansion, humankind now faces the prospect of transitioning to a phase of population decline" as is now occurring in China, Japan, Italy, Thailand, and Spain. Whether this trend will continue or expand its range remains to be seen.

But there is hope on the horizon and here is where the potential to avert human extinction aligns with a scenario I have been advocating for decades. As Woolfson explains: "The solution to this impending population calamity, Gee argues, is for humankind to expand its domain through the colonization of, and evolutionary diversification on, the Moon, Mars, and other planetary bodies. In so doing, Gee believes humans can rekindle the migratory wanderlust of their ancestors, using their intellectual agility to devise solutions for survival in hostile environments." I would also submit that this great cosmic diversification will also include free-orbiting worlds built out of the infinite material and energy resources of space itself.

Woolfson goes on to say that despite this vision being inspiring, there are "near-term issues" that "appear at odds with its feasibility." Among these issues the primary one is the fear of "diverting resources to space travel and artificial ecosystems." Since I became an advocate of space exploration and colonization in the 1970s, I have repeatedly heard, over, and over again, the argument that it would be immoral to divert resources to human expansion into space when there were so many unsolved problems here on Earth. Yet, here we are, a half century later and the problems articulated by the critics since then are still with us, unresolved.

While some things have definitely improved, war still looms over our world like the sword of Damocles. Human suffering continues apace, there are problems of pollution and food scarcity. Governments and agenda driven factions are still jockeying for totalitarian control. Maybe, just maybe, the solution to our Earthly problems is, in fact, expansion.

But one thing is different about the situation now. We know things about the history of this planet upon which we live, and the civilizations that our ancestors built upon it that we did not know back at the dawn of the Space Age. We know that powerful catastrophic disruptions have occurred over, and over again, catastrophes that have reset both the ecological clock and precipitated the fall of human civilizations. Prudence dictates that we must assume that devastating natural catastrophes will occur again, and not that infrequently, on a global scale. As it stands now, we are not prepared for the kinds of things we know that cosmic nature can, and will, throw at us.

But this can change with a change in human consciousness. Woolfson concludes his review of Gee's book by saying "Edward Gibbon believed that the principal cause of the Roman Empire's fall was the cultural shift invoked by Christianity. Perhaps an ideological shift will precipitate humanity's decline." While I am not inclined to believe that it was the advent of Christianity that provoked this cultural shift as much as it was in a shift the balance of nature, we can acknowledge that there indeed has been a cultural shift within the last millennium that is now accelerating. But this shift could work both ways. It could manifest as a positive, evolutionary change or it could be a destructive, de-evolutionary shift that aborts the forward momentum of civilization and humankind.

The kind of collective mindset that elevates the trivial to the pinnacle of importance, the so-called "woke" mindset that takes offense at the idea of individual merit and achievement, that pushes for an across-the-board dumbing down of society, that enslaves humankind to statist hierarchies of political control at the expense of freedom, that promotes never-ending wars of conquest - this will surely condemn us to another round of cultural and social collapse and the onset of a new dark age. The great experiment in Freedom and human civilization will have failed.

But if, instead, we promote and celebrate a philosophy of Liberty, of achievement, of willingness to take risks, and if, instead of a manufactured reality based upon propaganda dished out by politicians, autocrats and their minions, we endorse a true and authentic understanding of how the world works, we can accomplish things beyond our imagination and maximize the probabilities that this time we can successfully make it: That we can create a civilization that will endure for the ages.

And, it is not hyperbole to say that nothing less than terrestrial life on Earth is counting on us.

Reference:

See: Woolfson, Adrain (2025) An end to human exceptionalism: Science, Vol. 387, March 28, Issue 6741, p. 1360