this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
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me_irl
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Reality check. We are in ZERO danger of extinction. Our population could decline by 95%, and there would still be more humans alive than when Julius Caesar walked the Earth. Extinction would take millennia. But even then, there are built in safe guards that make declining below a certain population level impossible.
For a start, consider natural selection. societies are not homogeneous. Some groups reproduce at above replacement, some below. In the US for example, if we just assume birth rates remain the same for all groups indefinitely, never returning to an average replacement rate? In that unlikely scenario, extinction still will not happen. The Amish and the Mormons shall inherit the Earth.
And this can happen for cultural practices, not just religious groups. Maybe multi-generational households will become more common through natural selection. Maybe it will become the norm for people to have children right after high school, while still living with their parents. You only go to college and start your career after having some kids. Each generation pays to raise their own grandchildren, rather than their own children.
And even without cultural selection, eventually technological decline will prevent extinction. What technology your society can wield is a function of its population. As your population shrinks, your society's technological complexity decreases. Eventually you can no longer manufacture mechanized farming equipment, so more people have to work the land again. And on traditional family farms, children are an economic resource that pay for themselves. So the birth rate recovers. And of course, reliable birth control is the product of industrial production. Eventually your population shrinks enough that you are no longer capable of running a birth control factory.
I don't want to see the country become entirely Amish or to see us collapse back to 18th century levels of technology. But these are just the worst case scenarios. The absolute worse case scenario is that population declines by 90-95% and we regress technologically to some 18th century equivalent. Not a future I want to see, but it would hardly be the end of the world. Our present industrial civilization would be remembered as an unsustainable historical aberration, a temporary population boom brought on by the era of cheap hydrocarbons.
We are literally sterilizing the planet lol. The rate of change in CO2 and temperature has never before been seen on this planet, and that's including the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, lol.
Nothing can adapt quickly enough to survive that, including us and all of our livestock.
Including the asteroid? Ok now I know you're full of it.
And again, I'm not talking about whether we avoid mass calamity or civilizational collapse. Those things are possible. Complete extinction is not. Even if we end up with a few million humans scraping by as hunter gatherers at the high latitudes, humans are the most adaptable species on this planet.
Google it and get back to me.
I'm sorry, but there is no way the first derivative of the atmospheric CO2 concentration with respect to time is faster now than when literally every forest on the planet was burned to ash within a the span of a few hours. I think you're misremembering a half-remembered headline you saw somewhere. A quick google search shows nothing remotely like what you're claiming. If you want to tell me the CO2 concentration is changing faster now than some other CO2-induced mass extinctions, sure, I could believe that. But the asteroid was a massive instantaneous event.
Listen I'm happy you're so confident, but you're wrong. A simple google search can clear this up for you.
We are changing the temperature and co2 literally ten times faster than the asteroid.
Sorry to be the one to break the bad news to you, lol.
"Lol," said the confident fool.
You have extremely poor reading comprehension. The articles you linked do not back up what you claim in the slightest. You don't seem to understand the difference between total change and rate of change. The relevant paragraph from the first article:
So yes, the cumulative effect of centuries worth of CO2 emissions may be greater than the total CO2 released by the asteroid. But we're talking about rate of change, not total change. You're comparing centuries of cumulative CO2 emissions to emissions that were generated over a few hours.
I believe you didn't even read the second article, as it is merely discussing how CO2 rates were higher during the time of the dinosaurs.
Sorry, but you need to learn to read more carefully. Or at least gain an understanding of the difference between change and rate of change. For discussions of adaptation, rate of change is what matters.
You're not just a fool, but a one with hubris.
Lmao. So. fucking. Confident.
Also check out The Fate of the World: A History and Future of the Climate Crisis by Bill McGuire. More recent and stark.
I do see your points about the resilience, but to assume total population collapse is IMPOSSIBLE is wrong. Many species on this planet have become extinct and we are not immune to that, locally nor globally. The amish may struggle when crop failure and extreme weather becomes more common place due to changing climates or pollution levels. They might make a bad year or two, but several bad years in a row could significantly reduce populations, possibly to the point of poor genetic diversity where after a few generations certain diseases or conditions wipe them out. They could also just be murdered by hungry stragglers of modern society armed with assault rifles that take their farms without knowing how to sustainably run them.
And also those amish will still have to be having kids despite how bleak their future looks which was the ultimate point of my comment. No kids = no humanity.
We already know from millennia of history that the human population can be maintained just fine at pre-industrial technology and population levels. Sure crop failures happened, but they don't happen everywhere at the same time. Famines were historically very localized things.
And if we're talking complete climate collapse? In that scenario, everything goes out the window. If that's the scenario you want to plan for, then we should be doing everything we can to shrink our numbers as fast as humanly possible.
Humans are by far the most resilient species on this planet. We've learned to live everywhere from burning arid deserts to frozen arctic wastes. We will be the last species on this planet aside from some bacteria that go extinct.
[laughs in water bear]
We literally cannot be the last species aside from bacteria to go extinct because we eat other species. We rely on plants and often animals to provide our nutrition. We rely on pollinators for plants to grow fruits and vegetables. We were able to survive those harsh environments because they could provide for us. There is no living in the artic without the seals for example.
This is also the fastest our climate has ever changed. Yes the climate has changed in the past but never ar the rate it is now which could cause widespread species collapse, likely becoming earth's largest extinction event to date. We have no idea the extents that current climate changes impacts will have on us in 100 years, let alone the fact its still getting worse as there is a significant lag time in terms of the effects.
Sure. But again, if you're planning for climate collapse, it's a complete uncertainty. Really the only thing that we can do now that would reliably increase our chances of survival is to shrink our current population peacefully as rapidly as possible. If you're worried about climate collapse, you should be dancing with joy at a declining population. Fewer people means fewer emissions and less land taken up by human activities.
We are already in an extinction event. Its not so much about if collapse but more about when and how much.