These are the 14 ways humans could go extinct - unless we take immediate actions
The late, great novelist Doris Lessing famously suggested that modern society "is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse."
Lessing was right. They can collapse — in 14 different ways, according to a new paper out of Stockholm University’s Resilience Centre.
In the paper, the Swedish academics discuss 14 "evolutionary traps” that humans could be consumed by very soon. Worryingly, unlike more traditional dead ends, with evolutionary “dead ends,” there is no turning back. An "evolutionary trap" is, by definition, a dead end that occurs from initially beneficial innovations.
It is, in many ways, the evolutionary equivalent of the tragedy of the commons, when individuals with access to a public resource (like fresh water, for example) act in their own self-interest.
In doing so, these individuals end up depleting the resource and negatively affecting the broader community.
The Swedish researchers zeroed in on Anthropocene evolutionary traps, “as phenomena manifesting at the global scale of human society.” For the uninitiated, the term ‘Anthropocene’ derives from the Greek terms for human ('anthropo') and new ('cene'), and refers to human civilization’s impact on the Earth's ecosystem.
One of the traps identified by the researchers involves the oversimplification of the agricultural system. As the researchers note, relying on “a few highly productive crops such as wheat, rice, maize, and soya, has meant that calories produced have skyrocketed over the past century."
At the same time, however, it has "also meant that the food system has become very vulnerable to environmental change, such as weather extremes, or new diseases.”
Another economic trap, according to the paper, involves disjointed economic growth. It's a valid point. The richest one percent now own almost half of the world’s wealth, while the bottom half own just .75 percent. Gross inequalities and a taste for revolution are inextricably linked.
Rather appropriately, the Swedish academics also reference “the instability of global cooperation,” and how the current conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine could create World War 3. The rise of artificial intelligence, or AI, is also of concern to the researchers — and for good reason.
As the Daily Express US has previously reported, AI is transforming society at breakneck speeds, with an increasing number of men turning their backs on women for pixelated partners. Furthermore, the threat of conscious AI is one that has many experts concerned.
Dr. Peter Søgaard Jørgensen, one of the authors of the study, told the Daily Express US that he and his colleagues felt compelled to discuss evolutionary traps because “no one has ever asked the question whether the new environment we have created in the modern age (the Anthropocene) could be a trap for our own species.”
Their investigation, he continued, “led to the identification of 14 phenomena that could act as evolutionary traps for large scale and complex human societies.
Many behaviours that previously have been to our advantage, so to speak, might not be in the Anthropocene.” Which begs the question, added Jørgensen, “do we have the capacity to change in the face of this new reality?”
The answer, he said, is yes — but only if we act immediately.“Now," according to the cerebral Swede, “is the time to show our species extraordinary capacity to work together against the odds and across perceived divides.”
Considering the United States is more divided than at any time since the Civil War, America is a “heartbeat away” from a brutal war with China, the Middle East is a powder keg ready to explode, and the invasion of Ukraine appears to have no end date, the idea of mass cooperation seems unlikely.
Of all the threats, which one worries Jørgensen and his colleagues the most?
“The real worry,” he said, “is the interaction between the risks. This is the unprecedented situation that we are in, in the Anthropocene.”
Environmental disruption, he noted, including the likes of agricultural collapse and the creation of new, deadly viruses, “could increase the risks of global conflict.”
One of the biggest threats to humanity, he added, involves the use of “existential technology,” like AI, which could be used to create lethal weapons and also spread inordinate amounts of misinformation and disinformation.
Jørgensen, ever the optimist, believes that humanity “can break out of dead ends and business-as-usual, but for that, we must nurture the capacity for collective human agency and design settings where it can flourish.”
