A typical mammalian species lasts around a million years, and it's hard to insist that Homo sapiens will be an exception. Even if we had remained technologically humble hunter-gatherers, we would still be living in a geological shooting gallery.
A burst of gamma rays from a supernova or collapsed star could irradiate half the planet, brown the atmosphere and destroy the ozone layer, allowing ultraviolet light to irradiate the other half. Or the Earth's magnetic field could flip, exposing the planet to an interlude of lethal solar and cosmic radiation. An asteroid could slam into the Earth, flattening thousands of square miles and kicking up debris that would black out the sun and drench us with corrosive rain.
Supervolcanoes or massive lava flows could choke us with ash, CO2 and sulfuric acid. A black hole could wander into the solar system and pull the Earth out of its orbit or suck it into oblivion. Even if the species manages to survive for a billion more years, the Earth and solar system will not: The sun will start to use up its hydrogen, become denser and hotter and boil away our oceans on its way to becoming a red giant.
Technology, then, is not the reason that our species must some day face the Grim Reaper. Indeed, technology is our best hope for cheating death, at least for a while.
As long as we are entertaining hypothetical disasters far in the future, we must also ponder hypothetical advances that would allow us to survive them, such as growing food under lights powered with nuclear fusion, or synthesizing it in industrial plants such as biofuel. Even technologies of the not-so-distant future could save our skin. It's technically feasible to track the trajectories of asteroids and other "extinction-class near-Earth objects," spot the ones that are on a collision course with the Earth and nudge them off course before they send us the way of the dinosaurs.
NASA has also figured out a way to pump water at high pressure into a supervolcano and extract the heat for geothermal energy, cooling the magma enough that it would never blow its top. Our ancestors were powerless to stop these lethal menaces, so in that sense, technology has not made this a uniquely dangerous era in the history of our species but a uniquely safe one.
For this reason, the techno-apocalyptic claim that ours is the first civilization that can destroy itself is misconceived. As Ozymandias reminded the traveller in Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem, most of the civilizations that have ever existed have been destroyed. Conventional history blames the destruction on external events such as plagues, conquests, earthquakes or weather.
But the physicist David Deutsch points out those civilizations could have thwarted the fatal blows had they had better agricultural, medical or military technology: "Before our ancestors learned how to make fire artificially and many times since then, too , people must have died of exposure literally on top of the means of making the fires that would have saved their lives, because they did not know how. In a parochial sense, the weather killed them; but the deeper explanation is lack of knowledge.
A judicious look at threats to global well-being is not a call to complacency but the opposite. It is a call to prioritize the threats, identify the means to mitigate them and work toward implementing and strengthening these measures with all deliberate speed. Some threats strike me as the 21st-century version of the Y2K bug. This includes the possibility that we will be annihilated by artificial intelligence, whether as direct targets of their will to power or as collateral damage of their single-mindedly pursuing some goal we give them.
The first threat depends on a confusion of intelligence with dominance: Those traits are bundled together in Homo sapiens , but an intelligence that is designed rather than having evolved needn't be saddled with ruthless megalomania. The second depends on the premises that 1 humans are so gifted that they can design an omniscient and omnipotent AI, yet so idiotic that they would give it control of the universe without testing how it works, and 2 the AI would be so brilliant that it could figure out how to transmute elements, rewire brains and other superpowers, yet so imbecilic that it would wreak havoc based on elementary blunders of misunderstanding.
Other threats are less fanciful, but are already being blunted. Contrary to Malthusian predictions of teeming populations eating themselves into mass starvation, the world has been increasingly feeding itself. The reasons include advances in agronomy, the spread of democratic governance and especially the demographic transition: As countries escape extreme poverty and illiteracy, their people choose to have fewer children. The predictions of catastrophic resource depletion have been repeatedly falsified, too, by a combination of technology and markets.
As the most easily extracted supply of a resource becomes scarcer, its price rises, encouraging people to conserve it, get at the less accessible deposits or find cheaper and more plentiful substitutes. This leaves still other threats which are real and nowhere near being solved: climate change and nuclear war.
But unsolved does not mean unsolvable. Pathways to decarbonizing the economy have been mapped out, including carbon pricing, zero-carbon energy sources and programs for carbon capture and storage. So have pathways to denuclearization, including strengthening international institutions, de-alerting nuclear forces, stabilizing systems of deterrence and verifiably reducing and eventually eliminating nuclear arsenals. The prospect of meeting these challenges is by no means utopian.
The world has dealt with global challenges in the past, including atmospheric nuclear testing and the ozone hole. It has survived half-mad despots with nuclear weapons, namely Stalin and Mao, and episodes of dangerous brinkmanship during the Cold War.
It has reduced nuclear arsenals by 85 per cent, and the amount of CO2 emitted per dollar of GDP by 44 per cent. Implementing the measures that will drive these numbers all the way down to zero will require enormous amounts of persuasion, pressure, and will. But we know that there is one measure that will not make the world safer: moaning that we're doomed. Skip to main content. More From: OttomagicCritic Mindoutofsync views. Eddie Wise rant views. Let's get serious views. Ottomagic Commentaries 9: Matthew Titans Girls 75 views.
Related Videos. Krustacean go to Darfur reupload 6, views. Why Vidme is Shutting Down 4, views. Share Favorite Playlists Flag. Their deaths must have been horrific: confined in a box with no light, covered by six feet of earth making it impossible to lift the lid, each breath using the last available air until their gasps eventually stifled them in a suffocating panic…. Muscles need oxygen to function. We require oxygen to create ATP, which is what causes muscles to contract.
While a living human who wakes up in a coffin will eventually die from oxygen starvation which first causes the brain to cease functioning, then the nerves, and finally the muscles— remembering that the heart is a muscle , an already-dead zombie will also eventually run out of oxygen to fuel cellular respiration. Result: no more muscular movement to push through the soil and breathe once more the sweet, sweet air of the living. Oxygen has to get to the muscles.
The circulatory system that is, the heart and blood vessels take glucose and other nutrients to the muscles and take away carbon dioxide as the waste product. This means that the zombie would have to be breathing, taking in fresh air and exhaling carbon dioxide.
Which sounds an awful lot like not being dead. And that leads to….
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