Humans could be wiped out by a catastrophic asteroid strike, commit self-destruction with worldwide nuclear war or succumb to the ravages caused by the climate emergency. But humans are a hardy bunch, so the most likely scenario involves a combination of catastrophes that could wipe us out completely.
And while the starting point for modern humans is also up for debate, if we say that we've already been around for 200,000 years, we have a fairly comfortable minimum of 800,000 years left – a figure that's again in line with Gott's predictions.
But even if that common ancestor still existed, the fact that evolution is the result of both random mutation and a process of natural selection imposed by environmental conditions, means it's highly unlikely that it would ever retrace its steps in quite the same way.
What are mass extinctions, and what causes them? In the last 500 million years, life has had to recover from five catastrophic blows. Are humans dealing the planet a sixth? More than 99 percent of all organisms that have ever lived on Earth are extinct.
The passenger pigeon is one of many hundreds of extinctions that have been caused by human activities in the past few centuries, such as: 1690 Dodo bird – extinct from predation by introduced pigs and cats. 1768 Stellar's sea cow – extinct from hunting for fur and oil.
The Toba eruption has been linked to a genetic bottleneck in human evolution about 70,000 years ago; it is hypothesized that the eruption resulted in a severe reduction in the size of the total human population due to the effects of the eruption on the global climate.
Extinct Species: Pyrenean Ibex
The Pyrenean ibex is possibly the only extinct animal that has successfully been brought back to life — though it only lasted for a few minutes. The last of the animals died out in 2000, but three years later scientists used its frozen cells to clone a calf.
However, using information gathered by paleontologists and the history of evolution, it's been estimated that 99.9% of all species are extinct. That's not all of the species living here on the Planet today. It's actually of all the species who have lived on Earth at all.
The Holocene extinction continues into the 21st century, with human population growth, increasing per capita consumption (especially by the super-affluent), and meat production and consumption, among others, being the primary drivers of mass extinction.
In 100 years, the world's population will probably be around 10 – 12 billion people, the rainforests will be largely cleared and the world would not be or look peaceful. We would have a shortage of resources such as water, food and habitation which would lead to conflicts and wars.
There's a simple answer: Humans did not evolve from chimpanzees or any of the other great apes that live today. We instead share a common ancestor that lived roughly 10 million years ago.
By 2030, almost all countries will experience “extreme hot” weather every other year due mainly to greenhouse gas pollution by a handful of big emitters, according to a paper published Thursday by Communications Earth & Environment, reinforcing forecasts that the coming year will be one of the hottest on record.
Broadly speaking, evolution simply means the gradual change in the genetics of a population over time. From that standpoint, human beings are constantly evolving and will continue to do so long as we continue to successfully reproduce.
Will humans survive? Yes, almost certainly, but the factors that determine the outcome are so immensely complex that our blunt and instrumental efforts are almost meaningless. The only thing that makes a difference is the combined impact of all individual animals including humans.
According to a US report, the sea level will increase by 2050. Due to which many cities and islands situated on the shores of the sea will get absorbed in the water. By 2050, 50% of jobs will also be lost because robots will be doing most of the work at that time. Let us tell you that 2050 will be a challenge to death.
2050 is only about 30 years from now, which means it's close enough that we can imagine it happening, but far enough away that we can't confidently say what it will look like.
However, most of the atmosphere will be retained until the Sun has entered the red giant stage. With the extinction of life, 2.8 billion years from now it is expected that Earth's biosignatures will disappear, to be replaced by signatures caused by non-biological processes.
Extinction of Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other species took hundreds of thousands of years. If Neanderthals and Denisovans were really just stupid, grunting brutes, lacking language or complex thought, it's impossible they could have held modern humans off as long as they did.
With this context and timeframe in mind, the demographers estimate that 109 billion people have lived and died over the course of 192,000 years. If we add the number of people alive today, we get 117 billion humans that have ever lived.
In 2003, researchers used cloning to bring back the bucardo, a species of wild goat, using a modern goat as a surrogate parent and egg donor. The baby bucardo, the only extinct species to ever be cloned, died after only seven minutes because of a lung malformation.
The oldest DNA fragments recovered are only 800,000 years old, so dinosaur cloning is probably impossible. True cloning also requires an intact, living cell and it has only ever been successful using a host animal of the same species. That rules out mammoth cloning too.
Technically, a species could be resurrected by cloning DNA from a remnant cell. In reality, this has been impossible to achieve, mostly because viable DNA cannot be found.