Pros And Cons Of The Extinction Of Human Species
Extinction According to Raup (1991, p. 3f), “except that the human species still living literally forever, it will some time stop to exist. The future of humanity is easy to explain about extinction such a long-term. An estimated 99.9% of all species that ever existed on Earth are already extinct.”
There are two distinct ways in which the human species could become extinct: first, it is by evolving or transforming into one or more new species or life forms, amply particular from what came before so as not count more as Homo sapiens; the second, It is by simply a natural process as dying out, without any valid replacement.
His opinion is partly based on the controversial “Doomsday argument” and on his own opinions about the restraint of this argument (Bostrom 2002a). …show more content…
Sir Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, is even more pessimistic, putting the probabilities that humanity will survive the 21st century to no better than 50% in Our Final Hour (Rees 2003).
Richard Posner, an eminent American legal scholar, offers no numerical estimate but rates the risk of extinction “significant” in Catastrophe (Posner 2004). And I published a paper in 2002 in which I suggested that assigning a probability of less than 25% to existential disaster (no time limit) would be misguided (Bostrom 2002b). The idea of existential danger is distinct from that of extinction danger. When Bostrom introduced the term, an existential disaster is one that causes either the annihilation of Earth-originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic curtailment of its potential for future desirable
development.
There are two distinct ways in which the human species could become extinct: first, it is by evolving or transforming into one or more new species or life forms, amply particular from what came before so as not count more as Homo sapiens; the second, It is by simply a natural process as dying out, without any valid replacement.
His opinion is partly based on the controversial “Doomsday argument” and on his own opinions about the restraint of this argument (Bostrom 2002a). …show more content…
Sir Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, is even more pessimistic, putting the probabilities that humanity will survive the 21st century to no better than 50% in Our Final Hour (Rees 2003).
Richard Posner, an eminent American legal scholar, offers no numerical estimate but rates the risk of extinction “significant” in Catastrophe (Posner 2004). And I published a paper in 2002 in which I suggested that assigning a probability of less than 25% to existential disaster (no time limit) would be misguided (Bostrom 2002b). The idea of existential danger is distinct from that of extinction danger. When Bostrom introduced the term, an existential disaster is one that causes either the annihilation of Earth-originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic curtailment of its potential for future desirable
development.