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Averting Human Extinction
Welcome to the wiki on Averting Human Extinction! If you're human, you might be interested in this subject. If you have any ideas or expertise on any of the topics, please contribute! To survive, we're going to have to work together, and we definitely need all the help we can get.
The earth is currently undergoing a mass extinction. Mass extinctions large and small have occurred many times in the history of the planet, and there's a fairly big one going on right now. The human species is a likely candidate for the extinction list this time around. This wiki is devoted to exploring and sharing all the knowledge, ideas, and strategies that our species will need in order to avert that possibility. We don't know how much longer we have, so if we want to avoid the ultimate disaster, we should put forth our very best efforts to prevent it. We need more than just hope and faith to accomplish this, we also need vision, and we need a plan.
Many people and groups are working on the problem already, or on various pieces of it. The field is vast and encompasses many sub-disciplines. Explore more by clicking on the topics below.
Some ways you might want to contribute are by listing things that are wrong, things that need fixing, on our Rant List below. Or you can add suggestions for solutions in whatever category they fit, or if you can't find a fit then feel free to add new categories to contain your ideas. If you have time to research some of the topics listed below, and add content to their pages, that would be extremely helpful. We use the same editing standards and guidelines as Wikipedia. To begin editing click on the "edit" tab at the top of any page, or the "edit" link to the right of any section heading. This wiki belongs to you. Please help make it a useful tool for all of humanity.
Contents |
Background
Mass extinctions are a regular feature of the history of life on this planet. Why should we pay particular attention to this one? Why should humans want to survive? Why is it a worthwhile endeavor? Are we really in any danger, anyway?
- Mass Extinctions in History
- Documenting the Current Mass Extinction
- Are we really in danger?
- Is it inevitable?
- Why try to survive?
- How to change the world Can we really do it? Case studies in what works.
Beyond Survival: The next level
- What lies beyond? The coming golden age for humankind.
Further Study
- To learn more, see the additional resources on our page for Further Study.
Pale Blue Dot
Working on the Voyager spacecraft team, Carl Sagan had the spacecraft turn from the edge of the solar system and take a picture of the earth from whence it came. In the picture our whole planet appeared only as a pale blue speck, the size of a single pixel. The earth was very near the sun in the field of view of the camera, so, although the sun itself was blocked, rays from the sun still appear in the image, one by chance highlighting the tiny earth in a way that almost seemed symbolic. You can barely make out the earth in this picture between the two bars that highlight its location. Carl was struck by this photograph and had this to say about it:
"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
