{"id":60741,"date":"2021-12-02T08:20:09","date_gmt":"2021-12-02T13:20:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=60741"},"modified":"2021-12-02T08:20:09","modified_gmt":"2021-12-02T13:20:09","slug":"humans-are-doomed-to-go-extinct","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=60741","title":{"rendered":"Humans Are Doomed to Go Extinct"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Humans Are Doomed to Go Extinct<\/a><\/h3>\n

Habitat degradation, low genetic variation and declining fertility are setting\u00a0Homo sapiens<\/em> up for collapse\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Humans<\/picture><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Credit:\u00a0Jordan Lye\/Getty Images<\/a><\/section>\n

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Cast your mind back, if you will, to 1965, when Tom Lehrer recorded his live album\u00a0That Was the Year That Was<\/em>. Lehrer prefaced a song called \u201cSo Long Mom (A Song for World War III)\u201d by saying that \u201cif there’s going to be any songs coming out of World War III, we\u2019d better start writing them now.\u201d Another preoccupation of the 1960s, apart from nuclear annihilation, was overpopulation. Stanford University biologist\u00a0Paul Ehrlich<\/a>\u2019s book\u00a0The Population Bomb<\/em>\u00a0was published in 1968, a year when the rate of world population growth was\u00a0more than 2 percent<\/a>\u2014the highest in recorded history.<\/p>\n

Half a century on, the threat of nuclear annihilation has lost its imminence. As for\u00a0overpopulation<\/a>, more than twice as many people live on the earth now as in 1968, and they do so (in very broad-brush terms) in greater comfort and affluence than anyone suspected. Although the population is still increasing, the rate of increase has halved since 1968. Current population predictions vary. But the general consensus is that it\u2019ll top out sometime midcentury and start to fall sharply. As soon as 2100, the global population size could be less than it is now. In most countries\u2014including poorer ones\u2014the birth rate is now well below the death rate. In some countries, the population will soon be\u00a0half the current value<\/a>. People are now becoming worried about underpopulation.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Humans Are Doomed to Go Extinct Habitat degradation, low genetic variation and declining fertility are setting\u00a0Homo sapiens up for collapse\u00a0 Credit:\u00a0Jordan Lye\/Getty Images Cast your mind back, if you will, to 1965, when Tom Lehrer recorded his live album\u00a0That Was the Year That Was. Lehrer prefaced a song called \u201cSo Long Mom (A Song for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,7],"tags":[150,287,32239,32238,32240,4179,606,10003,681,32237],"class_list":["post-60741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","category-environment","category-survival-2","tag-collapse","tag-extinction","tag-fertility","tag-habitat-degradation","tag-henry-gee","tag-homo-sapiens","tag-overpopulation","tag-resource-limits","tag-resources","tag-scientific-american"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60741"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60742,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60741\/revisions\/60742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}