Oh man, one night me and a few science geek friends were talking about how our species will be part of the normal pattern on earth of extinction and we came up with quite a dire list of subjects, amongst them:
1. Failure of our magnetic shield (already depleting faster than predicted, especially for some strange reason in the south pacific). Death of all life on earth in less than a few months.
2. Super massive volcano. Big enough it could black out the sky, kill most animal and plant life causing near extinction or extinction within a year.
3. Global climate shift. The point most people forget amongst the climate debate is that we will see another dramatic shift to either ice age or hot climates which should cause massive die off in plant, and animal life. Near extinction event. This is of course already been a major factor in human evolution, the pressures of such extremes forced our ape like ancestors to evolve bigger brains. Its estimated thanks to DNA research that we reached at one point a tiny population of under 10,000 humans during the worst recent near extinction.
4. Death by space object or phenomena, gamma ray pulse from exploding star, a super massive solar eruption (radiate all life on earth), collision when our planet travels through milky way belt, rogue planet or large space object is flung into our solar system, Jupiter ignites and becomes a star, and my favorite aliens come and destroy us (hey its a pub we needed a laugh this was getting sad.)
5. Human caused extinction. Global climate destruction, nuclear or future weapon technology destruction (think Nano revolution), or some other unseen way we find to annihilate all life and ourselves.
6. Dead Oceans. If temps in the ocean depths rise enough, a massive amount of frozen hydrogen sulfide is sealed in tomb there, if warming reaches a certain point this will all evaporate into the atmosphere sealing our doom in 1-5 yrs time. Coupled with, the oceans would die from the death of the circulation system moving cold/hot water around and the ocean would stop recycling oxygen for us to continue to enjoy breathing. Double whammy, lets hope that never happens.
7. Viral destruction. The possibility exists that a super virus could destroy nearly all human life, even in worst case scenarios its expected a few thousand humans could live, but if that happened would you want to be around for that aftermath?
8. Earth's core. Tied to our magnetic field, just look at what a planet like mars does without one, it is suspect #1 amongst many in what turned a watery mars into a baron desolate desert devoid of all life. If ours slows enough or stops, Earth becomes Mars the 2nd.
I think that was all the mainly serious ones we thought of, if I missed any I'll post them later.
Happy thoughts everyone!
