Omnicide

A single living bristlecone pine, belonging to the Pinus Longeva species, is estimated to have been living for ~5,000 years. But there will be a day when it dies. As so will there be a day for the deep sea sponge – a Monorhaphis chuni which a study estimates to be ~11,000 years old. Everything will expire someday, including you and I.

And that includes our species as well.

But how would we become extinct? Extinction refers to the death of every single organism of a species, and on a human scale, that’s a lot of people. So what could be so catastrophic, so destructive, that it kills each and every one of us?

Wipe-out ways

1. A Supervolcanic Eruption?

Expelling more than 1,000 cubic kilometers of volcanic matter, supervolcanoes come to a mark of 8 in the Volcanic Explosivity Index, which is the highest that has ever been recorded.

The scar of a supervolcano – the La Garita Caldera shows us one of the largest and most powerful supervolcanic eruptions known, it is in Colorado, United States. To understand that, it was 5,000 times more powerful than the most explosive thing created by man. It is now considered to be an extinct volcano, its last eruption having taken place some 27 million years ago.

The ultimate destructive mega super-volcano would most likely impact our climate, resulting in the entire planet cooling, deplete our Ozone layer and emit large amounts of carbon dioxide (although we humans emit way more CO₂ annually than any volcano – the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens emitted roughly 10 million tonnes in 9 hours, whereas our species takes just two-and-a-half hours to do the same). However, scientists think that such a volcano alone could not be responsible for the wipe-out of our species. They think that flood lavas – events which changed continents, formed geological bodies over thousands of years and caused the five mass extinction events in the last half a billion years (End-Ordovician, Late Devonian, End-Permian, End-Triassic, and End-Cretaceous) could remove us from our planet.

The thing is, we have no idea when the next such flood lava will occur.

2. Viruses…

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past two years, then you’d know how destructive a virus can be.

Take smallpox for example, it killed more than 300 million people in the last century alone. Not only did it kill, but it also heavily scarred many of those who survived.

The Pharaoh Ramses V – Possibly the earliest known victim of smallpox. His mummy (in context, Egyptian) was found in 1898, and the Pharaoh had died in 1157 BC, and he is thought to have been at the age of forty then. Although electron-microscopic studied of his skin do not show clear evidence of the virus, some believe that the rashes (which have also been preserved) of his mummy closely resemble the effects of the smallpox virus on the human body.
Picture Credit – WHO

Okay, maybe we’re not at a very great risk from getting wiped out by a virus (by very great risk, I mean not all 8 billion of us would die out) that is natural, but maybe a man-made virus would do the trick.

Hopefully, nobody takes the initiative to make it.

3. WAR

This one is quite self-explanatory. A full-scale war to get depleting resouces like water or disagreements over land ownership could ignite a spark that would easily catch fire.

Random information you might have wanted to know.
Attribution – O Suave Gigante, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons 

And now that we have more advanced technology – compared to WW 1 and 2, nuclear bombs would definitely ruin our chances of surviving. These simply destroy the environment, kill off plants, create a radioactive city and make horrible living conditions for those who are unable to escape from the place. Below, I’ve linked Kurzgesagt‘s video on what would happen if one city was nuked – not a great war – just one bomb. Like they brilliantly put it, a nuclear explosion is like every single natural disaster at once.

People who are not killed immediately by the explosion would struggle to survive, many dying from cancers.

Wars would cause destruction of the infrastructure of cities, kill millions, displace people from their homes, the order of society would be completely gone and countries could be placed under the rule of new governments. Basically, it would be total chaos throughout the world for a long time.

I think, if the war is bad enough, we could all be gone in some time.

4. Cosmic Impacts

66 million years ago, the Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction took place- most likely caused by an asteroid impact. A bunch of different life forms were killed, and those who survived evolved into what we see on today’s Earth. Using marine fossils, scientists estimate that more than 75% of the species alive then were made extinct.

So our asteroid would have to be quite big to not burn up when it enters our atmosphere. Then, the smoke and dust it would give out would probably cover the sun’s light for some time. This would lead to plants being unable to function – thereby not giving most organisms anything to eat, which of course, would kill them.

Even in that case, we humans could go underground. Our technology may not make it, but always, our instinct has been – to survive. We would go on, our civilization may not be very advanced, but we would still be there, waiting to get out.

Anyway, no asteroid is expected to come any time soon and NASA is working on it’s programme to defend our planet from asteroid impacts. It might not be so catastrophic, but it will come and I think we’ll probably survive it.

Personally, I think we’re fine now, and we’ll go on being for quite some time. But like 99% of everything that has ever lived, we will face extinction, and there will be a point when we cease to exist. Completely.

Additional links & Credits –

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uWJnrwBQgq4CmRtMTDQWG9fr1096ngNcrA28jdH1cVo/edit?usp=sharing

Thank you so much for reading the post!!