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Nuclear war is an often-predicted cause of the extinction of humankind. [1]Human extinction is the hypothetical end of the human species, either by population decline due to extraneous natural causes, such as an asteroid impact or large-scale volcanism, or via anthropogenic destruction (self-extinction), for example by sub-replacement fertility.
Scientists assert that human activity has pushed the earth into a sixth mass extinction event. [ 5 ] [ 6 ] The loss of biodiversity has been attributed in particular to human overpopulation , continued human population growth and overconsumption of natural resources by the world's wealthy.
Climate change and civilizational collapse refers to a hypothetical risk of the impacts of climate change reducing global socioeconomic complexity to the point complex human civilization effectively ends around the world, with humanity reduced to a less developed state. This hypothetical risk is typically associated with the idea of a massive ...
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, also known as the IUCN Red List or Red Data Book, founded in 1964, is an inventory of the global conservation status and extinction risk of biological species. [ 1 ] A series of Regional Red Lists, which assess the risk of extinction to species within a ...
The conservation status of a group of organisms (for instance, a species) indicates whether the group still exists and how likely the group is to become extinct in the near future. Many factors are taken into account when assessing conservation status: not simply the number of individuals remaining, but the overall increase or decrease in the ...
Scenarios in which a global catastrophic risk creates harm have been widely discussed. Some sources of catastrophic risk are anthropogenic (caused by humans), such as global warming, [ 1 ] environmental degradation, and nuclear war. [ 2 ] Others are non-anthropogenic or natural, such as meteor impacts or supervolcanoes.
The report concluded that global warming of 2 °C (3.6 °F) over the preindustrial levels would threaten an estimated 5% of all the Earth's species with extinction even in the absence of the other four factors, while if the warming reached 4.3 °C (7.7 °F), 16% of the Earth's species would be threatened with extinction.
Existential catastrophe refers to the realized destruction of humanity's long-term potential, whereas existential risk refers to the probability that a given hazard will lead to existential catastrophe. Human extinction is one mechanism of existential catastrophe, but others can be imagined such as permanent totalitarian dystopia.