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Scientists from various countries help establish the International Geophysical Year, a series of coordinated, worldwide scientific observations between nations allied with both the United States and the Soviet Union, and the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, which allow Soviet and American scientists to interact.
Nuclear war is an often-predicted cause of the extinction of humankind. [1]Human extinction or omnicide 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.
Some of the more extreme warnings of civilizational collapse caused by climate change, such as a claim that civilization is highly likely to end by 2050, have attracted strong rebutals from scientists. [4] [5] The 2022 IPCC Sixth Assessment Report projects that human population would be in a range between 8.5 billion and 11 billion people by ...
Some were global, but were not as severe—e.g. the 1918 influenza pandemic killed an estimated 3–6% of the world's population. [13] Most global catastrophic risks would not be so intense as to kill the majority of life on earth, but even if one did, the ecosystem and humanity would eventually recover (in contrast to existential risks ).
However, while popular perception sometimes takes nuclear war as "the end of the world", experts assign low probability to human extinction from nuclear war. [ 85 ] [ 86 ] In 1982, Brian Martin estimated that a US–Soviet nuclear exchange might kill 400–450 million directly, mostly in the United States, Europe and Russia, and maybe several ...
Assuming that the world population stabilizes at 10 billion and a life expectancy of 80 years, it can be estimated that the remaining 1140 billion humans will be born in 9120 years. Depending on the projection of the world population in the forthcoming centuries, estimates may vary, but the argument states that it is unlikely that more than 1.2 ...
The biological and geological future of Earth can be extrapolated based on the estimated effects of several long-term influences. These include the chemistry at Earth's surface, the cooling rate of the planet's interior, gravitational interactions with other objects in the Solar System, and a steady increase in the Sun's luminosity.
In Our Final Hour, Rees explores various risks of human extinction and their likelihood, notably those caused by the unchecked consequences of new technologies (such as nanotechnology or machine superintelligence), uncontrolled scientific experimentation, terrorist or fundamentalist violence, or destruction of the biosphere. [4]