Environmental experts have described humans as an unprecedented “global superpredator” that routinely attaacks the adults of other top predators and has an impact on food webs all across the planet. It’s difficult to imagine that there were ever any human lives in danger with 6.8 billion humans on the planet today. The fact that there were only 18,500 early people reproducing on the globe 1.2 million years ago, however, suggests that there was a genuine threat to the extinction of our early ancestors. Earth’s surface temperature increase will lead to a runaway greenhouse effect in the next four billion years, producing conditions that are more extreme than those on Venus at the time and heating the planet’s surface to the point of melting. All Earth’s life will have disappeared by then. The planet will most likely be absorbed by the Sun in around 7.5 billion years, after the star has gone through its red giant phase and grown past the planet’s current orbit.
The different features that humanity has built up will start to deteriorate if the human species goes extinct. An estimated 1,000 years is the half-life of disintegration for the greatest constructions. Most likely, open-pit mines, big landfills, major roads, vast canal cuttings, and earth-fill flank dams would be the last buildings to remain. After a million years, a few large stone structures like the Giza Necropolis’ pyramids or Mount Rushmore’s sculptures might still exist.
In 2.8 billion years, it is anticipated that Earth’s biosignatures would vanish with the extinction of life and be replaced by signs produced by non-biological processes. The last mass extinction event on the world, which exterminated the dinosaurs 65,5 million years ago, was one of five that have previously occurred on the planet. According to experts, we are currently experiencing the sixth mass extinction.
According to the researchers’ findings, which they present in Scientific Reports, “using only the information that Homo sapiens has existed for at least 200,000 years, we conclude that the probability that humanity goes extinct from natural causes in any given year is almost guaranteed to be less than one in 14,000, and likely to be less than one in 87,000.” For instance, technology is to blame for the current Holocene extinction, which could have an impact that lasts up to five million years. In response, technology might lead to humanity’s extinction, leaving the Earth to gradually return to an evolutionary speed driven only by long-term natural processes.
Another mass ecological disaster will probably occur in the earth’s oceans if climate change is not addressed. Sea changes have already begun. Ocean temperatures have increased since a century earlier, sea levels are rising, and ocean acidity has increased. All of these effects are the result of human-caused climate change. Cut down on your carbon footprint. Support programs educating women in poor countries to reduce population growth. Purchase goods from businesses that use sustainably grown palm oil, a key component of food, cosmetics, and soap, to reduce deforestation. Consume fish from reputable fisheries.