AH Challenge: Make Humanity Extinct
- Thread starter The Red
- Start date
altamiro
Banned
"Yellowstone erupts" is not enough. Western/central USA =/= World!
However an eruption in the early 1980s with Soviets thinking that USA is distracted enough for a land grab in Western Europe may do the trick.
Otherwise, there is nothing available outside of an all-out nuclear exchange to make the ENTIRE land surface of the globe uninhabitable for humans, and even after this there will be survivors in remote and strategically unimportant locations.
Yellowstone erupting can certainly fuck up the climate and throw economy and order into disarray. To be honest, and I know I may be giving science the middle finger a bit here, some really fucked up global tectonic disaster a la 2012 may help, although god knows if geology permits. Perhaps a massive solar flare, although I don't know if that violates the OP.
Agreed. The indiginous peoples in Polynesia would be unaffected by disease, as they are isolated from mainstream civilization. And, any one eruption, or other natural disasters, couldn't wipe out 6+ billion people; people are way to adaptive, and somehow, we would survive. It may not be civilization as we know it today, but it would happen. For a nuclear war to wipe us out entirely would be hard too, because it would not kill enough eskimos and native polynesians to kill ALL of us. People can just adapt too well.
NomadicSky
Banned
Even in that latter horrible idea, humans would survive.
In time either people would be born with immunities to hiv, or it would just become a backdrop virus. Maybe something that never goes away but the immune system of these people keeps it from ever becoming aids.
altamiro
Banned
To the degree that the humanity is thrown back a few centuries - certainly possible.
To the degree that no human being is left on earth - no, it can't.
There is nowhere near enough energy stored in the crust tensions for that. Not by several orders of magnitude.
Solar flare will fuck up a lot as well, but not to the "desired" degree. You need the sun to go nova.
That's a bit overkill - α Centauri A going followed by 61 Cygni A the appropriate amount of time later* would probably do it as well, without the slow-roasting the entire planet stuff. (Obviously a total die-off of humanity is going to necessarily entail killing a lot of other critters with gamma rays, but at least under this scenario black smoker ecosystems and the like would survive, as opposed to the oceans boiling instantly.)
*However long you need to rotate the other face of the planet into view. It's surprising how many of the very nearby main-sequence stars are in the southern hemisphere.
altamiro
Banned
That's a bit overkill - α Centauri A going followed by 61 Cygni A the appropriate amount of time later* would probably do it as well, without the slow-roasting the entire planet stuff. (Obviously a total die-off of humanity is going to necessarily entail killing a lot of other critters with gamma rays, but at least under this scenario black smoker ecosystems and the like would survive, as opposed to the oceans boiling instantly.)
*However long you need to rotate the other face of the planet into view. It's surprising how many of the very nearby main-sequence stars are in the southern hemisphere.
I would assume that the gamma radiation may be deadly in the open, but wouldn't deep enough underground structures protect enough people for a "breeding population"? Of course there is the small problem of feeding them after the earth surface has been effectively sterilized. Assuming that some grain survived in protected space to be used for a seed stock, would it grow well enough after the subsurface microflora in the soil has been eradicated?
Every supervolcano on earth (Yellowstone, the one in New Guinea, KrakatoaX1000, Siberian lava traps) erupts. Then, an airborne strain of AIDS wipes out the developed world, and rising sea levels from the release of methane in Siberia causing the melting of the arctic and antarctic polar caps destroys Polynesia.
Now here's the tricky part. After all this is done, the few survivors gradually run out of supplies. They revert to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, complete with flint tools. However, the need to preserve energy causes shrinking of the brain, leading to a new species that is similar to H. Erectus. This one is better suited to survival in this new world, and replaces H. Sapiens.
Now here's the tricky part. After all this is done, the few survivors gradually run out of supplies. They revert to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, complete with flint tools. However, the need to preserve energy causes shrinking of the brain, leading to a new species that is similar to H. Erectus. This one is better suited to survival in this new world, and replaces H. Sapiens.
wormyguy
Banned
About 1% of the human population is born immune to HIV, as their T-Cells lack the protein that the HIV virus latches on to.
During supercollider experiments, scientists inadvertently create a black hole which swallows the Earth. Bingo bango, we're all dead.
Have you read "Swarm on the Somme"?
Because mankind appears to be pretty much extinction bound in that
Because mankind appears to be pretty much extinction bound in that
True. Even the worst of nuclear winters would not kill everybody. To wipe out life on earth, you would need an impact by an asteroid that punctures the crust, releasing trapped toxic gasses like sulfur dioxide to poison the atmosphere. That requires an extraterrestrial object, excluded as a condition in the OP.
If you hit them in 1901, the only survivors would in all likelihood be miners (I don't think turn-of-the-century subways ran deep enough). The population would be predominantly male and not very good at the kind of crazy-desperate subsistance needed to survive. I think it'd work.
Michael Busch
You fail at Rocks Fall Everybody Dies.
That is not at all what happens during a large asteroid impact. For mass-extinction-producing impacts, the destruction is from re-impacting ejecta making global firestorms followed by aerosols producing impact winter (at the low end) or the crust being shock-heated and either splashed around the planet or thrown into space (at the high end). For the last case, we don't need to worry about the atmosphere being unbreathable anymore.
As has been noted, causing a mass extinction through climate change or global thermonuclear war is entirely possible, but humanity is very hard to kill that way. Excluding rocks falling from the sky (rocks which would have to be moved from their normal courses) or ASB meddling, I don't think this timeline is possible (fortunately).
Last edited by a moderator: