-----Original Message-----
From: Atoms and the Void [mailto:AVOID-L@lists.hawaii.edu] On Behalf Of
Bill
Jefferys
Sent: Friday, November 26, 2010 7:34 AM
To: AVOID-L@lists.hawaii.edu
Subject: Frank Fenner Obit
Lawrence, and others: Note in particular the last two paragraphs.
Bill
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I seem to remember reading some biographical sketch on Fenner last summer
or
spring. I am not sure the human race is going to go extinct in the next
100
years. This is a different situation from the collapse of civilization.
It
seems pretty likely some sort of implosion of the human condition is coming
around the year 2050 time frame. It could be sooner than this, or maybe
later. This is different from the extinction of our species. Even with an
implosion of the human condition I think it is likely human beings will
exist in the year 2110, and probably in rather large numbers even if there
has been a population collapse. Even if there are a billion survivors 100
years from now, a billion people is still a large number.
What this implosion of our complex civilization sets up is a bottleneck.
The post collapse world is likely to be highly polluted and depleted of
resources, including biological resources necessary for food. These
conditions our species might face 100 years from now are also nicely timed
for the onset of global warming to become serious. The runaway situation
is
likely to occur 100-200 years from now, where the 5-deg C heating comes on
with full force. That could make a very bad situation into something dire
and could push our species into small pockets of remnant populations or
extinction over the preceding centuries. Which ever the case this looks to
be an impending bottleneck and a serious restriction in the genetic
diversity of our species, should we survive this over the 1000s or 10,000s
of years following this impending implosion.
When looked at over the much longer time frame this does clearly show Homo
sapiens is an evolutionary cul de sac. Any species that is on an
evolutionary track to reduced genetic diversity is clearly on the road to
extinction. This coming bottleneck is just the next in a sequence of such
events which appear to mark hominid evolution. The last one was 70,000
years ago, and our species appears to have emerged from such 150,000 years
ago. Evolution seems to do this some species of life, where the genetics
and genetic selection mechanism on a species bottlenecks it out of
existence. 99% of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct,
and
so will we.