Can Humanity Escape Or Survive Extinction?
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Can Humans Survive Extinction?

Is it Possible to cheat mass human extinction? How to fight mass extinction, humans should escape to Mars or make Earth Better, why not choose both? Ever thought of these questions?

The best benefit of the Google era is that we are not afraid of asking questions, Isn’t it? The more we ask questions the more facts we get and we become intellectually stronger. So let’s ask a valid question today – Can Humans escape or survive extinction?

A very famous philosopher once said – Every civilization gets extinct at the peak of its technological achievement. But what if the entire humanity goes pufffff…!!!!! Gone! Extinct! Possible, isn’t it? Let’s analyze if that were likely to happen or not and how can we cheat it.

Let’s imagine – what if a giant asteroid impacted earth tomorrow or a deadly virus rapidly spread across the earth before we could even discover & make a cure. Most of us probably wouldn’t make it through this devastation, but what if none of us made it? Would that be and end for the human species?

Not necessarily,

If you are a fan of dinosaurs, you know extinction does happen. The

Earth does not have immunity against all assaults. Any catastrophic event would severely wreck the environment and eventually most or all of life will be wiped out. These events are which we have absolutely no control upon.

How can we get past and survive then? Can Humans Survive Extinction or not? How did life survive previous mass extinctions? Can knowing about previous mass extinctions help us survive the next one?

Well, maybe yes!

A lot can be learned by looking back at mass extinction events that happened before. With that, maybe we could use that information and be prepared to survive the next mass extinction. We can try to incorporate those strategies used by animals and plants which have survived those mass extinctions. But if we think about it, humans already seem to be in a good position to overcome extinction because, in a mass extinction, it is not just human beings being wiped out, it is where most of the species on the planet die out. So technically, there are always survivors. How else can life continue to evolve? This is the way of life on this planet- earth.

Table source: Future of Humanity Institute

In each of these mass extinction happened previously, there are winners and losers. As humans, we can adapt to any sort of situation and that is an important aspect of surviving. This puts humans in a perfect position to be able to adapt, transforming ourselves and transforming our communities when climates and habitats start changing. What about our technology? Can technology help Humans Survive Extinction? Animals survived and adapted without any technology, we humans, with our marvelous technology, will be able to adapt even more quickly. Having huge populations was one of the ways in which some animals have survived so far. Our population could become our power in this case! Because well, let’s assume, about six billion people are wiped out. One billion of us will still be left!

Even if every single human on the planet becomes environment-conscious and work on ending our contribution to the carbon cycle by not using fossil fuels, reducing plastics, no cutting down trees and all of that, the planet sure would become a beautiful place, but this beautiful place could still blow up anytime by any catastrophic events!

So what then?

The next logical option, Space! Before that happens, huge changes must happen.

Stephen Hawking, the famous Theoretical Physicist, gave humanity 1000 years of a deadline to find a new planet, “Planet B”, to call home. Humanity has ten centuries, could be considered as a notice period before our Mother Earth, human’s collective landlord kicks us all out. What if there is no way found within this time?

There is one way to preserve the human species and survive human extinction and that is to literally pack up bags & move to Mars. But not all of us have to go and that’s the point, we just need to send enough to sustain a population so that if something catastrophic happens on earth, the human species survive. But right now no one wants to live on Mars, it has no food, very little water, the atmosphere is too thin to breathe, and it lets in UV light at levels so high they would kill most organisms including humans. What we really need is for Mars to be more like earth. But that’s impossible, right? There’s no way we could ever change the climate of an entire planet so that it’s global temperatures actually got warmer faster.

Well actually, we do know how to make the earth warmer so why not use the same method on Mars? Yes! During the winter on Mars, there’s a treasure trove of frozen carbon dioxide at the poles. So let’s find a way to get that into the atmosphere to start a greenhouse effect and warm the planet enough to thaw any frozen water into streams or lakes by increasing the co2 levels in the atmosphere. This would make a thicker atmosphere, which would block a lot of that lethal UV light allowing certain microorganisms to survive. Ideally, we would first want to send cyanobacteria to Mars. If these guys get sunlight, they felch oxygen straight into the atmosphere. Once that oxygen is in the air it could be inhaled or combined with other oxygen atoms to build a protective ozone layer strengthening the atmosphere even more. When those oxygen belching bacteria die, their biological matter enriches the soil with nutrients for a more complex life.

Can Humans Survive Extinction by successfully colonizing other planets?

Well, with enough time, yes. Totally!

WE ARE HUMANS – The Bear Grylls of Law of Nature! Humans have already made it through the plague, ice age and bunch of terrifying earthquakes, volcanoes, other natural disasters and even many years of elections!

This is not an entirely ridiculous idea but there are a lot of questions that still need answers. There are scientists at NASA working on finding those answers right now. So for starters, we need to know if Mars has enough frozen carbon dioxide to generate a greenhouse effect in the first place. There might not be enough or if there’s too much then we run the risk of making Mars too hot. Then we have to figure out how to get that frozen co2 into the atmosphere. Elon Musk had one suggestion, the planet’s last way is to drop the nuclear weapons over the poles like a supervillain!

NASA scientist Chris McKay thinks we could put giant mirrors in orbit around Mars that would focus the sunlight onto the poles. Whether its mirrors or something else it’s going to take hundreds possibly thousands of years to pull this thing off. Right now, we are so close to spreading out into the solar system. We can try modifying the human body suitable for living in space, we can try modifying the planet itself.

All of this is going to need a lot of technologies, technologies that we yet don’t know about. But we sure will figure out and invent superspace technologies! But if we succeed we’ll have better chances to secure the survival of the human race.

Editor’s Note: Can Humans Survive Extinction? – How? Can humans escape extinction? How can humanity survive extinction?

Shekhar Suman is the Co-founder of BioTecNika Info Labs Pvt. Ltd. He is an Entrepreneur, Writer, Public Speaker, and a Motivational Coach. In his career, he has mentored more than 100,000+ students toward success in the Biopharma Industry. He heads the BioTecNika Group, which comprises BioTecNika.com, BioTecNika.org, and Rasayanika.com. An avid reader and listener who is passionate about BioSciences. Today Biotecnika is India's largest Biotech Career portal, with over 5 Million subscribers from academia & Industry. It's ranked among the top 50 websites worldwide in the Biology category.