We have time to kill ourselves

The Sun will die and swallow the Earth in just over seven billion years. That’s a long, long time away; enough time for us to have killed ourselves in some other way.

Life on this blue blob, spinning through space with trillions of different parts fighting each other for superiority, is already improbable. But the constant tinkering of humans, as well as our short-term thinking, seems to be the greatest danger for our survival.

We won’t all die — humans are really good at surviving in whichever environment we land up in, from frozen Arctic tundra to scorching Pretoria heat — but any one of these scenarios will end this whole civilisation project.

Take your pick: a nuclear exchange between self-important dictators that escalates to the point where all populated areas are destroyed; artificial intelligence decides that we’re too unpredictable to work with so logically concludes that we need to be removed; our shift away from accepting science means preventable diseases start wiping out entire populations; tinkering with nanotechnology leads to an uncontrollable change or virus; or something we have never thought of, like all that music we keep sending into space angering an alien species that comes and destroys Earth.

Being a space species is the only way to avoid this — except that won’t solve the human nature part that keeps us tinkering our way towards chaos. — Sipho Kings