by D. Vogt

Created on: July 08, 2010

Sooner or later, the human race is doomed to extinction: the only real question is why this will occur. Although insisting that extinction is inevitable does seem morbid, even gruesome, this need not be the case. As individuals, we know our lives will one day come to an end - although we hope that end will not come too soon, and most of us avoid taking unnecessary risks for just that reason. The same thing is true of our species: we should sidestep risks, but we should realize that sooner or later our time in this universe will come to an end. The only real question is how - and it is over this matter that, fortunately, we do have a measure of control.

- War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death -

The most immediate threats to humanity are those of our own making: nuclear annnihilation or environmental collapse. The first of these seems to be a relatively minor threat today, but just a few decades ago, the most advanced societies on Earth were technically just minutes away from near-total obliteration, barring a sufficiently extreme political crisis. We should be thankful that tensions are lower than they were in the Cold War, but it would be foolish to believe that at this point we have solved the problem of war forever.

Second, and perhaps more seriously, there are myriad ways we are placing a greater strain on the Earth environment than it can plausibly bear: chemical pollution that poisons the biosphere, carbon dioxide and methane emissions that clog the atmosphere, intensive agriculture that exhausts the topsoil, overfishing, deforestation, desertification, and so on. So long as the Earth is our only home, using it in an unsustainable fashion can only be a threat to our species's future. Even if any one of these processes did not cause extinction on its own, it could certainly reduce our society to a group of impoverished, postapocalyptic survivors huddled in the ruins of a greater age.

Physicist Enrico Fermi once remarked that, given what we know of the natural world, we ought to see alien civilizations everywhere in the night sky - and we don't. One reason could be that few, if any, intelligent species like ours are able to escape the consequences of their own genius.

- Asteroids and Gamma Rays -

If we don't destroy ourselves, nature might do it for us anyways. Two of the most important threats which face us from the night sky are near-Earth objects like comets and asteroids, and distant stellar explosions releasing deadly gamma ray bursts. Large asteroid impacts

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