Essa Al-Nassr, a member of the Qatari legislative Shura council, spoke on Monday at an Arab League session, received ovation making bigoted accusations against Jews and promising the end of Israel.
Essa Al-Nassr, a member of the Qatari legislative Shura council, spoke on Monday at an Arab League session, received ovation making bigoted accusations against Jews and promising the end of Israel.
We’ll be lucky to evolve into anything at the rate we’re creating great filters from scratch.
I don’t think we’re at the point where we’re going to wipe out the species entirely. I think it’s likely that even a global thermonuclear war would result in enough pockets of survivors for the species to continue evolving (with quite serious selection pressure at that point) even if society as a whole lies in unrecoverable ruin.
My searching for minimum viable population size puts it all over the map, although the general consensus seems to be 50 people. But who knows? The California condor has gone from a low of 22 individuals to over 500 in just a handful of generations.
Anyway, I can certainly see 50 humans on some remote part of the planet surviving such a catastrophe.
Civilization? Maybe not. Maybe those 50 humans would evolve into something less intelligent and less able to achieve the level of technology we are able to achieve. There’s no reason selection always has to favor intelligence.
I agree. I actually think the only things that could legitimately wipe out humanity are cosmic things we have no control over and it’d have to be so significant that there’s little chance of it actually happening. (Until the sun’s red giant phase, anyway.)
My guess is there’ll be a very few Indigenous enclaves that will survive, if for no other reason than they fundamentally understand what community is and how to keep it strong.
Our Westernized ideology that “only the strongest win” doesn’t work in an end-of-the-world scenario.