Have you wondered will humans be here forever, or will our species go extinct just like the dinosaurs and all the other animals that lived during the Ice Age?
Will humans go extinct, too? Well, the short answer is yes! Fossil record shows that everything goes extinct, eventually. Almost all species that ever lived, over 99.9% are extinct.
Photo via Wikipedia
…while some left descendants. How interesting!
Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo erectus all have vanished, leaving only the Homo sapiens - which is us! Humans are inevitably heading for extinction.
The question isn’t whether we go extinct, but when?
According to The Conversation, humans have vulnerabilities and large, warm-blooded animals like us don’t handle disruptions well. Small, cold-blooded turtles and snakes can last months without food, so they survived.
Big animals with fast metabolisms like tyrannosaurs or humans, require lots of food, constantly. That leaves them vulnerable to even brief food chain disruptions caused by catastrophes such as volcanoes, global warming, ice ages or the impact of winter after an asteroid collision.
Not only that but humans are also long-loved with long generation times and very few offsprings, and slow reproduction makes it hard to recover from population crashes, and slows natural selection, making it difficult to adapt to rapid environmental changes.
This is exactly what happened to the mammoths, ground sloths and other megafauna - meaning large and giant animals.
Big mammals reproduced too slowly to withstand, or adapt, to human overhunting.
Photo via New Science
Though humans will soon be extinct, there are also reasons to think humans are resistant to extinction as we are deeply strange species, widespread, abundant and supremely adoptable.
So, we might just stick around for a while!
By: Aishah Akashah Ahadiat
