Pick up a book titled “The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire — Why Our Species is on the Edge of Extinction” (St. Martin’s Press), and it’s safe to assume its pages won’t be full of sunshine, lollipops and rainbows.
But while the author, British paleontologist Henry Gee, delivers an occasionally apocalyptic vision of the future, he also offers some hope for just how humanity can get itself out of a pickle of its own making. “The fact remains that as a species, humans are remarkably pox-ridden, worm-eaten and lousy,” says Gee. “But it is reasonable to ask if humans might evade extinction’s great scythe, and persist indefinitely.”
In “The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire,” Gee examines the many reasons why the human race finds itself in multiple instances of peril.
From over-reliance on agriculture to huge lifestyle changes to domestication of animals and our inability to cope with disease, Gee’s book reveals that the most successful species to ever exist has played a strong hand in its own potential downfall.
The overriding issue affecting our future is population growth — or lack of it.
According to United Nations data, the rate of global population growth peaked at 2.24% a year in 1964 but today it stands at just 0.88% and that represents an existential problem.
“The growth rate is projected to become negative — that is, the population will start to shrink — in 2086, when the world population will top out at 10.431 billion,” writes Gee, who also wrote the award-winning “A (Very) Short History of Life On Earth.”
For context, the population of the United States was 324.84 million in 2017 and will peak at 363.75 million in 2062 before falling back to 335.8 million in 2100.
A cursory look at life expectancy reveals the extent of the crisis that we might face.
Today, there are 1.7 billion people over the age of 65 in the world, a figure that will increase to 2.37 billion by 2100.
“The figure for octogenarians is even more pronounced, increasing from 141 million to 866 million,” Gee explains. “Over the same period, the number of children under five will decline from 681 million to 401 million.”
This decline will happen without any external interference, says Gee.
“It will appear to do this of its own accord, with help required neither from geopolitical tinkering, nor from pandemics, global wars, climate change, rampaging artificially intelligent killer robots, the invasion of malevolent aliens, although such things might make the decline happen faster,” he adds.
The paradox is that while there are more humans on earth than ever before, our genetic similarity as a species leaves us exposed to infectious diseases and new epidemics, like COVID, that might, in time, prove fateful for humans.
“For all our superficial variety, we are much the same underneath,” writes Gee. “In fact, there is more genetic variation in a troupe of chimpanzees in Africa than in the entire human species.”
It is Gee’s contention that because Homo sapiens expanded from a relatively small group of founders, we lack sufficient genetic variation and, in turn, resilience.
Despite this, we have — by either luck or design — managed to dodge extinction on several occasions in the last 300,000 years.
But as soon as Homo sapiens drove all other human species to extinction at some point between 50,000 and 25,000 years ago, it all but signed its own death warrant.
“The only question was when the final curtain would fall,” he says.
Gee argues that like “every other living thing that has ever walked, hopped or crawled on this planet’s face,” we are destined to perish, simply because we’ve become such a dominant species.
If you’re wondering how long we might have left, he estimates it to be in the region of 10,000 years. “We are far closer to the end of times than people realise,” he warns. “The human population will sink to a level that is ultimately unsustainable and extinction will beckon.”
Amid the gloom, there is some good news, however, and that’s thanks to our knack for getting ourselves out of trouble.
Gee’s idea is for humans not simply to venture into space but to attempt to establish a new future there instead.
“My proposed solution is the colonization of space, whether the surfaces of other bodies in the Solar System such as the Moon or Mars, or the interiors of modified asteroids, or completely artificial orbiting habitats,” he says, echoing the mindset of next-gen space explorers like Elon Musk, who’s made public his goal to establish a permanent human colony on the red planet by 2050.
“If we make a concerted effort to expand into the Universe, we could “live — potentially — for millions of years.”
The problem, inevitably, is whether we, as a species, can be focused on making such a future real.
“If Homo sapiens is going to take its long-term future seriously, it must start now,” he adds.
And if we don’t? “There might be no one left on the Earth for you to wave back to.”
