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The Human Race is Genetically Programmed for Self-destruction

  • I strongly doubt that humans have another 200,000 years ahead of them. We can survive the madness of one madman once, but not of all madmen all the time.
  • Christians have killed each other and others for centuries through incredibly bloody wars. The Japanese massacred Chinese and other nations in WWII. After WWII, scientific exterminations were carried out in Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Saddam Hussein's Iraq and countless fascist and communist dictatorships. The Rwandans slaughtered each other with machetes. Muslims are slaughtering each other all over the world. It is not just one group, it is everybody: all races, all religions, in all continents.
  • Every time in history we think that a genocide would never happen again, a new kind of genocide appears: European Christians did stop massacring each other after World War II, but communist and fascist dictators gladly took over (Ethiopia, Cambodia, Indonesia, China...), and, when communism fell, the Islamists gladly took over, and now that the Islamists are fading away we can wonder what will come next. A nuclear war? A biological terrorist attack?
  • At the same time the human race has armed itself with increasingly powerful weapons of mass destruction. Coupled with the rapid progress of weapons of mass destruction, the genetic tendency to mass slaughter dramatically increases the chances of complete annihilation. The number of countries equipped with nuclear weapons (or with the capability to build one in a short time) keeps increasing. The number of individuals who could arm themselves with biological, chemical and radioactive material is also increasing rapidly.
  • People have been richer and poorer in different ages, but weapons have only moved in one direction: the more lethal direction.
  • The human race ultimately specializes in self-extermination. Everything else that the human race has accomplished is a footnote in a long tedious history of self-destruction. One can even argue that the whole point of technological and scientific progress has been to create deadlier and deadlier weapons.
  • The odds are that at some point the human race will self-destroy; or, better, the odds that the human race will succeed at its mission of self-detroying keep increasing and will eventually reach a point of no return.
  • The human race may also destroy all forms of life on Earth, and life may never rise again on this planet. The universe will carry on, unaware of what happened during the brief, 200,000-year history of the human race.
  • The violent nature of the human mind is particularly visible in wealthy and free countries, where one would expect people to live in peace. Even in the wealthiest countries, people get very angry at each other over all sorts of issues. There is no amont of wealth and comfort that would make us stop arguing. In fact, the wealthier we are, the more we can invest in sponsoring divisive arguments. The human mind is designed to argue. Humans cannot possibly coexist peacefully. Whichever environment we get, we will find something to argue about. Even in the wealthiest countries people get very angry discussing the economy, an economy that is thousands of times better than the economy of their forefathers. And the arguments typically get more and more ferocious over the years, unless an external attack creates a distraction.
  • Eventually the constant bickering brings down entire empires, but not before causing wars against other empires.
  • Meanwhile the human race accumulates deadlier and deadlier weapons, and, to do so, it destroys the natural environment.
  • Human civilization is a gigantic loop of using natural resources in order to build better weapons in order to kill and destroy more efficiently.
  • One can reasonably expect that better extermination technologies will be developed in the near future, and that they will become increasingly available to all sorts of madmen and idiots, who will preside over increasingly angry populations.
  • Therefore the chances of self-inflicted extinction are 100% over 200,000 years. I'd guess 99% over 1,000 years.
  • The year 3,000 may come. The year 4,000 will never come.
  • The end of the (human) world will neither be brought by the will of a god (as religious people believe) nor by a cosmological event (as scientists pronosticate) but by genetically-programmed human madness.
  • Fanatical Christians are still waiting for the end of the world and the second coming of Jesus. Ironically, the end of the world is likely to come for real, but with no need to bother Jesus. It will be a simple case of self-destruction.
P.S. If any animal survives, i doubt they will miss the human race. Besides destroying the natural environment, humans also kill 60 billion mammals and birds every year to eat them. The biggest natural disaster on Earth is the daily meals of the human race.