How are humans going to become extinct?

[MrJonno]

Short of an event that kills 99.999% of the population within a few days or hours I can't see us going extinct naturally . We are simply too adaptable.

Civilization could well collapse and you will just get a few Seth Neanderthals wandering around but not totally extinction.

Now deliberate attempt using all man's intellect/insanity might work but its going to have to be something more efficient than nuclear weapons

[Sælir]

We will all suffocate with our heads up our arses

[Blind groper]

Assuming humans can survive another few hundred years, we should be able to set up self sustaining colonies away from Earth. Once that happens, driving the species extinct will be a lot more difficult. Give it a few thousand years, and those self sustaining colonies will be scattered among a number of star systems, making the extinction next to impossible.

My view is that this diaspora will lead to genetic variation, and eventual evolution (probably by deliberate genetic engineering) till there are many new species descended from humans.

So the answer is that humanity will go extinct, but via evolution into dozens, or even millions of 'daughter species'.

[JimC]

I want a Galactic Empire, then a fight to the death with the evil beings from Andromeda!

Terra über alles!

[Scott1328]

Even now we see the gay agenda taking hold and will soon turn the whole world to gay sex thus leading to the extinction of the species in just 4 generations.

[hackenslash]

Simultaneous multiple pandemic of pathogens resistant to antibiotics. The reasoning in the article concerning pandemics is seriously flawed. Aside from anything else, epidemiology has changed considerably in recent years compared to those thousands of years that we've survived as a species. We spread serious diseases at a rate well beyond the natural. Further, there are more and more pathogens that are resistant to antibiotics, and quite a lot of them have very quick, very high mortality rates.

I also think he's massively underestimated the risk of a bolide impact in the GLE category.

Considering that, even were many to survive the actual event, our wild survival skills are massively depleted since the dawn of the technological age. I suspect the vast majority of people wouldn't last 5 minutes in a post-apocalyptic scenario. You would end up with little pockets of people, geographically isolated, and probably well below the threshold of viability in most cases, meaning a massive reduction in genetic diversity, which itself leads to extinction within a few generations at best.

In short, I don't think Bostrom's come even close to factoring all the variables.

[pErvinalia]

Seth will survive to repopulate the Earth...