The Earth is getting hotter and hotter. How long can humans survive? The key is up to us.

If nothing is changed, a devastating disaster will occur within 100 years. With the current average life expectancy, it is difficult for any reader reading this answer to live beyond 100 years. If nothing unexpected happens, they will all die of old age. Therefore, these 100 years are not about the current readers, but the fate of mankind, or the fate of our descendants.

This may seem alarmist, but it is not without basis. If humans do not stop their suicidal pace, this prediction may become a reality. There are at least two reasons why humans themselves will cause destruction: the greenhouse effect, plague and war. Natural disasters include solar turmoil, asteroid impacts, super volcanic eruptions and super earthquakes.

Today we will discuss the issue of human survival and destruction.

The greenhouse effect has seriously threatened human survival.

The so-called greenhouse effect is that the increasing amount of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere makes it impossible for the earth to dissipate heat, and the average temperature continues to rise. Some people may think that a few degrees of increase does not matter, it just means that winters will be less cold and hotter in hot days. In winter, there is no need for heating, and in summer, turning on the air conditioner more often will solve the problem.

In fact, this understanding is very superficial. The so-called greenhouse effect is not a matter of raising the temperature by a few degrees everywhere, but a matter of damaging the entire climate regulation system of the earth. Its harm increases exponentially. When it reaches a critical point, the entire climate system will collapse, and cold places will become extremely cold, hot places will become extremely hot, dry places will become extremely dry, and flooded places will become extremely flooded.

At that time, the earth will become: coastal cities will be completely submerged, people will die of cold and heat, extreme storms will occur frequently, and the green rice granaries will become deserts, and the deserts will become swamps. As a result, humans will have to migrate to avoid disasters, billions of people will become refugees, modern civilization will be completely destroyed, and plague and hunger will bring humans to the brink of extinction.

Scientific research shows that if the average temperature of the earth rises by 6°C, mass extinction will be inevitable and it will be difficult for humans to survive. Since the industrialization of mankind, the average temperature of the earth has risen by 1°C, and various disasters have begun to occur, mainly manifested in: the rapid melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets, the rise in sea levels leading to changes in ocean circulation, the reduction of fresh water, the emergence of extreme climates, frequent forest fires, the disappearance of tropical rainforests, and the acceleration of the extinction of biological species.

The so-called 6°C temperature rise is just a limit, and extinction does not necessarily have to wait until the limit to come. Scientific models show that a 3°C rise in the average temperature of the earth is a threshold, that is, a critical point. When this critical point is reached, the earth's climate self-regulation mechanism will collapse, and it will soon reach the limit, and extinction will come irreversibly.

If humans do not immediately put on the brakes and change past behavior habits, that is, reduce carbon emissions and repair the environment, the 3°C threshold will arrive by the end of this century. This time is less than 80 years, which is faster than the 100 years I mentioned earlier. This is why the whole world is talking about energy conservation and emission reduction, reducing carbon emissions and achieving carbon neutrality.

This consensus was reached because the United Nations launched the Paris Agreement based on the call of the scientific community, which is a climate change agreement signed by almost all countries in the world in 2016. The core content of the agreement is to control the temperature rise within 2°C by the end of this century. It can be seen that greenhouse gas emissions that cause temperature rise have already affected the survival of mankind.

But the implementation of the agreement has not been optimistic so far, because according to the current level of science and technology, reducing emissions means concessions in economic development. Many countries are fighting to the death in order to reduce emissions for others and increase their own emissions. Some places are still fighting, and the smoke of gunpowder is so thick that lives are in danger. How can we talk about environmental protection and low carbon?

Therefore, it is difficult to achieve the goal of curbing temperature rise, and the temperature rise is likely to exceed 3°C by the end of this century. This indicates that the next century will be a tragic era. Of course, we can die of old age, but our descendants are likely to face extreme survival difficulties. Therefore, scientists around the world issued two open letters to humanity 25 years apart, calling and warning at the top of their lungs: Time is running out for humanity!

These have been explained in my past articles. You can see them by clicking on the blue link, so I won’t go into details here.

War and plague may make human beings disappear faster/

The novel coronavirus has killed more than 6 million people, which seems to be just a small test of the virus, indicating that human beings' ability to protect themselves is still very fragile. Many epidemics are related to human beings' bad living habits. There will definitely be bigger epidemics in the future. Can humans avoid them? The American science fiction movie Resident Evil seems to have given humans a warning a long time ago. Could it be a language? I won't elaborate on it here.

Humans never learn from their mistakes. Some people always seem to think that they are not dying fast enough, and after a while, something unexpected will happen that threatens human survival. Especially those anti-human dictators, who always want to occupy more of others' territory, enslave and control more people, and the way they do this is to intimidate, kill and use war machines.

This was the case with Hitler, who carried out genocide against the Jews and launched the Second World War, resulting in the deaths of tens of millions of people and more than 10 million deaths in Germany. He was eventually destroyed as well. There were many other such murderers, such as Enver Hopasha of Turkey, Yahya Khan of Pakistan, Hideki Tojo of Japan, Pol Pot of Cambodia, etc. Each of these evil men massacred hundreds of millions of people.

Such people will not become extinct, because there is soil for them to survive everywhere. The fact that there are still many people singing praises for such scum is ironclad evidence. With the development of science and technology and the improvement of war weapons, the harm caused by such people will be even greater. I have no intention of judging who is more "just" in the Russian-Ukrainian war, but now that nuclear threats have emerged, it is no longer a matter of one or two countries.

If a nuclear war breaks out, it will not be a one-man show by a certain nuclear-weapon country. All nuclear-weapon countries will definitely take the stage and join in the drama. Supporters and opponents will go to war in the chaos. Nuclear war will no longer be a shadow, but will be everywhere.

Some experts have repeatedly said that the stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world is enough to destroy the Earth several times. This statement is of course unscientific, because for the Earth itself, nuclear bombs can only tickle it. If all the nuclear bombs owned by humans were to explode, the Earth would still rotate as usual for billions of years. But humans and the ecosystem are different, and they may suffer a devastating blow.

According to statistics from authoritative organizations in the world, there are a total of nine nuclear-weapon-possessing countries in the world, both legal and illegal, with a total of more than 13,000 nuclear warheads. The largest nuclear bomb is in the tens of millions of tons class, and the smallest is about 20,000 tons class. If calculated at an average of 500,000 tons, the total equivalent is about 6.5 billion tons of TNT, which is generally believed to be no more than 10 billion tons of TNT equivalent.

That is to say, if the 7.5 billion people were to bear the ton of explosives, each person would be carrying about 1 ton of explosives. In this way, if a global nuclear war really happened, all nuclear bombs would be used, and the ton of explosives on each person's head would explode, and there would be no scum left. However, it is impossible for a nuclear war to evenly distribute one ton of explosives on each person's head. The main targets of the attack are generally military and industrial bases, and large cities would probably be destroyed.

The population loss may soon reach 40-50%, almost half of the population will be gone. And all technological civilization will be destroyed, and humans will return to the era of slash-and-burn agriculture. Some people may think that as long as there is land and water, they can survive.

But how many people can we feed now without electricity, running water, seeds, fertilizers, and mechanized and electric irrigation, let alone many high-tech ones? Even if we can feed some people, can these people survive the nuclear winter?

The so-called nuclear winter refers to the fact that after a nuclear explosion, a large amount of smoke and dust is injected into the stratosphere above 12 kilometers, thus blocking the radiation of solar energy to the surface, causing the surface temperature to drop, and leaving the earth in darkness and severe cold for several years. Without the photosynthesis of the sun, first a large number of plants die, then herbivores become extinct, and carnivores that rely on eating herbivores for survival also become extinct.

The severe cold of the nuclear winter caused a large number of people in the starvation plague to freeze to death. Some people may think that humans are omnivores and have the wisdom to dig holes to hide, but how long can they survive in hunger and cold? Think about it yourself.

The destruction caused by natural and geological disasters is unpredictable.

Natural disasters generally include: sudden solar explosions, asteroid impacts, etc.; geological disasters mainly include earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

Since the existence of human beings, the sun and the earth have been gentle and caring. Although there have been various natural and geological disasters over the past hundreds of thousands of years, there has not been a disaster like the 10-kilometer-class asteroid hitting the earth 65 million years ago, which led to the extinction of the dinosaurs; or the Ordovician gamma-ray burst attack, which led to the extinction of 85% of species.

But will it happen in the future? It is hard to say. Tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, or in the next few decades, as long as there is a 10-kilometer-class asteroid impact, it may cause the extinction of mankind. The sun has been very stable. For hundreds of thousands of years, it seems that at most it has erupted a few large flares, which have not caused a big disaster to the earth. This does not mean that the sun, which has endured for billions of years, will not suddenly erupt.

There is a science fiction film in the United States called "The Secret Code", which tells the story of a solar storm caused by a super flare that destroyed the earth. The energy destroyed all life on the earth hundreds of meters deep. Humans and life had nowhere to hide. Only some humans were rescued by aliens, and all humans left on the earth were destroyed.

The surface of the earth is made up of huge plates that are constantly drifting. Volcanoes and earthquakes frequently occur at the seams of the plates. Although earthquakes and volcanic eruptions have brought great disasters to mankind over the years, they seem to be just a quantitative change that is accumulating strength. The qualitative change of the future plate collision will definitely occur, but the time is difficult to predict.

The result of qualitative change is a global super volcanic eruption or super earthquake. Will the Yellowstone Park super volcano, which erupted 640,000 years ago, erupt again and trigger a global volcanic eruption? This is a topic that scientists around the world are paying close attention to and studying.

According to the model, if all the magma from the Yellowstone volcano were released, it would cover 38.5 million square kilometers of the earth's surface with a thickness of up to 1 meter; and the volcanic ash would enter the stratosphere and block the sunlight, causing the earth to be dark for several years, and the earth's temperature would drop by 15°C, with some places experiencing a sudden drop of 30°C, causing an extinction disaster more terrible than a nuclear winter.

Therefore, it is really impossible to predict how long humans can live. We can only cherish the present, work hard to develop scientific and technological civilization, and continuously improve the ability of humans to resist natural disasters, or develop the ability to escape from the earth and colonize other planets.

The Mars immigration that is now being actively explored is to ensure that humanity's eggs are not placed in just one basket on Earth. After the successful colonization of Mars, when a catastrophe that destroys life on a planet strikes, there will be a chance to preserve some human seeds and allow the human race to continue.

Therefore, there are people in this world who make a living by moving bricks, while others are "worrying about the future" and foresightedly doing scientific work that many people do not understand. In fact, the goal is the same, all for a better life. Only by continuously developing scientific civilization and improving human ability to resist disasters can humans have more and more opportunities to survive.

That’s all I have to say. If you have any opinions, please feel free to discuss in the comments section. Thank you for reading.

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