Human extinction

In futures studies, human extinction is the hypothetical end of the human species.

In the near future, anthropogenic extinction scenarios have been proposed: global nuclear annihilation, dysgenics, overpopulation,biological warfare or the release of a pandemic-causing agent, ecological collapse, and global warming; in addition, emerging technologies could bring about new extinction scenarios, such as advanced artificial intelligence, biotechnology or self-replicating nanobots. The probability of human extinction within the next hundred years, due to human cause(s), is an active topic of debate.

In contrast, human extinction by wholly natural scenarios, such as meteor impact or large-scale volcanism, is extremely unlikely to occur in the near future. Humanity has survived natural existential risks for hundreds of thousands of years, therefore it would be an unlikely piece of bad luck for a sufficiently large natural catastrophe to occur in the next hundred.

"Existential risks" are risks that threaten the entire future of humanity, whether by causing human extinction or by otherwise permanently crippling human progress. Many scholars make an argument based on the size of the "cosmic endowment" and state that because of the inconceivably large number of potential future lives that are at stake, even small reductions of existential risk have great value. Some of the arguments run as follows:

Parfit argues that, if the Earth is habitable for a billion more years, and if it can sustainably support a population of more than a billion, then there is a potential for 10¹⁶ (or 10,000,000,000,000,000) human lives of normal duration. Bostrom goes further, stating that if the universe is empty, then the accessible universe can support at least 10³⁴ biological human life-years; and, if some humans were uploaded onto computers, could support the equivalent of at least 10⁵⁴ cybernetic human life-years.

...
Wikipedia