Are we among the final generations of humans to walk the earth? One Australian scientist says yes, and he’s not just another 2012 doomsday believer. Professor Frank Fenner, who announced the eradication of smallpox to the World Health Assembly in 1980, says overpopulation and climate change are just two of many reasons why humans won’t survive much more than a century into the future.
In fact, Fenner declines to speak about climate change because he believes there’s no use — our fate is sealed.
“Homo sapiens will become extinct, perhaps within 100 years,” he said in an interview with The Australian. “A lot of other animals will, too. It’s an irreversible situation. I think it’s too late. I try not to express that because people are trying to do something, but they keep putting it off.”
Thanks to the population explosion and “unbridled consumption”, Fenner says food wars and global droughts will intensify problems like malnutrition and poverty.
Read the rest here.
Larval Subjects . 
July 7, 2010 at 9:21 am
There is quite a cottage industry of books and writings in this genre, from John Leslie’s (1996) Doomsday Argument application of Bayesian reasoning to the problem in his End of the World to Martin Rees’ (2004) Our Final Century and Clive Hamilton’s (2010) Requiem for a Species; plus other relevant works such as Jared Diamond’s (2005) Collapse, which I’m currently reading, and Peter Ward’s (2009) Medea Hypothesis. Of the two manuscripts that I am currently working on, one of them fits firmly within the depressing end of this doom soon genre.
As a species it seems to be the case that we are cognitively and socially very poorly equipped for responding to long term and global dangers. There are a whole host of analyses that highlight how we will ultimately be victims of our evolutionary success and various social and psychological addictions, desires and obssessions. The key question seems to be, can these analyses make a difference? As philosophers we may be grimly aware of many of the problems of capitalism, consumerism, ecological degradation, neoliberalism etc. But how to short-circuit these systems? Gatherings of climate scientists are now pretty depressing events, basically because they are generally persuaded that in many respects it is already too late (+2 to 4 degrees in the next hundred years). It is going to be a hotter and politically unpleasant century. Interesting times as the Chinese curse/proverb goes.
July 7, 2010 at 3:38 pm
Dang! At this rate we’ll never get a complete ontology.
July 7, 2010 at 10:37 pm
Can one comment on this thread with having a double last name?
July 8, 2010 at 2:30 pm
Well, sheesh, Camus already wrote The Plague, didn’t he? What difference does it make if we die in the next couple generations or some time more comfortably in the far future? Doomsdayers may be completely correct, and it doesn’t change anything that we should be doing.