The disappearance of the human species would no longer belong to the category of science-fiction. Overpopulation and its exponential growth, plus the incapability of adapting to changes –among which climate change– make human beings one of the species wit Leonardo Boff

Leonardo Boff

 

Human Armageddon? São Paulo – The current bleak scenarios about the future of the life-system and specifically of the human species allow biologists, bio-anthropologists and astro-physicists to warn about the possibility that the homo sapiens/demens might disappear during this century. They present arguments worth considering. The most solid one seems to be the overpopulation combined with the difficulty to adapt to climate changes. There is an exponential increase in the biological scale. It took humanity one million years to reach one thousand million people in 1850. The time gaps between one growth index to another are getting smaller and smaller. From 75 years –from 1850 to 1925– they’ve shortened to 5 years difference. The forecast is that by 2050 there will be ten thousand million people. Is this a victory or a setback? Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, two outstanding microbiologists, in their well known book Microcosmos (1990) declare after data from fossil records and our own evolutionary biology that one of the signs of the oncoming collapse of a species is its rapid overpopulation. This can be proved through micro-organisms put inside a Petri dish (a shallow cylindrical dish filled with bacteria and food). Shortly before it reaches the brim of the capsule and food is about to run out, they multiply exponentially. And all of a sudden, they die. For humanity, they comment, the Earth can be just like a Petri dish. Indeed, we occupy almost all its surface, leaving only 17% of it untouched: deserts, Amazonian jungle and the Polar Regions. We are about to reach the physical borders of the Earth. There is demographic explosion and a decrease in the means of life of a limited planet. Is this a precursory sign of our oncoming extinction? Medicine Nobel Prize winner Christian de Duve maintains that we are witnessing the appearance of the symptoms that preceded the large death tolls of the past. Normally, some 300 live species disappear every year because they have reached their evolutionary climax. The pressure that world industry is putting on the biosphere, some 3,500 are disappearing instead. A biological disaster. Could it be out turn now? The deceased Carl Sagan considered man’s attempt to reach the moon and send special ships such as the Voyager 1 out of the solar system as the manifestation of the premonition of the collective unconscious about oncoming extinction. The will to live leads us to discover ways of survival beyond the Earth. Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking talks about the possible extra-solar colonization with ships, sorts of space-caravels, fueled by laser beams at a speed of thirty thousand kilometers per second. But in order to reach other planetary systems we would have to travel thousands and thousands of millions of kilometers, which would take at least a century. And we happen to be prisoners of light, whose speed of three hundred thousand kilometers per second is still insurmountable. Even so, in order to reach the closest star –Alpha Centauri- we would need forty three years, and we still don’t know how to put on the brakes of the ship at such a speed…
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Leonardo Boff Doctor in Theology, Munich University .