“kills 99% of all humans...In each scenario, humanity almost certainly goes extinct.”
I don’t think that this is true for your examples, but rather that humanity would almost certainly not be directly extinguished or even prevented from recovering technology by a disaster that killed 99%. 1% of humans surviving is a population of 78 million, more than the Roman Empire, with knowledge of modern agricultural techniques like crop rotation or the moldboard plough, and vast supplies built by our civilization. For a dinosaur-killer asteroid, animals such as crocodiles and our own ancestors survived that, and our technological abilities to survive and recover are immensely greater (we have food reserves, could tap energy from the oceans and dead biomass, can produce food using non-solar energy sources, etc). So not only would human extinction be quite unlikely, but by that point nonhuman extinctions would be very thorough.
For a pandemic, an immune 1% (immunologically or behaviorally immune) rebuild civilization. If we stipulate a disease that killed all humans but generally didn’t affect other taxa, then chimpanzees (with whom we have a common ancestor only millions of years ago) are well positioned to take the same course again, as well as more distant relatives if primates perished, so I buy a relatively high credence in intelligence life reemerging there.
Thank you very much for your comment! I agree with your comment on the human extinction risks that 99% is probably not high enough to cause extinction. I think I wanted to provide examples of human extinction event, but should have been more careful on the exact values and situations I described.
On re-evolution after an asteroid impact, my understanding is that although species such as humans eventually evolved after the impact, had humanity existed at the time of the impact it would not have survived as nearly all land mammals over 25kg went extinct. So on biology alone humans would be unlikely to survive the impact. However I agree our technology could massively alter the probability in our favour.
I hope that if the probabilities of human extinction from both events are lower, my comment on the importance of the effect on other species still holds.
Welcome, and thanks for posting!
“kills 99% of all humans...In each scenario, humanity almost certainly goes extinct.”
I don’t think that this is true for your examples, but rather that humanity would almost certainly not be directly extinguished or even prevented from recovering technology by a disaster that killed 99%. 1% of humans surviving is a population of 78 million, more than the Roman Empire, with knowledge of modern agricultural techniques like crop rotation or the moldboard plough, and vast supplies built by our civilization. For a dinosaur-killer asteroid, animals such as crocodiles and our own ancestors survived that, and our technological abilities to survive and recover are immensely greater (we have food reserves, could tap energy from the oceans and dead biomass, can produce food using non-solar energy sources, etc). So not only would human extinction be quite unlikely, but by that point nonhuman extinctions would be very thorough.
For a pandemic, an immune 1% (immunologically or behaviorally immune) rebuild civilization. If we stipulate a disease that killed all humans but generally didn’t affect other taxa, then chimpanzees (with whom we have a common ancestor only millions of years ago) are well positioned to take the same course again, as well as more distant relatives if primates perished, so I buy a relatively high credence in intelligence life reemerging there.
Hi Carl,
Thank you very much for your comment! I agree with your comment on the human extinction risks that 99% is probably not high enough to cause extinction. I think I wanted to provide examples of human extinction event, but should have been more careful on the exact values and situations I described.
On re-evolution after an asteroid impact, my understanding is that although species such as humans eventually evolved after the impact, had humanity existed at the time of the impact it would not have survived as nearly all land mammals over 25kg went extinct. So on biology alone humans would be unlikely to survive the impact. However I agree our technology could massively alter the probability in our favour.
I hope that if the probabilities of human extinction from both events are lower, my comment on the importance of the effect on other species still holds.