Talk:Human extinction

Broken Reference Link

Hi, The following reference link leads to a 404 server error:

I tried to find the pdf, but didn't have success. Should this be removed? Or can someone else find the intended pdf?

References

Based on a formalization of this argument, researchers have concluded that we can be confident that natural risk is lower than 1 in 14,000 (and likely "less than one in 87,000") per year.[2]

I have truncated this part of the article to take attention off of what I feel are more like periphery characteristics of the important claim than relevant aspects of the scientific consensus. Specifically, I have removed the "likely 'less than one in 87,000'" (which should have been written as "1" btw, but I digress) with a reason I elaborated on in the edit summary. With that being said, this really does not get to the heart of the issue. Forecasts about forecasts actually project very little about the odds of an event: you can have some model, which is likely to be good, which forecasts the likelihood of an event as being very low, but have another one that is arbitrarily high, since there is no explicit constraint on it, and still say "the likelihood of this event is likely <<low>>". Really, we should try and procure a more productive risk profile for the case of a natural extinction event that actually offers an explicit probabilistic forecast instead of a meta-forecast on forecasts about the event themselves. 216.164.249.213 (talk) 19:57, 28 December 2022 (UTC)

This estimate is fallacious because of survival bias Imakesapage (talk) 22:42, 19 April 2026 (UTC)

Should article say "possible" extinction, or "eventual" extinction?

There's been a lot of back and forth on this . I argue in favour of "possible" extinction.

Wikipedia relies upon reliable secondary sources. The secondary sources used are virtuously unanimous in positing probabilities of extinction less than 100%; so "possible" extinction.

To say “eventual” is original research. It may seem like an obvious conclusion, and it may well turn out to be correct, but it argues against other arrogant human considerations. In considering humans as extinct, the perseverance of human thought considers flight to other planets, evolution into other forms (à la Kurt Vonnegut’s “”Galápagos’’), and what if dinosaurs predicted themselves extinct without acknowledging birds? What if AI from Earth encounters AI from another source, and the difference reveals the perseverance of humanity beyond any physical extinction?

All of the previous paragraph is original research and speculation. When it comes to “possible” vs “eventual”, arrogant or illogical though it may seem, Wikipedia is bound to follow the secondary sources, which postulate various percentages less than 100. The sources used say "possible". _signed, Willondon (talk) 21:17, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

Keep it as "possible" or something similar. The article recently came off of protection (placed over this issue) and no-one but now-blocked TAs has been supporting the change to "eventual" or similar wording. Meters (talk) 07:35, 31 July 2026 (UTC)

"Possible" because this article centers around human extinction in the near future. Because of this, changing it to "eventual" violates WP:BALL DonnieⓃⓄⓋⒶ (talk) 11:25, 31 July 2026 (UTC)

Eventually humans will go extinct. According to the most wildly optimistic estimate, our species will last perhaps another billion years but end when the expanding envelope of the sun swells outward and heats the planet to a Venus-like state. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/will-humans-ever-go-extinct/

The concept of a possibly eternal species is quite unscientific ~2026-42416-76 (talk) 17:59, 31 July 2026 (UTC)

As the first line of your source says, "It’s probably a matter of when and how, not if, we humans will meet our doom". Emphasis added. And humans may have spread out into space from Earth by then. Meters (talk) 18:28, 31 July 2026 (UTC)

Are you the same user who has been using TAs to make the edit to the article? It seems likely given your geolocation and ISP. Meters (talk) 18:31, 31 July 2026 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 30 September 2026

Remove the line "* In 1996, John A. Leslie estimated a 30% risk over the next five centuries (equivalent to around 6% per century, on average).", because it is stated once again in the line "* Philosopher John A. Leslie assigns a 70% chance of humanity surviving the next five centuries, based partly on the controversial philosophical doomsday argument that he champions. Leslie's argument is somewhat frequentist, based on the observation that human extinction has never been observed but requires subjective anthropic arguments. Leslie also discusses the anthropic survivorship bias (which he calls an "observational selection" effect) and states that the a priori certainty of observing an "undisastrous past" could make it difficult to argue that we must be safe because nothing terrible has yet occurred. He quotes Holger Bech Nielsen's formulation: "We do not even know if there should exist some extremely dangerous decay of, say, the proton, which caused the eradication of the earth, because if it happens we would no longer be there to observe it, and if it does not happen there is nothing to observe."". ~2026-51566-33 (talk) 16:44, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

 Done Day Creature (talk) 17:08, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

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