Poll: do you think the human race should survive?

[Biodeamon]

Yes, becuase a) intelligent does not come around easily. it's a pure miracle that a life form such as ours evolved and i wouldn't waste something that precious.
b) i wouldn't be standing around if i didn't think life was worth it.

i don't care how many gloomy people point our flaws the only thing i care about is that we are very rare precious.

 

[GeneralFungi]

Until something better comes along, yes. Just as homo habilis and homo erectus should have survived until their evolutionary betters came along. Why wouldn't we survive?

If we humans continue to evolve (which we will) it'll still be a continuation of the Homo-Sapien race. I'm curious of how we'll actually continue to evolve at this point. We already come up with technology to overcome our genetic disabilities. There actually is very little we can do to improve ourselves in a way simple technological advancements won't.

 

[FFHAuthor]

Oh look, yet another 'let's see how fast I can out apathy everyone else' thread. Marvelous.

 

[Bloodstain]

It really annoys me how, at any given time in history, people say 'Gosh, people nowadays are so stupid and useless! What has become of humanity?'. Hating humanity is not only the new hip thing to do, it's always hip.
Humanity is actually quite great, and full of potential -- especially in comparison to other races on our planet. There are many stupid people, but humanity itself is still amazing. I look forward to the things we will develop over the next few decades.

My God, I am so sick of the "Humans are bastards" shtick. I really am. Yes, we have flaws, but dammit we have done some pretty amazing things! Yes, I think we should survive, we owe it to ourselves.

THANK YOU. THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH.

EDIT: In my opinion, this inferiority complex regarding our race is just a way of trying to convey 'I stand above you puny humans, for I fathom our faults and you do not.' People 'hating' humanity just appear arrogant and vain to me.

 

[TheYellowCellPhone]

Yep. We've survived as a species this long, why not take it a little further?

 

[verdant monkai]

WAIT. STOP. HOLD IT RIGHT THERE.

Name any other species that has a global network system that can transmit information to the other side of the planet in a split second that stores the entirety of their cultural and technological information on.

The internet alone is one of the most amazing things ever conceived, I think a race capable of that in only around 400 years of electricity being discovered in a usable form is a bit more deserving than some of its members might think. Give us another 100 and space exploration may be the new internet.

Yeah the internet......wow
why does that justify the continuation of our species, so we can look at porn anywhere in the world, and update our pointless twitter accounts with stuff like just saw a film. Or just took a crap. Yeah that's really great isn't it.
Admittedly we can do a lot of good with the internet like amnesty international and other such positive things. But at the end of the day I would rather live in a society which is more environmentally friendly, than have a lot of the annoying bullsh*t.
Think of a world without tax returns, car insurance, nuclear bombs, guns and governments that know everything about everyone. A world where there are still blank spaces on the map waiting to be discovered.
A world where we can all live a sustainable existence, with the environment and its wonderful animals.
Hippy rant aside I think we should continue as a species, but there needs to be less of us and we need to be more environmentally friendly.

 

[spartan231490]

I think our potential is just too great to allow us to go quietly into the void. We aren't much now, and as a whole we do a lot more harm than good, but we have a lot of potential.

 

[planet.tyler]

No humans should most definately be extinct..... The replies on this forum prove that as anyone who tries pass any species off as intelligent when said species knows it can't support even 2 billion people but gives themselves a clap when their population reaches 7 billion!! no animal on earth is as stupid as us, nor more convinced of just how clever it is.

 

[isometry]

"For every scientist or teacher there are a million dumb-f*cks..."

The thing is, dumb-f*cks are nothing new or unusual in the universe, but teachers and scientists are. There are billions of dead planets with no intelligent life on them, adding ours to this collection of empty planets wouldn't improve anything.

 

[370999]

Using human based reasoning to argue the moral worth of humanity and the case for it's survival? This whole topic won't work.

I want humanity to survive. A lot of other people want that. If you don't want then fne, top yourself of first.

 

[Faulty Turmoil]

If I were harsher, I would tell anyone who thinks we should all die to lead by example. I consider someone who thinks that not only me but everyone I love deserves to die to be ignorant, childish, selfish, short sighted, and in general a horrible person and I wouldn't want to speak with them anymore.

It is of my opinion that the only species I actually care about is my own, and I wish for us to one day travel the stars and conquer the galaxy, hopefully making some alien friends along the way.

 

[bruunwald]

Yes, because my eleven-year-old son is a decent little guy who deserves life as much any unoriginal cynical poll-starter.

 

[Kriptonite]

I don't think that humans as a species should survive, the way we are. In order to continue living on this planet, we need to change. We need to make less of us and start making positive changes with the ones alive.

 

[Mycroft Holmes]

Sure we have had our bigotry our intolerance, our Hitlers, Stalins and Maos; our Sarah Palins our Ted Bundys and our Frank Luntzs. We burn down forests to make films, we annihilate environments for our convenience, we kill off entire species as often as we try to kill off entire populations of our fellow humans because they dared to believe in the wrong God, the wrong government, who had the wrong skin color or spoke the wrong language.

But for every travesty there are a hundred greater acts of good. We save species doomed to extinction. We replant forests, rebuild environments. People sacrifice their lives standing up against evil against dictators. We risk our lives for complete strangers. In the WW2 concentration camps there was a Greek term, Clepsydra that referred to the running out of hope like an hour glass or a water clock. Your humanity and your will to live would slowly seep out until you gave up. I forget the specific details and even the name of the book; but a German SS commander was ordered to decimate the concentration camp in the old style of the Romans, by killing one in every ten. But he gave them an option designed to break their will and let them know that they were worthless that none would stand up to save them. He said that If a man who was not slated for death were to volunteer to be killed, he would let the others live. But when all others were silent one man stepped forward. When they held him down and injected gasoline into his veins to kill him he gave every single man woman and child in that concentration camp their humanity back, he gave their lives worth, and because of that he reset their metaphorical water clocks. He gave them back their hope, and because of that sacrifice many of them survived the holocaust and are still alive today.


We build beautiful works of art, question the very nature of the cosmos and launch ourselves into that great unknown. We stand up for righteousness, for justice and for peace and eventually we are going to beat those that would do harm because we are the great majority. We have Stephen Fry, Shavarsh Karapetyan, Carl Sagan, Janis Joplin, Leo Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Jennifer Connelly, George Carlin, Jon Stewart, Liu Xiaobo, Marie Curie. And humankind is only just getting started.

 

[him over there]

Who the hell cares what the species does? We are thinking people with emotions and friends and values and a need to explore... Just enjoy life and whatever happens happens.

 

[LordFisheh]

No, I think an entire species should be condemned to death because, from my bitter, horrific experiences as a well nourished, internet using first-world teenager, everyone deserves to die.

Let's swap 'humanity' for 'Jews'. It's suddenly a lot less palatable, isn't it? But that's what you're advocating, outright genocide of a species just for being born human. Personally, as a human, I'm offended by the assumption that I'm a selfish scumbag who doesn't deserve to live just because of my genes. If I'd been born asari, would that make my existence tolerable all of a sudden?

Furthermore, what the hell are you expecting? There isn't some kind of advanced alien civilisation that we should be emulating. As far as our current knowledge goes, we are all there is. What we're failing to measure up to as a species is nothing more than a fantasy. We might be the most peaceful intelligent race in a thousand light years and we'd never know. What it comes down to is a person looking at the world, deciding they don't like it, and somehow conjuring up the arrogance to think that, because they don't like what they read in the news, the lives and experiences of seven billions equals are invalid and not worth the air they breathe. Honestly, more than anything, it reminds me of a child smashing up his Lego town because he didn't like how it turned out.

 

[TehCookie]

I think the human race should survive, nature will sort itself out. Probably in some sort of terrible disaster that will kill a lot of lives, but not all. It's the circle of life, populations grow and if they get to big they die off so they can grow again. Or they go extinct, and something else fills the role or the structure changes. Being human I'd rather humans not go extinct, but I would like for people to control our population before nature does it for us.

 

[albinoterrorist]

now I'm not asking if you think we should die tomorrow, I just thought, since I don't ever want kids, what's the worst that could happen? well obviously if no one had kids then the human race would gradually die out, I guess my question is, is that really such a bad thing?

YES, YES, YES, YES, YES IT IS!

Through literally BILLIONS of years of good fate and perserverance, life has taken root on an unassuming rock in the arse-end of the universe.
We don't know if it exists, or has existed, - beyond the microbial level - anywhere else.

And we - Humanity - have had the luck to dominate our fellow Earthlings, and develop intellectual capabilities far surpassing anything they have achieved.

Our very existence is the greatest miracle of chance we have discovered to date.

Earth bore complex life - and that life bore us. WE are the only ones capable of developing the necessary means to spread that complex life beyond our planetary limitations.

Now, tell me, Oly - will you let the greatest 14 billion years of history imaginable be wasted?
Or will you help ensure this life - the life of the Earthlings - transcends our terrestrial coil and is sown far and wide?

I, for one, cannot allow billions of years of fate, and millions of years of pain and suffering be all for naught.
Humanity WILL SURVIVE, long after this planet does.
We will, because we must.
Only we can raise ourselves and our simpler, more animalistic Earthling brethren beyond that condition - that of being bound to our common Earth.

 

[Jaksteri]

Humanity to survive? A two edged sword, personally my instics kick in and sceam against idea of extinction.
And no less than our sun coming to it's end before we have managed to leave this system or massive nuclear war(every country will use theirs) will lead to humanitys extiction. As to why, we humans are extremely adaptive and resilient. Yes a ecological catastrophe such as polar caps melting(not going to happen any time soon btw) will lead to prolonged time of fighting for survival but having mass extiction isn't likely.

We live, we die, thats the gist, only thing we can affect is how we live and maybe even afect on how we die. Everything else is determined by random, luck or complicated mathematical equations of cause and effect.

 

[Imat]

Well the human race will get extinct someday . Let all things happen in due time . Like many species before us , we will all disappear , and a new species will be dominant . Thats how evolution works .

Now as for dying tmr . Well if the entire world disapears or if just i disapear i wouldn't be able to tell he difference ( since i would no longer exist in both cases ) , so i don't really care .

That isn't how evolution works...Evolution never states that a dominant species must die out eventually. Other species may have died out, but were they the fittest? Clearly not. Evolution is all about Survival of the Fittest, not Survival of the Fittest until they are Forced to die out and some other Species becomes Fittest (SFFSF). I'm of the opinion that no species on Earth will become fitter than us before the Earth becomes unlivable. If some other species grows to match our current intelligence, we will have already grown so much (Unless evolution of the human race simply stops) that it won't matter. So the only question is one of extra-terrestrials, and thus far the evidence for their existence is somewhat lacking.

On topic: Yes, the human race should survive.

I voted other. Once we reach the transhuman phase, our resource use will shrink tremendously, and we'll be able to focus more on learning and exploration. That and religion and extremism will pretty much die out in favor of science and understanding, and even non-intervention.

And who's to say religion is wrong? Because you don't personally believe, clearly nobody else should either? It'll be a sad day when religion "dies out." Based on my own beliefs, that'll mean no more folks entering the eternal domain of Heaven. Unless you believe my beliefs are wrong and I should convert, which certainly wouldn't be very "understanding" of you. Just sayin'.