Humanity’s possible impending extinction is natural

There are, I think, lots of misconceptions about humanity’s behavior being ‘in discord’ with nature. And in particular, that our path of over-consumption and overpopulation is unnatural. However, nature has no innate inclination for balance, or harmony between its plant and animal species. Nature is constant warfare, an endless arms race through evolution, with the goal being to consume and reproduce as much as possible. Nature is more nihilistic than anything.

Humanity is clearly winning that evolutionary arms race. And when one species dominates an ecosystem and it’s no longer a close contest in the food chain, nature gets bored. Carnivores overpopulate and run out of prey. Or, herbivores overpopulate and run out of vegetation. Disease and/or starvation would then set in, and microorganisms and scavengers hit the reset button.

One misconception some people have, is that overpopulation of humans is our primary self-created threat. However, there is no fixed number for overpopulation. One estimate is that there are 1–10 quadrillion ants on the planet, possibly equaling the biomass of humans, yet they don’t even seem to register as far as a negative impact on the planet. For humans, overpopulation could occur at 1 million, or 50 billion. It is a matter of resource inflow (eating, building homes) vs resource outflow (dying, planting trees). A small percent of the world’s humans are responsible for the majority of our resource consumption thus far, so it seems we could exceed well over 8 billion while having a stable environment.

For animals in the wild, population is mostly linear with consumption growth. Each animal consumes a certain amount of food and bears a certain number of children. So overpopulation is usually synonymous with the real problem of over-consumption, making overpopulation an accurate assessment as to the primary dilemma for animals.

No non-human animal has the long-term planning/awareness to hit the brakes on their resource consumption and population growth. Dolphins would multiply into the billions if they got the opportunity, and then eventually collapse due to overconsumption of prey sources. So humans staying on their current course, population explosion and excessive consumption, is completely natural… and in line with non-human species’ behavior. It follows the pattern of many other species that had a good run and grew to disproportionate size. There is a boom, followed by an inevitable bust.

Mistaking Inter-Species Altruism as an Expression of “Order” in nature

There are incidents in nature that are quite touching, such as whales protecting a seal or human from a shark. It seems this would contradict the formulaic, almost nihilistic natural world that I argued for above, where nature simply eliminates what it becomes bored with through disease/famine.

But this inter-species altruism exhibited is coherent with a nihilistic view of nature as well. In the example of whales protecting others from sharks, doing so furthers the whales’ aims. Sharks are one of whales’ few threats… mostly to their young children, but a group of sharks can also take down a blue whale. It does not take much energy for a whale to put it in between a shark and its desired prey, depriving the shark of food and reproduction. By winning their war against sharks, whales further their dominance in the oceans, helping themselves by helping others.

These wars between species can be quite organized. Some orca groups have become expert shark hunters, systematically killing sharks with extreme precision by turning them upside down and quickly disabling them. Shark society, in response, vastly shifts its migratory movements to avoid these particularly threatening orcas. So it seems a nihilistic war schema makes sense in the larger structure of nature as well.

This begs the question, why do orcas, dolphins, and other whales not kill humans, like they kill sharks? We are their primary threat by far. They do not always know if the human boat they encounter is a peaceful scientist/tourist, so they should just attack them all on sight.

However, like crows, whales can communicate with each other through the generations as to which specific human groups are friendly or mean. So whales could become very good at learning which types of boats are most often used by whalers, and impart this knowledge onto their children.

Animals, when they know they can no longer defend themselves, submit and freeze in the hope that their pursuer, like an angry bear, was only curious or defending its territory against a perceived threat. They just pray that the predator isn’t hunting for a meal.

Whales and dolphins may be submitting to humans in a much more complex manner. It may not be the case that they are nice to us because they have a natural affinity for humans. Instead, they have learned the lesson, and are telling their families, that “those creatures are your greatest threat. We have no way to fight back. We must be courteous to them and make peace, or risk death.”

When the whale protects the human from the shark, they are not just denying food and reproduction for that enemy fish. They are also offering a fig leaf to the enemy apes, in the hope that the human will spare that whale’s life as well as the lives of his/her family.

Most animals, if they were able to view our wars in full perspective, would likely see us as very dumb. Humanity’s wars make the least sense of anything that has happened on this planet. Animals do go to war against each other, but they target their neighbors, and only expand so long as it increases their own survival.

A few chimp nations have been observed expanding their borders to an extreme degree, but eventually the group becomes unmanageable, and fractures into smaller ones. Once chimps have all the resources they need, sacrificing cohesion for more resources would simply be irrational.

Humans, on the other hand, behave more like killer bees or ant swarms. We have a small amount self-appointed queen bees, our elected/appointed leaders.

Some of these “queen bees” are rational in their expansion, as once their countries have becomes leading world powers, they no longer keep expanding. It could be argued this has simply been replaced with economic as opposed to territorial expansion, but the the victorious countries in WWI and WWII did show restraint in not assimilating the defeated.

But for other queen bees, this expansion is not for the security of his/her tribe, but simply satiation of the ego. Humans have a unique capability to create our own worlds in our heads, and for many leaders, in their distorted, malformed world, individual ego takes precedence over the survival or well-being of the group.

Typically animals would dispose of an incompetent leader, either by killing him/her or just making them an outcast/lower in the caste. But because our tribes have grown so large past our ‘healthy’ limit of perhaps 50–1000, we no longer have the ability to respond swiftly and appropriately to our inward threats. When you have a tribe of 300 million, the leaders’ deceptions can easily be masked, and our evolved stress responses that normally occur when group cohesion starts to break down do not trigger correctly. Either the responses trigger on our neighbors who are not the cause of the breakdown, or they do not trigger at all, as is par for the course in modern tribal politics.

It does not seem we’ve evolved the instincts to healthily maintain societies as large of ours. Just like we can’t judge how fast a large object like a train is actually moving, or accurately judge the threat of navigating vehicles with extreme mass and velocity and thus play bumper cars on highways. Hopefully we humans have some surprises still in store.