Greatest threats to Earth??

Question

Dr. Stephen Hawking said that the biggest threats to the human race was meteorites, nuclear warfare or accidental or intentional release of biochemical viruses. What do you think?

Answer 1

1. Large scale War in all its horrible manifestatios.
2. Disease and Poverty: i.e., a pandemic influenza could kill 100 million people and affect hundreds of millions more; millions of children die each year due to hunger, diarrhea, and malaria.
3. Global Warming: once the threshold is reached there is no going back. The world as we know it will cease to exist, buried under glaciers, the survivors in tropical areas having to start from scratch. This is a real threat, but it operates in a scale of hundreds or thousands of years. (Global warming will be followed by global cooling and glaciation. But before the glaciers, tsunamis will destroy coastal cities).
4. Destruction of the planet by an asteroid: although possible, statistically occurs once every several hundred million years.
5. Destruction of all life by a nearby supernova explosion: again, once every several million years.

Answer 2

He's probably right on the specifics, but as other people have mentioned it's human nature that is the real culprit. We want what we want and we'll usually not think of the consequences. What I find particularly galling these days is that mankind seems to think we can "manage the environment". Well if we had not industrialized then there would be no problem. Too few resources controlled by too few. Communications technology is making things worse and better. Better because more people are aware of the other parts of the world and are more likely to realize that we're all on the same planet. Worse in the sense that people have also realized that they are not very well off. They will want toys too. There is nothing written anywhere that says only a few countries get all the toys. Look out.

Answer 3

Fashion and the beauty industry, magazines like Cosmo and other image based media, the human race has become a society of narcissists and egotists, every day children see these images plastered all over t.v. and think to themselves, this is what beauty is so this is how i have to look, but it just makes more problems, sure war is bad but war and violents have been around since the dawn of mankind, in war you never see a soldier tell the enemy soldiers that they look fat, so the enemy soldier goes home and diets until they become anorexic or bulimic and kills them selves, do you. No the greatest threat to the planet is mankind's own ego.

Answer 4

Man is the greatest threat to Earth.
Unlike all other plants and animals that our co-dependent on each other for existence and survival, man's own arrogance, hubris, greed, and overrated intelligence leads him to believe that he is superior to everything else on Earth.
So, he refuses to protect and preserve the delicate ecological balance between man, plants and animals that Nature (or some evolutionary 'big bang' process, or an intelligent designer, or God) intended.
We have created a disposable society that wastes Earth's valuable resources, destroys Earth's fragile environment, and ignores the fact that every single species of plant or animal is on this Earth for a purpose, becoming extinct only in its own time (as opposed to being extincted by man's recklessness).
We don't REturn, REuse, or REcycle. We continue to pollute the air with smoke-belching factories and vehicle emissions. We pay little attention to the depletion of the ozone layer. We make crude jokes about the consequences of global warming. And once it's all gone, man will sit around asking himself, 'What the hell happened?" -RKO-

Answer 5

The greatest threat is human nature.
2 of the 3 things you mentioned from Dr. Hawkings stem from this flawed, selfish, greedy, self-destructive nature.

Answer 6

we humans should learn to get along and realise that our beleifs might not be correct that our religion ar faith is not the superior one.
the devoloped nationd should lose their double standards like their stand on india and pak , israel ona lebanon, iran etc the devoloped nations shouldnt try to control the whole world. the "jehadis" should stop lying to themselves that they are warriors of god and realise that they got into it just because they are unemployed and things like that. our biggest and most probable threat is suerly a large scale war which will drag every nation in itand make the world a horrible place. and the main cause for this would be pride, pride to control more territory pride to make the whole world follow their faith etc

Answer 7

Overpopulation! The more people breed, the more natural resources are being used. Once it really becomes a threat, people are going to start fighting over everything... those who don't die because of the fighting will starve because nothing is left.

Answer 8

.The greatest risk to humans is humans themselves. Not sure what will kill us all first, but with all the hatred in the world today. My bet is nuclear war is not that far off in the future

Answer 9

i love the answer of "huge style 17" suited, yet, the stuff from interior sight supernova can be a higher probability to our planet or maybe the solar for that count number. Supernova stuff is ejected at a speed way too quickly to be stopped if any of it ever comes our way. it can hit us with more effective stress than something ever widespread.

Answer 10

Neocon republicans and the "war on terror". That should cover everything but the meteorites.