Will we soon be extinct?

Is Earth due for a mass extinction? Population ecologists think so. Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn more mass extinctions.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know from house stuff works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast You've got Josh,
You've got Chuck Here, we're a couple of writers from
how stuff works dot com. Right, Chuck, that's right, so Chuck, Yes,
are you familiar with any Turkish authors? I've heard this one. Um,

(00:25):
what's the punchline? There's no punch line. Oh, that's a
real question. Now. I don't know if the Turkish authors.
I didn't either until I was reading an article to
Day about a Turkish author who writes in the name
Haroon Yahiah. Yeah, I believe that's how it's pronounced, and
maybe butchering. Yet my Turkish is a little rusty. Um,
but Mr Yahia recently offered ten trillion Turkish lira, which

(00:52):
is about eight trillion dollars. It's not one of those
upside down things. It's about point eight um point eight
Turkish lyric to the dollars last time I checked. Um
to anyone who can provide definitive fossil evidence of evolution. Wow, yes,

(01:12):
that's a lot of money. What's his motive? His motive?
He's an outspoken creationism creationist crea. He's an outspoken creationism misted.
That's in the word now um and uh he he
is so vehemently opposed to Have you heard of Richard Dawkins. Okay,
Dawkins has a website and uh, you know he's a

(01:34):
zoologist who's a huge evolutionary theorist. He actually believes that
we're nothing more than a vehicle for our genes. That's all.
We are, just big bags of flesh and our genes
are really in control. Um So he's a huge, huge evolutionist.
Um and uh mr Yahiah got the um got Dawkins
website band in Turkey, So really if you go to Turkey,

(01:56):
you can't get unto Richard Dawkins dot com or what
dot ceo dot uk or whatever. Um So, he's he's
really kind of he thinks evolutionary theory is false and
it's not correct. So he's sort of ingested throwing out
this huge sum of money because he claimed he doesn't
think anyone can actually prove this right. Yeah. I I
didn't get the impression that he is a trillionaire. I

(02:18):
don't know how many trillionaires there are. And it sounds
like a smart alec to me, kind of a smart
Alec sure, but he was pretty specific. He said that
he wanted an intermediate form fossil. And this is like
an animal that is clearly um a species that is
the the connecting species between one and another, like UM,
some fossil that that links us humans to frogs. Because

(02:43):
on the tree of life, we all, if you go
back far enough, are related. Everything. Every species on Earth
came from some little strand of RNA in the primordial
soup here on Earth billions of years ago. Right, That's
what I believe. That's that's what a lot of people.
But the fossil record, which is this UM, this this

(03:05):
record of all the fossils, all the um sedimentary layers,
all this stuff over the last five and fifty million
years UM is admittedly spotty. The history of our planet.
It is. It is. It's a it's a it is.
So you go and take an nice sample, you know,
when you go down far enough and you reach a
point where no one is sampled yet that gets added

(03:27):
to the fossil record. It paints this whole picture of
the evolution of life on Earth. Depending on what you believe,
everything may have been placed there. That's another theory. Okay,
So UM we're still trying to figure out if evolution
occurs like consistently over a long period of time, which
is called phyletic gradualism, or it could be in short.

(03:49):
First is the competing theory, which is punctuated equilibrium. So
it's still like I said, it's spotty, but it does
have its uses. What uses, I'll give you a use
to a chuck uh. Last year, October of two thousand seven, uh,
some British researchers came up or where they published a
study that where they used the fossil record and compared

(04:10):
it to global climates over a five twenty million year period,
because we have what climate information in the fossil record
as well, And what they found was that in times
of warm global temperatures like we have now, I think
the mean global temperature, which is land and ocean average

(04:31):
temperatures put together, it's about fifty four degrees fifty six
degrees ferret height, which is about which historically we're in.
It's a greenhouse period, which is what we're in now. Traditionally,
when the Earth has seen greenhouse periods, mass extinction has
taken place. So the question we're forced to explore is

(04:52):
will we soon be extinct, right, which if you look
at the history of our planet, there's you know, there's
a case for that. And if we're not extinct, certain
uh organisms on our planet might become extinct, which could
lead to the domino effect and eventually we might be
extinct after all. It is very true. Um, there's one

(05:13):
case in point a mass extinction, the worst one, apparently
on the fossil record, happened at the end of the
Permian period. I believe two fifty one million years ago
of all the species on Earth died out like all
at once. I read. When I read that, I was
just blown away. I mean, can you imagine if all
of a sudden it was like, you know, humans, dogs, cats,

(05:36):
and yeah, mosquitoes and maybe a cockroach something like that,
with all the rest just gone. You know, you didn't
see anything when you went outside, right with, humans wouldn't
last long if that were the case. No, because we
require biodiversity exactly you want to tell them about biodiversity. Yeah,
I can speak a little bit about that. You know,
the Earth basically, Josh is like just a big machine

(05:58):
and if you were compared to like a car engine,
each each little part has its own function. And if
one you know, nut on the car engine goes off,
that leads to something else to break and something else
to break in. And the earth is kind of like
that as well. Um, there are no unnecessary parts. Everything
is important. Even even if looking at a car engine
you don't really understand, you know, what this does or

(06:19):
what that does, It's still essential. It was put there
for a reason. If you'll, you know, excuse the comparison,
excuse thanks. Uh so, I know when one example you
use was a nitrogen in your article if you wanted
to enlighten some folks, what I love enlightening folks. You're ready, folks,
let's do this. So Um, nitrogen basically is present in
the soil. It's it's an essential food for crops or crops, right. Um.

(06:45):
We we've learned to harness wild crops to to be
produced under conditions we like corn um and you know,
we can control how many grow and how well it
grows in that kind of thing. But really, ultimately, none
of this would work if it wasn't for the nitrogen
present in the soil. And we can add nitrogen, but
it occurs naturally in the soil through like worms digesting

(07:10):
you know, all sorts of different microbs that kind of thing. Um,
and the microbs themselves are involved in digesting things, and
they what they put out is a waste product in
many cases is nitrogen which feeds the crops which feed us. Yeah,
so I mean the lowly worm or the even lowlier microbe, bacteria,

(07:30):
things that just seems so unimportant or even threatening to us.
We are essential life on Earth. That's that. It kind
of goes with that machine you were talking about, the
interrelated parts that each one's very important, even if it
doesn't seem like it. So it with a loss of biodiversity.
So we lose the worms, we lose a lot of
the nitrogen in the soil. All of a sudden, our

(07:51):
crops fail. So we will be effective when we're one
way or another despite our technology. It's pretty amazing when
you think about that. The smallest thing can have the
the trickle effect and we may actually be able to
survive some sort of mass extinction. I mean, we're we're
pretty smart species. Like technically we're subtropical, you know what, right,
And we've mastered the colder climbs by a technology like

(08:15):
clothes or you know, um, tankless hot water heaters that
kind of thing. UM. So we're supposed to be living
kind of near the equator, UM, so we could conceivably
survive a mass extinction we have before. Actually, supposedly about
seventy thousand years ago, human humanity faced a an evolutionary bottleneck,

(08:38):
which is where there's some a species is brought to
the brink of extinction. So imagine it like a bottle,
and then the bottleneck comes and you lose all that
all that life and all those genes and UM. Basically
the population squeezed down and they estimate that there is
about fifteen thousand people worldwide on planet on planet Earth

(08:58):
at that time because of that bottle from what number
you know, I don't know the number, but I think
a lot more than UM. So on the other end
you come out. So really the evolutionary bottleneck, if the
species survives, goes from a bottleneck to an evolutionary hourglass
where it becomes robust again and populated. But at that

(09:19):
if you go back to that bottleneck, it took a
lot of inbreeding to get past that point. Or which
under a theory that I have, UM explains why a
lot of people today mouth breathe Wow, yeah, let's hear it.
That was it. I think I think there's mouth breathers
on planet Earth today because seventy thousand years ago it

(09:39):
took a lot of inbreeding to get past our evolutionary bottleneck,
and previously we breathe. I'd probably throw a nose guilt.
There's no no, no, no no. I mean you know,
you know, like you ever watched twenty four Uh I
watched the first day? Okay, Well keep for Sutherland. He's
a good example of a mouth breather. He breathes through
his mouth, breathe with his mouth open. It's still a

(09:59):
little slack jaw. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, Okay,
Mr Sutherland, no offense, he doesn't listen, so um chuck.
That's pretty much the long and short of whether or
not we will face a mass extinction. I think it's
entirely possible. Um. I know I've been storing water ever
since I wrote this. Really, in your basement, do you
have a bomb shelter? Um? I don't know if I

(10:22):
call it a bomb shelter. It's more like an emergency
bachelor pad. So you've got your Nintendo and your liquor
and yeah, exactly, and the water well. I got plenty
of that sleeping bags over. You can learn whether or
not you're going to die in the next couple of
years by reading will We Soon Be Extinct? On how

(10:43):
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
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