Will the Sun set on the human race?: Can Homo sapiens survive - or is it doomed to extinction, a fate known to have overtaken up to 99 per cent of all life forms?

Credit: iStockphoto

Related articles

• Factfile: The evidence for climate change
• A new bottom line
• Rise of migrants is damaging planet: British think-tank
• Doomsday: Five catastrophes that could wipe out civilisation
• Australia should lead the energy revolution

If science helped us into this mess, then surely it will also offer a way out? We pride ourselves as being the cleverest species that ever strode the planet.

We've conquered land and sea and space; learnt how to build materials from their basic atoms; developed ways of curing or preventing most of the diseases that can kill our species; searched back almost to the beginning of time; discovered and unlocked the primordial forces that hold atoms together. If can we make these incredible technological and scientific advances, we are surely bright enough to work out just how to maintain a highly developed civilisation and not take our own species to extinction?

Well, maybe we're not so clever: most of our technological advances are applied heedless of the cost to future generations. Depletion of fossils fuels, nutrient build-up in our land and water systems and unrestrained growth in greenhouse emissions – all are consequences of our failure to acknowledge and account for the impacts of our technology: we have become hooked, like a junkie to heroin, incapable of breaking away.

We are addicted to energy-sucking air conditioners, our petrol-guzzling cars, and all the gizmos and gadgets that the electricity drives, and which require mountains of coal to be burned every minute of the day.

Some people think money makes the world go around. Others, such as ANU geologist Prame Chopra, know better. "Energy makes the human world go around," said Chopra. "It's the stuff of life. At every level of our lives, from individual cells to the machinations of our national and international economies, energy is the driving force and one of the prime objectives."

So, we're hooked on it, but rather than explore alternative or more sustainable ways of producing energy, we're locked into a dependence on the easy stuff: fossil fuels. And if you're wondering where our escalating fuel prices will end, Chopra recommends you look to China.

The one variable that has closely and consistently shadowed the oil price over the last five years has been the level of oil imports to China; and China's thirst for oil is rapidly escalating. "It took 38 years for China to acquire its first million cars and only three years for the second million." said Chopra.

"If in the coming years it's business as usual, China will be the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases by 2020."

But regardless of how high the price of oil goes, the biggest cost we'll be paying for this addiction to fossil fuels will be climate change, said Michael Raupach of the Earth Observation Centre, part of the CSIRO. Its impacts are real, from sea-level rises to temperature increases; they are global and inescapable, and we know that human activity is behind the dramatic increases in greenhouse gases, he said. Raupach pointed out the enormous inertia in the climate system, so that we simply can't wait until the full extent of climate change becomes obvious before we do something about it.

Is the solution to our overtaxed Earth more of the same? More technological fixes? We split the atom more than half a century ago and tapped into untold power. Some scientists argue our next big adventure will be manipulating the genome: that a new age of biotechnology lies before us.

But others suspect genetic engineering is more dangerous than we imagine. "Physicists lost their innocence with Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Now it's the turn of biologists," cautioned Geoff Davies, an ANU geophysicist with a deep understanding of the perils of playing with complex systems.

"Genetic engineering is not just an extension of traditional breeding methods, it is 'super fire': a tool with unprecedented power to meddle with the fundamentals of the living world. Multicelled organisms have been developing for hundreds of millions of years, and the way they are is no accident. Life, ageing, death and breeding are cyclical. Barriers to crossbreeding ensure the viability of species and ecosystems. The complex relationships within ecosystems support every component species and individual."

Readers' comments