Most of the problems of the world are discussed fairly often. Things like pollution, terrorism and other issues that are discussed ad nauseam in the media. But the truth is there are other, often times more severe problems in the world, that only rarely discussed. Because you deserve to know just how doomed the human race is, i've brought you the 5 greatest problems that are never talked about.
1. Below Replcement Fertility
Most of the time, your discussion about world overpopulation. But the truth is, the discussion tends to be more one sided. There are places that are overpopulated such as Africa, where the resources available simply do not measure up to the number of people that require them. But his does not apply across the globe. throughout the technologically advanced world, in countries as diverse as Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Lithuania, people are having so few children that the number of births is actually below Replacement Level Fertility. Replacement Level Fertility refers to the number of humans that are required to be born in order to at least equal and replace the previous generation. With each generation, there's a drop in total population as the elderly die out, but without anyone to take their place down the line to fill jobs, contribute taxes, and be productive. Throughout the West and the East, fertility levels are dangerously low and no one has come up with a good solution for this. The causes of this are manifold, the introduction of birth control, women entering the workforce, and postponing childbirth past the optimum fertility window, which is ages 18 to 26, a world filled with leisure and comfort that is simultaneously too expensive, making children a less than affordable prospect and fewer and fewer jobs. Unless this problem can be countered through, for example, automation and similar innovations, the industrial world would be facing dim prospects in the future, or perhaps none at all.
2. Humans Are Getting Dumber
We humans evolve in an environment that was incredibly harsh and unforgiving and this led to selection pressures that favored attributes that would increase our chances of survival and the most important one was without a doubt intelligence. And maybe you're inclined to think that we're smarter today than we were say 20,000 years ago but here you would be wrong. According to researchers, we're actually getting dumber and our ancestors were more intelligent than we are. Now, you might be asking, How is this possible? But it's actually quite elementary. Human intelligence was birthed in an environment that was very harsh and this harshness led to selection pressures that gave us the intelligence we now have. But as human evolution is not stopped and we live in an increasingly comfortable environment with few if any challenges to our survival, we've been losing our intellectual edge. So it might be a trade-off in the end as the modern environment allows us to live without being challenged, but it has also cost us dearly in other ways. According to one professor, an average Athenian over 2,000 years ago would rank among the smartest people around today, but that is in the past now and how we will overcome this deficit in intelligence is anyone's guess.
3. Artificial Intelligence
We've all seen such films as Terminator and its various spin-offs but the threat of dangerous hyper-intelligent AI, or artificial intelligence, is something that some scientists take very seriously to the point that some believe it to be the single most dangerous threat to the human species. To put things in perspective, imagine the mind of a man such as John von Neumann the Hungarian polymath and genius. It was said that he could calculate complex equations in his head at speeds roughly equivalent to those of a pocket calculator and this is truly impressive. For a human. And he was the best of the best. As already mentioned, a tiny solar pocket calculator can do the same but even better and far more complex computers can do far more, such as beat grandmasters at chess and engage in multiple effectively superhuman operations simultaneously, which is to say that we already have limited AI that is better than the best humanity has to offer. If AI continues to advance its capabilities, it will dwarf those of the smartest humans, and if capable of many functions at once or even the same array as an average human, this could become incredibly dangerous for human beings because it would operate on a level beyond human kin and supersede us in everything it does and it could possibly deem us disposable.
4. Bioengineered Diseases
There was a time when the world was ravaged by an unparalleled number of deadly diseases such as the bubonic plague and smallpox, but at this time, few, if any people give serious thought to the possibility of such a thing affecting us today. Well, given the fact that there is widespread knowledge of the structure of viruses that is understood down to the smallest detail, cooking up a virus with unprecedented destructive potential is far easier than you may be inclined to believe .Biotechnology and genetic engineering could be a gateway to a new dawn for humanity or its death knell as these technologies put in the wrong hands could easily annihilate the entire human race. Given that there are 7 billion of us roaming the planet, all in close proximity to each other and constantly traveling. Whether this happens or not is something we will probably get to witness in our lifetime or die in the process of witnessing. The latest example is the spread of coronavirus in the whole world , Few believe that the disease is created in a lab and then spread and it may be the ultimate thing that can be done to create instability in economic and political world without any weapon or any kind of force. Few say this is a result of the US-China trade war and it is taking it's final form as the resources are getting limited to few countries while others have to depend on richer countries. The total death toll in the world has gone above 1 million and nobody knows where it stops.
5. We Are Doomed
By far, the biggest problem humanity faces is our almost certain inescapable doom as just another species that bit the dust. Our Sun is a star and all stars are born, then live and then die, and when our Sun dies, it will take the Earth with it. There is enough hydrogen in the Sun's core to keep it going for another few billion years, but eventually it will have all fused into helium and when this happens, it will not be able to generate as much energy as before and will collapse under its own weight and thus will begin the process of our Sun transforming into a red giant. And eventually, the Sun's core will shrink into a white giant and the earth will survive none of this. But this will take billions of years and the good news is we don't need to worry about the death of our star because we're probably going to die out long before that. Extinction events throughout Earth's history are well known and well documented and some, such as the Permian extinction event, nearly destroyed all life on Earth. The truth is that we are long overdue for a catastrophic extinction event of a sort that nearly wiped out all life before us. Whether it comes to us in the form of an asteroid, volcanic eruption, or something else, it really is just a matter of time until we are wiped out and go the way of the dinosaurs. And the unknown element of what causes this is the truly sinister aspect, but it might be that we don't need external help because humans can be pretty stupid and destructive, and with dozens of ways available to us, we might just be skilled enough to end our own lives before anything else out there gets the chance. Either way, all life coming to an end on this planet is an inescapable inevitability.
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