What will destroy the human race

Insects are mobile, reproduce quickly and live in almost any environment, making them a highly successful class of species, even when humans are actively trying to suppress them. The bug explosion will in turn will fuel a population increase in bug-eating species, like birds , rodents, reptiles , bats and arachnids , and then a boom in the species that eat those animals, and so on all the way up the food chain.

But what goes up must come down — those huge populations will be unsustainable in the long term once the food that humans left behind has been consumed. The reverberations throughout the food web caused by the disappearance of humankind may still be visible as much as years into the future, before things settle down into a new normal.

Some wilder breeds of cows or sheep could survive, but most have been bred into slow and docile eating machines that will die off in huge numbers. Those carnivores will include human pets, more likely cats than dogs. Want to feel a little smarter while you snack on a sandwich?

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Already have an account with us? Sign in to manage your newsletter preferences. Edit your newsletter preferences. You can unsubscribe at any time. Everywhere they go they thrive. One theory holds that intelligence evolved because it helped our early ancestors survive environmental shocks. A third is that intelligence is merely an indicator of healthy genes. All three scenarios could plausibly occur again in a post-human world. Full Terms and Conditions apply to all Subscriptions.

Or, if you are already a subscriber Sign in. Other options. Close drawer menu Financial Times International Edition. Search the FT Search. World Show more World. US Show more US. Companies Show more Companies. But the other missing point is about how society would respond to the changing forces.

The predictions are, fundamentally, optimistic. And through it all is a sense of trust: these changes will be good, and the companies making them well-intentioned.

If the Guardian missed the advent of the smartphone, despite writing just three years before the launch of the iPhone, how can we possibly do better today, looking 10 times further ahead? But there are forces working in our favour. The internet is far more entrenched now than it was in , and while its chaotic effect on our lives shows no sign of abating, it is at least predictably unpredictable.

Similarly, smartphone penetration in the west is now as high as it looks likely to go. Other predictions can be as simple as following trendlines to their logical conclusion. By , the switchover to electric cars will have mostly finished, at least in developed nations — as well as in those developing nations, such as China, that are starting to prioritise air quality over cheap mechanisation. But what they do on the internet is harder to guess.

In , there are two countervailing trends at work: on the one hand, providers, principally Facebook, have been trying to use subsidised deals to push newly connected nations on to stripped-down versions of the internet.

If they succeed at scale, then many of the benefits of the web will be stolen from whole nations, reduced instead to being passive participants in Facebook and a few local media and payment companies. But pushback, from national regulators in places such as India and from competing carriers, could bring the new nations to the real internet instead. Unless, that is, national regulators push in a different direction, copying China, Iran and Russia to keep Facebook out by building a purely nationalistic internet.