The content explores the inevitability of extinction for all species, including humans, and details five primary scenarios that could lead to human extinction: pandemics, nuclear winter, climate collapse, extraterrestrial catastrophes, and artificial intelligence. It emphasizes that unlike past extinctions, humanity is aware of these threats and is, in many cases, actively contributing to them.
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Who would’ve thought that after the zombie apocalypse,
the cannibals and the vampires…
you, Mansy, would be the last human left on Earth?
Thank God! There’s still another human left alive.
You ruined the moment! Who are you?
I’m Atef, the last human on Earth.
Time out, guys.
I'm the real last human on Earth.
Wait. If there's 2 of us, then neither of us is the last human.
You just took away the most important thing in my life.
All my life, I’ve been like a stray dog, ignored, lonely.
I never had any friends.
Even when the world ended, I was alone.
My only comfort was knowing that I was the last human on Earth.
-Get it now? -It’s okay, my friend.
You don’t have to be alone anymore.
We're together in this.
Let’s stand together.
We'll be there for each other, ease the pain of the world’s end…together.
What do you say?
Nah.
Who would’ve thought that after the zombie apocalypse,
the cannibals and the vampires…
you, Mansy, would be the last human left on Earth?
Hello dear viewers and welcome to a new episode of El-Daheeh.
Dear viewer, allow me to start with a daring question:
Have you ever imagined that one day, Earth might go on without us?
That all humans, by some stroke of fate, might simply cease to exist?
"Don't scare me like that!
I've told you not to end the world before I get married!"
I'm telling you this so that you could save yourself from extinction.
The idea of extinction feels far-fetched to us
because we’ve lived for so long, seen so much,
science keeps advancing, and nothing has wiped us out yet.
We've been through worse.
But here's the ugly truth:
our survival so far doesn’t mean we’ll stay here forever.
Sorry to break it to you, but extinction is inevitable.
It’s only a matter of when.
Scientists believe the Earth has existed for about 4.5 billion years.
For nearly a billion of those, it was almost completely lifeless.
The first microscopic life appeared around 3.5 billion years ago.
From that moment, life became a trend,
simple organisms gave life on Earth a go, experimenting:
DNA, RNA, viruses, bacteria, insects…
until animals appeared.
But one rule applied to every living thing, no matter how long it lived for:
extinction is the inevitable fate of all.
About 99.99% of all species that ever lived on Earth
are now completely gone.
Take the trilobite for example, one of the creatures that survived the longest,
an arthropod crab-like creature that lived for 270 million years,
only to disappear in the largest mass extinction in history.
That extinction did quite the damage.
It wiped out 95% of marine life.
- [Seafood restaurants] - [Sad song playing]
The sea was nearly emptied.
Then came the dinosaurs, giant creatures that lived for tens of millions of years,
nearly 150 million years.
Those mighty creatures ruled the Earth, then vanished. Gone. Extinct.
Paleontologist David Raup of the University of Chicago
wrote in his book 'Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck?'
that logical thinking leads to one conclusion: extinction is inevitable.
Simply because if all species that ever lived hadn’t gone extinct,
we would've had between 5 to 50 billion creatures walking around with us.
The planet would've been like a huge clown car.
Extinction is the rule not the exception.
Life on Earth is about extinction not immortality.
So, could humans be an exception to that rule?
That’s the big question. I’ll answer it in a moment,
assuming I don’t go extinct on the way.
Hundreds of scientists around the world are working in research centers
and institutes, focused on one thing:
figuring out how humans might go extinct.
There's the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University,
and the Future of Life Institute,
with entire departments dedicated to studying catastrophic existential risks.
These scientists specialize in studying what would wipe us out.
The United Nations has its own agency for the coordination of disaster risk reduction.
Disaster Risk Reduction Office.
It specializes in mapping global extinction scenarios.
So the question isn’t if we'll go extinct, it’s how.
We take it for granted.
In his book 'Our Final Hour', British astrophysicist Martin Rees says that
humanity’s chance of surviving to the end of the 21st century is less than 50%.
In fact, he argues that we’re living in the most dangerous period in human history
and that our entire existence could vanish within the next few years.
And honestly that's a fail in survival.
Think about it, dinosaurs lived for 165 million years,
and we’ve barely made it through a few hundred thousand.
What did you do with that huge brain of yours?
What good did that brilliance and philosophy do?
Your programming skills… it's all for nothing.
Dinosaurs didn't even have a match, a pinky or a ring finger.
Yet they lived for 165 million years, you loser!
Some creatures lived for billions of years!
You'd allow a creature that could only move like so to beat you?!
"I have a question, Abo Hmeed. You don't count yourself as human, too?
You're just as dumb!"
-Where did your accent go? -"We're becoming extinct,
no time to show off."
Listen carefully. We need to figure out what to do about this.
There are many scientific theories that try to explain how humanity might end.
I won’t go through them all,
but let’s focus on 5 main scenarios.
All you have to do is pray none of them actually happen.
Scenario One: The Pandemic.
In the year 541,
a grain ship sailed from Alexandria
to the capital of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople.
The ship carried special passengers, rats.
And those rats weren't lonely passengers,
the rats carried fleas,
and those fleas carried Yersinia Pestis,
this isn't any bacteria, this is bacteria that causes the plague!
Those rats were the least frightening thing on that ship.
When the ship docked, the Plague of Justinian began spreading.
It was named after Emperor Justinian himself.
It spread across the world, and became one of the greatest pandemics
in modern history.
That wasn’t humanity’s first pandemic,
but it was the first to be recorded in detail.
The Plague of Justinian killed between 30 and 50 million people,
that's a terrifyingly huge number!
A tiny bacteria wiped out 20%, one fifth of the global population.
One in every 5 people died of the plague.
One in every group of 5 had the plague.
In some villages, 80% of their population were wiped out by the plague.
Since then, countless pandemics have struck,
some wiping out massive portions of the population.
The Black Death in the 14th century killed
25% to 40% of the world’s population.
That’s nearly half of everyone alive.
The Spanish Flu killed about 5% of the global population,
nearly 100 million people.
And strangely, it was like a hitman.
It targeted the young and healthy more than the elderly.
"Man, stop it, you’re giving me Covid flashbacks!
Covid was bad, sure, but life went on.
Thankfully we bounced back, science advanced and we found solutions.
In a year and a half, we had 5 vaccines,
although no one knew which did what, or if any really worked.
Looks like Yasmine Sabry was right when she said
"Whoever gets it, gets it, whoever moves on, moves on. Survival is for the strongest."
[Darwin]
I actually agree with that…
Whoever agrees, agrees, whoever disagrees, disagrees. Survival is for the episode.
Anyway, compared to other pandemics, Covid was a rookie.
It's weak.
I agree, my friend, yet, I kind of disagree as well.
Although Covid was a big deal, it was a weak pandemic.
Compared to other pandemics, it was nothing.
It's a walk in the park.
You don't know how it is with a real pandemic!
Scientists say that its fatality rate was under 1%!
SARS, by contrast, is around us. It's highly contagious.
Its fatality rate is 9-11% of those infected.
MERS has a fatality rate of 34%, while Ebola's up to 90%.
Luckily, those viruses spread more slowly.
You can rest assured, my friend, for now… What if…
What if these viruses mutated and spread more quickly?
Imagine if Ebola became as contagious as Covid or the Influenza.
We wouldn't even have enough time to say our goodbyes.
Worse… what if we got a whole new virus
that's much stronger, one that we know nothing about?
You know that is not impossible.
Scientists estimate there are around 1.7 million viruses
that we haven’t yet discovered, we're still going to find them!
Most of them are living in wild animals.
Between 25% and 50% of them could potentially spread to humans.
Viruses like SARS, MERS and Covid-19 are new strains
that we knew nothing about until recently.
Current human behavior is making it more likely for unknown viruses
to jump from animals to humans.
Our current behavior speaks for itself.
In the past hundred years alone,
we’ve destroyed about 30% of the world’s forests.
Poor forests!
A third of the forests is gone.
Forests absorb sunlight, turn this to that, split this, give that…
with chlorophyll here and there, all was good.
Then we came with an axe and took away 30% of that in the past century.
Removing that many firests means millions of animals are losing their homes.
They had no choice but to cling to humans and share their habitats.
Animals had to invade our world
and in doing so, they transferred their viruses to us.
So, creatures that we normally don't come in contact with,
lost their natural habitats and came to live next to us.
Like bats, for example.
They're like flying virus warehouses.
About 5,000 types of bats have left the forests and came to live near humans.
Every tree we cut brings some creature and its viruses a little closer.
Now, those viruses are right next door,
and only God knows what harm they might bring or when.
We’ve seen what they did in a bowl of noodles.
They put the planet to sleep for nearly 2 years.
There's also climate change.
The thing we’re destroying so quickly as if we’ve got a plane to catch.
It's like we're determined to melt those ice caps!
And as we were doing just that, we found types of bacteria coming back to life,
bacteria that had been frozen solid for about 50,000 years.
But the worst part is that scientific and technological progress did more than that.
Though it's made medicine more advanced and treatments easier,
but at the same time, it’s made the spread of deadly viruses
much faster than ever before.
The ship that carried the Plague of Justinian
needed weeks to reach its destination,
and it was just one ship in a vast sea.
Today, we have other means of transportation. We have buses.
It's so crowded we're literally breathing down each others' necks.
Not to mention airplanes.
Do you know how many flights we have every single day?
100,000 flights a day!
That’s 100 thousand planes flying above every day!
365 days a year, planes carrying every imaginable kind of infection.
An infection that begins today in China can travel to New Zealand,
then to America, then to the Middle East, then to Europe, voilà.
Just when the virus thinks it’s done with its world tour,
it realizes it's landed in Egypt.
That’s how bacteria and viruses move in our modern age.
The first Covid case recorded outside China appeared in Thailand,
and within the same week, another appeared in the U.S.
That means the virus crossed the largest ocean in the world, the Pacific.
The world isn’t a small village anymore; it's a one-bedroom flat.
The population is greater, cities are more crowded,
streets are smaller and houses are packed one next to the other.
All of that just makes infection spread much faster.
Back in the time of the Plague of Justinian,
Constantinople was the largest city on Earth at the time.
It had about half a million people.
Half a million! That’s barely a neighborhood now.
Cairo today has between 10-23 million residents.
The half a million that once filled Constantinople?
I ran into them this morning in line at the bank.
So now, every mega-city with millions packed together is, in a pandemic,
a ticking time bomb of potential infection sources.
"I must remind you, Abo Hmeed.
You’ve said more than once that medicine has advanced.
And what we saw was that, in almost 12 months, labs managed to develop a vaccine.
I took the first dose, but not the second.
I got away with it, though."
True, but those same labs are what’s worrying some scientists even more.
In 2011, they conducted the first experiment of what came to be known as
Gain of Function.
This experiment was originally meant for the good of humanity.
Through it, a group of scientists tried to answer a legitimate question,
a question about the avian flu.
That virus was truly deadly, not like Covid.
It killed 50% of those infected.
Luckily, it didn’t spread easily between humans.
So thankfully, we got lucky… can't say the same for poultry vendors.
Still, one question lingered:
What if it mutates and gains the ability to spread quickly from a person to another?
How would we deal with that?
And that’s where Gain of Function experiments began.
So that we could see what would happen
if we modify the virus, give it new functions, and study the result.
From 2011 to 2014,
American scientists carried out experiments on different viruses
all for a noble goal: to study the dangerous version
before it appears naturally, so we can prepare for the battle.
But what happened was a great controversy in the history of science.
Unfortunately, it was the doing of Democrats.
In 2014, under the Obama administration, these experiments were completely halted
along with more than 20 related research projects,
some of which were essential for producing dangerous viruses.
Then, strangely, and this is what makes you wonder how America really operates,
in 2018, the Trump administration brought these experiments back,
though partially and under strict safety regulations.
Looks like no one is satisfied with his own ideology.
The cycle of opening and shutting down these programs reflected a deep fear,
the same fear you probably see every week on MBC2.
Could one of these evil viruses "accidentally" escape from the lab?
And the simple answer is: yes and it already has.
There have been dozens of incidents where deadly viruses leaked from labs.
For example, in 1977, there was a mini-pandemic
caused by the flu virus. It spread widely and strongly across the world.
When scientists studied that virus,
they discovered that it was identical
to the strain that had caused a previous pandemic in 1950.
And that is something impossible to happen naturally.
Because the flu virus mutates very quickly.
It could never remain genetically identical after 27 full years.
There are always mutations.
Scientists realized that this mini-pandemic pointed back to the old records.
In 1979, a Soviet biological weapons lab
accidentally released anthrax;
it spread in a Russian village, causing the deaths of dozens of villagers.
As usual, the Soviet Union denied it.
What's the cost of lies?
But years later, Boris Yeltsin admitted that,
a mistake had indeed happened: the virus had leaked from one of their labs.
That's how the Soviets roll. Every now and then comes a guy who'd reveal it all.
Shift, delete.
Even in democratic countries we find accidents
like in 2007 in England, the Foot-and-mouth outbreak.
A lab leak caused by a broken tube that triggered an outbreak.
The lab acknowledged the problem, said they fixed it, and patched the tube.
2 weeks later, there was another leak.
Another tragic accident was the last fatal case of smallpox in the world
and that infection came from a laboratory leak.
Clearly, labs need serious leak-prevention.
Check your tubes, everyone. They're leaking viruses!
An unconfirmed theory considers that Covid-19 was the result of
experiments at a lab in Wuhan
and then accidentally leaked out, and you know how that story goes.
But even if safety standards are extremely high,
can you guarantee no one, somewhere, is doing this kind of risky work
for evil motives?
A guy studying biology might have terrible intentions…
"That can't be, Abo Hmeed!"
I know someone who lost his hair and his nose grew longer.
He went through a bad time, so he tried ending the human race
by spreading misinformation of humans' extinction.
That was my not-so-hidden agenda that I haven't completed yet.
The world really does contain plenty of evil people.
Humans have used viruses as weapons for a long time.
In medieval times, armies would catapult corpses of plague victims over city walls
to spread disease among the enemy.
"Take that, enemy. Incoming corpses, breathe in, good night."
Your virus has been sent successfully.
And in modern times, things only got darker.
Unit 731 of the Japanese army deliberately spread Cholera and the plague
to the Chinese, killing tens of thousands.
Hear me, 'Japan in Arabic' page? I haven't forgotten!
The team’s memory is tighter than a sushi roll.
You bring the poison, I bring the soy-lution
I can take the heat, teriyaki, wasabi and all.
That’s all the time we’ve got for jokes, I'll wrap the rest to-go.
[Japan in Arabic page] [Gibberish]
I'm kidding, guys! Don't be upset. I love you. I still play Winning Eleven not Fifa.
Let me give you another example.
The government of the apartheid regime in South Africa had a covert project
called Project Coast.
The name feels like summer, but it's not as lovely as it sounds.
The project consisted of experiments
that targeted black people using biological weapons.
Not only wars or dictatorships,
there have been deranged individuals who used viruses
to achieve their own twisted goals.
One example is a religious cult in the U.S. state of Oregon,
an extremist group called the Rajneesh.
To make their mayoral candidate win the elections,
they went around restaurants in the city spreading Salmonella bacteria.
They contaminated the food so that people eating in restaurants would get sick
and miss the chance to vote.
So only their supporters could go and vote,
"Eat at home!
We’ll sweep the elections this year and make our candidate win."
Instead of hiring a proper marketing company
or working on a real election campaign,
they ended up poisoning 750 people with food poisoning
and still lost the elections.
Now tell me, what guarantees that someone with that same twisted mindset isn’t working
in one of these labs, capable of leaking a virus?
And this time, not by accident but deliberately.
That’s why Toby Ord, a researcher at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute,
says that the odds of human extinction from a virus transmitted from animals
is about 1 in 10,000.
But the probability of extinction due to a lab leak
is about 1 in 30.
May God protect us all and the labs.
All that lead us to the second scenario:
Nuclear Winter.
If you’ve seen our episode 'The Last Day on Earth',
you surely know the story of the Soviet submarine incident.
If you haven’t watched it, please do.
It’s one of our finest episodes in terms of storytelling.
The Soviet submarine B-59 was stationed near the U.S. coast
during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
At one point, the submarine lost communication with headquarters,
and the crew inside became convinced that World War III had already started.
The captain, thinking the war was underway,
received orders to launch a nuclear torpedo toward America,
a torpedo with destructive power equivalent to the Hiroshima bomb.
According to protocol, such a decision required unanimous approval
from the three senior officers aboard.
Two officers agreed, but one, Vasili Arkhipov, refused.
And actually, there was no World War III.
Had that torpedo been launched, it would have triggered World War III.
The world owes that man for preventing World War III.
It would've been a nuclear war that would've wiped us out.
Imagine the nuclear giants, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, going to war.
The Earth would’ve been roasted like a chicken, bones and all.
That incident alone could have caused 200 to 325 million deaths,
mostly in the Eastern Bloc because America wouldn’t have stayed silent.
And that wasn’t the only time we came close to a nuclear war.
According to declassified reports from 2013,
in 1983, at the peak of the Cold War,
the Soviet early-warning system detected what looked like 5 nuclear missiles
launched from the U.S. heading toward Moscow within 5 minutes!
The Soviet Union was about to be erased.
The duty officer, Stanislav Petrov, saw the alert on his radar.
He was supposed to immediately inform the command
that the Soviet Union was under nuclear attack
which would’ve triggered a full retaliatory strike.
But luckily, he hesitated.
He doubted the alert and decided not to report it right away.
Later, he discovered that the system had malfunctioned.
It was a false alarm caused by a technical glitch.
It would've been solved if only he had restarted his machine.
In a press conference, Petrov said: "I’m not interested in medals.
I’m more interested in what we'll do if this happens again."
And despite all the treaties to reduce nuclear weapons,
we have today,
in the world of the UN, the Red Cross, organizations,
international law, international humanitarian law, and the list goes on,
we still have 12,000 nuclear warheads.
American, Russian, Chinese, Indian,
Pakistani, Israeli, British, French,
each with their own arsenal.
Say India and Pakistan lost their temper, tens of millions could die.
And if everyone started firing nuclear weapons,
we’d be talking hundreds of millions.
What happens if one loses their mind and actually uses the weapon?
Dr. Alan Robock, Professor of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University
and his team worked on a research with a scenario
in which India and Pakistan launched nuclear attacks
in one of their repeated skirmishes.
The study reached a terrifying result.
The immediate death toll would be between 50 and 125 million people.
But the real problem is what comes next:
that would generate around 5 million tons of smoke and soot,
which would rise into the atmosphere and block large parts of the sun.
Global temperatures would drop by 1-2 degrees,
the global warming target we’ve been trying to control would be destroyed.
Forget the crops and cows.
When the sun is blocked, water won’t evaporate as much,
so rainfall would decrease dramatically.
According to research, precipitation could drop by 30%,
and all the world’s staple crops would be affected.
For example, wheat yields might fall globally by 15-30%
You’d need to make a huge bank withdrawal just to buy a loaf of bread.
Corn yields could drop by 20-40%
So, no more popcorn but it’s not really that big of a deal,
we'll get tacos for movie snacks,
or maybe some avocados.
The real problem is that corn isn't just human food, it's animal food as well.
"What's that got to do with me?"
Well, we eat those animals, my friend.
That corn shortage would lead to famine and leave us with far less meat to eat.
In short, such a catastrophe could kill around 2 billion people.
And remember: these 2 countries don’t even hold the largest nuclear arsenals.
Now, imagine if such a nuclear war broke out between the U.S. and Russia,
or the U.S. and China, the Trump-Putin-Xi Jinping trio is deadly,
with all due respect to India and Pakistan,
that could very much start a nuclear war,
but it's not something a cup of tea in Kashmir can't fix.
Researchers at the University of Colorado modeled a scenario
where the U.S. and Russia use half of their nuclear arsenals against each other.
What would happen then?
That would be the end of everything.
Forget the Hiroshima bomb, that was a small weapon compared to what exist today.
Today’s bombs are much more powerful.
With the first nuclear bomb, millions of people would die instantly.
Survivors wouldn’t be lucky.
On the contrary, they’d face a slow death.
These firestorms would produce 150 million tons of smoke,
which would rise into the atmosphere and block about 70% of sunlight.
People would live in darkness for 1 to 3 years,
They'd go to bed and wake up 3 years later. We'd go back to flashlights.
Global temperature would fall.
Do you know what the temperatures would be like? Take a guess.
Temperatures would drop 8-13 degrees Celsius.
A single degree matters! One degree has the whole United Nations up and running.
To put that in perspective,
that’s a greater drop than the one we had in the last Ice Age.
Huge areas of seas and oceans would freeze completely.
Half the planet wouldn’t see a single day above 0°C.
Fish populations would collapse.
Marine life would be gone. If you don’t have enough layers on, you’ll freeze solid.
You'd need to find a warm place to defrost.
Agriculture in northern Europe would vanish,
as well as in Russia, China and Japan.
The world would lose 80% of its food supply.
By the end of the second year of the nuclear winter,
5 billion people would starve to death.
99% of China’s population would die.
[The 1% left] Hey, I'm still here.
75% of Americans and Russians would die.
99% of England's population and northern Europe's would meet the same fate.
Even if the survivors managed to come together to find solutions,
and adapt to the new climate,
they’d still face other catastrophes.
The smoke would destroy 75% of the ozone layer.
After 3 years, when the smoke clears and the sun rises again,
humans would be exposed to ultraviolet radiations.
With three-quarters of the ozone gone, who would protect you from the sun? Neuer?
Many people would get skin cancer,
plants would die, marine life would collapse,
life in the oceans would end.
That’s the terrifying finale:
bitter cold, global famine, total darkness,
and when the sun finally comes back, it would lead to cancer.
It would burn everything, finishing off human civilization.
That’s why, in August 2022, the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres,
warned world leaders that the world stands one misunderstanding away,
one mistake away from nuclear annihilation.
May we never reach that point.
All we can do is hope.
The nuclear apocalypse would end every form of life on Earth.
There might be other creatures that'd survive, but we wouldn't stand a chance.
This brings us to the third scenario.
Scenario Three: Climate Collapse.
The Earth has gone through 5 major mass extinctions in its history.
Each wiped out 75-95% of life on Earth.
What all those extinctions have in common
is a massive event that altered the climate drastically,
changing conditions for life and causing extinction.
Many scientists now believe we’re witnessing
the beginning of the sixth mass extinction.
And surely you know, my friend, what human activity is doing to the climate.
Stanford researchers calculated that
we’re witnessing accelerated extinction rates to animals around us,
at a rate 114 times faster than normal.
-"114 times faster, you say?" -114, my friend.
"114 times faster, yet there are still animals?!"
Soon they'll be 115. I know an endangered species when I see one.
Some species that naturally might have lived for 10 thousand years,
have been wiped out by human interference.
The most important factor accelerating extinction is severe climate change.
In 1988, the world leaders launched the Toronto Declaration,
saying that climate change had reached catastrophic levels
whose consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war.
Over the following decades, countries have agreed at the COPs
to hold the increase in global temperature to 1.5°C,
or else we'll face dire consequences.
Today, after 38 years of the Toronto Declaration,
temperatures exceeded those targets in 2024.
Those were the highest recorded temperatures in history.
Dr. Hesham Al-Askari has warned us.
He's been traveling
and raising alarms about the consequences of climate change.
Every extra degree is a collapse in the whole system.
It gets hot so we turn on the AC,
and in doing so, we release more Freon, making it hotter.
Then we turn up the AC again, releasing more Freon.
So it gets hotter…
What's happening?! We'll die clutching our remote controls.
God created the Earth in perfect balance,
the slightest change in temperatures can cause a disaster.
If your body temperature rises by 2 or 3 degrees and gets up to 40,
we can’t just ignore it and say, "Oh, it’s only 2 or 3 degrees."
It literally flips your world upside down.
Once your temperature crosses 40, everything collapses.
The Earth is like that: every extra degree is a cascading system-wide breakdown,
It isn’t a warning sign, it’s when everything falls apart.
