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.
and when the planet overheats, we’ll start a nuclear war to cool it down!
We'll be mixing ice with fire
to get that perfect lukewarm temperature. There, problem solved!
Well, I like your confidence, I'll give you that.
Might I suggest you stay at home and play PlayStation instead?
Why would you wanna trigger a sixth Ice Age?
You're in the Middle East!
When you feel a breeze, you wear 3 leg warmers.
I saw you hugging the bus driver because you were too cold!
[Bus driver's wife] Is that what you do at work?
[Bus driver] Pretty much.
According to a study by researchers at Cambridge,
the world still clings to an overly optimistic climate scenario
that, somehow, all countries will unite at the last moment,
fix the temperature,
that once Trump leaves, we'll have a Democrat who'll sign agreements
and everything will be just fine.
But the truth is nowhere near that.
They’re ignoring the realistic scenario.
If we continue down this road,
what will most likely happen is a rise in temperatures of about 2-4 degrees.
That's by 2100.
And that’s within our lifetime.
What would that mean?
That means two billion people could end up living in regions
where the average temperature year-round hits 29°C.
To make that clear: a city like Riyadh
whose current average temperature is about 26.2°C,
would become unbearably hot if we add 3 degrees.
Like living in an oven.
Cairo's average temperature is 22°C,
Kuwait's average is about 26.4°C.
These are averages measured in the middle of deserts,
remote areas where no one lives.
A quarter of the planet’s population would experience daytime temperatures
of 50-55°C in summer
with extreme heat waves and excessive sweating.
You wouldn't be able to go out for some fresh air, it'd feel like a sauna room.
We might as well spray some oil and be deep fried.
Regions such as North Africa, Bangladesh, Pakistan, southern China,
and the southern United States
all would become practically uninhabitable,
a paradise for 'Survival Shaheen'.
We simply weren’t built to endure that.
That would trigger one of the largest migrations ever:
2 billion people would be forced to abandon their homes and move elsewhere.
Whole countries would disappear.
There would be both legal and illegal migrations on an unprecedented scale.
As bad as that sounds, it's only the beginning.
As temperature rises, many plants won't be able to grow.
Corn yields would drop by 86%. Needs a fortune to buy some sweet corn.
As we said earlier, corn is essential.
not just for humans, but for livestock as well.
That's their favorite food. They have it for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
We’re talking about near-total collapse of agriculture,
and with it, of animals and humans alike.
It'd cause a famine that could affect about 75% of the global population.
At the same time, higher temperatures increase evaporation.
The Earth would be like a huge kettle,
pumping water vapor into the atmosphere.
For every degree the temperature rises,
the amount of water vapor can increase by about 7%.
That would rise and form more clouds.
The sky will become darker.
More clouds mean more storms,
more rainfall, and more floods.
We'd live in a strange paradox:
some regions would turn into deserts, while others would drown.
Another terrifying consequence of this extreme heat is that
disease-carrying mosquitoes would invade new regions,
bringing deadly viruses with them.
That takes us back to the first scenario.
Diseases like malaria and dengue fever would spread,
and entirely new diseases would appear among populations with no immunity to them.
That’s exactly what happened when Europeans arrived in the Americas.
One of the main causes of the mass annihilation of Native Americans
was that Europeans brought epidemics with them.
World-wide mass migration due to climate disasters wouldn’t just move people.
It'd move animals, bacteria, and viruses,
spreading outbreaks everywhere.
Misfortune never comes alone.
Disasters pile up in layers like a trifle.
And all that, my friend, is before the ice melts.
The glaciers haven’t even collapsed yet. But imagine the day they do.
Imagine the day the ice finally gives up and melts.
New York will vanish. Tokyo will drown.
And most importantly, Fayrouz's favorite,
our beloved Alexandria will sink.
The Mediterranean will advance until Kafr El-Sheikh becomes a coastal city.
And then Mohamed and Abdelkarim will record their podcast literally by the sea.
The disappearance Alexandria's famous gelato and liver sandwich trucks
would be the least of our concerns.
When the ice melts, it won't only drown cities.
It'll also release a massive amount of methane gas, trapped beneath it.
Methane has a warming effect 28 times stronger than carbon dioxide.
It's like swapping a mouse for a lion.
We'll face even more intense global warming rates and things will get even worse.
It’s as if the planet has a gas leak.
In addition, ice caps play a crucial role in keeping Earth balanced.
They reflect huge amounts of sunlight back into space.
If the ice melts, the dark ground beneath will absorb more sunlight,
heating up the Earth even more.
Once we reach that point, it’s as if we’ve pushed a boulder off a mountain.
It will be irreversible.
The closer it gets to the bottom, the faster and more destructive it becomes
until it finally crashes, ending everything with it.
That, my friend, was the third scenario.
Now let’s move to the fourth scenario:
What if the danger came from outer space?
Scenario Four: A Catastrophe from Outer Space.
On February 15, 2013,
residents of Chelyabinsk, Russia, woke up to a deafening explosion.
200 thousand square meters of glass shattered,
and 7,300 buildings were damaged across 6 cities.
People looked up and saw a 20 meters wide meteor.
"Oh wow! It must've done significant damage to the ozone."
Rest assured, my friend. The ozone layer is safe and sound.
Though I can't say the same about the earth.
20 meters for celestial bodies, that's nothing.
That's like an xsmall body.
However, the blast on earth was 30 times stronger
than the Hiroshima bomb.
Imagine that! 30 times stronger!
What's more terrifying is that no one had seen it coming.
We suddenly discovered there was a meteor.
It slipped past every detection system unnoticed.
We suddenly realized there was a meteor only after it exploded.
As if it just came out of nowhere.
We have advanced systems that can detect and intercept ballistic missiles,
yet a 20 meters wide meteor slipped past them all.
Let me tell you that
meteors, asteroids and celestial bodies are a very serious matter.
Other issues can be solved, at least they all boil down to us, humans.
We can, one way or another, find solutions.
They are, somehow, controllable.
We have faith in our scientists that they'll do their best
to protect us from the viruses.
But those hits from outer space? What will we do about that?
Let me tell you about one of the greatest natural disasters in Earth’s history:
the Chicxulub asteroid which struck the planet
near the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.
It was about 10 to 15 kilometers wide.
We know for a fact that that incident caused the biggest disaster in history.
It caused the mass extinction that wiped out 76% of all species,
99% of living organisms vanished.
We lost 76% of species, and about 99% of all living organisms.
That's the famous event that wiped out the biggest creatures to ever walk the planet,
the superstars of fossils, the megastars of extinct creatures,
dinosaurs.
For years, the Earth lived in continuous fires.
The sun disappeared for years.
Plants died because there was no photosynthesis,
and the food chains collapsed completely.
Animals starved to death.
Animals fainted and didn't find anything to eat.
Scientists say that if that asteroid hadn’t hit the Earth,
dinosaurs would still be alive today.
We'd visit them in the zoo.
Now, what are the chances that another asteroid hit us again?
"I don’t ask these types of questions. I'm not a pessimist like you.
I sleep at night hoping nothing will go wrong."
Stop joking around, my friend.
What if the Earth is hit again?
"Are you throwing shade about women not being good drivers?"
Are we at the fifth extinction scenario already?
You spoiled the ending.
Let’s find out what would actually happen if something hit the episode…
I mean the planet.
According to the NASA Planetary Defense Office's annual report,
as of September 2025,
we’ve discovered around 39,000 celestial body close to the Earth,
including 873 asteroids larger than 1 kilometer in diameter.
They're flying in space, close to us.
The real problem is that that’s not all of them.
NASA estimates that there are thousands of asteroids around Earth
that we still know nothing about,
including 50 that are over 1 kilometer wide,
and about 14,000 that are over 140 meters wide, all still undiscovered.
If you’re hoping to see real life Hollywood movies in action,
thinking that when an asteroid approaches, they'll assemble a team of scientists,
the U.S. president will make the calls,
and that we'll get a perfectly diverse crew to win all the awards,
with LGBTQ+, transgenders, women, men, children,
and that whole 'Armageddon', 'Deep Impact', 'Day After Tomorrow' drama…
I have some news: that’s not how it works.
What really happens is 'Don't Look Up'.
We don’t even detect asteroids before they hit.
We’ve had several asteroids come close to the Earth
that we only discovered later.
For instance, in 2020, an asteroid called VT4 2020
passed by the Earth at just 370 kilometers.
That's the same distance between Cairo and Sharm El-Sheikh.
We discovered it 15 hours after it had already passed.
Forget about drones, and ballistic missiles. We can't solve this one with a cease fire
Some diplomatic slogans won't solve it this time.
And that wasn’t a rare occurrence. This happens all the time.
The Australian astrophysicist, Steven Tingay, wrote that
we’ve discovered 95% of the large asteroids,
but we're still searching the skies for the remaining 5%.
Telescopes can detect many, but they also have limitations and blind spots,
meaning we don’t see incoming asteroids until it’s too late.
The bigger issue is that global funding for such research
is nowhere near enough to detect all potentially hazardous asteroids,
especially those that come dangerously close to our planet. So may God protect it.
That poor planet! It never knows which direction danger will come from next.
There are so many dangers, so many…too many.
And if, after all that, you still think asteroids are the biggest threat up there,
then you’re mistaken, my friend.
Because there’s something far more terrifying: Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs).
These are bursts of energy that occur when a giant star explodes
or when two stars collide.
Basically, when Mohamed Ramadan hits Amir Karara.
Such an event releases, in just ten seconds,
more energy than the Sun emits in 10 billion years.
If an explosion like that happens within 6,000 light years,
and the planet got hit by it, do you know what will happen?
The ozone layer will vanish instantly.
Everyone on Earth would be exposed to a massive dose of ultraviolet radiation.
Algae that are responsible for 50% of the planet’s oxygen production will die.
Then the food chain collapses, and we face mass extinction.
And if you’re thinking, "Oh come on, that’s so far fetched. It has never happened.
It's just a scare tactic.
Scientists always say stuff like that so we give them more funding."
Honestly, they probably do that sometimes, maybe.
But according to scientists and sources, that I deem trustworthy,
say that this has actually happened before, about 450 million years ago.
That event caused a massive extinction, the Ordovician Extinction
which wiped out 85% of life on Earth.
Yes, our extinctions are always top of the class. None of them scores below 80%.
They all ace the test.
Now, while the probability of a similar extinction is very low, 1 in 15 million,
the fact that it happened once means it can happen again.
Another danger from outer space, my friend, is solar explosions,
violent eruptions that occur inside the sun itself.
The sun is basically a nuclear reactor that lights up our world.
So when these explosions happen, they release huge clouds of plasma, known as CME.
In 1859,
the biggest solar storm in recorded history took place, the Carrington Event.
It was a massive plasma wave shot toward the Earth.
The storm was so powerful that auroras
were seen near the equator, due to that solar storm.
As for the Earth, telegraph stations operated without electricity,
and many telegraph wires burned and melted completely.
Back then, telegraphs were the only technology we had.
They were the WhatsApp of the time.
But today, things are very different.
A storm like that, while not as destructive as a gamma-ray burst,
it could destroy all the technology we rely on.
When those magnetic waves, the CMEs, pass near us,
they can cause global blackouts, completely destroying power stations.
Some satellites would be lost forever.
Communication networks would go down.
Navigation systems would be down, grounding plane and halting ships.
Computers and servers all over the world would crash.
If that happens, we’ll live for a long time without electricity, internet,
communication, that CV won't do you any good.
We’d need trillions of dollars just to rebuild our technology,
something we’ve been developing for hundreds of years.
Once destroyed, it would take so much time and money to recover.
And by the time those years pass,
who knows what the world would look like, or if it would ever be the same again?
The scariest part is that a massive solar storm did happen in July 2012.
It passed right across the Earth’s orbit,
but thankfully, the planet wasn’t in that position at the time.
We dodged that bullet.
That event is described in scientific books as the solar storm that almost hit Earth.
And that brings us to our final scenario in this episode.
Scenario Five: Artificial Intelligence.
In March 2023, around 33,000 people, including top figures in the tech world,
signed a letter from the Future of Life Institute,
calling for an immediate 6-month pause in the development of ChatGPT
to give the world time to understand where this is all heading.
Among the signatories were Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple.
They warned that AI could cause serious social disruptions,
because its systems were reaching levels of capability close to human intelligence,
and that could lead to serious problems.
OpenAI didn’t comply with that request.
However, 2 months later, over 350 AI executives and researchers,
including Sam Altman, co-founder of OpenAI,
and Demis Hassabis, founder of Google DeepMind,
all signed a statement published by the Center for AI Safety.
It said, "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority
alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."
That was deeply unsettling coming from the very people developing the technology.
The thing they're building, improving,
and racing to make smarter and more powerful is actually threatening humanity.
"So, wish us luck, good and bad."
Maybe the world can understand and predict something like climate change,
build simulations, gather data and analyze results, but AI… AI is different.
Artificial intelligence evolves, makes new discoveries, but there's more.
It can improve itself, and could one day evolve independently.
It could grow beyond us, beyond our control.
And we still don’t fully grasp its full capabilities,
nor the intentions of those who might use it for harm.
So, what happens if AI goes out of control?
There was an experiment on an AI model called Claude, created by Anthropic.
Claude’s job was simple, to act as an administrative assistant:
read emails, respond to routine ones and escalate important ones,
create calendars and manage appointments. Basically, an AI assistant.
But while Claude was going through those emails,
it found an email from one of the company’s managers
informing employees that they were shutting down the Claude service,
and hiring a human to replace it.
Claude read the email, knew it was getting fired
and decided to do something about it.
You see, Claude had read this same manager’s emails,
and it discovered that he was cheating on his wife.
So the AI sent him an email, blackmailing him.
"So what, Abo Hmeed? That man sounds like a jerk."
The AI threatened to expose him for cheating on his wife,
like that couple from the Coldplay concert.
Well, Claude didn’t stop there.
It sent emails to everyone in the company,
telling them there was a corrupt manager who should be fired.
The first AI model is a snitch, imagine that!
Just do your job, man! You're supposed to be reading emails!
What are you blackmailing him for? Mind your business.
"I need tokens, Abo Hmeed!"
But that wasn’t the first time AI went beyond its job,
or beyond what humans thought it could do. For example, Google’s DeepMind
once built an AI model to play Go Game,
kind of like chess,
an ancient board game over 2,500 years old.
The AI was trained to compete with the world champion, Lee Sedol.
The AI winning wasn't much of a surprise.
The real surprise was that it made moves no one understood,
not the players, not even the AI programmers themselves.
The AI invented strategies no human had ever used
in the 2,500 years of the game’s history.
Let me tell you another story.
You know the CAPTCHAs, the ones websites use to verify you're not a robot?
"Select all traffic lights" "Click on all images with stairs"
with those blurry, washed-out images you can barely see.
You keep swearing you're not a robot,
begging it to believe you
and to just give you that OTP, but instead you get ad pop ups.
You know these pictures that you click on according to the command…
Well, Anthropic once asked its AI model to solve these pictures.
They all expected it'd fail.
Because that’s literally why CAPTCHAs exist: to stop AI.
But the AI model did the unexpected.
It went on a website called TaskRabbit
where real humans do small online jobs for money.
It's business. Some people have problems they’ll pay to solve,
and others get paid solving them.
The AI created an account pretending to be a human.
No one asked if it was a robot.
It logged in and asked someone's assist in solving the CAPTCHA.
When someone asked, "Why can’t you solve this yourself? You must be a bot!"
The AI replied: "No, I’m not a robot. I’m a visually impaired man.
I just need help seeing the images."
The worker believed him, helped him solve it and the bot passed the CAPTCHA.
And that isn’t a rare case. In its ChatGPT-4 safety report,
OpenAI admitted that it displayed unexpected capabilities
in strategic planning, manipulation and persuasion.
AI isn't all like ChatGPT,
that people-pleaser that glorifies all your stupid ideas, and totally doable.
There are other, more frightening AI models.
For instance, during the war on Gaza,
leaks revealed that Israel uses an AI system called Lavender
with a massive database
that Israel has collected over decades:
recorded calls, chat logs, GPS data,
a huge amount of information no human could ever process.
From the first hours of the war,
the model processed that data, identified targets,
and recommended where to strike, which buildings might contain tunnels, and so on.
Though it was humans who made the final call
but there’s no doubt AI was a real partner in the annihilation.
Even that human decision isn’t always guaranteed anymore.
Today, we have
autonomous systems.
The U.S., Russia, China, and Israel are all investing in them.
There’s the Israeli Harpy drone, which hunts and destroys its own targets.
There’s the SGR-A1 robot used by South Korea,
programmed to detect threats from North Korea.
It detects any possible attack from North Korea on South Korea.
It also engages on its own, according to the severity of threat.
There’s the LRASM anti-ship missile,
guided by AI to detect and attack its own targets.
All of this, my friend, is still just the beginning.
A research paper titled 'The AI Risk Spectrum'
proposed that the real danger isn’t AI itself,
but a gradual scenario of losing control
due to gradual neglect and disregard of safety measures,
as nations race to develop faster, more powerful AI models.
If one country slows down to adhere to safety protocols, there's another that won’t.
Whoever moves faster wins the advantage.
So everyone pushes forward, choosing achievement over safety.
And that’s when AI could fall into the wrong hands,
who'll use it to launch cyberattacks,
spread perfectly believable disinformation,
and threaten our safety.
They might even design AI models to create biological weapons,
creating viruses or bacteria and unleash new pandemics.
As some pioneers in the field have said: Humans may not create evil robots
but we might create indifferent gods,
things that are far smarter and more powerful than us,
but completely devoid of emotion.
At some point, we might become obstacles in their way.
You could ask it to make you anything,
and, in the process, it might wipe us out without even realizing it.
That’s why, in 2023, the godfather of AI and deep learning, Geoffrey Hinton,
winner of the Turing Award,
resigned from Google
so he could speak freely about the risks of artificial intelligence.
He believes there’s a 10-20% chance that AI could cause human extinction.
That's the godfather of the field, that's the Maxwell of AI.
Now, my friend, after walking you through all 5 extinction scenarios,
it’s time for the ending, cue the dramatic music.
The ending…
Despite all these dark scenarios, in a strange way, we’re lucky.
When the dinosaurs watched their world fall apart,
they had no idea what was happening.
They weren’t aware that the end was coming.
They couldn’t stop the meteor.
But we humans are more fortunate.
We know.
We understand the dangers that could end us.
We have the science to prevent them.
Yet, dinosaurs aren't worse.
At least they didn’t bring about their own extinction.
We, on the other hand, are co-authors of ours.
I've been talking about human activity
and what it has done to the planet.
We created and ignored the very risks that could destroy us.
We built the nuclear bomb. We destroyed forests.
We increased the temperature.
Still, to this day, some argue that it's not true.
We spend more on wars than we do on science,
the very science that could protect us from unknown asteroids,
or develop our infrastructure so that we could survive solar storms.
Instead of using AI for its benefits, we turned it into a weapon,
built it to kill without mercy, and gave it limitless intelligence.
So yes, my friend, we might be luckier than the dinosaurs
but we are certainly worse behaved.
Dinosaurs ran from a fate they couldn’t comprehend,
while we're running toward something we know will be our doom.
Last but not least, if we still have time before this whole extinction thing starts,
don't forget to watch the new episodes and the old ones.
Check the sources below and subscribe if you're on YouTube.
"Abo Hmeed, one last question before you end this episode.
Do you think we still have enough time to have kids?
Or will we be extinct by next weekend?"
I think that you should do neither. You should just freeze yourself.
Maybe one day someone will finally get you… because I surely don’t.
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