Humanity’s Past Suggests We Only Have 10,000 Years to Change or Go Extinct

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 27 March 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

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Summary

We are living through a period that is unique in human history. For the first time in more than ten thousand years, the rate of human population growth is slowing down. In the middle of this century population growth will stop, and the number of people on Earth will start to decline - fast.

As Gee demonstrates, our population has peaked, and is declining; our environment is becoming inimical to human life in many locations; our core resources of water, arable land, and air are diminishing; and new diseases, simmering conflicts, and ambiguous technologies threaten our collective health. Can we still change our course? Or is our own extinction inevitable?

There could be a way out, but the launch window is narrow.

Unless Homo sapiens establishes successful colonies in space within the next two centuries, our species is likely to stay earthbound and will have vanished entirely within another ten thousand years, bringing the seven-million-year story of the human lineage to an end.

To look at our escape options, we are joined by Henry Gee, author of “The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire.” He envisions new opportunities for the future of humanity—a future that will reward facing challenges with ingenuity, foresight, and cooperation.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It's going to here with another episode of the History and Blog podcast.
0:08.0	Something new is happening in human history.
0:10.0	For the first time in more than 10,000 years, the rate of human population growth is slowing down.
0:15.2	In 2022, China's population peaked, and it has more people than any other nation.
0:19.9	And in the middle of this century,
0:21.3	population growth will stop completely, and the number of people on Earth will start to
0:24.7	decline and decline fast.
0:26.7	But this instability could come new diseases, diminishing arable land and water, and other
0:31.6	challenges to our collective health.
0:33.1	This actually charts the decline in eventual extinction of other animals, such as woolly mammoths,
0:37.9	who started to spiral downward after the end of the Ice Age and survived until 3,000 BC on a small
0:42.3	island north of Russia. Now, there is a way for humans to survive, but evolves finding a new
0:46.9	environment with new resources. What exactly does that look like and what does it mean when
0:51.1	we've largely inhabited nearly every livable place on earth?
0:58.6	To look at this story, we're joined by Henry Gee, author of The Declining of Fall of the Human Empire.
1:04.9	He envisions new opportunities for the future of humanity by looking back at tens and hundreds of thousands of years of our past,
1:08.2	what it means to be human and what avoiding extinction looks like.
1:10.0	Hope you enjoyed this discussion.
1:17.0	And one more thing before we get started with this episode, a quick break for a word from our sponsors.
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