There are some who say humans are the cancer cells spreading around the Earth. If that's the case we have a dilemma, do we support our own species or our planet? Personally, I would support the planet.

//Will the human species become extinct?//

Of course. The question is when and how, not if.

I've posted this before, but it's pertinent to this thread.

The following are from the opening lines of Noam Chomsky's "Hegemony or Survival":

"A few years ago, one of the great figures of contemporary biology, Ernst Mayr, published some reflections on the likelihood of success in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.He considered the prospect very low. His reasoning had to do with the adaptive value of what we call "higher intelligence", meaning the particular human form of higher intellectual organisation. Mayr estimated the number of species since the origin of life at about fifty billion, only one of which "achieved the kind of intelligence to establish a civilisation." It did so very recently, perhaps 100,000 years ago.....Mayr speculated that the human form of intellectual organisation may not be favoured by selection. The history of life on earth, he wrote, refutes the claim that "it is better to be smart than to be stupid," at least judging by biological success: beetles and bacteria, for example, are vastly more successful than humans in terms of survival. He also made the rather somber observation that "the average life expectancy of a species is about 100,000 years."
We are entering a period of human history that may provide an answer to the question of whether it is better to be smart than stupid. The most hopeful prospect is that the question will "not" be answered: if it receives a definite answer, that answer can only be that humans were a kind of "biological error," using their allotted 100,000 years to destroy themselves and, in the process, much else.
The species has surely developed the capacity to do just that, and a hypothetical extraterrestrial observer might well conclude that humans have demonstrated that capacity throughout their history, dramatically in the past few hundred years, with an assault on the environment that sustains life, on the diversity of more complex organisms, and with a cold and calculated savagery, on each other as well."

Have you guys been into the catnip again? You all sound like Pennti Linkola at his most crotchetty.

//Have you guys been into the catnip again?//

Oh, OK then... homo sapiens is the only immortal species in the known universe. But I'm still unclear about the mechanism. Or even if we are truly immortal as a species, because my crystal ball is on the fritz again. Could you shed some light on this matter, Jay?

How do we survive heat death?

Oh God.

Toni Lavis, global warming is bullshyt. Tony said so, as do any people with any savvy, not on the gravy train. This is a great pity. It is so damn cold here tonight, I wish we could turn the heat up a bit.

Of course we will become extinct, but it will be the coming ice age, or an asteroid strike, whichever comes first, that does us in, & certainly not a colourless odourless plant food.

Whatever happens it is a certainty that it will happen to us, not because of anything we do. I find it amusing that people grant us such power & importance.

The only way we could survive would be to get a few billion of us inhabiting a couple of dozen other planets, in more than one galaxy. I find it hard to imagine that is possible, but then the first man who hollowed out a log to build a canoe, could not have imagined modern ships or aircraft. The future may show us to be almost as primitive at he was.

One thing is for sure, it is of no importance to anyone on earth to day.