De partida, nosotros, sin saber nada de ciencia, creemos que no se puede saber. Parece probable que sí, que somos una especie, en principio, durilla de roer (ambiciosa y mezquina, dos buenos elementos para sobrevivir... y con pelo), pero ¿podemos asegurar que no habrá ningún elemento inesperado o una situación mal calibrada (virus, meteoritos...)? Sencillamente no lo sabemos, así que escuchamos a gente que sabe más que nosotros (hemos seleccionado los dos comentarios que más nos han llamado la atención):
Dave Munger (Cognitive Daily) opina:
The short answer is yes.
The slightly longer answer is this: we could face a number of catastrophes, including a pandemic, massive global warming, nuclear war, or all of the above. Our numbers could be reduced to a tiny fraction of what they are today. But we will most certainly still exist.
From a cognitive science perspective, there are a couple other interesting possibilities. What if, within the next 100 years, we succeeded in creating artificial intelligence that appeared to match human intelligence? What if we could create a robot that, externally at least, appeared to be "human"? Would we consider such a thing to be a part of the human race? If we couldn't distinguish it from other humans based on behavior and external appearance, then why shouldn't we consider it to be a human being, with human rights?
If so, then arguably the human race would be fundamentally different from what it is today, and so in that sense you might say that the human race no longer exists.
If this can't happen in 100 years, then certainly in 1,000 it might.
What's more, in 1,000 years, we may have discovered the secret of aging, and it might be possible for people to live infinitely long lives. Would such a creature be human? Isn't mortality part of what makes us who we are? Assuming some catastrophe doesn't bring humanity back to the stone age, it's possible that in 1,000 years we will have changed ourselves into something that is no longer recognizably human.
Tara C. Smith (Aetiology) ofrece otro punto de vista:
Short answer: yeah. Long answer: I'm not sure why there were scare quotes around "human" (are we going to mate with cyborgs or something?), but I think it will take quite a lot to totally wipe us out. We may not be as hardy as cockroaches, but we're adaptive as hell, and even major events (volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, massive infectious disease outbreaks, etc.) haven't done much to put a dent in our population. I do think, though, that our quality of living has a chance to take a real tumble. Already clean water is scarce for a sixth of the world's population, and almost half lack adequate sanitation. We're working on royally screwing up our environment, and increases in the amount of world travel mean that a virulent, easily-transmissible infectious disease could easily do some major damage (though not enough to put much more than a dent in our overall population, IMO). Will the next century bring improvements, or more destruction? Dunno, but I'll bet $100 that humans will still be around to see it.
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