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Why do you believe that humanity could never invent something capable of causing our extinction? Even if you think strangelets are safe, is there some rule that says they have to be? What about nanobots? What happens when you create an AI advanced enough to make itself more advanced?
"Nature doesn't work that way." Why? What does that mean? Why are you using the word "nature" and not "technology and its future"?
Futurists tend to have this problem where they're so fixated on hypothetic possibility they tend to forget anything we do, including novel technology, is still part of nature and still restricted by the same limits as everything else. It's rare that we can come up with something that is both legitimately more efficient than what evolution has come up with and sustainable in time.
In this instance, we know what the behavior of a very deadly virus is: it kills a bunch of people until eventually its death rate catches onto its propagation rate and it smothers itself or it manages to mutate into a less deadly strain that can become endemic and live in a population by not killing it fast enough.
To guarantee extinction we then have to reach for effects that are so radically deadly and permanent that they can actually effect all or virtually all of the human population and have enough staying power that you can't escape by living in some remote place for a bit. Even total nuclear war doesn't pass that test. Humanity can still thrive with high rates of cancer, and wildlife has long since forgotten about Chernobyl even as we did not.
I don't believe in extinction McGuffin because to create something that can affect us in totality is extremely difficult; and it is so as I've stated because the processes of nature, down to even physics, are self limiting most of the time.
I'd still feel more secure if we had two planets, nay, if we had two solar systems. Because there are a decent amount of events that pass that threshold. But I'm a lot less concerned with extinction as I am with widespread catastrophe.
"Futurists tend to have this problem where they're so fixated on hypothetic possibility they tend to forget anything we do, including novel technology, is still part of nature and still restricted by the same limits as everything else. It's rare that we can come up with something that is both legitimately more efficient than what evolution has come up with and sustainable in time."
Cars, planes, buildings, roads, computers, printing press, guns, bombs, boats, submarines, ice cream, space ships, etc. A grizzly bear's claws are sharp, but a sword is made of metal. Why do you think improving on nature/evolution is rare?
Why do you think smarter than human AI is impossible? For one thing, human brain size is limited by the size of the woman's hips, so we're not even as evolutionarily selected as we could be.
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If your standard is life by any measure goes on, then ok. But it's not like mass extinction has never happened, and given enough time, will not happen again. The Permian–Triassic extinction event knocked out something like 81% of all marine species, according to wiki. Some things lived on or recovered over the course of millions of years, but plenty of creatures got perma-wiped. I don't see why humans could never ever be like the trilobites.
Oh I'm not saying humanity can't go extinct, not at all. But it's not like those trilobites engineered their own destruction or something. Some impossible to prepare incomprehensible new circumstance just came about and wiped them out. That seems much more likely to me than the Frankenstein scenario we're all so obsessed with.
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Chernobyl did not kill many people.
Fair point about how the death rate will cause it to smother itself. Of course, the world is probably more connected than it has ever been, meaning that it would be harder to reach that point. But that's not enough to wipe people out.
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