Having wandered Earth for 200,000 years, it may be time for Homo sapiens to consider that destiny did not intend its occupancy for eternity, and perhaps far short of that as such things go. Faced with certain eventualities, humans could shuffle off this mortal coil not individually, as with the younger Cato, but collectively, like the mythical lemmings. This possibility could have occurred to humans in times past but barring divine wrath, which brought it close with the infamous flood, never with today’s plausibility. Both then and now our extinction, leaving aside another wayward asteroid, would be self-generated: earlier in the form of...

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