A supercomputer's grim prediction: 25% of Earth's life at risk of extinction

Earth is experiencing its sixth mass extinction event, and Europe's leading supercomputer has predicted that the majority of the deaths will likely occur between now and the end of the century.

One of the biggest mass extinction events the planet has ever faced will take place before the end of the century according to one of Europe's most powerful predictive supercomputers. 

Modeling from a supercomputer operated by the European Commission found that over a quarter of today’s species will be extinct by 2100. 

The findings of the European Commission’s death-predicting computer were recently published in the journal of Sciences Advances by Corey Bradshaw and Giovanni Strona, and their conclusions were a bit dire…

Bradshaw and Strona predicted that in the best-case scenario, the planet would only lose 17.6% of its vertebrate diversity by 2100. 

In the worst-case scenario, the scientists found that the Earth’s animal diversity would be reduced by roughly 27% by 2100. 

Popular Mechanics staff writer Tim Newcomb dug into Bradshaw and Strona’s study and revealed one more startling statistic that you will probably be able to see in your lifetime. 

“The supercomputer says 10 percent of all plant and animal species will disappear by 2050,” Newcomb wrote in his analysis of Bradshaw and Strona's findings, “and 27 percent of vertebrate diversity will vanish by 2100.”

“Yeah, that’s over a quarter of our animals gone in about 75 years,” the Popular Mechanics writer added. 

One of the most frightening pieces of this story is how the reduction of the Earth's biodiversity will affect the human population long-term. 

“Communities will lose up to a half of ecological interactions, thus reducing trophic complexity, network connectance, and community resilience,” Bradshaw and Strong wrote in the abstract of their study.

This means the complex ecological systems that underpin our modern world could fall apart, which would make the situation even worse as the knock-on effects wreaked havoc on our world. 

“The model reveals that the extreme toll of global change for vertebrate diversity might be of secondary importance compared to the damages to ecological network structure,” the scientists added. 

If the destruction of the world's ecological systems wasn’t enough, the European Commission's supercomputer also predicted that this mass extinction event is completely unavoidable. It’s going to happen no matter what we do to try and stop it. 

“No matter how scientists queued up one of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers, the results remained the same,” wrote Popular Mechanics Tim Newcomb.

“Mass extinction of plants and animals isn’t slowing down,” Newcomb added. “It’s only growing.”

Bradshaw and Strona studied models on a time period between 2020 and 2100 and ran 100 replicated experiments for each scenario they studied. But still, the answer was always the same, the Earth was going to lose a large amount of its plant and animal diversity.

“Unless conservation practitioners rapidly start to incorporate the complexity of ecological interactions and their role in extinction processes in their planning,” the Bradshaw and Strona wrote, “averting the ongoing biodiversity crisis will become an unachievable target.”

Just because a supercomputer tells us we can't avert disaster doesn't mean we shouldn't try. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) says urgent action is needed to stop the sixth mass extinction event and recommends world leaders ramp up their commitments to cutting carbon emissions agreed to the in Paris Agreement.

The WWF also recommends world leaders support the 30x30, an initiative aimed at preserving 30% of the worlds land and oceans by 2030, and this is where you can help according to the WWF, grassroots activism can make a difference in changing our world.

"While the federal government can set high-level policies to conserve nature, businesses, communities, and individuals have a powerful role to play in shifting corporate behavior with their consumer choices and demanding accountability from political leaders," the WWF wrote on its website.