Averting Human Extinction

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

"The facts are sobering. More than 99.9 percent of species that have ever existed on Earth have gone extinct."

"Humanity could be extinguished as early as this century by succumbing to natural hazards, such as an extinction-level asteroid or comet impact, supervolcanic eruption, global methane-hydrate release, or nearby supernova or gamma-ray burst. (Perhaps the most probable of these hazards, supervolcanism, was discovered only in the last 25 years, suggesting that other natural hazards may remain unrecognized.)"

And citing NASA Administrator Michael Griffin:

"The history of life on Earth is the history of extinction events, and human expansion into the Solar System is, in the end, fundamentally about the survival of the species."

I've long considered the Universe a mostly sterile place, and our place in it explicable only by the odds of our being here being only slightly less infinitesimally small than the Universe is huge. We've relied on dumb luck to survive so far, coddled in an evolutionary breathing space between mass-extinction events, our time will run out on Earth and the only fundamental way we can survive is to harness our natural instinct toward curiosity and innovation, we're in a race against the universe.