Are humans designed to go extinct?
For nearly half a million years, they have been roaming the Earth, in tight packs that fought with each other to maximize simple objective functions. Seventy thousand years ago, they had their first taste of extinction by environmental factors, largely out of their control, when they were reduced to a mere thousand samples. A few of their genes survived and then exploded across a globe that already shows signs of age. As many worry about self-created tactical environmental disasters and some strategic wipe-outs, most miss an important design aspect of humans that all but assure they will not be here for long.
The design of humans appears to have a common feature — they are local utility maximizers. In a stable system, this may not be prominently displayed as the packs of humans — countries, races, religions, political affiliations, genders, and country club dwellers, can simultaneously pursue their objectives with segmented resources. But it is a certainty that humans will face discontinuities in the future that may affect resource availability or challenge their existence. Then, the homo-sapiens, successful destroyers of every other homo-species and most other animals and plants, will show their true colors. They will fight to maintain themselves with no concern for a global maximum. Such a process has a predictable outcome, extinction.
This appears programmatic. In half a million years, they hardly changed, and they behave the same in any regime. Each human appears to live surrounded by concentric circles, self, family, religion, race, country etc. As long as they are not threatened and there is enough parallel resources, they will remain silent. But we know for sure that there will be changes to the system in the future, some strategic such as an asteroid hit or pathogens that do not discriminate or others more tactical such as global warming. In either case, as these events start to reduce available resources and challenge their existence, the homo-sapiens will start to defend their local universes at the expense of others. This is a run-away process that cannot be arrested. At the end, each pack will fall akin to dominoes, each fighting for herself, with no consideration for the rest.
It is irony. Humans cannot escape themselves even if they solve every known engineering and biological problem.