I wasn’t sure what to expect when I picked up The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire (and I fully expected it to be all doom-and-gloom), but it turned out to be a fascinating and surprisingly accessible look at humanity’s past—and possible future. Henry Gee, a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, traces our journey from early evolution to modern dominance, and then makes a compelling case for why that dominance might not last much longer.

Gee draws from both human evolution and past extinction events to argue that humanity is on a trajectory toward its own decline. What really stood out to me was how he connects the very traits that made us successful—like our social structures and global expansion—to the vulnerabilities we now face. It’s sobering, but not preachy.

As someone who’s more into paleontology than anthropology, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the archaeological insights throughout the book. It gave me a new appreciation for how many factors contributed to our rise—and how many of those same factors could contribute to our fall.

One part I wish had been expanded was the section on what we can actually do to change our course. Gee touches on it, but I found myself wanting a deeper dive into those potential solutions. That said, the statistical analysis behind his predictions was fascinating and gave the book a grounded, scientific weight without being overly technical.

Overall, this was a thought-provoking and surprisingly readable book that blends science, history, and a dash of existential reflection. If you’re curious about where we came from—and where we might be headed—it’s definitely worth a read.

3.5 stars, rounded down.

Thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for the copy of the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

I thought the first half of this book was stronger than the second. I don’t think this book sold me on the decrease in population necessitating a move to living in space. This is well written and interesting but I don’t feel sold on space colonization being the best option to solve the problem of population decline. I received a complimentary digital copy of this book through NetGalley.

Despite the heaviness that the title and subject matter, it was surprisingly upbeat.
A bit repetitive at times but overall has a good message for those wanting to learn more.

I stopped reading this book after part one. In the introduction the author used the phrase "female emanicipation" and that made my hackles rise. Now, he did put it in quotations so I hope he was using it in an ironic manner. I went to Goodreads to read some reviews and one was very informative. It didn't really address that phrase but it did mention how repetitive the book was and that part three was not good at all.

When I went back to read it, I noticed all the repetition. It also seemed to bring up the ideas of population collapse, which is an hypothesis that I have a lot of problems with, not least because of one of its biggest proponents. Do I think population collapse is possible, of course. As the author mentioned in the introduction, all species go extinct at some point. The author seemed to really be pushing this hypothesis. With what the other review said about part three, I was not interested in reading how the author wrote about colonizing the solar system. Do I want us to leave earth and explore the solar system and beyond. Yes, I am a space geek. Do I think we will need to leave earth for our species to have a chance of lasting. Yes. I just was not liking the almost fawning tone of the book. This could be my own prejudice due to my dislike of a certain person but the book really wasn't written well with all the repetition.

I did read part one since it was a history of hominin evolution, which I am fascinated by but stopped after that.

I did read another of this author's books previously, A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth, and liked it but was not one I wanted to own after reading the ARC on Netgalley.

In order to fall it’s necessary to get up high. That’s as true of species as it is of civilzations. So Henry Gee begins by examining the mechanisms leading to the rise of homo sapiens and extinction of other homo species. The now dominant species expands until something happens. That something isn’t always an asteroid. It can be societal or environmental change or some combination. In our case the result is going to be population collapse which will lead to extinction. As Gee sees it, the one way to avoid extinction is to establish human populations in space. I rolled my eyes at that idea. Then he explores the pros and cons and it sounds like a rather organic evolution of the desire to live.
Like most of Gee’s writing this is somehow both basic and detailed. The pace is brisk, but doesn’t skimp on information on everthing from evolution to photosynthesis, and the dynamics of population, all clearly explained. It’s full of ideas to ponder, including the quotes from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the chapter headings.

The Rise and Fall of the Human Race is about the end of humanity. Not in the sense of a catalog, or as a prediction, but in a statistical or ecological (in the formal sense of the word) sense. If we take what we know about extinction as a process, and direct that analysis towards humans, what do we come up with?

The discussion of extinction science is the highlight of the book. The key observation is that the usual methods of looking at the end is wrong. Someone talking about existential risk has a risk in mind, and usually solution at a reasonable cost, but extinction is not about an extinction event as much as it is being in a state of vulnerability to extinction. This puts humans with a small amount of time, geologically speaking, like 10K years.

The writing is delightful. I want to go drinking with the author. The endnotes are frequently hilarious. The book is an introduction to great concepts like extinction debt. This is a book where the brevity is a problem. I wanted more writing and more detail on more things, and there are plenty of places for the author to expand.

Well, maybe. This book is an expansion of an article that the author wrote. Most of the best parts are shared with that article; the rest is the book-lentgh version of the difference between science and the humanities, sometimes memed as the difference between a high INT stat and an high WIS stat.

The author's solution to preventing humanity's extinction is for humans to expand into space. The reason this is the solution is a tautology: humans should go into space because they should go into space. Humanity will outstrip the carrying capacity of the earth, and the way to fix that is to go into space, which will require vastly expanding the carrying capacity of the earth, based on what will be required to support people living in space. Gay Space Communism is unexplored.

This might be an idle problem. The book could pass as a polemic with a few more expletives and polemics grade on their own curve. I share with the author the view that Ehrlich deserves contempt, but less than he gets. It becomes a real issue because of the various fragments of argumentation in the book that feel like no one is minding the till.

I loved the writing, and I loved the science. I now have a whole new scientific sub-discipline that I am interested in learning about. But - unintentionally - the author has written a pitch sheet for Bond villains.

My thanks to the author, Henry Gee, for writing the book, and to the publisher, St. Martin's Press, for making the ARC available to me.

First, thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for allowing me an advanced copy of this book. This book really opens your eyes to how humans have abused our planet, so much so that it will be the species downfall. Despite the serious subject matter, I did find myself laughing, and I will definitely be recommending this to others.

This book discusses the rise of humans and talks about the population decline, factors that can cause the population to drop sooner. I thought it was very informative, but the parts about going to space seemed slightly outlandish for now.

Human population growth is slowing and will soon reverse, leading to a rapid decline. This provocative book argues that humanity is on a path to extinction. It explores our rise and fall, from scattered groups to a dominant species now facing dwindling resources and escalating threats. The book questions whether we can change course or if extinction is inevitable, offering a vision for a future demanding ingenuity and cooperation.

This book is interesting and informative, but at the same time, I think its premise is a little silly. The fact that human population will begin declining this century is a good thing, not a harbinger of doom. Population will increase by 25% over the current level before it begins dropping. We’re not going to run out of humans anytime soon. And it’s impossible to say what the reproduction rate will be once human population falls to a level that the planet can sustain more easily than it does now. Plus, it seems a bit contradictory to lament falling human population while at the same time raising alarms about declining resources. IMO, this book is much ado about nothing.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

In a class with Homo Sapiens A History by Yuval Harari, this non-fiction is an analysis' of human growth and ultimate decline.
Both humorous and sometime satirical , it considers human accomplishments and impact on our environment from prehistoric to our projected future. So many intriguing rabbit holes of information to explore that this is a launchpad for farther reading. Highly readable and recommended for anyone interested in human history. It offers speculative ideas to the where-do-we-go-from-here question; some of course are controversial but never out of the realm of possibilities.

A rather thought provoking read about the inevitable decline and fall of the human empire. The book details the human race's rise in Africa, it’s growth to the most dominate being on the planet and it’s slow decline in the the coming centuries.

I'm a fan of Henry Gee's popular science books, having enjoyed A (Very) Short History of Life On Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Chapters and The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution. He has a knack for clear and very readable explanations, in service of interesting and thought-provoking ideas and theories.

This book is focused on the extinction of the human species. Gee helpfully begins with the long rise, and then traces the sudden fall, of our kind. He provides a thorough catalogue of all the forces working to extinguish us, including climate change and the change in the social role of women (their education and autonomy leading them to reproduce late and a much lower rates than needed to sustain the species). His final part, "Escape", conjectures how we might after all avoid our fate. It is futurism in the respectable sense, backed by solid science and disciplined imagination.

The writing, however, is not as tight, elegant or crafted as in the earlier books. Gee tends to repeat the same set of claims, sometimes within a few pages of each other. And he slows and sometimes completely stops the onward flow of his narrative with unnecessarily detailed and technical tangents.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an ARC.

The book has some very strong points. I enjoyed the brief yet comprehensive discussion of human evolution and some very clever wording. The discussion of climate change was also very good and proposed solutions were interesting. The pacing is good and all explanations of the science seemed easy to understand. The tone is mostly conversational, but can at times lapse into the overly literary for my taste. I also wasn’t enamoured with the discussion of space or with the quotes used to open each chapter. Overall this was a very worthwhile read. Thank you to Netgalley and St. Martin's Press for the advance reader copy.

My thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for an advance copy of this book that looks at the how the human race made it to the top as a species, the problems that humans are facing and how these lead to our inevitable extinction.

Something humans have a hard time admitting to themselves and others, besides being wrong, is that everything ends. This review, the book being reviewed, the reader the author, everyone we know, or will ever know. At some point they will be gone,as will the whole of humanity. In many ways we seem to be in a race to end it all, with a feeling that something better awaits on the other side of the veil. I have my doubts, but I have always had a sense of my own mortality. Everything ends, that's a universal truth. How soon that happens might just be up to us, and the way things are going right now, that end might be zipping fast. However as the author points out, there are things we can start doing, though again looking at the state of the world, co-operation seems the furthest from anyone's mind. The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire: Why Our Species Is on the Edge of Extinction by Henry Gee is a look at how humans defied the numerous odds and made it to the pinnacle of power on Earth, how what goes up must come down, and what we might be able to do to delay the end, or even expand the reach of humanity to the stars.

The book begins with of course the dinosaurs. There were numerous ideas on why the dinosaurs went extinct, theories that covered a whole lot of bases. Some thought the eggs of dinosaurs were too soft to protect the babies, or became too hard to babies to get out of. Maybe mammals ate the eggs. Or even a plague or galactic event, say something from the sky. What became apparent, was that many species had risen to the top and eventually went extinct. Gee looks at these reasons and shows where humans nearly didn't make it, and how these events helped or hindered the growth of humans. Gee looks at the problems facing humans today, and points climate change that will force migration as areas become too hot, or too underwater to support life. More importantly Gee discusses the fact that people are not having children, either by choice, or by fertility problems. This will cause problems for a lot of countries, as population age out of existence, and no one will be there to do the work needed to keep GDP up, or to advance technology. Especially in these days of racial discrimination. Gee posits a few ideas, changes in how we farm and produce food, worldwide female emancipation, something the Internet trolls won't like, and of course space being the place where humans might have to go.

A book that is full of so much information, however all told in a way that is not a lecture or a droneing teacher, but told in a conversational style. There is a lot here that will spark a few, actually many spirited conversations. And saying that space and life on Mars might help humans seems a little tech bro solution to ignoring problems on Earth. However Gee states his case quite well, and makes a very good argument. I just think that humans have regressed in many ways in their attitudes towards women and minorities, and don't see how in this current environment any of this could gain traction. The book is well-written, and well-thought out, with a good mix of hard science, with plenty of explanation. And a lot of hope.

As I stated a book that a lot of people won't like, it talks about female rights, climate change, and evolution. I found this quite engaging, and learned quite a bit about the way humans adapted to things, and found myself almost rooting for humanity to keep going. Something I have not felt in a while. Definitely a conversation starter, and a book that will be of interest to a lot of people.

Don't let the doom and gloom title of this book deter you from reading it. The author traces the history of how humanity came to be in it's present form and explores possible futures for our species. While extinction is an obvious possibility, the author also takes time to show how humanity might be able to push off that fate. While this book is very heavily science based, the author writes in such a way that everything was easy to understand. My only complaint is that sometimes the author is a little bit repetitive. Overall I found this book interesting and thought provoking.
Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.