The earth will be fine. It’s been through way worse than us. There was about a billion years when the whole thing was just a snowball. People don’t even really know how microbial life that was adapted for the surface survived, although the theory is that its little lifeboats were melted pools of water near volcanic hotspots, some sort of liquid water that incredibly enough was able to randomly stay around the whole time through. It only takes a very small number of survivors to repopulate everything once it turns okay again. The earth has been through oceans at the poles and total freezes and meteor strike apocalypses and everything in between, some of where we came from was the engine of creation in the wake of one of those disasters, the end of the dinosaurs.
The paradise place we call home, though, is cooked and done for forever, on any kind of human timeline. There is 0 chance that what we call a livable biosphere, the kind of green grass nice summer day paradise we were born into, will still be around in a hundred years. It’s gone. We’re the last generation.
There’s still a lot we can do to choose less apocalyptic options. The sheer massive scale of the disaster means that every fraction of a percent could save millions of lives, or significantly reduce the chance of total extinction. But bottom line, the planet itself and the web of life that lives on it will persist. Whether we will, certainly whether our civilization will, is uncertain, it will be determined by this generation and the next.
The earth will be fine. It’s been through way worse than us.
People say this a lot, but what are we calling ‘fine’?
Supporting life is what makes Earth special; if that’s snuffed out and Earth becomes just another dead rock floating through space, I’d argue it isn’t fine at all, in the same sense that you or I wouldn’t be fine if we suddenly died, even though our physical corpse would remain for much longer.
And we’re WAY far away from life being completely extinguished, but even in its current state with life relatively abundant, Earth is running a high fever, so I’d say it’s already crossed the ‘not fine’ line.
We’ve discovered hundreds of billions of planets, and so far we’re only aware of life existing on a single one of them: life is an incredibly rare, incredibly fragile, statistically insignificant fluke in our universe. It may literally be the single best example of “it’s the exception, not the rule”.
So, why are people always so certain that it’ll persist? Life in general will certainly persist well beyond humans, but even the most resilient of extremophiles have their limits. The whole “Life, uh, finds a way” is great and all, until it doesn’t.
The damage we’re doing to our planet directly is pretty small on a universal scale, but we’re playing with forces we don’t understand - some of those forces are feedback loops, so our involvement may be the first tiny domino that sets off a cascade of increasingly large dominos until our planet is molten all the way to its core.
Or, we die off and feedback loops stop, the environment stabalizes, and Earth lives on happily ever after. Or anything in between: the point is we have no idea, and no basis to make and real predictions good or bad.
Hopefully Earth will be fine.
…sorry that was so wordy. I ramble when I’m tired.
If the heartbreak I feel didn’t come through about the destruction of our home and everything that makes survival on it easy, the possibility of our total extinction and the certainty of massive scale suffering of every living thing on the planet, then let me make it clear: Yes, that’s a bad thing.
You’re absolutely right. People insist on making this ridiculous point every time a topic like this comes up. It’s like, holy shit, just let the destruction of all life on Earth be the point of the conversation instead of some stupid tangent about a lifeless rock in space.
I agree, but this argument only hold up in the big picture. Nature today, animals especially are hurting now. So are we. I think we have an obligation to future generations in terms of doing our best to keep the planet habitable and to all current lifeforms to stop making this planet such a shitty place to be (talking about both domestic animals that are factory farmed into food and wild animals such as these birds that starve to death because their filled stomach doesn’t have any nutritional value and also can’t leave their body).
The earth will be fine. It’s been through way worse than us. There was about a billion years when the whole thing was just a snowball. People don’t even really know how microbial life that was adapted for the surface survived, although the theory is that its little lifeboats were melted pools of water near volcanic hotspots, some sort of liquid water that incredibly enough was able to randomly stay around the whole time through. It only takes a very small number of survivors to repopulate everything once it turns okay again. The earth has been through oceans at the poles and total freezes and meteor strike apocalypses and everything in between, some of where we came from was the engine of creation in the wake of one of those disasters, the end of the dinosaurs.
The paradise place we call home, though, is cooked and done for forever, on any kind of human timeline. There is 0 chance that what we call a livable biosphere, the kind of green grass nice summer day paradise we were born into, will still be around in a hundred years. It’s gone. We’re the last generation.
There’s still a lot we can do to choose less apocalyptic options. The sheer massive scale of the disaster means that every fraction of a percent could save millions of lives, or significantly reduce the chance of total extinction. But bottom line, the planet itself and the web of life that lives on it will persist. Whether we will, certainly whether our civilization will, is uncertain, it will be determined by this generation and the next.
People say this a lot, but what are we calling ‘fine’?
Supporting life is what makes Earth special; if that’s snuffed out and Earth becomes just another dead rock floating through space, I’d argue it isn’t fine at all, in the same sense that you or I wouldn’t be fine if we suddenly died, even though our physical corpse would remain for much longer.
And we’re WAY far away from life being completely extinguished, but even in its current state with life relatively abundant, Earth is running a high fever, so I’d say it’s already crossed the ‘not fine’ line.
We’ve discovered hundreds of billions of planets, and so far we’re only aware of life existing on a single one of them: life is an incredibly rare, incredibly fragile, statistically insignificant fluke in our universe. It may literally be the single best example of “it’s the exception, not the rule”.
So, why are people always so certain that it’ll persist? Life in general will certainly persist well beyond humans, but even the most resilient of extremophiles have their limits. The whole “Life, uh, finds a way” is great and all, until it doesn’t.
The damage we’re doing to our planet directly is pretty small on a universal scale, but we’re playing with forces we don’t understand - some of those forces are feedback loops, so our involvement may be the first tiny domino that sets off a cascade of increasingly large dominos until our planet is molten all the way to its core.
Or, we die off and feedback loops stop, the environment stabalizes, and Earth lives on happily ever after. Or anything in between: the point is we have no idea, and no basis to make and real predictions good or bad.
Hopefully Earth will be fine.
…sorry that was so wordy. I ramble when I’m tired.
If the heartbreak I feel didn’t come through about the destruction of our home and everything that makes survival on it easy, the possibility of our total extinction and the certainty of massive scale suffering of every living thing on the planet, then let me make it clear: Yes, that’s a bad thing.
You’re absolutely right. People insist on making this ridiculous point every time a topic like this comes up. It’s like, holy shit, just let the destruction of all life on Earth be the point of the conversation instead of some stupid tangent about a lifeless rock in space.
I agree, but this argument only hold up in the big picture. Nature today, animals especially are hurting now. So are we. I think we have an obligation to future generations in terms of doing our best to keep the planet habitable and to all current lifeforms to stop making this planet such a shitty place to be (talking about both domestic animals that are factory farmed into food and wild animals such as these birds that starve to death because their filled stomach doesn’t have any nutritional value and also can’t leave their body).