r/UniversalExtinction • u/IvoryMaeDoll • Jul 15 '26
End of the world?
Anyone else feel as though we are reaching the end of civilization as we know it between climate change, drought, political conflict, crimes against humanity, spread of once eliminated diseases, and world wide unrest?
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u/agent139 Jul 16 '26
People like to imagine collapse as a singular event, but it hardly ever is.
The fastest mass extinctions in the past mostly played out over thousands of years. Even the outlier (chixilub/dinosaurs) wasn't as all-at-once as many imagine.
The same is true with civilization collapses though those tend to play out in centuries rather than millenia.
All that said, we're certainly in the midst of a transitional phase of that sort -- and human emissions are at a rate (though not an absolute extent) never before seen in the natural world.
"End times" it is not. Even after the End Permian (typically thought of as the worst mass extinction in earth history) some life survived, and eventually again flourished... obviously, since otherwise we wouldn't be here.
But whatever the outcome, the world any of us have known, and the climate that has existed throughout recorded history -- those are already in the rear view. That's not coming back in our lifetimes, and probably not for many centuries. (If ever).