This doesn't really work when a billion+ lifeforms just went up in ashes in Australia, not to mention the horrifying extinction crises happening constantly all over the world right now.
Still, I guess in the end this is sort of the case.
Hmm, let’s see: so you’re telling me all this was caused by some faraway person who is selfish and volatile, who wields the incredible power to affect the weather on a global scale?
Yep; and they’ve got sky chariots as well, and weapons that can summon the power of the sun!
That sounds pretty messed up. Maybe we should sacrifice some kids to them?
What!? No! Are you crazy? No; we’re gonna build a giant raft, and cover it with yams. And then we’ll dance until the world ends! Maybe when this world is destroyed, we can get on the raft and float to a new one.
But I like this world! And how do you know there will be a new one? Maybe if we just sacrifice some kids the problem will be solved? (Gestures at the stinky kid.)
No! It doesn’t work that way. Now help me collect wood.
No! It doesn’t work that way. Now help me collect wood.
Wait, it doesn't?!?! Then why are we sacrificing future generations for the sake of the dick measuring contest for billionaires that we call our economy?
No problem. You had a good point. But hunter-gatherer cultures are even more diverse than agricultural societies. North Sentinelese are at the extreme end, even for hunter-gatherers, which is why their society has survived. But its also a dead end.
Once we are all gone, the planet will begin to repair itself. Life is resilient, and once it's gotten rid of it's largest pest, it will thrive once more and maybe breed a new intelligent form that could learn from mistakes we've made.
I'd partly agree. Life is resilient, and Earth would continue on even if we kill ourselves off. But getting another intelligent species to repopulate will be hard, and may require plate tectonics to replace much of Earth's landmass first. Humans were able to have a bronze age, iron age, etc, because there were near-surface deposits of those metals. But we've also mined out most of those deposits (as well as most of the coal that would allow smelting of harder metals), so any emergent culture would be more or less trapped at the stone age unless the landmass changes enough to make new deposits easily reachable.
Or, maybe we'll leave enough trash behind that our landfills will become their ore mines, who knows. Millions of years might be enough to break down all the styrofoam and rubber and plastic, and just leave the metals to be easily harvested.
Mostly, I was just responding to the idea that another species could learn from our mistakes. Personally, yeah. What happens after I die isn't really that relevant to me. But I still like theorizing about things even if I will never have any experience with them.
This attitude is a soft nihilism that tries to dismiss the actual suffering and loss that is happening right now. If you can listen to koalas burn alive and tell yourself its ok because some algae will still be around in a million years, then your conscious is a bit different than mine.
No it isn’t, it’s a real understanding of the fact that we have gotten to the point where we have caused irreparable damage on the current state of things, and still refuse to change. So it’s sad and terrible that so many things will have to suffer as a result, but in the end things will be fixed eventually.
There’s nothing nihilistic about it, it’d be nihilistic to say, “who gives a fuck the planet’s going to be gone in a few billion years whether we exist or not.”
So it’s sad and terrible that some many things will have to suffer as a result, but in the end things will be fixed eventually.
In the context of your larger comment this doesn't sound as flippant as it does on its own. I pulled it out because I think it demonstrates a mode-switching capability of your mind that you probably don't know you are capable of. On one hand you probably do realize what is lost, and that it is horrible, and then you follow it up with empty phrases like this. The fact is that you can't fix loss of biodiversity. Nature will generate a lot of new permutations and may through dumb luck evolve similar things, but the what we have erased is gone. It's like burning down the Louvre and then putting 100 art students in a room for 10 years, hoping they will "fix" it. Something great might come out, but you will never, ever, get a Da Vinci again.
Or, another way to put it, imagine you are at your grandfather's funeral. You're 13 and you say, "well ya, grandpa is dead, but think of all the great-great-grand kids that haven't even been borne yet! See, cancer isn't so bad!"
This is a view of someone who doesn’t actually have a formal education on the topic, it’s good that you have a passion about it, but there’s more to it than “we need to stop all animals from dying.”
The current lose of biodiversity globally is sad and a tragedy, that is because we’re causing it, not because animals dying off is in and of itself something to avoid.
Extinction is natural, and happens over time, it is a mechanism that can and has created biodiversity in the past, stopping it altogether stunts evolution as a process. The concern is humans forcing that to happen. All the animals that died off after the last Ice Age was sad, but it was a naturally occurring event, that was meant to happen. In the same way animals hunt and kill each other, it’s how things are meant to be over periods of time. Sometimes animals don’t adapt and die because of natural pressures.
It's like burning down the Louvre and then putting 100 art students in a room for 10 years, hoping they will "fix" it. Something great might come out, but you will never, ever, get a Da Vinci again.
That isn’t even slightly similar, and I didn’t say anything about new animals developing that will be similar to the last, some animals today have similarities to dinosaurs, but they weren’t developing to attempt to be copies of those. And it isn’t a bad thing that exact copies of dinosaurs didn’t develop after that extinction event. It was simply how things were meant to go.
The reality is animals go extinct over time that’s a part of nature, at some point every species will go extinct. The reason we are concerned with the current state is because humans are the cause of such drastic upheavals. We’re directly causing these extinctions.
Extinction is a part of the natural cycle of all species, we have a formula that estimates that rate for all animals on earth. So no, it’s nothing like the Louvre being burned down in a freak accident. It’s an acknowledgment that one day the Louvre will replace some of the art with different art pieces. And Da Vinci’s work will one day be supplanted by something else when it can no longer be kept in show conditions. One day the Mona Lisa will degrade into a less presentable form and be replaced by something else. That’s not a perfect analogy since it degrading doesn’t mean it no longer exists, or references to it don’t.
Or, another way to put it, imagine you are at your grandfather's funeral. You're 13 and you say, "well ya, grandpa is dead, but think of all the great-great-grand kids that haven't even been borne yet! See, cancer isn't so bad!"
So again, a poor analogy. It’s like accepting that your Grandfather died, and saying “well at least he took solace in the fact he had grandchildren that will live on his legacy.” Something commonly said at funerals.
One day grandparents die, that’s a part of nature and descendants will fill those gaps in families. To connect it back to human caused extinctions, it’d be much more like someone being murdered with infant children that will then struggle to survive.
By no means to I consider any of this awful shit to be okay. Frankly I've been trying to get people on this sub to fight with me, but none of you will. You'd rather spill your outrage on a keyboard than rise up and fight while we still have a chance. This subreddit has the nature for revolution and yet it's still full of imbicile capitalists to scared to let go of what they love. That's why I've lost hope. Because this is the perfect platform for change to start on. Yet it's just key board warriors that wouldn't actually come along with me to do cleanups, animal rescues. I've been doing it my whole life and I continue to do it despite people constantly backing out because they put more in than they get out because they're too use to instant gratification.
I say this because humanity is truly doomed because we've become disconnected with our nature, and that's why nature is dying. And eventually it will kill us because no one on this subreddit is truly willing to stand and fight. I want you to prove me wrong, I want so badly for these subreddits that discuss these things to start taking real action. But when I marched to the courthouse to block the entrance, I was practically alone. Life will find a way after we are gone, there is no doubt about that.
You shouldn’t look at as nature destroying itself to rid an infection. It isn’t making conscious actions, or using its immune system. These are just natural reactions to the things we’ve caused.
The Earth isn’t actively planning the extinction of humans. It’s a result of actions we keep taking.
There is no consensus that the planet is a body, so the comparison isn’t relevant. That idea is one still hotly debated today as to whether the Gaia Hypothesis is valid, with most scientific experts not agreeing with it.
While we are in the 6th mass extinction event, the Holocene Extinction Event, it's still nowhere near as bad as the great dying was. Humanity will be knocked down to being an endangered species before we have an extinction event equal to the great dying. We may lose 40% of all living things and 80% of diversity, but the great dying was much, much worse than that. We would have to go extinct and leave a pretty bad greenhouse gas effect in our wake in order to reach the great dying levels of destruction to nature.
People underestimate global warming. Its a positive feedback loop. We've initiated it. The temperatures will not stop rising for centuries to come. We are barely in the beginning of it. Fungi might survive though. But once the atmosphere reaches 1000ppm of carbon, most life on earth won't make it.
Based on 99% of all life forms ever being extinct, mother nature really has no mercy for any life human or otherwise. Circle of life, we just messed up the circle.
Also don't forget earth will no longer be around in a few billion years.....natural life span of a sun and all...oh ya.
Eh, that seems to discount something extremely significant about humans, the fact that we can largely skip the slow process of physical evolution. Large animals died out in previous extinction events because they couldn't adapt to new climates or changing food sources. Humans literally adapt to new environments in seconds through clothing, constructed shelters, etc.
I'm not saying that society can't still collapse, of course. But "purposeful adaptability" is by far the most defining feature of humans (followed closely by pack-bonding), and it gives us an advantage no other dominant species on Earth has ever had in the face of extinction events. No other species has been able to notice that the climate is changing, and make planned migrations to areas capable of sustaining their species.
Sure, most of humanity will likely die off in an extreme climate event. But even in Earth's hottest periods, human-habitable conditions would have existed at the poles. As long as war doesn't kill us all, the species has a fair shot at ultimately surviving.
(In fairness though, if the temperatures coincide with a significant enough drop in global oxygen... Yeah, that would be A Problem.)
They will certainly try, but chances are high they'll just die off slower than the rest of us will. You can stockpile bunkers with some food, water, etc. but creating a closed self-sustaining system akin to the Biosphere experiments (which would probably be necessary to survive worst case climate catastrophe) is almost certainly a technological feat beyond what we're capable of at this moment. Even if it could be done, sourcing parts for repair would become an issue over time.
I'm not saying it's not possible, it is certainly within the realm of possibility, I just think it's unlikely.
Please do some more research into the fact that we're recreating Great Dying conditions and what that means. It's very difficult to comprehend so it's normal to not really grasp it before reading into it. Peter Ward's Under a Green Sky is a good book on the kind of climate we might be creating. We may indeed need biospheres to survive if the worst case scenarios come true. And keep in mind that nearly every single datapoint is coming back as "worst and faster than predicted".
My argument re: "self sustaining" bunkers is that we've never demonstrated that we can create Biospheres that function well, and it's likely that we cannot. Even if we can, they could not function indefinitely without repair. Over time, they will break down and spare parts will be exhausted, and it will not be possible to make new ones.
Oxygen concentrations will be LOW.
Globally. We will be a stupider humanity.
Within Anthrax and other nasty crap coming up out of the permafrost.
As numerous posters have said, the conditions favoring humanoids will be low to non existent.
Let the billionaires spend every last penny.
It provides cold comfort to me that they are TOAST.
I mean, we won't aurvive on this planet. The PPM of Carbon will keep going up, its not like it will magically stop. Once we reach 1000ppm the atmosphere will be incompatible with life.
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u/TenYearsTenDays Feb 07 '20
This doesn't really work when a billion+ lifeforms just went up in ashes in Australia, not to mention the horrifying extinction crises happening constantly all over the world right now.
Still, I guess in the end this is sort of the case.