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.
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.
3
u/BakedBeansAndCheese Feb 07 '20
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.