It’s so hot in Mexico that howler monkeys are falling dead from the trees. At least 83 of the midsize primates, who are known for their roaring vocal calls, have been found dead in the Gulf coast state of Tabasco.
There’ll be a whole lot of “Oh if only we had known! If only climate scientists tried harder to convince us for the last 70 years!” as civilization collapses.
On the bright side, once civilization collapses, there really won’t be anything stopping us from slapping such people. Won’t fix anything, humans aren’t clearly aren’t any good at fixing our messes anyway, but it’ll feel good on the way out.
The problem in this reasoning is that the Earth will take MILLIONS of years to recover from the reckless growth/metastasis caused reverse terraforming we’re doing in a matter of decades.
I agree humans are cockroaches and will likely survive what we’re doing at some level, but we won’t be crawling back out to the temperate paradise we lucked into 200,000 years ago. We’ll be surviving on hard mode, on a scorched world with an unforgiving climate filled with massive weather events, droughts, and other poor farming conditions.
That will likely keep us more in check. Life on Earth is 3.8 billion years old. We’ve only been a threat for 200ish years. We aren’t even the first cancerous mistake of evolution to cause a mass extinction from within, look up the carboniferous period. We have long played pretend we mastered this world, but this world is about to punish us for our hubris.
If we ever come to monopolize this world again, it will be in a future so distant we can’t begin to map the path.
Yep, once cyanobacteria flooded the world with oxygen, everything that couldn’t hack it in an oxygen rich atmosphere died off never to return, and cyanobacteria and the chloroplast is still here, defining our world.
As bad as we fuck things up, we’re better placed than many organisms to weather the consequences of our actions. Our numbers and harm done might go down for a while but like waves of the plague, we’ll adapt to upset the new equilibrium in time.
Millions of years is still only 0.08% of the earth’s current age. Not to anthropomorphize the planet, but i really don’t think it and the rest of the nature will care in the long run. It’ll adapt and move on.
We’re a blip to the earth, as my mentor George Carlin said, a surface nuisance.
To our living Earth, that is no time at all, but from our perspective and limited ability to fully appreciate scales like that, a million years might as well be infinity years.
Humanity will be Lucky to be a sentence in the encyclopedia of life that started billions of years ago that will likely end when our sun begins to destabilize into a red giant in another couple billion.
There’ll be a whole lot of “Oh if only we had known! If only climate scientists tried harder to convince us for the last 70 years!” as civilization collapses.
On the bright side, once civilization collapses, there really won’t be anything stopping us from slapping such people. Won’t fix anything, humans aren’t clearly aren’t any good at fixing our messes anyway, but it’ll feel good on the way out.
This is overly optimistic. We humans are so resilient. We have every resource that’s left at our disposal.
Even if there’s full scale environmental collapse, we’ll survive, rebuild, and be around to do it all over again.
The problem in this reasoning is that the Earth will take MILLIONS of years to recover from the reckless growth/metastasis caused reverse terraforming we’re doing in a matter of decades.
I agree humans are cockroaches and will likely survive what we’re doing at some level, but we won’t be crawling back out to the temperate paradise we lucked into 200,000 years ago. We’ll be surviving on hard mode, on a scorched world with an unforgiving climate filled with massive weather events, droughts, and other poor farming conditions.
That will likely keep us more in check. Life on Earth is 3.8 billion years old. We’ve only been a threat for 200ish years. We aren’t even the first cancerous mistake of evolution to cause a mass extinction from within, look up the carboniferous period. We have long played pretend we mastered this world, but this world is about to punish us for our hubris.
If we ever come to monopolize this world again, it will be in a future so distant we can’t begin to map the path.
Yep, once cyanobacteria flooded the world with oxygen, everything that couldn’t hack it in an oxygen rich atmosphere died off never to return, and cyanobacteria and the chloroplast is still here, defining our world.
As bad as we fuck things up, we’re better placed than many organisms to weather the consequences of our actions. Our numbers and harm done might go down for a while but like waves of the plague, we’ll adapt to upset the new equilibrium in time.
Millions of years is still only 0.08% of the earth’s current age. Not to anthropomorphize the planet, but i really don’t think it and the rest of the nature will care in the long run. It’ll adapt and move on.
That was my point.
We’re a blip to the earth, as my mentor George Carlin said, a surface nuisance.
To our living Earth, that is no time at all, but from our perspective and limited ability to fully appreciate scales like that, a million years might as well be infinity years.
Humanity will be Lucky to be a sentence in the encyclopedia of life that started billions of years ago that will likely end when our sun begins to destabilize into a red giant in another couple billion.
Nah, the language has shifted to “Oh darn. I guess it’s too late to do anything now.”
Fuck yeah, I’m blasting some knee caps on the way out. Murder would be a mercy at that point.