What we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants. It is well within our power to destroy our civilization, and perhaps our species as well
And any other species’ chance. Given the expected lifecycle of the Sun that will affect the habitable zone we’re in, we have just under a billion years to go before the planet becomes unlivable by anything. Is that enough time for life to start over from some point and try again? Presuming minus a hostile period of time while Earth finds a new environmental balance, which always takes a while.
I think for whatever odds there are out there of other planets that can have the right conditions for life to become intelligent and expand further, they get one shot at it. If there were alien observers they’ve probably stopped by now. “That went like usual. Got close, but they did the typical mistakes.”
There’s also the argument that developing our civilization was only possible due to easy access to fossil fuels. We’ve now burnt all the easily accessible ones, so any future civilization won’t have them.
We climbed up, burnt the step ladder behind us and are now jumping off the cliff.
True except for coal, there’s a hell of a lot of still accessible coal. Coal is limiting of course and dirty. There’s also other resources like metals that we jump started society with that were easily obtained, even picked off the ground, and now are either buried in landfills or merged into alloys that even our technology can’t separate or reuse well.
Carl Sagan
And any other species’ chance. Given the expected lifecycle of the Sun that will affect the habitable zone we’re in, we have just under a billion years to go before the planet becomes unlivable by anything. Is that enough time for life to start over from some point and try again? Presuming minus a hostile period of time while Earth finds a new environmental balance, which always takes a while.
I think for whatever odds there are out there of other planets that can have the right conditions for life to become intelligent and expand further, they get one shot at it. If there were alien observers they’ve probably stopped by now. “That went like usual. Got close, but they did the typical mistakes.”
There’s also the argument that developing our civilization was only possible due to easy access to fossil fuels. We’ve now burnt all the easily accessible ones, so any future civilization won’t have them.
We climbed up, burnt the step ladder behind us and are now jumping off the cliff.
True except for coal, there’s a hell of a lot of still accessible coal. Coal is limiting of course and dirty. There’s also other resources like metals that we jump started society with that were easily obtained, even picked off the ground, and now are either buried in landfills or merged into alloys that even our technology can’t separate or reuse well.