this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2024
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In the words of a famous scientist, "Life, uh, finds a way."
Some life, sure. We'll extinct untold millions of species on the way out. Michael Crichton, the author of Jurassic Park, was a climate change denier, not a scientist.
To be fair, most people were in the 90s.
Mathematician.
Well... until it doesn't.
Eh. We're making the planet uninhabitable for us, not for all life necessarily.
Part of the damage we're doing is triggering positive feedback loops. When we finish cooking ourselves to extinction, those feedback loops will continue to nudge the climate that same direction. We don't know to what extent those feedback loops will warm the planet, but the extreme end of the possibilities are things like Earth becoming molten and ending even the most resilient shreds of life.
We could literally be setting the stage to end all life on Earth.
That is of course a possibility and we cannot discount it, but I think it far more likely that we wipe ourselves, and in addition a ton of other life off the planet, but there will always be some that survives. Same way that when the dinosaurs died mammals came up. Maybe they won't be mammals. Maybe some other form of life, but it will most likely exist after us. And once we are Gone and not constantly throwing more planet warming and toxic gasses and toxic materials out into the world, the earth will slowly correct itself and disseminate that.
Right now our feedback loops are occurring because we are not really changing anything in what we do.
There's an important distinction between the types of feedback loops. We're dealing with positive feedback loops, which are exceptionally dangerous because they'll just continue to spiral until something blocks them from progressing.
Our positive feedback loops occurred because we are not really changing anything in what we do. They're occurring because they're self-aggravating. Our continued bullshit may serve as an accelerant at this point, but it isn't necessary for the feedback loop to continue.
Yes, historically there has always been a successor to this planet's mass-extinction events, but we can't really point to that as proof that some other critter will step in for the next one - outside of this planet, we've yet to find a single example of life, so I'd argue that evidence points to 'life, uh, finding a way' being a ridiculously rare exception to the universal norm of the absence of life. Life is fragile, and to the best of our knowledge, all of life's eggs are in one basket. And we've set that basket on fire.
Sounds like we need to generate our own panspermia situation here... Just throw a falcon rocket atars with everything available that we have to survive and mutate onto mars. Fuck it. Let's be space orcs up in this bitch.
Somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, life wont stop for a looooong time unless the sun explodes or the planet gets shattered by something. All life extinct will probably not happen for billions of years.
Bold to assume there will still be oceans in a millennium.
The thing about climate change is that we've set off positive feedback loops that we don't fully understand - you may have noticed a trend of climate projections of "It's gonna be pretty bad next year..." followed by "Okay, so the year happened... it was WAY worse than we expected...". Think of things like the methane trapped under the permafrost: permafrost melts, methane releases, greenhouse happens and shit warms up a bit, more ice melts / faster, more methane is released, more greenhouse happens, etc.
Humans could all get thanos-snapped out of existence RIGHT NOW. Full and instant stop to all of our industries, all pollution... the feedback loops we've set into motion are still at play, and the environment will continue to get worse.
How much worse? No idea. Maybe it'll warm up for another 10 years, plateau, then come back down to give the non-human life that didn't get snapped out a relative paradise? But maybe those positive feedback loops will just keep cranking along, and the extreme end of that would look something like the planet going completely molten.
The TLDR is we don't know, so assumptions for pretty much any end result are going to fall under 'educated speculation' at best.
Its not really speculation. The planet recovered from much worse scenarios. It was at one point just a rock of hot magma stuff. Humans will die very quickly if things get nasty but we are just very sensitive creatures. As soon as we are gone, things will continue to be weird for a couple thousand years or maybe much more, but eventually it will just stabilize again like with any other extreme period in the planets history.
The conditions will just be different in ways that are incompatible with us, but short life cycle fast evolving creatures will adapt no matter what. From a nature perspective this is just a bit of a strategy shift, because as long as there is some sort of atmosphere (which there will be without a doubt) things will just go on. Just without us.
Dude, you open with that and then hit me with two paragraphs of pure speculation.
Worse scenarios than what?
Was there life then? Will life persist if Earth returns to that state? How?
How?
...because?
...because?
Which things? Life? How?
I appreciate your optimism, but unless you're a god, that isn't going to just will this shit into happening.
It's lasted billions of years. We may largely scour the face of the Earth clean, but archaea will hang around, hiding in the cracks, and more complex life will evolve when conditions are suitable for it
There may be no cracks for life to hide in - Earth could be on a trajectory to going molten after a million more years of exponential greenhouse effect. The positive feedback loops we've set in motion will persist long after our extinction.
Nah man. That's not how that works. Look at the covid climate studies. And the 9/11 climate studies. Nature will survive humans. Shit it think humans will survive humans. Wait for mass extinction level human die offs and then you'll see humans thrive again. (Objectively speaking)
Lots of people here seem to agree with you, but so far no one's justified that opinion with anything other than wishful, optimistic thinking.
My stance remains that none of us, self included, have any credible insight to predict where climate change will take this planet; but that some of the potential outcomes include Earth in a state that doesn't support even the most extreme micro-critters.
First off, I urge you to look at EPA study's from covids stay at home restrictions and air pollution. AND 9/11s EPA study's of grounded airplanes and pollution.
Second, the sun would have to explode for no life to be left on our planet. It's insanely egotistical to think humans could possibly destroy an entire planets worth of life lol. A meteor 200 miles wide impacted the earth at 100 million megatons of impact pressure....the Tsar bomba the biggest nuke ever made is 54 megatons lol. It would take 2 Million Tsar bombas to even match the destruction of that meteor. AND lift still survived pretty well and moved on.
I think you need to reevaluate and requantify your beliefs because hyperbole is not your strong suit.
I'm tired of refuting that strawman shit. Please stop putting words into my mouth. They taste funky.
You make a strong argument against... something, probably, but I'm not sure why you're posting it here.
Here, let me hold your hand through this one. The meteor is an example of the extreme strength in energy that was exerted on our planet. The force of such a force was about to shake up the planets health shortly. Humanities strongest "machine" is 1/2,000,000 that force.
When humanity slowed down their societies even for a couple weeks (covid) the air pollution dropped so drastically they saw positive air quality in c02.
When the towers fell and all airplanes stopped and we're grounded the same occurred with air quality as with covids air quality change.
The information above are examples of two things...
1.humanity can have a direct impact on the future of our environments.
Your original comment was extreme hyperbole. It's not a good start to a conversation about this in a level headed discourse. When you use hyperbole to exclaim an opinion you wind up being overlooked because of how ridiculous your claims may be. It's childish.
Here, I hyperlinked each part of your post to the corresponding fallacy you're attempting.
You do have one line in there that I got nothing on, so... cheers to that. Edit- to be clear, the line above that one isn't itself a fallacy; the hyperlink in that one is to label what the "above examples" amount to.
Fun. I mean really. Lots of fun to be had here. Never mind you are correct. 100%. Good job winning an argument on the Internet to prove how fucked humanity is. Whew, almost got caught being optimistic for a second there. Good thing I have you guys...