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Question is if humanity would have been able to survive for the duration of those 4m years; Earth surviving humanity to my knowledge has never been the issue.
by nxzero 10y ago
Question is if humanity would have been able to survive for the duration of those 4m years; Earth surviving humanity to my knowledge has never been the issue.
- tim333 10y agoWell, our ancestors were around. It seems it was about 2C hotter from 10 to 4m years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:All_palaeotemps.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:All_palaeotemps.svg
- Daishiman 10y agoYes, but they were a couple million and most, and consuming orders of magnitude fewer resources than we are.
- caf 10y agoThey weren't humans, though: humans have only been around for about 0.2M years.
- yongjik 10y agoWe don't know what happened to our ancestors. Anything from environmental disasters to epidemics could have wiped out 95% of our ancestors at some time, and the only trace of that would be slightly lower fossil counts. In other words, "our ancestors survived" isn't really reassuring. There's a really wide gap between "Everybody's lives become seriously harder" and "Humanity goes extinct". After all, even WW2 only managed to kill ~3% of the human population. A completely survivable event.
- m_mueller 10y agoArguing about the past about whether we can survive in the future is a logical fallacy because we all experience the Anthropic principle [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
- mikeash 10y ago"Our ancestors were around" is a useless thing to say. Every single extinct species had an unbroken chain of ancestors going back to the very first life forms.