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Life will be fine. Rats, pigeons, raccoons, flies, jellyfish, quite a few plants, fungi, etc, will all be fine. The Cretaceous was a thing. The atmosphere had
by erikpukinskis 9y ago
Life will be fine. Rats, pigeons, raccoons, flies, jellyfish, quite a few plants, fungi, etc, will all be fine.
The Cretaceous was a thing. The atmosphere had about as much CO2 as it could hold. There were lots of animals. We're headed back to it.
Will there be Eastern Brown Pecker Grouse habitat? No. Will there be coral reefs? Lol no. Will most of the pages of National Geographic be unrecognizable by the naturalists of the future? Yup.
But life will continue. All we're doing is robbing future generations of the myriad beautiful and delicate old growth ecologies that we were taught about in school. We can go snorkeling in them, or hiking in them. They'll just watch 1080p videos of them on their AR glasses.
We're headed back to the Cretaceous. We're going to take the biodiversity of the planet down two orders of magnitude. Maybe four.
That's all.
If we coders get our act together we'll get a decentralized anarchist bioremediation movement going which will rehome millions of acres of biome to Cretaceous-friendly locations, we'll limit the biodiversity loss to that 100x range. 10x if I'm feeling optimistic and smoking really good weed.
I think we can do it!
- freeflight 9y ago> The Cretaceous was a thing. The atmosphere had about as much CO2 as it could hold. There were lots of animals. We're headed back to it. Extinction scale events have been "a thing" in Earth's history for as long as Earth's been around [0], as you note we are very likely in the middle of another one right now [1] The big difference this time being: Previous ones most certainly had not been man-made, this one has a very high chance of being man-made. Who's to say humanity is incapable of damaging Earths biosphere beyond a point where it can recover? If we can manage to fill the oceans with more plastic than fish by 2050, then I'm certain we can manage to do quite a bit of damage to this planet as a whole [2]. A while ago I read a paper reasoning something like that might be the explanation for the Fermi paradox; extraterrestrial civilizations getting so advanced that they destroy the biosphere of their own planet, beyond repair, but not advanced enough to escape said destroyed planet. Sadly I can't find it anymore. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event#List_of_extinction_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event#List_of_extin... [1] http://www.theworldcounts.com/counters/degradation_and_destruction_of_ecosystems/species_extinction_facts http://www.theworldcounts.com/counters/degradation_and_destr... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/01/20/by-2050-there-will-be-more-plastic-than-fish-in-the-worlds-oceans-study-says/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/01/2...
- cclements 9y agoYou're probably thinking of the "Great Filter" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
- freeflight 9y agoWasn't that Great Filter even tho it might qualify as a Great Filter, I managed to find the paper [0], it's about applying the "Principle of Mediocrity". [0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-astrobiology/article/implication-of-our-technological-species-being-first-and-early/EB38BDC09C0908578184835C8B072390/core-reader https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journa...