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I will link this the next time someone says "we're destroying Earth", when they mean "life on Earth". Earth is 4.5B years old, and will likely continue to exis
by aminozuur 6y ago
I will link this the next time someone says "we're destroying Earth", when they mean "life on Earth".
Earth is 4.5B years old, and will likely continue to exist for quite some time. That's called the "Lindy effect" (old things will likely continue to exist).
- andi999 6y agoWhy did nobody tell the dinosaurs about the Lindy effect?
- jacquesm 6y agoMaybe someone did, who's to say...
- paulryanrogers 6y agoWhat do you hope to accomplish responding to a life-on-earth concern with an article exploring how to destroy the celestial body?
- aminozuur 6y agoThat people say "life on earth", and not "earth". I'm a bit autistic when it comes to language.
- gcheong 6y agoI think the term is pedantic.
- HelloMcFly 6y agoThis only thing this accomplishes is making you look like a jerk, with maybe a 10% chance of getting a chuckle out of the right person.
- ttt0 6y agoWith the extreme environments that some animal species live in, I'm not even considered about destroying the life on Earth. It doesn't seem like an easy thing to pull off.
- dennis_moore 6y agoI'm not saying it isn't, but these organisms evolved over millions of years to adapt to these environments, whereas the extreme conditions caused by human activity are happening on a much shorter time scale, probably too short for organisms to be able to adapt.
- vaduz 6y agoIt is pretty hard to imagine any particular set of conditions short of total planetary surface destruction that would make all extremophiles go extinct - and as long there is enough of them, they will start spreading again. Any particular species, including humans that lives on Earth is unlikely to survive catastrophic changes - but life will come back and spread into the newly freed and opened niches, just as it did before multiple times.
- gcheong 6y agoMore specifically they mean human life. Almost nobody cares about an Earth incapable of supporting human life.
- Isamu 6y agoWe probably can’t destroy all life on earth either, because of the adaptations of microbes to the most inhospitable conditions. You’d have to remove the atmosphere and the oceans probably, or turn the earth into Venus. Likewise when people remark on the fragility of earth when looking at a whole earth image - no, it is we who are fragile, particularly when, as tiny as we are, we could make the earth inhospitable to us.
- 8bitsrule 6y agoCarlin had something to say about that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdSi9NW5u3E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdSi9NW5u3E
- bootlooped 6y agoIf somebody says they destroyed their car in an accident do you also point out that the car is fine and mostly in one piece, it's just totally unusable for human transportation? Everybody knows what is meant when people say this.
- aflag 6y agoThe car crash disfigured the car into something people wouldn't really call it a car anymore. However, even if earth stops supporting human life (or, more likely, greatly reduce the number of places on earth that humans can live on), no one would argue it is still a planet.
- bootlooped 6y agoI think that assertion is disproven by thinking about what junkyards are full of: cars. It doesn't matter that they can't drive anymore, or even that they may be totally missing significant parts. People still generally think of them as cars.