5 ms·
That book really hit home for me the insignificance of human versus planetary timescales. For all our handwringing about global warming, we're actually in an i
by jimmyvalmer 5y ago
That book really hit home for me the insignificance of human versus
planetary timescales. For all our handwringing about global warming,
we're actually in an ice age. Even if we solve climate change, the
earth will continue to witness unfathomably long geologic eras long
after we're gone.
- tehjoker 5y agoYes and no. The planet is middle aged. If we burn everything down to nothing again, the Earth only has one or two regenerative cycles left (where it can go from simple organisms up to things as complex as mammals again based on how long that took) in it before the sun's slow increase in brightness evaporates the oceans making complex life impossible in about 1.1 billion years. We can really do some damage to the lifecycle of this planet. It took about 2 billion years to go from RNA world to today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth#Loss_of_oceans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth#Loss_of_oceans
- jimmyvalmer 5y agoCall me an anthropomorphic narcissist, but I can barely manage concern for my descendants a hundred years from now, much less the carbon-based morlocks scampering around a hundred thousand years from now.
- tehjoker 5y agoWhile it seems likely life is located elsewhere in the universe, it seems to me we should be good stewards of the one little mote of dust where we know for sure it exists.
- jimmyvalmer 5y agoI don't have a particularly good grip on how long a million years is, but I suspect it's still better than yours. A million years is less than a week in the Earth's lifetime. The virus of humanity can do its darnedest but the planet isnt going to remember a mild cold.