I've always hated this smartass retort from Carlin (who was awesome otherwise). this is indeed a pedantic distinction. there may be billions of planets like ear

I've always hated this smartass retort from Carlin (who was awesome otherwise). this is indeed a pedantic distinction. there may be billions of planets like earth around but what make it special is the life on it & we are destroying that for some imaginary 'capital' that wont matter in large scheme of things anyways. The other significant problem with this punchline is that it is still heavily human centric. we are not gonna go away without a major fight in/against biosphere. and guess what since we dont ascribe any value to it other than how its useful to us its going to take the brunt of destruction. at this point if we hold our population & resource utilzation where we are and eventually settle down to a smaller size I'd be okay with it as long as we give the rest of biosphere a chance but we all know thats not going to happen. We need to keep growing, thats the system we are in. And sure there will be some targeted geoengineering & green energy hopium for us to hang our concerns on but at the end of day we'd end up in the same place. there was a line I read somewhere that made me realize our current predicament, it goes -- if a distant civilization just looks at the rise in atmospheric greenhouse gas composition of the planet, they wont be able to tell if its a intelligent species consuming fossil fuels or a bacteria that just learnt metabolize fossils and just growing exponentially. its the same curve largely. So much for human discretion & intelligence. /rant end.