Concerning: "Why have none of these massive events just turned the planet into a dead world?". Among other rationales: survivorship bias / anthropic principl

Concerning: "Why have none of these massive events just turned the planet into a dead world?". Among other rationales: survivorship bias / anthropic principle. Of all the worlds in which a mass extinction event has wiped out all life prior to the emergence of a technologically-advanced species, there would be no (indegenous) witnesses to the fact. We are only here to ponder that question because utter annihilation did not occur. You can make a similar argument about any catastrophic risk/event, and I was delighted to discover a few years ago that Richard Posner (former US federal judge) did just that: By definition, all but the last doomsday prediction is false. Yet it does not follow, as many seem to think, that all doomsday predictions must be false; what follow is only that all such predictions but one are false. -Richard A. Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response, p. 13. <https://archive.org/details/catastropheriskr00posn/page/13/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/catastropheriskr00posn/page/13/m...> (Previously mentioned: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34647615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34647615>). There are of course other points to be argued, including the resilience of life and its (possible) capacity to re-emerge multiple times. I suspect this was the case in the history of the early Earth, though of course there is vanishingly small prospect of finding any evidence of such an event. Once life did become widespread (~3--3.5 bya) it does seem to have had remarkable tenacity.