Some life, sure. We’ll extinct untold millions of species on the way out. Michael Crichton, the author of Jurassic Park, was a climate change denier, not a scientist.
Part of the damage we’re doing is triggering positive feedback loops. When we finish cooking ourselves to extinction, those feedback loops will continue to nudge the climate that same direction. We don’t know to what extent those feedback loops will warm the planet, but the extreme end of the possibilities are things like Earth becoming molten and ending even the most resilient shreds of life.
We could literally be setting the stage to end all life on Earth.
That is of course a possibility and we cannot discount it, but I think it far more likely that we wipe ourselves, and in addition a ton of other life off the planet, but there will always be some that survives. Same way that when the dinosaurs died mammals came up. Maybe they won’t be mammals. Maybe some other form of life, but it will most likely exist after us. And once we are Gone and not constantly throwing more planet warming and toxic gasses and toxic materials out into the world, the earth will slowly correct itself and disseminate that.
Right now our feedback loops are occurring because we are not really changing anything in what we do.
Right now our feedback loops are occurring because we are not really changing anything in what we do.
There’s an important distinction between the types of feedback loops. We’re dealing with positive feedback loops, which are exceptionally dangerous because they’ll just continue to spiral until something blocks them from progressing.
Our positive feedback loops occurred because we are not really changing anything in what we do. They’re occurring because they’re self-aggravating. Our continued bullshit may serve as an accelerant at this point, but it isn’t necessary for the feedback loop to continue.
Yes, historically there has always been a successor to this planet’s mass-extinction events, but we can’t really point to that as proof that some other critter will step in for the next one - outside of this planet, we’ve yet to find a single example of life, so I’d argue that evidence points to ‘life, uh, finding a way’ being a ridiculously rare exception to the universal norm of the absence of life. Life is fragile, and to the best of our knowledge, all of life’s eggs are in one basket. And we’ve set that basket on fire.
Sounds like we need to generate our own panspermia situation here… Just throw a falcon rocket atars with everything available that we have to survive and mutate onto mars. Fuck it. Let’s be space orcs up in this bitch.
Somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, life wont stop for a looooong time unless the sun explodes or the planet gets shattered by something. All life extinct will probably not happen for billions of years.
Bold to assume there will still be oceans in a millennium.
The thing about climate change is that we’ve set off positive feedback loops that we don’t fully understand - you may have noticed a trend of climate projections of “It’s gonna be pretty bad next year…” followed by “Okay, so the year happened… it was WAY worse than we expected…”. Think of things like the methane trapped under the permafrost: permafrost melts, methane releases, greenhouse happens and shit warms up a bit, more ice melts / faster, more methane is released, more greenhouse happens, etc.
Humans could all get thanos-snapped out of existence RIGHT NOW. Full and instant stop to all of our industries, all pollution… the feedback loops we’ve set into motion are still at play, and the environment will continue to get worse.
How much worse? No idea. Maybe it’ll warm up for another 10 years, plateau, then come back down to give the non-human life that didn’t get snapped out a relative paradise? But maybe those positive feedback loops will just keep cranking along, and the extreme end of that would look something like the planet going completely molten.
The TLDR is we don’t know, so assumptions for pretty much any end result are going to fall under ‘educated speculation’ at best.
Its not really speculation. The planet recovered from much worse scenarios. It was at one point just a rock of hot magma stuff. Humans will die very quickly if things get nasty but we are just very sensitive creatures. As soon as we are gone, things will continue to be weird for a couple thousand years or maybe much more, but eventually it will just stabilize again like with any other extreme period in the planets history.
The conditions will just be different in ways that are incompatible with us, but short life cycle fast evolving creatures will adapt no matter what. From a nature perspective this is just a bit of a strategy shift, because as long as there is some sort of atmosphere (which there will be without a doubt) things will just go on. Just without us.
Dude, you open with that and then hit me with two paragraphs of pure speculation.
The planet recovered from much worse scenarios.
Worse scenarios than what?
It was at one point just a rock of hot magma stuff.
Was there life then? Will life persist if Earth returns to that state? How?
Humans will die very quickly if things get nasty but we are just very sensitive creatures. As soon as we are gone, things will continue to be weird for a couple thousand years or maybe much more, but eventually it will just stabilize again like with any other extreme period in the planets history.
How?
The conditions will just be different in ways that are incompatible with us, but short life cycle fast evolving creatures will adapt no matter what.
…because?
From a nature perspective this is just a bit of a strategy shift, because as long as there is some sort of atmosphere (which there will be without a doubt)
…because?
things will just go on. Just without us.
Which things? Life? How?
I appreciate your optimism, but unless you’re a god, that isn’t going to just will this shit into happening.
It’s lasted billions of years. We may largely scour the face of the Earth clean, but archaea will hang around, hiding in the cracks, and more complex life will evolve when conditions are suitable for it
There may be no cracks for life to hide in - Earth could be on a trajectory to going molten after a million more years of exponential greenhouse effect. The positive feedback loops we’ve set in motion will persist long after our extinction.
Nah man. That’s not how that works. Look at the covid climate studies. And the 9/11 climate studies. Nature will survive humans. Shit it think humans will survive humans. Wait for mass extinction level human die offs and then you’ll see humans thrive again. (Objectively speaking)
Lots of people here seem to agree with you, but so far no one’s justified that opinion with anything other than wishful, optimistic thinking.
My stance remains that none of us, self included, have any credible insight to predict where climate change will take this planet; but that some of the potential outcomes include Earth in a state that doesn’t support even the most extreme micro-critters.
First off, I urge you to look at EPA study’s from covids stay at home restrictions and air pollution. AND 9/11s EPA study’s of grounded airplanes and pollution.
Second, the sun would have to explode for no life to be left on our planet. It’s insanely egotistical to think humans could possibly destroy an entire planets worth of life lol. A meteor 200 miles wide impacted the earth at 100 million megatons of impact pressure…the Tsar bomba the biggest nuke ever made is 54 megatons lol. It would take 2 Million Tsar bombas to even match the destruction of that meteor. AND lift still survived pretty well and moved on.
I think you need to reevaluate and requantify your beliefs because hyperbole is not your strong suit.
It’s insanely egotistical to think humans could possibly destroy an entire planets worth of life lol. A meteor 200 miles wide impacted the earth at 100 million megatons of impact pressure…the Tsar bomba the biggest nuke ever made is 54 megatons lol. It would take 2 Million Tsar bombas to even match the destruction of that meteor.
I’m tired of refuting that strawman shit. Please stop putting words into my mouth. They taste funky.
You make a strong argument against… something, probably, but I’m not sure why you’re posting it here.
No assumption is safe. We’re playing with forces we don’t understand and consistently finding the results worse than we expect. Life on Earth is a solitary speck of an exception to the norm we’ve found literally everywhere else, which is the complete absence of life.
There is certainly life on Earth more resilient than humans, but even the most hardy of extremophiles have their limit. We cannot claim that our damage to this planet will reverse before that limit is reached. It might, but we have no basis to say it will.
If you look at how much the climate has changed over the last billion years (or heck, the last 3.5) and the events that have happened, it’s tough to imagine life not surviving handily even if a lot of species go extinct.
What we’re doing is going to be traumatic , but it’s nothing like, say, the absolute decimation of life 65 million years ago, etc. And life flourished again not long after.
It actually feels kind of conceited to me to think that we’re even capable of wiping out all life on the planet. Even if full on, worldwide nuclear war l with our entire arsenal broke out, I wouldn’t expect it.
What we’re doing is a 5-alarm fire for us, but for the planet it will be a blip.
We’d be able to create megastructures to shield or replenish the water by then. Whatever the “we” is then. Or just build a shit ton of orbitals, much better mass to real estate ratio.
My point is that we don’t know. It doesn’t matter if something’s hard to imagine - we don’t even understand the bits of climate change that we’ve actively measured.
It actually feels kind of conceited to me to think that we’re even capable of wiping out all life on the planet. Even if full on, worldwide nuclear war l with our entire arsenal broke out, I wouldn’t expect it.
All we did was get the ball rolling. Our destructive capability at this point is moot compared to the natural forces we’ve unleashed.
Saying life will persist is a point of faith or wishful thinking. It’s not a given. I wish it was. But of the two trillion or so galaxies in our observable universe, so far life has only ‘found a way’ on ONE rock that we’re aware of. Why would it seem conceited to express the possibility of failure for something with a success rate amounting to an anomalous blip in an otherwise 100% life-free void?
Life is fragile as fuck. Even extremophiles are fragile as fuck when we’re talking about logarithmic temperature increases fueled by a literal star and a planet with an atmosphere acting as a giant magnifying glass.
The scale of your perspective is of little importance.
There exists objective, observable evidence of the fact that life has cycled continuously throughout the existence of this planet and there is none to suggest that this will change at any significant point in the future.
The ONLY data on the earth warming as quickly as it is, is the data we’re gathering right now as shatter record after record. We don’t know where these positive feedback loops end, or how any life will handle it.
How life did during the ice age or dino-meteor etc doesn’t mean shit - we have zero examples to pull from that are comparable to what’s happening right now.
We cannot claim that our damage to this planet will reverse before that limit is reached. It might, but we have no basis to say it will.
I just got to this part and that’s a resounding no, even if we dedicated all our resources to it, we couldn’t literally sterilize Earth. I can’t even think of a cosmological event in the next million years that would have this effect.
Earth will be just fine. We will likely be gone by then, but there will be life and it will do just fine. You are seriously lacking knowledge and sense of scale of Earth and the ecosystem and life on a broad scale. Go back to start and try again.
Eh, a million years is a blink in geological history, we have no record in the long, long, long stretch of time before us of earth no longer being able to sustain life, as evident by our being here typing comments on the internet, so it would be WILDLY surprising if this all came to an end right now. (The next million years is “right now” in geological time.)
In about 70 million years we might be ready to talk issues with the carbon cycle, but for the next geological “hour” we’ll likely be facing the same issues as always. Short of a nearby supernova or other event that will cook Earth below the crust, or a collision with a small planetoid, I can’t think of anything that will sterilize Earth anytime soon.
Skim my other posts in this conversation if you want the full reasoning, but the summary is we’ve set off positive feedback loops that are warming the climate at a rate that keeps catching us off guard because we don’t know what the fuck we’re dealing with. Because we don’t know what we’re dealing with, we don’t know what will end those positive feedback loops, so the extreme end of worse-case-scenario is Earth gets better and better at soaking up the sun’s energy - heat increases enough and things like oceans evaporating start to happen; more heat, the crust start to melt.
There comes a point in all of that where even the most resilient of life finally dies off. You can’t just count on adaptation/evolution when the planet is made of boiling iron.
…people keep talking about things like nuclear war scrubbing the surface and extremophiles eventually emerging as the next batch of like to take the reigns… Earth’s combined nuclear arsenal is barely a spark compared to the forces at play here - which is a literal star, and a planet’s increasingly efficient ability to soak up that star’s rays.
This is unlike any previous mass extinction event we’re aware of - the only data we have is what’s unfolding in real time, so there is no basis to any assumption, good or bad.
That worse case scenario is as much speculation on my part as the prevailing “life, uh, finds a way” sentiment, but I’m having a hell of a time convincing anyone here that NONE of us knows shit. People seem to think life will prevail no matter what, but that’s just blind optimism.
Well, you are correct that Earth’s nuclear weapons are literally a poofing fart compared to the energy we could potentially get from the sun, and we do have precedent for the sun creating extremely hostile conditions due to greenhouse gasses in one of our nearest neighbors, Venus.
But we need to examine what we’re talking about here specifically. I am not a geophysicist so I don’t have the numbers, but in order for your “concern” to have teeth you would need to show that there’s anything we can do here and no or even in the next thousand years that could change the nature of Earth’s atmosphere enough to replicate the kinds of conditions that created Venus’s current conditions.
And not only that, you need to compare what we could possibly do, even intentionally, that would come remotely close to some of the other greenhouse heating events that we’ve experienced in the past, and we’ve had some real doozies. We’ve had Earth heat up to scorching conditions from the planet turning inside-out several times, we’ve had Earth become a giant ice-ball. We’ve had impacts in the distant past that make the Chicxulub impactor look like a bottle-rocket misfire. And still, Earth regained equilibrium enough to support life. Over the last 4.5 billion years or so it doesn’t appear we’ve experienced anything that turned Earth’s surface and subsurface hostile to all forms of life, so it’s pretty safe to say that unless we start deliberately steering planetoids into our crust, which isn’t out of the question knowing our warlike ways, we’re probably not going to unintentionally create Venus-like conditions on Earth.
And of course we have to address the fact that we’re not even sure if Venus is sterile, there are increasing signs of bacterial life in the atmosphere so it’s quite possible that once life gets a foothold it may be incredibly hard to dislodge.
This isn’t an argument against the serious threat that we pose to the ecosystem, or to say that we’re not in extreme danger of ruining the current biosphere of the planet, we are in fact in the middle of a human-made mass-extinction. It’s not good. Our worst-case scenario sees a planet completely devoid of ice, no clouds, an atmosphere that consists of a hot haze that heat can’t escape from for thousands of years and an ecosystem collapse killing off most land animals. But it won’t be the end of life. Just another setback.
This is important to make clear because truth is important, speculation is not helpful when it points out unlikely extremes, it gives ammunition to deniers when you proclaim factually improbable extremes. Things are absolutely going to get bad, but there’s no reason at all to hype it to an extreme or you shoot yourself and your cause in the face.
Here’s the discussion I was after!! Seriously, thank you! 🍻
Mixing and matching a bit, but this seems like a good thing to start on:
This is important to make clear because truth is important, speculation is not helpful
Speculation is all any of us are doing - that’s what I keep trying to hammer home.
Life has endured a lot, but that does NOT mean it can endure anything. Folks here have a blind faith that it can, and blind faith gets under my skin.
But we need to examine what we’re talking about here specifically.
Self-admitted speculation on my part; speculation conflated as fact from just about everyone else.
in order for your “concern” to have teeth you would need to show that there’s anything we can do here and no or even in the next thousand years that could change the nature of Earth’s atmosphere enough to replicate the kinds of conditions that created Venus’s current conditions.
Why? My only real claim is that we don’t know shit. I’ve hypothesized a range, based on our lack of understanding, spanning from “everything will self-correct and life will be hunky-dory” to “our atmosphere is doing the magnifying-glass thing, and the sun is plenty capable of cranking out enough energy over the course of a million years to melt Earth thoroughly enough that it doesn’t support life”
Others are making the claim that life WILL be fine. You’ve done the most to defend that claim (again, thank you!!) but for some reason folks seem to expect the burden of proof to fall on me for pointing out that a huge array of things could happen vs their claim that one specific thing will happen.
The ‘teeth’ of my concern stems from the exponential nature of the temperature increase we’re seeing; the myriad of climate articles about “we thought the last year was gonna be bad, but not this bad!!”; and the presence of positive feedback loops (which I haven’t actually defined, and it just donned on me that that term might be causing some miscommunication here, so just in case: “positive” doesn’t mean “good” or anything. A positive feedback loop is one that produces an effect that makes the next ‘loop’ even more severe than the previous, which makes a stronger effect that bumps up the next loop and so on. They’re self-aggravating until some other force cuts the process off. Most of the ones I’m familiar with are physiologic, and they tend to be super dangerous. An environmental example would be that permafrost traps methane; heat melts permafrost; methane releases and does its greenhouse thing; greenhouse thing leads to more heat; permafrost melts faster; methane releases faster; climate warms faster; permafrost melts; methane releases; climate warms; melt; release; warm; etc. It does this until there’s no permafrost left to melt, no methane left to release, or something happens that actively interrupts the cycle like some kind of terraforming or weird space shit that somehow gets something tidally locked between the Earth and the sun that cuts off our supply of heat… in which case we’ve now got an even bigger fish to fry).
We’ve had Earth heat up to scorching conditions from the planet turning inside-out several times
Now that is relevant to what we’re talking about! My question is the extent of turning inside out - was there life before hand that survived the process, or did it form after the fact? If the former, were there pockets of relatively unaffected ‘safe spots’ for life to wait out the worst, or did it somehow survive the planet being completely/uniformly molten? I know there’s life that can survive extreme temperatures, but are things like molten iron within those survivable temps?
You mentioned a few other ‘doozies’ but I don’t see the relevance of those ones other than to showcase life’s resilience… which is great, but again that doesn’t make it absolute. I’d point to the rest of the observable universe as contrary evidence. We have a sample size of exactly ONE planet out of trillions that we’re sure there’s life on. The conditions for life to exist relative to what the universe is capable of dishing out… that sweet spot is tiny! I just can’t wrap my head around why I getting so much heat for suggesting a literal star is capable of nudging a planet out of that range.
And of course we have to address the fact that we’re not even sure if Venus is sterile, there are increasing signs of bacterial life in the atmosphere so it’s quite possible that once life gets a foothold it may be incredibly hard to dislodge.
Definitely an intriguing point, but even giving that the benefit of the doubt and assuming there’s microbes in Venus’s atmosphere, is that a guarantee that microbes will persist on Earth’s? If shit gets hot enough to sterilize life through and beneath the crust, I wouldn’t have high hopes for atmospheric critters surviving the beating.
speculation is not helpful when it points out unlikely extremes, it gives ammunition to deniers when you proclaim factually improbable extremes. Things are absolutely going to get bad, but there’s no reason at all to hype it to an extreme or you shoot yourself and your cause in the face.
With you there… although, I can’t see humanity actually getting ourselves out of this one. I’ll vote and act according to preservation, but… even as bad as we can credibly predict things will get, we aren’t really doing shit to stop it. Looking again to positive feedback loops, our limited power might have been in not unleashing them… But now? We’re fucked.
![Remember Humans? [War and Peas]](https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/932/286/752/215/715/original/9f56f9fffe247894.jpg){kind=link}
Bold to assume this planet will still support life in a millennium.
In the words of a famous scientist, “Life, uh, finds a way.”
Some life, sure. We’ll extinct untold millions of species on the way out. Michael Crichton, the author of Jurassic Park, was a climate change denier, not a scientist.
To be fair, most people were in the 90s.
Mathematician.
Well… until it doesn’t.
Eh. We’re making the planet uninhabitable for us, not for all life necessarily.
Part of the damage we’re doing is triggering positive feedback loops. When we finish cooking ourselves to extinction, those feedback loops will continue to nudge the climate that same direction. We don’t know to what extent those feedback loops will warm the planet, but the extreme end of the possibilities are things like Earth becoming molten and ending even the most resilient shreds of life.
We could literally be setting the stage to end all life on Earth.
That is of course a possibility and we cannot discount it, but I think it far more likely that we wipe ourselves, and in addition a ton of other life off the planet, but there will always be some that survives. Same way that when the dinosaurs died mammals came up. Maybe they won’t be mammals. Maybe some other form of life, but it will most likely exist after us. And once we are Gone and not constantly throwing more planet warming and toxic gasses and toxic materials out into the world, the earth will slowly correct itself and disseminate that.
Right now our feedback loops are occurring because we are not really changing anything in what we do.
There’s an important distinction between the types of feedback loops. We’re dealing with positive feedback loops, which are exceptionally dangerous because they’ll just continue to spiral until something blocks them from progressing.
Our positive feedback loops occurred because we are not really changing anything in what we do. They’re occurring because they’re self-aggravating. Our continued bullshit may serve as an accelerant at this point, but it isn’t necessary for the feedback loop to continue.
Yes, historically there has always been a successor to this planet’s mass-extinction events, but we can’t really point to that as proof that some other critter will step in for the next one - outside of this planet, we’ve yet to find a single example of life, so I’d argue that evidence points to ‘life, uh, finding a way’ being a ridiculously rare exception to the universal norm of the absence of life. Life is fragile, and to the best of our knowledge, all of life’s eggs are in one basket. And we’ve set that basket on fire.
Sounds like we need to generate our own panspermia situation here… Just throw a falcon rocket atars with everything available that we have to survive and mutate onto mars. Fuck it. Let’s be space orcs up in this bitch.
Somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, life wont stop for a looooong time unless the sun explodes or the planet gets shattered by something. All life extinct will probably not happen for billions of years.
Bold to assume there will still be oceans in a millennium.
The thing about climate change is that we’ve set off positive feedback loops that we don’t fully understand - you may have noticed a trend of climate projections of “It’s gonna be pretty bad next year…” followed by “Okay, so the year happened… it was WAY worse than we expected…”. Think of things like the methane trapped under the permafrost: permafrost melts, methane releases, greenhouse happens and shit warms up a bit, more ice melts / faster, more methane is released, more greenhouse happens, etc.
Humans could all get thanos-snapped out of existence RIGHT NOW. Full and instant stop to all of our industries, all pollution… the feedback loops we’ve set into motion are still at play, and the environment will continue to get worse.
How much worse? No idea. Maybe it’ll warm up for another 10 years, plateau, then come back down to give the non-human life that didn’t get snapped out a relative paradise? But maybe those positive feedback loops will just keep cranking along, and the extreme end of that would look something like the planet going completely molten.
The TLDR is we don’t know, so assumptions for pretty much any end result are going to fall under ‘educated speculation’ at best.
Its not really speculation. The planet recovered from much worse scenarios. It was at one point just a rock of hot magma stuff. Humans will die very quickly if things get nasty but we are just very sensitive creatures. As soon as we are gone, things will continue to be weird for a couple thousand years or maybe much more, but eventually it will just stabilize again like with any other extreme period in the planets history.
The conditions will just be different in ways that are incompatible with us, but short life cycle fast evolving creatures will adapt no matter what. From a nature perspective this is just a bit of a strategy shift, because as long as there is some sort of atmosphere (which there will be without a doubt) things will just go on. Just without us.
Dude, you open with that and then hit me with two paragraphs of pure speculation.
Worse scenarios than what?
Was there life then? Will life persist if Earth returns to that state? How?
How?
…because?
…because?
Which things? Life? How?
I appreciate your optimism, but unless you’re a god, that isn’t going to just will this shit into happening.
It’s lasted billions of years. We may largely scour the face of the Earth clean, but archaea will hang around, hiding in the cracks, and more complex life will evolve when conditions are suitable for it
There may be no cracks for life to hide in - Earth could be on a trajectory to going molten after a million more years of exponential greenhouse effect. The positive feedback loops we’ve set in motion will persist long after our extinction.
Nah man. That’s not how that works. Look at the covid climate studies. And the 9/11 climate studies. Nature will survive humans. Shit it think humans will survive humans. Wait for mass extinction level human die offs and then you’ll see humans thrive again. (Objectively speaking)
Lots of people here seem to agree with you, but so far no one’s justified that opinion with anything other than wishful, optimistic thinking.
My stance remains that none of us, self included, have any credible insight to predict where climate change will take this planet; but that some of the potential outcomes include Earth in a state that doesn’t support even the most extreme micro-critters.
First off, I urge you to look at EPA study’s from covids stay at home restrictions and air pollution. AND 9/11s EPA study’s of grounded airplanes and pollution.
Second, the sun would have to explode for no life to be left on our planet. It’s insanely egotistical to think humans could possibly destroy an entire planets worth of life lol. A meteor 200 miles wide impacted the earth at 100 million megatons of impact pressure…the Tsar bomba the biggest nuke ever made is 54 megatons lol. It would take 2 Million Tsar bombas to even match the destruction of that meteor. AND lift still survived pretty well and moved on.
I think you need to reevaluate and requantify your beliefs because hyperbole is not your strong suit.
I’m tired of refuting that strawman shit. Please stop putting words into my mouth. They taste funky.
You make a strong argument against… something, probably, but I’m not sure why you’re posting it here.
It’ll support plenty of life.
Maybe not many of us.
No assumption is safe. We’re playing with forces we don’t understand and consistently finding the results worse than we expect. Life on Earth is a solitary speck of an exception to the norm we’ve found literally everywhere else, which is the complete absence of life.
There is certainly life on Earth more resilient than humans, but even the most hardy of extremophiles have their limit. We cannot claim that our damage to this planet will reverse before that limit is reached. It might, but we have no basis to say it will.
If you look at how much the climate has changed over the last billion years (or heck, the last 3.5) and the events that have happened, it’s tough to imagine life not surviving handily even if a lot of species go extinct.
What we’re doing is going to be traumatic , but it’s nothing like, say, the absolute decimation of life 65 million years ago, etc. And life flourished again not long after.
It actually feels kind of conceited to me to think that we’re even capable of wiping out all life on the planet. Even if full on, worldwide nuclear war l with our entire arsenal broke out, I wouldn’t expect it.
What we’re doing is a 5-alarm fire for us, but for the planet it will be a blip.
Yeah even full on nuclear war won’t be as bad as the big asteroid 65 million years ago. Life will be fine for the next 1.5 billion years until all the water evaporates.
Once water starts getting even a little sparse for everyone I fear shit is gonna go off the rails quick
We’d be able to create megastructures to shield or replenish the water by then. Whatever the “we” is then. Or just build a shit ton of orbitals, much better mass to real estate ratio.
My point is that we don’t know. It doesn’t matter if something’s hard to imagine - we don’t even understand the bits of climate change that we’ve actively measured.
All we did was get the ball rolling. Our destructive capability at this point is moot compared to the natural forces we’ve unleashed.
Saying life will persist is a point of faith or wishful thinking. It’s not a given. I wish it was. But of the two trillion or so galaxies in our observable universe, so far life has only ‘found a way’ on ONE rock that we’re aware of. Why would it seem conceited to express the possibility of failure for something with a success rate amounting to an anomalous blip in an otherwise 100% life-free void?
Life is fragile as fuck. Even extremophiles are fragile as fuck when we’re talking about logarithmic temperature increases fueled by a literal star and a planet with an atmosphere acting as a giant magnifying glass.
By all accounts life on this planet isn’t special.
It’ll be fine. We won’t.
This planet is the one and ONLY account of life. That makes it pretty special imo.
And also makes it apparent how ridiculously the odds are stacked against life.
The scale of your perspective is of little importance.
There exists objective, observable evidence of the fact that life has cycled continuously throughout the existence of this planet and there is none to suggest that this will change at any significant point in the future.
The ONLY data on the earth warming as quickly as it is, is the data we’re gathering right now as shatter record after record. We don’t know where these positive feedback loops end, or how any life will handle it.
How life did during the ice age or dino-meteor etc doesn’t mean shit - we have zero examples to pull from that are comparable to what’s happening right now.
No
I just got to this part and that’s a resounding no, even if we dedicated all our resources to it, we couldn’t literally sterilize Earth. I can’t even think of a cosmological event in the next million years that would have this effect.
Earth will be just fine. We will likely be gone by then, but there will be life and it will do just fine. You are seriously lacking knowledge and sense of scale of Earth and the ecosystem and life on a broad scale. Go back to start and try again.
Ecclesiastes 1:4 — “Men go and come, but earth abides.”
(also a great SciFi book under the same name)
Eh, a million years is a blink in geological history, we have no record in the long, long, long stretch of time before us of earth no longer being able to sustain life, as evident by our being here typing comments on the internet, so it would be WILDLY surprising if this all came to an end right now. (The next million years is “right now” in geological time.)
In about 70 million years we might be ready to talk issues with the carbon cycle, but for the next geological “hour” we’ll likely be facing the same issues as always. Short of a nearby supernova or other event that will cook Earth below the crust, or a collision with a small planetoid, I can’t think of anything that will sterilize Earth anytime soon.
…kinda what we’re talking about tho.
Explain.
Skim my other posts in this conversation if you want the full reasoning, but the summary is we’ve set off positive feedback loops that are warming the climate at a rate that keeps catching us off guard because we don’t know what the fuck we’re dealing with. Because we don’t know what we’re dealing with, we don’t know what will end those positive feedback loops, so the extreme end of worse-case-scenario is Earth gets better and better at soaking up the sun’s energy - heat increases enough and things like oceans evaporating start to happen; more heat, the crust start to melt.
There comes a point in all of that where even the most resilient of life finally dies off. You can’t just count on adaptation/evolution when the planet is made of boiling iron.
…people keep talking about things like nuclear war scrubbing the surface and extremophiles eventually emerging as the next batch of like to take the reigns… Earth’s combined nuclear arsenal is barely a spark compared to the forces at play here - which is a literal star, and a planet’s increasingly efficient ability to soak up that star’s rays.
This is unlike any previous mass extinction event we’re aware of - the only data we have is what’s unfolding in real time, so there is no basis to any assumption, good or bad.
That worse case scenario is as much speculation on my part as the prevailing “life, uh, finds a way” sentiment, but I’m having a hell of a time convincing anyone here that NONE of us knows shit. People seem to think life will prevail no matter what, but that’s just blind optimism.
tldr,
My take: things might be bad.
The rest of Lemmy’s take: things will be fine.
Well, you are correct that Earth’s nuclear weapons are literally a poofing fart compared to the energy we could potentially get from the sun, and we do have precedent for the sun creating extremely hostile conditions due to greenhouse gasses in one of our nearest neighbors, Venus.
But we need to examine what we’re talking about here specifically. I am not a geophysicist so I don’t have the numbers, but in order for your “concern” to have teeth you would need to show that there’s anything we can do here and no or even in the next thousand years that could change the nature of Earth’s atmosphere enough to replicate the kinds of conditions that created Venus’s current conditions.
And not only that, you need to compare what we could possibly do, even intentionally, that would come remotely close to some of the other greenhouse heating events that we’ve experienced in the past, and we’ve had some real doozies. We’ve had Earth heat up to scorching conditions from the planet turning inside-out several times, we’ve had Earth become a giant ice-ball. We’ve had impacts in the distant past that make the Chicxulub impactor look like a bottle-rocket misfire. And still, Earth regained equilibrium enough to support life. Over the last 4.5 billion years or so it doesn’t appear we’ve experienced anything that turned Earth’s surface and subsurface hostile to all forms of life, so it’s pretty safe to say that unless we start deliberately steering planetoids into our crust, which isn’t out of the question knowing our warlike ways, we’re probably not going to unintentionally create Venus-like conditions on Earth.
And of course we have to address the fact that we’re not even sure if Venus is sterile, there are increasing signs of bacterial life in the atmosphere so it’s quite possible that once life gets a foothold it may be incredibly hard to dislodge.
This isn’t an argument against the serious threat that we pose to the ecosystem, or to say that we’re not in extreme danger of ruining the current biosphere of the planet, we are in fact in the middle of a human-made mass-extinction. It’s not good. Our worst-case scenario sees a planet completely devoid of ice, no clouds, an atmosphere that consists of a hot haze that heat can’t escape from for thousands of years and an ecosystem collapse killing off most land animals. But it won’t be the end of life. Just another setback.
This is important to make clear because truth is important, speculation is not helpful when it points out unlikely extremes, it gives ammunition to deniers when you proclaim factually improbable extremes. Things are absolutely going to get bad, but there’s no reason at all to hype it to an extreme or you shoot yourself and your cause in the face.
Here’s the discussion I was after!! Seriously, thank you! 🍻
Mixing and matching a bit, but this seems like a good thing to start on:
Speculation is all any of us are doing - that’s what I keep trying to hammer home.
Life has endured a lot, but that does NOT mean it can endure anything. Folks here have a blind faith that it can, and blind faith gets under my skin.
Self-admitted speculation on my part; speculation conflated as fact from just about everyone else.
Why? My only real claim is that we don’t know shit. I’ve hypothesized a range, based on our lack of understanding, spanning from “everything will self-correct and life will be hunky-dory” to “our atmosphere is doing the magnifying-glass thing, and the sun is plenty capable of cranking out enough energy over the course of a million years to melt Earth thoroughly enough that it doesn’t support life”
Others are making the claim that life WILL be fine. You’ve done the most to defend that claim (again, thank you!!) but for some reason folks seem to expect the burden of proof to fall on me for pointing out that a huge array of things could happen vs their claim that one specific thing will happen.
The ‘teeth’ of my concern stems from the exponential nature of the temperature increase we’re seeing; the myriad of climate articles about “we thought the last year was gonna be bad, but not this bad!!”; and the presence of positive feedback loops (which I haven’t actually defined, and it just donned on me that that term might be causing some miscommunication here, so just in case: “positive” doesn’t mean “good” or anything. A positive feedback loop is one that produces an effect that makes the next ‘loop’ even more severe than the previous, which makes a stronger effect that bumps up the next loop and so on. They’re self-aggravating until some other force cuts the process off. Most of the ones I’m familiar with are physiologic, and they tend to be super dangerous. An environmental example would be that permafrost traps methane; heat melts permafrost; methane releases and does its greenhouse thing; greenhouse thing leads to more heat; permafrost melts faster; methane releases faster; climate warms faster; permafrost melts; methane releases; climate warms; melt; release; warm; etc. It does this until there’s no permafrost left to melt, no methane left to release, or something happens that actively interrupts the cycle like some kind of terraforming or weird space shit that somehow gets something tidally locked between the Earth and the sun that cuts off our supply of heat… in which case we’ve now got an even bigger fish to fry).
Now that is relevant to what we’re talking about! My question is the extent of turning inside out - was there life before hand that survived the process, or did it form after the fact? If the former, were there pockets of relatively unaffected ‘safe spots’ for life to wait out the worst, or did it somehow survive the planet being completely/uniformly molten? I know there’s life that can survive extreme temperatures, but are things like molten iron within those survivable temps?
You mentioned a few other ‘doozies’ but I don’t see the relevance of those ones other than to showcase life’s resilience… which is great, but again that doesn’t make it absolute. I’d point to the rest of the observable universe as contrary evidence. We have a sample size of exactly ONE planet out of trillions that we’re sure there’s life on. The conditions for life to exist relative to what the universe is capable of dishing out… that sweet spot is tiny! I just can’t wrap my head around why I getting so much heat for suggesting a literal star is capable of nudging a planet out of that range.
Definitely an intriguing point, but even giving that the benefit of the doubt and assuming there’s microbes in Venus’s atmosphere, is that a guarantee that microbes will persist on Earth’s? If shit gets hot enough to sterilize life through and beneath the crust, I wouldn’t have high hopes for atmospheric critters surviving the beating.
With you there… although, I can’t see humanity actually getting ourselves out of this one. I’ll vote and act according to preservation, but… even as bad as we can credibly predict things will get, we aren’t really doing shit to stop it. Looking again to positive feedback loops, our limited power might have been in not unleashing them… But now? We’re fucked.
One millennium. More millennia.
Oh, gracias! Fixed.
Silly.