Insect die offs really scare me, so many fruits and plants are pollinated by them, or things just up the food chain from them. Then I just can’t help imagining a chain of collapse from there.
I think humans will be the last living things to go unless we engineer our own extinction early.
I think humans will be the last living things to go unless we engineer our own extinction early.
Evolution happens as long as there is life. Unless we turn the planet surface into a giant ball of lava, it is impossible to kill all life and it will continue without us. Even if there is only bacteria left after we go, they will simply evolve into complex life all over again, in fact it’s not the first time that has happened. In the grand scheme of what life has withstood on this planet, humans are a speed bump at best.
Yes, debates don’t really center on the issue of sterilizing the whole planet (fyi there are deep-rock bacteria everywhere so “just” molten surface isn’t enough), but rather on the loss we are causing.
Ie ending species that without us would have no issue evolving & continuing to be part of the ecosystems.
Also from bacterial life to complex fauna its easily a billion years (+/- a lot).
Ie ending species that without us would have no issue evolving & continuing to be part of the ecosystems.
That’s not true though. Even the animals we’ve created, like cats and dogs, can live on just fine without us. As can most small and micro herbivores like mice, rabbits, certain songbirds, and most of the “pest” insects; as well as mesopredators (middle of the food chain predators) like foxes and the aforementioned cats and dogs. Plenty of plants are asexual and do not require external pollination, including many of the invasive plants that we can’t kill despite our best efforts.
Actually, invasive species in general are a major counterexample. We’ve been trying to drive many of them to extinction, they are not going extinct. Australia is trying to kill feral cats, that’s not working. The US spends billions on herbicides against invasive plants, that’s not working and many argue that it’s doing more harm to native plants in some cases than the invasive plants themselves. They also tried to kill European sparrows and starlings which are also not working. Same with fire ants. Same with invasive fish. Same with invasive seaweed and algae.
In fact, in environmental sciences which I majored in, there is increasing discussion on whether calling species “invasive” even makes sense. Humans are also part of the ecosystem and of “nature” despite us claiming to be the masters of it. We are subject to its laws just like all other life, so if a mite can hitch a ride on a bird across the ocean and that’s considered natural migration, why shouldn’t a mouse that hitches a ride on a human boat across the ocean be considered natural migration? There is no morality in nature, it just is and everything is fair game, so we really need not worry “for nature,” we should be worrying for ourselves about losing our place in it by going extinct. Adapt or die, that’s nature’s one and only rule, so if we don’t want to die we need to adapt and clean up our act basically.
Exactly. Plus the whole underwater portion of ecology we have basically no data on (yet it’s of huge global importance). Scary, sad, infuriating stuff.
Unfortunately I too think that we will outlive our consequences for long enough to take a proper mass extinction event levels of biodiversity collapse with us.
But let’s focus on the positive - biodiversity boom between mere 10 million years from now to like 50 or 100 million years from now (which in the scheme of things isn’t that long, just very unnecessary that it will come to that for something like capital/amassing of power of one species over others of the same species).
