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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)
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.
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.