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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.