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.
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.
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.
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.
or other event that will cook Earth below the crust
…kinda what we’re talking about tho.