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.

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.