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World faces ‘deathly silence’ of nature as wildlife disappears, warn experts
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2024
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Remember the Permian-Triassic extinction? Now THAT seemed like it doomed the planet, right? Two mass extinction events, BLAM-BLAM, back to back!
80% of marine invertebrate species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species WIPED OUT FOREVER.
Too much oxygen sometimes, too little others - that time it rained for 2 million years - the two times volcanoes froze the Earth.
Yet like the Dude, the Earth abides.
That's right. In a meager checks notes 2M years, the native floura and fauna will be back on their feet, maybe, we hope.
We're enjoying a certain degree of selection bias. We exist here because our planet did eventually recover. But this outcome wasn't predetermined.
Along the way, we may end up destroying things that are ultimately unrecoverable. The eye-sight of the trilobyte was a happy little accident no living species has yet been able to duplicate. Anerobic life has been relegated to the most remote and microscopic corners of the world. Natural longevity has degraded in younger variants and our genetic code is overloaded with failed, silenced adaptations that leave mammals more prone to cancer and other genetic defects that our historical counterparts are less frequently burdened by.
And that's assuming we aren't on an unwitting collision course with a real end game disaster - like the hyper-corrosive atmosphere of Venus or the depleted atmosphere of Mars.
What are the odds something as complex and intricate as the human brain will exist before our star goes nova and the planet is consumed in its expansion? It took us 4.5B years to get here. Crazy to toss it all out the window because some business nerds in DC and Detroit hate trains.
There is no native anything. We're ALL transitional species. OF COURSE things get destroyed that are unrecoverable. We don't have fish with armor. We don't have giant sloths with stony skin. Trilobites are ALL OVER the Fossil record. We don't have a single one today.
Let's stop trying to preserve this thin slice, this snapshot of evolution as though it were the final destination. It's not.
I like people; I'm one of them. But humans have only been here a few hundred thousand years. Life wasn't struggling to produce US. We're a (in our own minds) happy accident, produced by the opportunities afforded us in one of those earlier extinctions.
We will not be throwing away 4.5B years of evolution. We'll just be demonstrating that too much intelligence is not a successful evolutionary trait.
That's a sloppy use of the term
Yeah, we are not dooming the planet - we are dooming ourselves.