At least as far as I understand it today (leaving this comment in the hope that folks can help me expand my understanding)
Life on earth is not stable. We are in the final death throes of this planet. Roughly 75% of life on earth is behind us. Life has been here for 4Bn years and we have about 500m left[1] until our carbon cycles grind to a halt due to the earth moving outside of the habitable zone and all life on earth starts it’s final, and ultimate, extinction event.
This pending extinction event is not human made. It was coming regardless of whether humans evolved on this planet.
From everything I can tell, there is no making it through, let alone coming back from, this impending extinction event without “technology” that decouples life from the carbon cycles on this planet.
In 4.2bn years life on this planet has printed exactly one golden ticket for escaping that fate: humans.
We’ve done some bad things along the way to industrialization processes that can produce the technology necessary to get life off this rock - and to artificially sustain life on this rock as it becomes unsuitable for life.
But I’m not confident that the bad stuff we have done is sufficient to condemn our species and disqualify us as a suitable steward for this planet. Primarily because there is no alternative, there is no species in “second place” that I’d trust to evolve a civilization capable of getting life off this planet in the time we have left.
The eco-movements (outside of whole earth) have lost me. The calls for an immediate suspension of industrial processes, or the sentiment that life on earth would be better off if humans didn’t evolve to be what we are today, seems misplaced.
Without humans, and without our recent attempts to escape this planet, all life on earth is doomed to complete extinction.
It seems like we are in a critical several hundred year window where humans need to appreciate both that we are accelerating the end of the Holocene, a climate that was critical for the development of our civilizations, and do our best to slow that process already under way.
At the same time, we need to maintain the civilization that’s setting life on earth on an escape trajectory.
If we toss the baby with the bathwater we doom all life on earth to guaranteed extinction.
It seems to me to be incredibly arrogant to be reasoning starting from humanity as saviors of life in 500 million years.
And to say that that somehow means that the eco-movements (many of which are focused on the keeping us alive for the next few thousand years) are flawed seems wrong.
The focus put on silly Greenpeace actions and fights about nuclear in the media is part of a somewhat intentional strategy to paint all environmentalists as wrongheaded or stupid.
I’m not sure it is arrogant. Arrogant would be saying we have some divine right or special capacity that places us at the center of this.
I think we’ve gotten incredibly lucky in the last 600 years or so and have stumbled our way into a viable exit strategy for life on our planet.
We don’t necessarily deserve this role.
I think I’m well aligned that keeping life alive for the next few thousand years is absolutely necessary. We can’t do anything on a 500m year timeline if our species is wiped out in 1000 years.
But, I’d disagree with many of the seemingly “at all costs” approaches I’ve seen advocated for in my social circles (outside of the media). I’ve seen my friends adopt a “humans were a mistake” mindset over the past decade.
If we save all life on earth in the next 1000 years by ridding the planet of human civilization, we doom it to death in 500m years. Unless another species stumbles into another approach for leaving this planet, everything dies. If we are going to step down, we absolutely need to acknowledge that.
If you want to save life on earth, your plan needs to save life on earth. If you aren’t solving for these expected extinction events on these timelines, what are you solving for?
To put that another way: if you save life on earth over the next 1000 years by collapsing human civilization, you haven’t saved life on earth. You’ve doomed it to a slow death unless lightning strikes twice and cephalopods figure out how to build rockets.
I don’t think we deserve this role, we’ve lucked into it. But now that we wield the capacity to get life off of this rock, stepping down from that role on moral grounds seems… immoral. We do this because it’s what our ecosystem demands of us, not because of anything special about us but because there is no other species that can do it. The ball is in our court regardless of whether we like it or deserve it.
Oh, I certainly disagree with people who put the environment above humans. But usually I just discount such people - they "are not serious people."
> my friends adopt a “humans were a mistake” mindset over the past decade.
This is an edgy take that I see increasingly adopted by young people in cities.
Generally I try to recenter around "okay, if humans are a mistake, who would you like to kill first?" People find it easy to reason about the end of a species in the abstraction, not when it is their friends and family who either die or cannot have children because the world is in such shambles.
Agreed, I suspect we are closer to being on the same page than it originally seemed.
I’ve seen it fairly broad and wide, not just city kids but there is a concentration there.
It’s most apparent to me in the debates downstream of the “whole earth” movement. The eco movements of the previous few decades seemed to be fairly unified because tech wasn’t at a place where we could reasonably attempt to fix some of the problems humans had manifested.
Now that this tech is starting to shake out as viable, we are seeing a hard split in the eco movement.
One faction is advocating for humans to “just stop.”
The other is advocating for humans to try and solve the problems.
You see this in the de-extinction movement where eco-advocates are trying to bring back extinct keystone species that humans drove to extinction, in an attempt to restore the ecosystems we disrupted. You see serious eco-advocates shake out of the woodwork fighting the de-extinction movement on anti-human grounds.
To be fair, there are valid arguments against the de-extinction movement; but these aren’t the arguments I see most frequently.
You see the same arguments shake out for carbon capture, green energy, rocketry, colonizing other planets, etc.
I think the core of this split is that there were two currents of thought in the eco-movement that were so similar folks didn’t realize they disagreed until recently when “bringing extinct species back” became viable. One current of thought was that what humans did was bad. The other was that humans were bad.
It's just stupid Nihilism in an attempt to seem cool. It's putting lipstick on the pig of just sticking your head in the sand and ignoring the problem. There's a lot of money in ignoring the problem, so a lot of pressure by certain groups to do so.
Well if someone other than humanity wants to step up and save life I’m sure we would be okay with it but my dog still spends his time licking himself and my houseplants are not especially active so I think it’s up to us.
500 million years is longer than the time it has taken to evolve mammalian life. Assuming that no other intelligent species would ever evolve is pretty crazy, it's only taken us 200 million years. If that's an average, we could be looking at 1 to 3 other intelligent species developing on this planet alone.
It has not taken 200m years. It has taken 4.2bn years.
Every other species today has had the same 4.2bn years.
In 4.2bn years, we’ve had one successful draw of a species with sufficient intelligence born into an environment with sufficient incentives to tackle this problem (that we know of).
Saying another 1 will happen in time to thwart the pending extinction event strikes me as an aggressive gamble, let alone 3.
It has actually taken over 13 billion years if we're being pedantic. But that's not the point.
What we need to consider is the level of complexity life will be able to sustain after our annihilation. How long did it take to get to humanity from the last time life was at that level of complexity? Much less than 4.2bn years, since we likely will not be reducing life to the level of one single living cell.
Before the sun goes red we need to understand and categorize the interactions of life on earth, preferably including extinct animals as much as possible, and using that knowledge, we need to attempt to recreate it elsewhere. 2000 years ago the earth was covered with tribes and nations that had an intuitive understanding of these things, built on analogy and language. Even dredging that level of understanding up would help us today. Investigating the observations contained in that folk wisdom is often how science works. We haven’t been doing the work because industrial Ag and transportation have their own solutions which sound more appealing (as is often the case, doing the wrong thing feels easier and more fun).
I’m guessing you’re getting downvoted for not expanding on:
> Life has been here for 4Bn years and we have about 500m left until our carbon cycles grind to a halt and all life on earth starts it’s final, and ultimate, extinction event.
As far as I understand, the habitable zone in our system is not stable. It’s shifting. Between 500m and 800m years from now it’ll have moved sufficiently where our carbon cycles start grinding to a halt.
I disagree, my guess is the downvotes is for the idea that the CURRENT trajectory of industry and technology -- largely focused on converting non-renewable sources into luxuries and trinkets for humans currently alive -- has to continue uninterrupted to be the one shot humans have to go to the starts.
If we had to go to the stars in the next 50 years, sure, current industry would be our best bet.
If we (or whatever is evolved) have 500 million years, why would not environmentalists be RIGHT that we need to focus on sustainability first, and improve the odds of society not getting a huge setback?
500m is a lot of time even evolutionarily. Dinosaurs were around 245m-66m years ago. There very well may be another animal/civilization in the next 500m years that has a decent shot at escaping from earth.
This particular extinction is indeed man made. Oil companies knew of their impact and role in the seventies and close to not just suppress their knowledge but in fact funded disinformation campaigns.
See https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-a...
TL;DR the sun is expected to continue brightening, and that's likely to cause the end the carbonate-silicate cycle in a few hundred million years, which will mean the end of photosynthesis soon (for geological values of "soon") after that starts to grind to a halt. The end of photosynthesis means the end of large, complex life-forms on earth, permanently, forever, never to return.
This means that the practical end of the Earth, as far as humans are concerned, is on track not for a few billion years from now when the Sun expands—the commonly imagined end of "Earth gets charred/absorbed by the Sun"—but a few hundred million years from now. Maybe sooner for a variety of reasons, but that's likely to be the final lights-out—the upper bound—for everything but some microbes and a few lobsters around deep-sea vents or whatever. Barring some serious intervention by intelligent, technologically-advanced life, anyway.
It isn't the poster who's developed this theory. It's a matter of chemistry. It's possible life could persist, but we don't know of chemical processes that would make it possible, so we shouldn't expect that it can.
At least as far as I understand it today (leaving this comment in the hope that folks can help me expand my understanding)
Life on earth is not stable. We are in the final death throes of this planet. Roughly 75% of life on earth is behind us. Life has been here for 4Bn years and we have about 500m left[1] until our carbon cycles grind to a halt due to the earth moving outside of the habitable zone and all life on earth starts it’s final, and ultimate, extinction event.
This pending extinction event is not human made. It was coming regardless of whether humans evolved on this planet.
From everything I can tell, there is no making it through, let alone coming back from, this impending extinction event without “technology” that decouples life from the carbon cycles on this planet.
In 4.2bn years life on this planet has printed exactly one golden ticket for escaping that fate: humans.
We’ve done some bad things along the way to industrialization processes that can produce the technology necessary to get life off this rock - and to artificially sustain life on this rock as it becomes unsuitable for life.
But I’m not confident that the bad stuff we have done is sufficient to condemn our species and disqualify us as a suitable steward for this planet. Primarily because there is no alternative, there is no species in “second place” that I’d trust to evolve a civilization capable of getting life off this planet in the time we have left.
The eco-movements (outside of whole earth) have lost me. The calls for an immediate suspension of industrial processes, or the sentiment that life on earth would be better off if humans didn’t evolve to be what we are today, seems misplaced.
Without humans, and without our recent attempts to escape this planet, all life on earth is doomed to complete extinction.
It seems like we are in a critical several hundred year window where humans need to appreciate both that we are accelerating the end of the Holocene, a climate that was critical for the development of our civilizations, and do our best to slow that process already under way.
At the same time, we need to maintain the civilization that’s setting life on earth on an escape trajectory.
If we toss the baby with the bathwater we doom all life on earth to guaranteed extinction.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future