Comment by nostrademons
8 years ago
We're not, actually:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/the-ends...
I used to think that we were, and when I read that article, I kept looking for flaws in its logic or counterexamples in other press. But ultimately, it interviews a real expert, and his logic is correct: we're drawn to flashy apex predators at the top of the food web, but these species spring in and out of existence all the time, and when it comes to the fossil record, they're barely a blip. If we were actually in a mass extinction, we would be worrying about cockroaches, ants, and seaweed going extinct, not tigers and rhinos. And of course, we wouldn't be here to observe it.
That's not an argument to completely fuck up the environment, since, like I mentioned, we'll be the first to go and most people have some sense of self-preservation, let alone preservation of the human species. It is a reminder of just how insignificant we actually are on a planetary scale, and of how our cognitive biases often lead us to think that we are more important or more powerful than we actually are.
Okay.
> “I think that if we keep things up long enough, we’ll get to a mass extinction, but we’re not in a mass extinction yet, and I think that’s an optimistic discovery because that means we actually have time to avoid Armageddon,” he said. [...]
> “The only hope we have in the future,” Erwin said, “is if we’re not in a mass extinction event.”
* * *
I guess it’s a bit fuzzy where you draw the line. Perhaps mass extinction is not an inevitability and concerted global action or some technological breakthroughs could still save us, but it has an uncomfortably high likelihood considering how bad humans are at staving off uncertain long-term threats.
It's maybe worth drawing a distinction between things like "species extinction" versus "civilization collapse" and "massive reduction in carrying capacity".
I think it is much easier to have one or both of the latter outcomes in the med term (the next few hundred years, say) without it necessarily ending in human extinction.
Yeah. There's a whole hierarchy from "inconvenient weather" to "natural disasters" to "cities wiped off the map" to "civilization collapse" to "all civilization collapses" to "we're back in the stone age" to "humanity goes extinct" to "vertebrates go extinct" to "almost everything goes extinct" to "earth can no longer support life as we know it". Each level is a couple orders of magnitude more severe than the last, and each level is a couple orders of magnitude less likely.
The first is already happening. The second is highly likely. #3 and 4 are possible, but beginning to strain the bounds of likelihood. Somehow whenever global warming comes up people tend to jump to the last level, ignoring all the other steps and the massive reduction in complexity that has to happen without adaptation from any other lifeform for us to get there.