Comment by bmk44

7 hours ago

Reminds me of the classic George Carlin bit:

"The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?”

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bmk44

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autoexec  4 hours ago

> It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed.

Sadly this really isn't the case, and there are a lot of things we can do that will permanently fuck the planet. It can't be certain that we will kill ourselves off before we cross some tipping point that will eventually turn the Earth into just another lifeless rock in our solar system.

  • GuB-42  14 minutes ago

    We probably couldn't sterilize the earth even if the entire humanity wanted it more than anything else and threw everything it had to make it happen and then some more.

    Even destroying the entire humanity would be hard, civilization could go, we have plenty of scenarios for that, but killing every human, even the odd tribe of refugees who could survive in a cave somewhere is something else. I'd say it is the maximum extent of what our technology could do. By that I mean nuking everything we could nuke, including things like volcanoes, mass produce all the greenhouse gases, the ozone depleting ones, the poisonous ones just to release them all, have our finest biologists prepare a pandemic, we may even try to bring in some asteroids.

    To sterilize the Earth we would need to destroy all the extremophile bacteria, the tardigrades, the deep biosphere,... That's not happening. Note that we are very careful to sterilize Mars rovers, so that we don't contaminate Mars with Earth life. That's how hardy we consider life to be.

  • fuoqi  2 hours ago

    Well, "permanently fuck the planet" can be a matter of perspective. The great oxidation event "fucked up" the planet for anaerobic life, but we would not exist without it, so it was a huge blessing for us. Even human CO2 emissions could be viewed as a huge blessing for biosphere in the far future since it releases captured carbon ("the currency of life") thus significantly delaying the timeline of atmospheric CO2 depletion to levels at which photosynthesis becomes impossible.

  • conception  3 hours ago

    That seems pretty arrogant that a hundred million years or more won’t restart life back on Earth. But I also might just be ignorant. What could we do to end all life on earth and prevent future life from forming?

    • culi  3 hours ago

      Well there are some well-described scenarios of what could've happened to a hypothetical ancient life on Mars. There's some evidence suggestion methane-producing microbes may have lived on Mars 3.7 to 4.1 billion years ago that may have lead to the CO2 and hydrogen being replaced with methane, stripping away the planet's protection and leading to rapid glaciation and total extinction.

      Indeed earth has itself had a few close calls with total extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medea_hypothesis

      99.5% of life may have died during the Great Oxidation Event. 96% of all marine life may have died during the Permian–Triassic extinction event

      TBH it's no short of a miracle that we're still here.

      2 replies →

sublinear  3 hours ago

Yes, and this era of comedy is thankfully over. Carlin became quite preachy in his later years. He has way better material.