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About 250M years ago, 90% of species on Earth died during the Permian extinction.

Tragic? Perhaps. But it also created a lot of vacant niches to fill.

And not long after, the very first mammals, our ancestors, appeared.

#Life on Earth is resilient & will continue to be, whether we're part of it or not. #history #science

in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum

was just thinking about how the last 100,000 years of climate bouncing helped make us human. i'm sure it was a struggle, but creative.

what will the next 100,000 years of climate bouncing create?

it'll be rough but we are rugged.

in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum

I'd personally like us to be a part of it though
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum

I'm not sure about that. This #time, it is possible that we are about to face the possibility of a permanent #collapse. The maximum speed of evolution is much lower than the speed of climate change that is taking place.
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum

Gonna be some really fascinating plastic eating organisms in a couple hundred or thousand years (I'm not educated enough in biology to understand how long that might feasibly take). Kind of a bummer there might be like, five people left to notice them, if that.
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum

Yes, I had been thinking about that.

"New research shows the "Great Dying" was caused by global warming that left ocean animals unable to breathe...As temperatures rose and the metabolism of marine animals sped up, the warmer waters could not hold enough oxygen for them to survive. "*

/s: Rhat, and that the only known species that was as stupid as human beings to destroy its habitat was the blue algae.

What does this say about human intelligence? /s

*
https://earth.stanford.edu/news/what-caused-earths-biggest-mass-extinction

This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum

What’s tragic is the idea that humans can go ahead and induce a mass extinction event, and it’s ok bc the Earth’s long term resilience means life will only be extinct for a few hundred million years. Eesh.
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum

Life will always reboot itself via deep ocean vents.

As long as the magnetic field exists.

See Mars for when the magnetic field stops.

in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum

I wish I was convinced of this. The extinct event is too extreme - animals, plants, ocean - and Earth will be left too hot to possibly even recover from it. Humans deserve to die, but the other life did not. I am having trouble getting my mind around the scope of our dismal failure as a species. I always have..my physicist Dad taught environmental sci. in 70's. I tried a lifetime to make change happen. That was also a dismal failure.
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum

"vacant niche" sounds like a good business opportunity, for those that can make it to post-capitalism
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum

it'll be interesting since we mixed so many ecosystems together. Like mad scientists meddling evolution in strange ways.
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum

I struggle getting minimizers to understand this one the most. Climate change won't destroy the Earth, that's nearly impossible. But climate change doesn't need to destroy the Earth in order to create a bunch of problems for us. Climate change only needs to destroy the Earth's ability to sustain our entire species. That's very easy to do and is happening at an alarming rate. At this point, I believe it's inevitable; best case, half of humanity survives.
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum

Zooming out to 100,000 years and viewing the planet as just one sphere is unhelpful, since most people can’t see past their own house and won’t plan past a few weeks into the future. I think it’s unspeakably tragic that humanity has been such a terrible scourge for every part of the ecosphere and all life contained within it. I really hope no one is successful in transplanting humans to any other planet, for obvious reasons.
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum

Well, the way we are busy making it possible to have summer all year on the Poles, humans definitely will not be part of it in the future of Earth.....
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum

and we probably won’t be a part of it, the way things are going.
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum

@lisamelton I always try to use this to give the correct perspective to folks having a hard time grasping the concept and the impacts: https://mastodon.infrageeks.social/@erik/110507145243094030

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