this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2024
857 points (97.6% liked)
Comic Strips
13109 readers
2541 users here now
Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
The rules are simple:
- The post can be a single image, an image gallery, or a link to a specific comic hosted on another site (the author's website, for instance).
- The comic must be a complete story.
- If it is an external link, it must be to a specific story, not to the root of the site.
- You may post comics from others or your own.
- If you are posting a comic of your own, a maximum of one per week is allowed (I know, your comics are great, but this rule helps avoid spam).
- The comic can be in any language, but if it's not in English, OP must include an English translation in the post's 'body' field (note: you don't need to select a specific language when posting a comic).
- Politeness.
- Adult content is not allowed. This community aims to be fun for people of all ages.
Web of links
- [email protected]: "I use Arch btw"
- [email protected]: memes (you don't say!)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Bold to assume this planet will still support life in a millennium.
In the words of a famous scientist, "Life, uh, finds a way."
Well... until it doesn't.
Eh. We're making the planet uninhabitable for us, not for all life necessarily.
Part of the damage we're doing is triggering positive feedback loops. When we finish cooking ourselves to extinction, those feedback loops will continue to nudge the climate that same direction. We don't know to what extent those feedback loops will warm the planet, but the extreme end of the possibilities are things like Earth becoming molten and ending even the most resilient shreds of life.
We could literally be setting the stage to end all life on Earth.
That is of course a possibility and we cannot discount it, but I think it far more likely that we wipe ourselves, and in addition a ton of other life off the planet, but there will always be some that survives. Same way that when the dinosaurs died mammals came up. Maybe they won't be mammals. Maybe some other form of life, but it will most likely exist after us. And once we are Gone and not constantly throwing more planet warming and toxic gasses and toxic materials out into the world, the earth will slowly correct itself and disseminate that.
Right now our feedback loops are occurring because we are not really changing anything in what we do.
There's an important distinction between the types of feedback loops. We're dealing with positive feedback loops, which are exceptionally dangerous because they'll just continue to spiral until something blocks them from progressing.
Our positive feedback loops occurred because we are not really changing anything in what we do. They're occurring because they're self-aggravating. Our continued bullshit may serve as an accelerant at this point, but it isn't necessary for the feedback loop to continue.
Yes, historically there has always been a successor to this planet's mass-extinction events, but we can't really point to that as proof that some other critter will step in for the next one - outside of this planet, we've yet to find a single example of life, so I'd argue that evidence points to 'life, uh, finding a way' being a ridiculously rare exception to the universal norm of the absence of life. Life is fragile, and to the best of our knowledge, all of life's eggs are in one basket. And we've set that basket on fire.
Sounds like we need to generate our own panspermia situation here... Just throw a falcon rocket atars with everything available that we have to survive and mutate onto mars. Fuck it. Let's be space orcs up in this bitch.