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this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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Biodiversity
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Welcome to c/Biodiversity @ Mander.xyz!
A community about the variety of life on Earth at all levels; including plants, animals, bacteria, and fungi.
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Biodiversity is a term used to describe the enormous variety of life on Earth. It can be used more specifically to refer to all of the species in one region or ecosystem. Biodiversity refers to every living thing, including plants, bacteria, animals, and humans. Scientists have estimated that there are around 8.7 million species of plants and animals in existence. However, only around 1.2 million species have been identified and described so far, most of which are insects. This means that millions of other organisms remain a complete mystery.
Over generations, all of the species that are currently alive today have evolved unique traits that make them distinct from other species. These differences are what scientists use to tell one species from another. Organisms that have evolved to be so different from one another that they can no longer reproduce with each other are considered different species. All organisms that can reproduce with each other fall into one species. Read more...
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Fifty thousand years from now, when humanity clings to existence near the poles on an otherwise inhospitable world, those living in Antarctica will thank their ancestors for making it a lush sanctuary.
Very bold of you to assume humanity still exists in 50,000 years. It’s been 100 since industrialization and everything has already gone to shit and is only getting worse more and more rapidly.
We'll still be around. Humans are uniquely capable of surviving in a wide variety of climates, on a wide variety of diets. We may decimate the wildlife population, and billions of us may die, but humans are super good at survival.
Humanity will survive. It will be rough, trillions of people will die unnecessarily, billions more will suffer their entire lives in torment, but we'll find a way. The only thing that strives to survive even more than an animal is an intelligence with an idea of a future. Even if that's the belief in a perfect future that can never exist, even if in our ignorance we destroy the utopia we try to create, ideas and plans will never cease driving us to continue. Even if we replace ourselves as a species with something no longer human, we as an intelligence, or at least a kind of collective hive-mind of our creation, will continue to exist. The human will to stay alive will exert itself upon the depths of the universe, even if in doing so it becomes unrecognizable...