Destroying the Planet
-----ERIC L.-----
I always have a problem when people
say that humanity can destroy the earth. That's totally false. The earth
doesn't care what we do to it. The absolute worst we can do to the earth is
destroy ourselves and most other species, but in a few million years (or 10
million or 100 million years) things will settle down and descendants of the
surviving species will occupy the empty niches.
There have been extinction events in
the past where 95% of all species have been wiped out.
The only way to render the planet
totally lifeless would be to somehow strip away the entire atmosphere, and I
know of no way humans can do that, well at least this year.
-----JOE-----
It's
may be possible for us to create a nasty ecological positive feedback loop that
Venusizes the planet, and the potential for nanotech to grey goo us all is
terrifyingly plausible, but I agree that we're unlikely to kill the earth dead
in the short term.
However, if the
planet hasn't bred in the next 5 billion years, it's history when the sun goes
red giant on us. And by using up so much of the cheap and easy resources, we're
making the job harder -- maybe impossible -- for the next potential spacefaring
species to evolve if we muck it up and extinguish ourselves. We're the best
chance for the planet to reproduce, and we definitely have the ability to stop
ourselves from doing that. Making humanity extinct would be hard, but fragging
civilization so badly that it never recovers to the current state is all too
easy.
Filed Thu - February 16, 2006, 06:02 PM in
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