No, not really. The rate of extinction has skyrocketed above the baseline extinction rate in the last 100-200 years, and it has a very specific and known cause: human industrialization and spread.
He's presumably referring to a geologic timescale. This [1] graph is telling. There have been numerous extinction events, even before the existence of humanity. So the survival rate of species looks much more like a sine wave than it does some sort of linear graph. Life, even on a species level, is brief. It creates an interesting balance between humanity and nature. The one solution to this problem is to expand - make life multiplanetary, and not just human life. Human industrialization is certainly causing plentiful destruction, yet it will also likely be the one thing that may possibly save the lives of countless species.
So for instance the most popularly known mass extinction event was the dinosaurs, like caused by an asteroid impact some ~15km large. If there was such an asteroid on an impact course today, we could probably detect it a bit before it impacted - but not do a whole heck of a lot more. We could launch every single nuke we have and it would be like throwing baseballs at a semi-truck. By contrast when it lands, it would be the equivalent of hundreds of millions of nukes going off, and the ash of the impact would completely blot out the sky. Those who survived the initial impact would die from either starvation, freezing, or lack of oxygen as all plants and wildlife gradually died off.
Anyhow, space tech is important. And we're only able to achieve such thanks to human industrialization and spread. Paradoxical, but such is the nature of all technological progress which invariably brings problems ultimately only solved by even more advances which, again, bring their own problems. It makes life feel like a game, or maybe we just make games modeled after life.
If the goal is returning the planet to their original status of lifeless floating rock for billions of years, we are doing a spectacular job in just a glimpse of time. I can imagine how puzzling this will appear in the fossil record some millions years from now.
bmitc|2 years ago
ravetcofx|2 years ago
somenameforme|2 years ago
So for instance the most popularly known mass extinction event was the dinosaurs, like caused by an asteroid impact some ~15km large. If there was such an asteroid on an impact course today, we could probably detect it a bit before it impacted - but not do a whole heck of a lot more. We could launch every single nuke we have and it would be like throwing baseballs at a semi-truck. By contrast when it lands, it would be the equivalent of hundreds of millions of nukes going off, and the ash of the impact would completely blot out the sky. Those who survived the initial impact would die from either starvation, freezing, or lack of oxygen as all plants and wildlife gradually died off.
Anyhow, space tech is important. And we're only able to achieve such thanks to human industrialization and spread. Paradoxical, but such is the nature of all technological progress which invariably brings problems ultimately only solved by even more advances which, again, bring their own problems. It makes life feel like a game, or maybe we just make games modeled after life.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Extinction_intensity.svg [from the page at] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event
pvaldes|2 years ago
Is more like how dead on Earth works
If the goal is returning the planet to their original status of lifeless floating rock for billions of years, we are doing a spectacular job in just a glimpse of time. I can imagine how puzzling this will appear in the fossil record some millions years from now.