Comment by jcgrillo
If we keep at it like we have been maybe there's light at the end of the tunnel for Earth, ecologically. In say 100k or 1M years, after we're long gone and things have started to repair themselves.
If we keep at it like we have been maybe there's light at the end of the tunnel for Earth, ecologically. In say 100k or 1M years, after we're long gone and things have started to repair themselves.
Was it part of beautiful nature when an asteroid strike killed most life on earth?
What does it matter if a bunch of non-sentient animals keep on trucking here on earth? Some disaster will eventually kill most of them just like it has repeatedly over the eons.
Then the sun will die and all life on earth with it permanently. In fact the sun's red giant phase will erase even the traces that life ever existed here. Is there some value in that abstract notion of everything being melted into slag and disappearing?
It is entirely possible we are the last chance life on earth has of becoming inter-planetary. Of surviving in the long term.
As for the heat death of the universe who knows. That's far enough into the future some future generation can deal with that problem. We don't know enough to say if that's what will happen or if there is any way to avoid it (like escaping into another universe).
Not that I think a planet full of non-sentient life is worth very much. It is no different than a huge factory of machines left on automatic. A bunch of biological machines fussing around accomplishing nothing and having no purpose. The concept of beauty only exists while there is an intelligence around to enjoy or contemplate it.
At least the asteroid didn’t know better and wreck it anyway?
This is where I find hope: ten million years from now we'll all be gone, and the earth will be a beautiful, thriving place once again.
The short term doesn't look so good, but at least I will only have to watch a few more decades of it.