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Screw humanity.
If only it was just humanity, it would be fine. A dead end species. We're taking everything with us, which is the real crime.
Well, the planet will bounce back without us. Sure, it won’t be the same… but a billion years ago was pretty different from now.
Great Oxygenation Event: Around 2.4 billion years ago, a type of photosynthetic microorganism—cyanobacteria, often called blue-green algae—began producing large amounts of oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis. At the time, Earth’s atmosphere had almost no oxygen, and this new oxygen was actually toxic to most existing life. The result was it killed most of the life on earth including itself, and new life forms adapted to oxygen.
So in a few billion more years, whatever intelligent life pops up will look back and think of us as just another algae problem.
David Kipping introduced me to the idea that the window of opportunity for intelligent life may be far smaller than we used to think. It's a companion to the Rare Earth hypothesis of having so many variables that MIGHT need to exist to make things work, but assuming all conditions are good for what we consider hospitable, how long a planet has before the star changes and how soon basic life starts is not that long cosmically.
Simply put, new life after whatever this climate run stabilized to won't have a billion years before the Sun begins to change. Not turn into a red giant or dwarf, those are far off still, but it will begin its path towards those long before the actual event, and conditions here will worsen for a teeming biosphere.
To quote "Hamilton", life only gets probably one shot. Maybe two or three if it's fast, but we can probably count a few of the mass extinctions that set things back for that.
If humans didn’t have sufficient numbers and intelligence to take advantage of the stable climate of the last hundred thousand years we’d either be extinct or hunter gatherers.
Now that we’ve used up most of the accessible fossil fuels another species won’t be able to industrialize, especially in the next billion years before the sun starts to warm the earth beyond habitability.
Apathetic bloody planet. I’ve no sympathy at all.
Then there is no point, and we should probably not care that much.
So what you’re saying is we’re evolutionary boomers