Nature Endorses Human Extinction
In the latest Nature, Chris Thomas says:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/11/terrible-optimi.html
This year the baiji river dolphin (Lipotes vexillifer), a victim of
the pollution and boat traffic of China's Yangtze river, was added to
the list of creatures on the verge of extinction. Is this part of the
sixth mass extinction in 450 million years, or does the recent spate
of losses caused by humans represent a blip in the history of life on
Earth? Michael Novacek's Terra takes stock of the situation and
provides an opportunity to learn from the past. ...
Of course, we shall solve some of these issues with technological
fixes. Yet if we maintain 9 billion avaricious people on Earth for the
next millennium, a sixth extinction event seems inevitable. The
geological perspective of Terra is bizarrely reassuring. Humans will
presumably be gone within a few million years, perhaps sooner. If the
past that Novacek describes is a guide to the future, global ecosystem
processes will be restored some tens of thousands to a million years
after our demise, and new forms of life over the ensuing millions of
years will exploit the denuded planet we leave behind. Thirty million
years on, things will be back to normal, albeit a very different
`normal' from before. It is good to be optimistic. The problem is
living here in the meantime.
Thomas is "optimistic" that humans and any descendants with a remotely
similar population or resource-intensive technology will be extinct in
a million years. Yet if a plague, for example, were to produce this
outcome within the next ten years, I'm pretty sure most everyone would
see this as a catastrophe of the highest possible order. So how does
this become a good thing if it happens in the next million years?
--
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to
escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. -- Marcus Aurelius
"...the whole world, including the United States, including all that
we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark
Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights
of perverted science." -- Sir Winston Churchill
Joseph R. Darancette
daranc@NOSPAMcharter.net
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