The last time I saw a Wizard of id comic strip was in the early 70s.
Best case scenario to be sure.
For sure.
But tbf it’s still a bold assumption that afte only a million years biodiversity would rebound to the point to support (mega)fauna like that again.
Hoping for the best.
Actually the fauna comes back really quick. After only a hundred years when nothing is maintenaned the plants will cover most of our infrastructure.
After probably 500 years most constructions are probably only hills.
No, not extinct species.
I don’t believe we will leave isolated, big, and diverse oasis of specimens to just repopulate vacant areas.
We are well into a huge (and particularly very fast) mass extinction event, sure only a few headline megafauna species get press coverage, but the amount of invertebrates alone that go extinct and in contrast a single or a few species temporary takes its place in turn expediting the imbalance levels & collapsing entire ecosystems is staggering.
Insect die offs really scare me, so many fruits and plants are pollinated by them, or things just up the food chain from them. Then I just can’t help imagining a chain of collapse from there.
I think humans will be the last living things to go unless we engineer our own extinction early.
I think humans will be the last living things to go unless we engineer our own extinction early.
Evolution happens as long as there is life. Unless we turn the planet surface into a giant ball of lava, it is impossible to kill all life and it will continue without us. Even if there is only bacteria left after we go, they will simply evolve into complex life all over again, in fact it’s not the first time that has happened. In the grand scheme of what life has withstood on this planet, humans are a speed bump at best.
Yes, debates don’t really center on the issue of sterilizing the whole planet (fyi there are deep-rock bacteria everywhere so “just” molten surface isn’t enough), but rather on the loss we are causing.
Ie ending species that without us would have no issue evolving & continuing to be part of the ecosystems.
Also from bacterial life to complex fauna its easily a billion years (+/- a lot).
Ie ending species that without us would have no issue evolving & continuing to be part of the ecosystems.
That’s not true though. Even the animals we’ve created, like cats and dogs, can live on just fine without us. As can most small and micro herbivores like mice, rabbits, certain songbirds, and most of the “pest” insects; as well as mesopredators (middle of the food chain predators) like foxes and the aforementioned cats and dogs. Plenty of plants are asexual and do not require external pollination, including many of the invasive plants that we can’t kill despite our best efforts.
Actually, invasive species in general are a major counterexample. We’ve been trying to drive many of them to extinction, they are not going extinct. Australia is trying to kill feral cats, that’s not working. The US spends billions on herbicides against invasive plants, that’s not working. They also tried to kill European sparrows and starlings which are also not working and many argue that it’s doing more harm to native plants in some cases than the invasive plants themselves. Same with fire ants. Same with invasive fish. Same with invasive seaweed and algae.
In fact, in environmental sciences which I majored in, there is increasing discussion on whether calling species “invasive” even makes sense. Humans are also part of the ecosystem and of “nature” despite us claiming to be the masters of it. We are subject to its laws just like all other life, so if a mite can hitch a ride on a bird across the ocean and that’s considered natural migration, why shouldn’t a mouse that hitches a ride on a human boat across the ocean be considered natural migration? There is no morality in nature, it just is and everything is fair game, so we really need not worry “for nature,” we should be worrying for ourselves about losing our place in it by going extinct. Adapt or die, that’s nature’s one and only rule, so if we don’t want to die we need to adapt and clean up our act basically.
Exactly. Plus the whole underwater portion of ecology we have basically no data on (yet it’s of huge global importance). Scary, sad, infuriating stuff.
Unfortunately I too think that we will outlive our consequences for long enough to take a proper mass extinction event levels of biodiversity collapse with us.
But let’s focus on the positive - biodiversity boom between mere 10 million years from now to like 50 or 100 million years from now (which in the scheme of things isn’t that long, just very unnecessary that it will come to that for something like capital/amassing of power of one species over others of the same species).
We have maintained huge megafauna populations though, who are ready and able to take over the moment we go. Cows, sheep, and yes, horses like shown in the comic, are prime examples. We’re also doing a damn good job of killing all their natural predators, namely wolves and big cats.
Horses have actually become an invasive species in some parts of the Americas and driving out native large herbivores. Ever heard of American wild horses? They’re technically “feral horses” because they did not exist in this hemisphere before Europeans came.
oh no, more pro-extinction on lemmy, fun…
You need only look at how our species treats one another, despite claiming to know better, to understand why. Endless styles of cruelty of the many by the few in the name of greed, gluttony, power lust, and schadenfreude. The few voices of sanity and compassion assassinated, mowed down, blacklisted, and threatened into contrition. Literally destroying civilization pumping carbon shit into the air, fully aware of what we’re doing, to continue stoking the ego scores of a handful of sociopaths.
If you’re proud of our species, good for you. Take the bliss, Cypher
I do think there’s something positive about being the only species we know of with the intelligence and knowledge developed over generations to even realize these things and much such judgements. The plants that filled the atmosphere with oxygen killing almost everything couldn’t know any better or do anything about it. Past species and humans before modern times changed their environments and caused extinctions without even knowing. And while we might not end up doing so, we do have the capabilities to do better.
I’ve thought about that and to me it makes it worse. We have glimmers of knowing better, of doing the right thing, just enough to demonstrate that we *can, * but 99 times out of 100 we don’t.
You can’t get angry at a lion for following it’s genetic programming, it doesn’t have the capacity for introspection about its nature. Its sentient, but not sapient. We can know better, with our cognitive abilities combined with tools of historical recording most of us do know better, but when presented the chance to take either our share of the pie with our brothers and sisters, or to take the whole pie and leave them hungry, we pick the latter like clockwork.
The tragedy is knowing that we have the capacity to be a great people that accomplishes wonders together, but we still choose to fight one another for the biggest banana pile like impulsive beasts almost every time throughout recorded history. We refuse to learn. We refuse to heed the lessons of history for longer than a single generation. We can glimpse enlightenment, but choose the easy dopamine hit. It’s maddening.
Are the horses a million years old or did humans go extinct recently and are they being snarky about it?
They are paleontologist supersmart-horses, many generations after their ancestors killed the last human.
They are also in a dome, decorated with a picture of mountains and a blue sky, that they set up to protect themselves from the remaining of the recent nuclear war.
I totally wanna read a short story about this now!
You just did!
Technically correct, which as we all know is the best kind of correct…
Ha ha, no. In a million years, mankind would have paved the entire planet’s surface, including the oceans. Our numbers would be in the hundred billions and most will live underground. The few elites would live on the uppermost levels and even have real gardens and plants. Wildlife would be extinct, save for a few robotic simulacra in the Imperial Zoo. Ironically, you would have to go to the Outer Colonies to see some animals that are extinct on Terra.
the cyberpunk 2077 universe just keeps looking more and more plausible every day, down to the corporate decisions and design
But that’s just a few decades away
H.G. Wells would like a word. The Morlocks have some recipes to share.
An asteroid hit the earth and blanketed it in ash for ten thousand years, a force many times bigger than all the nukes humanity could ever hope to build, and life still thrived eons later. The Earth and nature doesn’t need saving, we need saving.
Don’t forget that we’re still apart of the ecosystem and “nature” and subject to every single one of its laws, including the biggest one: adapt or die.
That’s not even the worst one, before the dinosaurs a large volcano in What is now Siberia errupted, throwing Earth’s climate into a catastrope, the oceans became stagnant and putrid, belching poisonous gases from anaerobic bacteria across the land and sea, an estimated 90% of all life on Earth was smothered by the event.
It’s called the End Permian extinction and it’s the closest life on earth has come to being snuffed out entirely. Though for some reason it’s forgotten about a lot.
life still thrived eons later
After a 30k year reset period, sure.
30k years is nothing compared to the lifetime of the Earth though
But its everything compared to the lifetime of human civilization.
It’s like rain on your wedding day
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it figers
Wall-E irl
The fact that you mixed elements of utopia and dystopia together makes it rather difficult to infer what opinion on the comic you’re trying to convey
What part of that was utopian?
Maybe from the perspective of the few rich elites its utopian? Lmao
In a million years we’d have had a Dyson sphere for nearly a million years and colonized almost the entirety of the galaxy already.
We unfortunately wouldn’t have colonized Andromeda quite yet though.
Any utopia first requires the basis of free energy. Dyson spheres are the start and the logical first outcome for any sufficiently advanced civilization. Fusion reactors being used as needed where we can’t donate from the former.
The rest is all politics. The vast majority of people are good. When everyone isn’t fighting for the same resources, the population of earth stabilizes in 2100 to about 11 billion people.
The growing pains until then through space colonies and terraformers will be admittedly rough though. Space radiation and the classism in that vacuum will be terrible for the poor and disenfranchised.
https://science8sc.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/2/7/132773018/milky-way-galaxy-light-years_orig.jpg
https://interestingengineering.com/science/what-would-it-take-to-create-a-dyson-sphere
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpcTJW4ur54
Yeah this could easily mean that humanity left Earth.
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Good ending
A million years? That very generous (งツ)ว
I believe it’s more like a hundred thousand years for humans on earth to go extinct, and another nine hundred thousand to clean the traces.
Whatever comes after us will be a consequence of us. Sort of like how all our modern bird species are echoes of the giant lizards of the crestatous period.
The world will never be “clean” of humanity’s traces. No more than it is clean of trilobites that gave us all this limestone or the carboniferous plants that gave us coal and oil.
The future will be whatever species are most fit to live in the world we have created.
Or a hundred (not thousand) to become transhuman and have every short living species forget we existed.
(my regards to SkyNet, StarlinkNet, The Matrix, or whatever)
“why does this grass taste like plastic?”
Not that they know what plastic is but ya know.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Earth’s new dominant life form
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
In the year one million and a half/
Humankind is enslaved by giraffes/
They will pay for all their misdeeds/
When the treetops are stripped of their leaves!
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I would have also accepted:
“What are humans?”
🎶 We are a fluke
of the universe.
We have no right to be here.
And whether we can hear it or not,
The universe
is laughing behind our backs. 🎶Deteriorata! I love that “song!”
Thanks a loot, I didn’t known it !
You’ll see it’s all a show
Keep ‘em laughin’ as you go
Just remember that the last laugh is on you!
Do you think humans became extinct, transferred into computers, moved onto other corners of the universe, or became the horses?
Growing up, I wanted to believe humanity could become like the humans of the Federation.
The reality is, we are significantly morally inferior to the Ferengi.
The Ferengi became warp capable before they allowed women to wear clothes. I think you’re underselling us.
Between climate change and nuclear proliferation, I think extinction is what I’d put my money on.
Yes.
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Because people could make money by not changing course.
(But you knew that…)
Yeah I don’t disagree. But people are also pretty adaptable, I think we can survive some pretty apocalyptic stuff. (That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do everything we can to stop climate change, I just think it’s pretty likely at least two people will survive)
I’m reading a lot of variation about the minimum viable breeding population of humans from around 100 to over 1000, but no one says two.
Yeah inbreeding would be terrible. But anyway, I think it’s likely some people could survive an apocalypse.
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I hope so badly that it’s transferred into computers. We need to get there in the next few decades though or I’m gonna miss the boat. :-D
Have you seen the show Upload?
I have not, but I will check it out.
Yeah man immortality in the meta verse sounds rad lmao.
If you don’t think it does, you should read a little scifi sometime.
Sci fi is great. Reality is not.
Reality doesn’t include the ability to upload ourselves yet though, so I base my enthusiasm on what could be, rather than a cynical assessment of what is. You do you though.
Cheers
The sad thing is, if we want life as we know it (that includes horses happily munching on grass) to continue existing, humans are it’s only shot.
It might be edgy and cool to wish humanity would go instinct, but with it, potentially all life will go instinct.
I mean not really once costal areas flood and the locations best for growing food change we will see massive issues with humanity surviving, the rest of the ecosystem would adapt, migrate and evolve to survive. Hell even chernobyl basically shows us even if we went the full nuclear option wildlife would bounce back better than before with just maybe shortened life expectancies. We are a lot more prone to die from changes than the wildlife on this planet is.
I think you’re underestimating our ability to save our own asses through technology.
Even if all the soil for growing food goes to crap, we can just engineer food crops that can grow in that soil. Hell, NASA has a research project exploring how to grow crops in moon (Or maybe it was martian) soil. Humans are one of the most adaptable species, because if natural processes are too slow we can just augment it through our technological prowess.
Even if all the soil for growing food goes to crap, we can just engineer food crops that can grow in that soil.
It’s not about soil going to crap its about the climate surrounding those areas changing. Moon and Mars experiments are about indoor climate controlled greenhouses which sure can be done anywhere but not at the scale needed for our current civilizations or to replace the agriculture infrastructure at scale we have now.
Short term, yes, no question. But long term (a million years and beyond) we look at different challenges life on earth will face.
It’s a fact that it won’t simply continue existing indefinitely. And definitely not in the diversity we know now. It’s not likely for rabbits or another species to suddenly rise up to the task of inventing space travel. That would need way more time than what it takes for earth to be hit by an asteroid big enough so that life won’t bounce back. The same goes for other types of mass extinction. Only humans have at least a slight chance to make life endure beyond earth.
I mean realistically even then we don’t know for sure, it took humans and our ancestors a couple hundred thousand years to develop to to where we are at now. It’s not to say any other of our closest relatives could end up on a similar path without us in the picture in a much more tropical climate as they are used too. The question is will the earth stabilize itself when we get to that point or will we take it out of balance so severely that it goes into run away warming like Venus ending all life.
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Why shouldn’t we care, though? Personally, I see no reason why we should not try to preserve life, especially when perhaps it’s the only example of life there is.
Rationally, since we don’t know whether there is a reason for anything, the only thing we can do is to insure that someone in the future will be able to find it. That chance is 0 if life stops existing altogether.
Oh fuck off
Image Transcription:
A four-panel War and Peas comic.
The first panel shows two horse-like creatures standing in a field, munching on grass. Text in a yellow box at the top of the panel reads “One Million years from now…”. Palm-like trees with yellow leaves and mountains are in the background. The creature on the left is brown and the creature on the right is grey. The text “Munch Munch” are over the brown creature.
The second panel shows the brown creature with its head raised up and a concerned look on its face, saying “Hey. Remember humans?”
The third panel shows the grey creature now with its head raised up, the background of nature has been replaced by an orange background, which is lighter in a circle around the area of the panel where the creature’s head and speech bubble are. The grey creature is saying “No.”
The fourth panel is a slightly zoomed in version of the first panel with the onomatopoeic munching text moved over the grey creature’s head.
[I am a human, if I’ve made a mistake please let me know. Please consider providing alt-text for ease of use. Thank you. 💜 We have a community! If you wish for us to transcribe something, want to help improve ease of use here on Lemmy, or just want to hang out with us, join us at !lemmy_scribes@lemmy.world!]
You should mention that the first panel says “One million years from now…”
Wow, can’t believe I forgot to put that part. Thanks for catching it!
