As of right now, climate change and pollution are legitimately unfixable problems in my opinion. Everything else could hypothetically be fixed (although most of it probably won’t be), but those two are really going to fuck us over.
climate change and pollution are legitimately unfixable problems in my opinion
The Late Devonian mass extinction was likely caused by the evolution of oxygen producing plants. This fundamentally altered the chemistry of the atmosphere and kicked off the Hangenberg event which is estimated to have killed half of all life in the world’s oceans and around a quarter of all life on dry land.
Incidentally, the sudden and massive spread of plant-life during this period is responsible for the rapid accrual of fossilized carbon that has become the fuel we’re currently killing one another to secure.
Everything else could hypothetically be fixed
We can’t ever really go back. We can update our social responses to climate-wide events. But industrialization isn’t just going to stop happening even if we check our fossil fuel consumption habit. Humanity’s propensity for engineering our surroundings to meet our comfort needs is an unstoppable evolutionary tendency. That’s not something we can ever “fix”. Pandora’s Box was opened millions of years ago. We’re going to have to play this hand out until we hit another ecological balancing point.
Yes but the longer it takes to address them, the worse the fever gets. We still have an opportunity to not burn ourselves out. Albeit a slim one. Earth will be scarred but will survive. Unless we change our ways, we will not.
With the way they are acting carelessly; I truly doubt they will do much better. The ruling class may srvive for a hundred or so years after the rest of us but without massive changes, they are also doomed.
The “ruling class” of today rely on the vast pools of labor that constantly increase with food production and industrialization. If something ever killed a significant percentage of the world and reversed population trends, they’d have much less leverage to continue their way of life as they do now. That doesn’t mean things will be good, but there can only be so much cannibalism before it is no longer in a ruling elite’s self interest.
As of right now, climate change and pollution are legitimately unfixable problems in my opinion. Everything else could hypothetically be fixed (although most of it probably won’t be), but those two are really going to fuck us over.
The Late Devonian mass extinction was likely caused by the evolution of oxygen producing plants. This fundamentally altered the chemistry of the atmosphere and kicked off the Hangenberg event which is estimated to have killed half of all life in the world’s oceans and around a quarter of all life on dry land.
Incidentally, the sudden and massive spread of plant-life during this period is responsible for the rapid accrual of fossilized carbon that has become the fuel we’re currently killing one another to secure.
We can’t ever really go back. We can update our social responses to climate-wide events. But industrialization isn’t just going to stop happening even if we check our fossil fuel consumption habit. Humanity’s propensity for engineering our surroundings to meet our comfort needs is an unstoppable evolutionary tendency. That’s not something we can ever “fix”. Pandora’s Box was opened millions of years ago. We’re going to have to play this hand out until we hit another ecological balancing point.
Yes but the longer it takes to address them, the worse the fever gets. We still have an opportunity to not burn ourselves out. Albeit a slim one. Earth will be scarred but will survive. Unless we change our ways, we will not.
Oh no, humanity will survive, but you probably won’t.
With the way they are acting carelessly; I truly doubt they will do much better. The ruling class may srvive for a hundred or so years after the rest of us but without massive changes, they are also doomed.
The “ruling class” of today rely on the vast pools of labor that constantly increase with food production and industrialization. If something ever killed a significant percentage of the world and reversed population trends, they’d have much less leverage to continue their way of life as they do now. That doesn’t mean things will be good, but there can only be so much cannibalism before it is no longer in a ruling elite’s self interest.