We made it through a cold war. Previous generations had to live with the very real risk of a fast escalating total nuclear disaster. We still have nukes but I generally don't worry about a fast escalating "everyone launches everything they have and we are ill prepared to shoot them all out of the sky before they make contact" doomsday scenario. Not only did we make it through that, but we put humans on the moon during that window of time and humans made some pretty significant scientific advances with the backdrop of all that stress.
> Our impact on the environment is measurable and the impacts look dire.
Humans are pretty resilient and have been pretty good at mitigating large scale problems. Yeah we are impacting our environment, but we aren't the only species that does this. Many species, left unchecked, go through natural boom+bust cycles where they blast past the carrying capacity of their ecosystem and then bust the next generation.
At no point do deer look around and go "hey, we are eating all the food, maybe we shouldn't do that?" - they just eat and reproduce and nature sorts it out. They aren't morally corrupt for causing a boom/bust cycle, they're just animals like us. However, when it comes to humans, we have blasted past our ecosystem's natural carrying capacity (we've been past it for a long time now). Not only do we look around and go "hey, this is a problem" - something that puts us in a league all our own - but we have repeatedly solved that problem. And now we get to tackle the next set of problems.
Simply being aware that we are responsible for climate change and the ending of the Holocene is a huge achievement for a species, let alone putting together plans to over come it.
That is pretty cool!
What's even cooler is that all of the growing pains we are going through are putting us on a trajectory to literally save all life on Earth. Folks like to kick around the can about how humans are destroying Earth's environment. That's true, and we need to work our butts off to keep everything balanced moving forward. There are very smart humans working very hard to keep our ecosystems from collapsing.
But, no matter what we do to save our ecosystems, we are over 75% through the window of time life can survive on this planet.
A world without humans is a world where Earth slowly moves out of the habitable zone and finds itself in a complete extinction event in ~500m years - with little to no hope of any life bouncing back.
Getting life off this planet is a noble cause. Doing that requires either:
* a biological pathway to interstellar travel beyond the micro-organism scale (maybe nature will produce this in 500m years? find that _exceptionally_ unlikely)
* a species to develop the technology to get itself off this rock and survive the extremely hostile environments in space
Humans are doing that latter, and I have no reason to believe any other species would do a better job than we have getting to "building rockets and settling planets." Not only is our species going to the stars, but we are going to bring life on Earth with us when we do.
> Our impact on the environment is measurable and the impacts look dire.
Humans are pretty resilient and have been pretty good at mitigating large scale problems. Yeah we are impacting our environment, but we aren't the only species that does this. Many species, left unchecked, go through natural boom+bust cycles where they blast past the carrying capacity of their ecosystem and then bust the next generation.
At no point do deer look around and go "hey, we are eating all the food, maybe we shouldn't do that?" - they just eat and reproduce and nature sorts it out. They aren't morally corrupt for causing a boom/bust cycle, they're just animals like us. However, when it comes to humans, we have blasted past our ecosystem's natural carrying capacity (we've been past it for a long time now). Not only do we look around and go "hey, this is a problem" - something that puts us in a league all our own - but we have repeatedly solved that problem. And now we get to tackle the next set of problems.
Simply being aware that we are responsible for climate change and the ending of the Holocene is a huge achievement for a species, let alone putting together plans to over come it.
That is pretty cool!
What's even cooler is that all of the growing pains we are going through are putting us on a trajectory to literally save all life on Earth. Folks like to kick around the can about how humans are destroying Earth's environment. That's true, and we need to work our butts off to keep everything balanced moving forward. There are very smart humans working very hard to keep our ecosystems from collapsing.
But, no matter what we do to save our ecosystems, we are over 75% through the window of time life can survive on this planet.
A world without humans is a world where Earth slowly moves out of the habitable zone and finds itself in a complete extinction event in ~500m years - with little to no hope of any life bouncing back.
Getting life off this planet is a noble cause. Doing that requires either:
* a biological pathway to interstellar travel beyond the micro-organism scale (maybe nature will produce this in 500m years? find that _exceptionally_ unlikely)
* a species to develop the technology to get itself off this rock and survive the extremely hostile environments in space
Humans are doing that latter, and I have no reason to believe any other species would do a better job than we have getting to "building rockets and settling planets." Not only is our species going to the stars, but we are going to bring life on Earth with us when we do.
That is pretty rad.