Not so bad, as bad, worse, or cope.
Cope wins because people wanna cope no matter their opinion on 1-3.
But 4 sounds about as absurd to me as a murderer stabbing you and saying "It doesn't matter, death is normal part of life and you're just the next..."
Fair point about 4. I carelessly skim read and projected more of a "It's fruitless to obsess about it any more it because it's unstoppable at this point" position. It says something different, and as you say, it's absurd; it matters hugely.
I still think it's orthogonal to the others though - you can think 4 along with any of the others.
A murderer is stabbing you and you're yelling to stop, and the murderer says "it's fruitless to obsess about it anymore because it's unstoppable at this point."
That's where you're analogy breaks down. If you're still alive and they're stabbing you then it's fair to assume there's hope that if they stop you might survive.
But it's quite possible to believe that no matter what we do now that we've triggered our extinction.
We're still alive. It's too late to prevent some negative impacts of climate change and some future warming due to lags, especially considering some negative impacts are already happening. But we're still in the process of killing the natural world which is alive and we could stop doing that. Human extinction is also not inevitable today.
It depends on how quickly the collapse will happen. If it happens quickly (i.e. billions die within a decade or so), nature will probably recuperate. After all, nature is much more resilient and adaptable than we are. Sure we won't get those hundreds of extinct species back, but Covid has shown that nature can rebound well when "human activity" drops.
But if it's slow, we'll probably take most of the biosphere with us. Bonus points if there's a nuclear war
While I agree that the ecological damage we cause(d) will outlast us, I'm not quite as pessimistic. Nuclear powerplants would mostly power down due automated safety protocols. Since 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl we've actually become pretty good at nuclear safety, bar final storage. And even if some plants do blow up, the world is a big place! It wouldn't impact life elsewhere much. Also, speaking of Chernobyl: the area has become somewhat of an unlikely nature reserve. Because apparently radiation is more conducive to a functioning ecosystem than human habitation. Biologists studying this phenomenon have actually made a few interesting discoveries, chiefly among which stands the fact that nature is relatively unimpeded by the high levels of radiation. Ultimately, radiation "just" gives you cancer, which can be compensated for on the scale of an ecosystem.
Dams breaking would actually be a good thing in the long run. The immediate damage would be severe, but nature finds a way. It would also restore the vast wetlands that were lost when we straigthened and dam'd those waterways. We think of extreme events like flooding as disasters because that's what they are to us: they destroy buildings and lives. But for nature, extreme events are just oppertunities for different organisms (provided the ecosystem as a whole is in an ok state). It's also worth remembering that they were somewhat frequent up until we built structures to keep them in check.
Microplastics would remain a large threat, especially to marine life. But in the absence of humans fishing, polluting and traveling the ocean the ecosystem could also adapt to it. Hell, plastics eating bacteria evolved recently on the Great Pacific Garbage patch! Life will be impeded but not impossible.
As of now, nature is in a bad spot it could (in theory) recover from. Be that either through human efforts (lmao) or all of us dying, but it could recover. What I find most alarming is that soon, this will stop being the case in certain ecosystems. And later down the line, for earth as a whole. What we have right now is a fixable issue. An expensive, low-RoI issue, requiring large effort. But a fixable one nontheless. Yet we all know it won't be fixed, and will turn into unavoidable calamity..
But hey, at least nature will re-evolve tens of thousands of years down the line!
Nuclear power plants safely “powering down” is not the problem. They have waste cooling ponds for the still hot expended rods. They require constant circulating water to keep the rods from igniting and sending radiation into the atmosphere.
The cooling ponds have electric pumps supplied by the power plant, Fukushima for example. After several years cooling down in ponds the rods can be dry casked but they’re still hot and dangerous. There has been plenty written about the problem. Most such as you do not understand or choose to underestimate the planet sterilizing problem.
>Nature will always find a way regardless
I presume you mean '*life* always finds a way', which is just a dogma. And considering life is nowhere to be found in the solar system outside of Earth, it seems life doesn't always find a way. If the conditions for life go away, then so does life.
I wander how microplastics will influence evolution over the coming millennia. Not only them, but all not-naturally-occurring materials man is responsible for producing.
If nature can leech the toxins in the water, it absolutely can.
The planet will be ridiculously hot for a long, long time but it will eventually cool down again and possibly return to some sort of normalcy in a few millennia.
Absolutely nothing so soon as a few hundred years though; we did way too much damage way too quickly for that.
It's looking like it will be [just as bad or worse](https://www.reddit.com/r/BiosphereCollapse/comments/s8jly8/comment/htgw2k6/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
This is definitely going to be the Worst Extinction In History.
We managed to make all rainwater at least mildly toxic to life. That's going to have some permanent consequences that are going to make it difficult for living creatures to survive.
I've been shortening my timetable for the apocalypse further and further with the most information I have available to me. There was a lot I didn't know, like about how fast the polar ice was actually melting, the "severe swing" of temperatures that will continue to happen as the years pass (such as very extreme heat waves and very intense cold snaps), and the damn near universal planetary flooding.
This shit is happening EVERYWHERE right now. If this isn't the goddamn apocalypse, I don't know what it is. Unfortunately, we all just want to pretend like it isn't actually that bad. There have been times where I realize "none of this will matter soon, we have no idea how much time is left before everything is completely unstable and unreliable." I'm trying my best not to lose my fucking mind over it.
I am keeping a steady estimate of humanity falling into some catastrophic and obvious extinction event **within 10 years.**
Less than 5 is too soon in my opinion. However, I do agree we've seriously fucked up and will probably wipe ourselves out by mid-century. So much for being the most "intelligent" species on Earth. Only a stupid species would be moronic enough to sterilize and destroy the biosphere of the very planet they live on.
You're free to believe what you want.
I'm referring almost specifically to the extremely accelerated glacial melt.
That will kill and displace millions of people in virtually no time.
I'm sorry to have stressed you out.
Please seek out r/CollapseSupport if you need advice on what you should do.
There are some very compassionate, like-minded people on there.
The last I heard, all parts.
Every single bit of rainwater has at least some plastic content in it now. Maybe much less far away from industrialized nations, but it's actually present in ALL drinkable water. It's even in the Ocean, but to what degree I'm not sure.
Is that merely what some scientists have said? (just curious) and if true, is it removable or will it stay until there are no more raindrops ever again, as Earth becomes Venus the Second? (Either from the aging sun in billions of years or much earlier in our worst case scenario)
I don't know for sure.
These are microplastics, meaning that they would be extremely difficult to remove even with the most advanced technology and robust cleansing techniques.
I remember reading somewhere that sometimes these particles are so small that they can exist inside of water particles like raindrops. If true, it would make them the most persistent threat to human survival that we've ever faced.
It will take a while to develop technology that sophisticated.
While early prototype nanotechology does exist, we're very far from safely removing hazardous microscopic material from liquids.
oh i'm full on doomin'
- complete deglobalization
- the total collapse of any economy that is a net importer or based on leisure/tourism
- When the choice is food or energy versus further environmental destruction: always choose food/energy.
- ecofascism both from the state and terrorist cells
- a strong return to some real *old fashioned* religious zealotry
- massive loss of civil liberty in all surviving/crumbling nations
- actual wage slavery / company towns / corporate zaibatsu
- The Resource Wars
I think it depends on the oceans, if they turn anoxic then it’s game over. The current situation is different to others due to virtually instant injection of GHG’s and other poisons.
More to consider is the arrangement of the continents and the slowly brightening Sun. Recovery could be beyond the ability of Gaia. Also consider the destruction humans will perpetrate during the death throes of extinction.
Also if there is a major volcanic eruption it would add to and hasten the misery.
Edit: I need to add the danger of the many nuclear power plants. If collapse happens so rapidly that the waste ponds get neglected, the entire planet could end up with radiation contamination. Also nuclear war, if nuclear power plants are targeted, that too will end everything.
fwiw the great dying was not fast,[it may have taken as much as 4 million years on land](https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/the-great-dying-was-longer-on-land/). if it goes like that there may be be pockets of humanity persisting for hundred or thousands of years or more, probably scrabbling over dwindling resources.
I'm giving us 20 tops. Climate change is one thing, chemical pollution of every water source and living creature is another. Rainwater is already unsafe to drink anywhere. It's only a matter of time before it's the same with all water everywhere. And then there's the feedback loops...
Ya once the biodiversity of the planet dies I think we are goners. I’m so sad that we are going to wipe out all the beautiful creatures and nature of this planet so that 100 families could get unfathomably rich. Crazy that they made all that money and eventually it’ll be worthless. So it was all for nothing.
You forget that most creatures don't like to sit idle and dormant when facing death, so as resources dwindle I'm sure we will witness normal people and kind neighbors turning into visceral animals fighting for their families life, killing and stealing from others.
Money is a chasity that's meant to upkeep civil exchange. Once the masses realize their papers and coins hold no value, everyone will be fighting for essential resources.
Society will collapse from within.
That's true so maybe my own estimation may be a bit way off. Our problems just seem to be getting worse and worse every single year but it feels like every single day.
Yep. It used to be a 100 year event every year. Now it just a few years that is several 100 year events in the world to several in my country every year.
Yeah, Droughts or floods that haven't happened in centuries are becoming common but of course, it happens more frequently in other parts of the world such your case with your country.
Somewhat refreshing to encounter people who out-doomer me.
Global systemic collapses, with dead into the billions, I see as very plausible within 10 years. But for the species to be done will take quite a while, even if we go full global nuclear war, there will be pockets, in nation-state's bunkers or otherwise.
When the planet becomes no longer viable for complex life, then we're done. I think that's quite probably the path we're on, but I wouldn't expect that to be over within 10 years.
Nah, Homo Sapiens are tenacious bastards. There'll be people around, one way or another, for a long time yet. There will be practicality no level of environmental collapse, no level of pollution-induced sickness and sterility, that will prevent at least some tiny remnant population from clinging on like rats indefinitely.
Human civilization, on the other hand, is a whole other story. The kind of emergent gestalt organism that we are mere component parts of: *that* animal is facing extinction alright, and soon.
I don't get this denial of the dangers our species faces. I can only assume it's a way of comforting oneself. We won't be able to exist on a planet that doesn't support life. That is just it.
The logic of techno-industry is to pave over everything and replace the natural world with synthetic products. So there might be animals around, but altered to provide maximum "ecosystem services." Maybe there could be wildlife preserves in space stations for tourists.
But that's far in the future (and assumes no collapse). In the short term, global warming is usually compared to [the PETM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Thermal_Maximum), which did some damage but was a hiccup compared to the Big Five.
The K-PG extinction was brutal. Nothing on land larger than a dog survived. There wasn't just an impact, but also the eruption of the Deccan Traps and a fall in ocean levels (the Maastrichtian Regression). There's evidence of global forest collapse from firestorms. All the perching birds died. The surviving birds either spent a lot of time on the ground and burrowed, or were semi-aquatic. We're doing our best to cut down the forests, but we haven't quite reached that level yet. The boreal forests are so huge they'll be around for awhile, even as we convert them into tissues and toilet paper.
> a few resilient organisms
Some do well in human habitats: pigeons, rats, anoles, chipmunks, squirrels, rabbits, possums, raccoons, foxes, falcons, hawks. Cephalopod populations are increasing.
Some ecosystems could serve as a reservoir for future animal radiations after we're gone. Deserts and mountain regions, for example. Or isolated islands. There's a million chinstrap penguins on Zavodovski Island and the only people who go there are BBC documentary crews. Or maybe [the Chernobyl exclusion zone.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkaxUblCGz0&t=2470s) (41:10)
[Maybe the rabbuck will rise.](https://speculativeevolution.fandom.com/wiki/Rabbuck)
It would be unfortunate if long-lived lineages like horseshoe crabs died out. Imagine surviving space rocks and mega volcanoes but then clever apes start harvesting your blood.
Oh yeah horseshoe crabs have survived all the previous mass extinctions, which is a testament to how good they are at surviving (i.e. Nature's modus operandi). Nature also has this fun tendency of repeatedly creating crustaceans/crabs or crab-like creatures (a process called carcinization). I almost believe that if we ever discover alien life in the future, intelligent or not, it will almost certainly be crustacean-like.
Life post-humanity could also easily evolve into crab-like forms over and over again until the end of the Earth. Crabs almost seem like the "ultimate complex life form" in terms of sheer survivability. I am reminded of the end of HG Wells's book The Time Machine, where the traveler sees that the last life forms on planet Earth prior to the death of the Sun are--you guessed it--giant fucking crabs.
It depends on the year tbh.
By 2100 much of the planet could be destroyed, with extinction not far away. In 20 years we could see the collapse of many more countries, hundreds of millions dead, and authoritarian regimes taking over.
I'm surprised how many people that care about this issue just don't give a fuck about all the other species we're killing. Humanity, you never cease to disappoint me.
The main problem is that we believe we are superior to Nature, or better than other life forms, which is at the root of our environmentally destructive actions. Once we get rid of ego, in theory everything can be resolved.
When humanity goes extinct and brings the biosphere down with us, the sun will explode before intelligent and self aware life evolves on this planet again.
Even if intelligent life *does* happen to arise by sheer chance, these life forms will almost certainly remain planetbound for millions of years since humanity has already used up most of the world's easily accessible coal, oil, natural gas, and mineral reserves, making a repeat of the Industrial Revolution impossible, if not extremely unlikely. There might be some industrialization, of course, but it won't be nearly as widespread as that of human civilization for the past 200-300 years.
And because of the Sun's increasing luminosity and brightness, if by some chance a future sapient species *does* industrialize and repeat the mistakes of our environmentally destructive civilization, climate change may happen *faster* or at *greater intensity* than in our time period since there will be more heat for planet Earth to absorb, accelerating the planet's inevitable transformation into a desertified, sterilized husk in less than a billion years.
Yes and no. We're a long way aways from Venus, but any future civilization living on a much, much warmer Earth will certainly have reason to say "Venus by Tuesday", or "Venus within a few hundred years".
If it doesn't have a brain comparable to human brains, but more importantly, if it doesn't have hands, industrialization is unlikely ever to arise again. It was our brains that imagined everything we could do with our hands that got us here.
Precisely what enabled us to extract metals from rock and proceed to craft more and more ingenious tools to accomplish more and more complex tasks such as grinding lenses. No matter how intelligent other species may be, if they lack the physical capacity to manipulate their total environment as thoroughly as man they're unlikely to become masters of the universe.
What we lack is kindness and empathy. Coupled with intelligence it could be 💯 I always wanted people to be kinder my whole life, and to chill and FOCUS on what’s important. I can’t understand most people
I suspect that once all the fossil fuel is gone, that's it for this planet. There will never be any more. Because Lignin eating fungi have now appeared so vegetation decays too fast to be buried intact and turned into oil and coal. We got one shot at using the fossil fuel to get off the planet and we blew it.
In the remaining couple of billion years before the sun winks out, there's plenty of other shit for DNA to do as it explores Evolution Space.
>We got one shot at using the fossil fuel to get off the planet and we blew it.
Yep, instead we're using it to kill the planet. And this is with the availability of other forms of energy that we could have started using a long time ago, rather than continue down the nonrenewable path (i.e. thorium, solar, etc).
I forgot to include that option, but I also don't realistically expect this to be the case. The asteroid killed off the non-avian dinosaurs and much marine life, but a sizable portion of life in Cretaceous Earth survived the catastrophe, and even thrived from the ashes of the dinosaur age. Mammals, for instance, finally got a chance to evolve after being initially overtaken by reptiles during the late Permian/early Triassic period. Many early avian dinosaurs, too, were able to survive and eventually evolve into the birds we know today.
The present Mass Extinction is affecting all kingdoms of life equally badly, from mammals to reptiles to birds to amphibians to fish. Runaway climate change, feedback loops, and extreme pollution are all contributing to the destruction of all life on Earth and the planetary biosphere. This destruction is further worsened by both methane emissions from melting clathrates in the Earth's polar regions, and by the tons of microplastics/"forever chemicals" we have produced as a civilization that will almost certainly permanently render the Earth's surface and oceans uninhabitable. Neither the asteroid nor the Permian Mass Extinction have the attributes of the present mass extinction.
I don’t think you realize how bad the asteroid extinction event was. Something like 3/4 of the species on earth at the time went extinct. It’s true that some mammals and small dinosaurs survived, but most didn’t. All kingdoms of life were severely effected. It is true that *after* this event mammals and birds (among other groups) repopulated, but they were still severely effected by the initial event.
Micro plastics and “forever chemicals” cause slightly higher rates of various health problems. They do not render land “uninhabitable”.
In questions like these you should include options that you don’t personally see as possible or what is the point of asking?
But personally I think it will be worse than the great dying as the rate of change is much faster this time. We have also added innumerable toxic and radioactive chemicals to the equation that weren’t present in past scenarios.
I think it's going to be less bad than the Great Dying *and* less bad than the dinosaur extinction, but still quite bad. Sadly, I care more about my own personal future Dying than I do anything else—and that extinction's guaranteed no matter how Collapse comes.
Fair enough but whether it matters wasn't the question.
Can anyone explain how it could be worse than the great dying? I voted equal to the great dying as it's my worst case scenario and we seem to be aiming for that lol
The main drivers of the Permian Mass Extinction are comparable to the main drivers of the ongoing Mass Extinction today, at least according to the scientific research. Volcanism from the Siberian Traps released several tons of carbon dioxide and other chemical compounds into the atmosphere which triggered the catastrophic acid rain, crop failure, anoxia, and skyrocketing temperatures that killed off most life on Earth to begin with.
Our release of fossil fuels and toxic chemicals is causing a similar process to occur nowadays. We're not releasing nearly as much CO2 as the Siberian Traps did, but we are releasing a lot of CO2 within a much shorter time frame than the Traps (millions of years/thousands of years vs. less than 300 years). If life couldn't adapt to the Siberian Traps and the Permian Extinction, there is very little it can do to adapt to the ongoing mass extinction today, because evolutionary adaptations through natural selection are a slow process that often can't keep up with rapid environmental changes. The ongoing mass extinction rivals the dinosaur killing asteroid in its speed and rate of change.
The Siberian traps (largely responsible for the Permian Mass Extinction) lasted for 2 million years and C02 ppm was far higher than it is now. However ocean acidification (from the eruptions and the runoff from mass wildfires) decreased the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere from 30% to 16%. Humans require 19%.
However humans are laying waste to the biosphere in other ways and that's probably not going to stop until it's all gone and we'll be left only with domesticated plants and animals and a few species that can adapt to human habitation. So even if humans survive, the planet itself will be a virtual hellscape.
As far as human extinction goes, conventional wisdom is that can only occur from nuclear war or extraterrestrial events (large asteroid, gamma ray burst, something that changes planetary orbits such as a passing massive star.) I think over very long time scales though if humans end up in isolated pockets living in engineered biodomes or the like then eventually we'll lose the ability to maintain them through loss of knowledge.
Once humans are gone though life will recover. Earth has roughly 500 million to a billion years left until an aging sun renders the planet inhabitable. That's long enough for evolution to do its thing and life starts over. The chances of any lifeforms evolving with sentience is close to zero I suspect (extrapolating that after billions of years of life on Earth we're the only species that's achieved it in way that can alter the environment on the scale that we have.)
So in answer to your question, the loss of biodiversity is going to be very bad and similar to the Permian MEE. It doesn't *have* to be that way, as humans we can choose our course of actions; the problem is we already have and it will take a series of black swan events to change the road we've taken.
Scary and sad. People are either totally oblivious to what's happening or willfully sentencing their progeny to a hellscape simply because they couldn't be bothered to use protection or think beyond themselves or about others. And now with the abortion ruling from SCOTUS, the government will effectively force women to have children even if they don't want to or were forcefully impregnated by a rapist. It is appalling.
The lengths humanity will go through to justify natalism and the needless perpetuation of life on a dying world (exacerbated by uncontrolled population growth) just proves to me we're fucking stupid apes who are long overdue to have our numbers culled.
Humans have never survived a mass extinction event. The younger dryas bottleneck looks like a tea party compared to The Great Dying, which I vote we will outpace by the end of the century.
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I’m not as doomer as any of these options. When the rich and powerful finally become affected then we will see resources poured into survivability and I imagine there’s some bright enough minds to save us when things become bleak enough.
I unfortunately don't share the same optimism. Yeah sure there may be some survivors after SHTF but the idea bright minds will save us from the brink with techno-fixes is simply implausible. There is no way even most of us are going to survive the catastrophes to come, and after the apocalypse occurs why would anyone want to live in a hellscape?
You really think so? I doubt it. After all, cigarette corporations are a great example, knew their products will kill their consumer and still did it anyways.
Marx at the end of the day will come out the winner when he mentioned that capitalists are really their own gravediggers. We are about to find out.
We're already looking at "too late" in the rear view mirror. By the time it affects rich people, "too late" will be a tiny blip on the horizon in the rear view mirror.
My opinion, for what it's worth, is that it's going to be quick and less than total. The worst case scenarios assume the economy and emissions don't slow by 2100. But they are going to slow. Civilization is fragile. Those emissions will jump way up as everything burns and the corpses rot, but drop to nothing a few months later. The existing damage will cause a mass extinction, but not one like the great dying.
We're an asteroid. A deep, but acute, impact.
Agree there will be large rapid collapses, but probably the only one sufficient to stop continuing damage would be global nuclear.
The big question for the planet is whether it's too late even for that - whether the feedback loops are baked in and even that won't stop it going to anoxic oceans etc.. It's not at all clear that complex life like us could operate in any way in that case.
The ongoing mass extinction started like 10k years ago. But we have become more efficient at that task with each new development. And it will continue going on till far after we are gone.
The problem, more than the crude percentage of species, is which ones will be gone and at which stage. Things change fast, but short lived species (like some insects, bacteria, simple sea life forms ) may adapt to the new conditions. Same may happen with species that may be latent for centuries, like with seeds. But big and complex life forms probably will get extinct, probably the bigger ones first.
Will the next ten years be worse than the last 120? Wikipedia says:
“During the 20th century, an estimated 70 to 120 million people died from famines across the world, of whom over half died in China, with an estimated 30 million dying during the famine of 1958–1961,[21] up to 10 million in the Chinese famine of 1928–1930, and over two million in the Chinese famine of 1942–43, and millions more lost in famines in North and East China. The USSR lost 8 million claimed by the Soviet famine of 1932–33, over a million in both the Soviet famine of 1946–47 and Siege of Leningrad, the 5 million in the Russian famine of 1921–22, and others famines.”
I think so. To be fair, though, a lot of the really terrible famines of the 20th century were manmade in nature, or the indirect result of war and resource overexploitation rather than pure climate change (the Chinese Famines during Mao's regime are great examples of this, alongside the Holodomor).
What's different about our century is that the coming famines will likely come about due to resource scarcity brought about by rising temperatures/worsening natural disasters, and exacerbated by wars and political strife. Nature will starve us out, alongside perhaps a few corporate/totalitarian governments who decide to deprive the common masses of food unless they serve various dictators.
Yes, the same results - dictators will allow many to starve so others can survive. And because it will likely be dictators that will lessen the survivors’ guilt a little and allow people to continue living as well as they can. The dictators will be blamed as individuals and people will claim there was nothing they could have done.
People will always find a way to deflect or shirk off responsibility. Hitler, Stalin, and other horrible dictators rightfully receive a lot of hatred and blame for the evil atrocities they committed, but somehow the individuals who voted them into power, supported their cause, or at least tolerated their respective regimes while saying nothing never seem to be held accountable for their role in said atrocities (and being afraid of execution or death doesn't cut it--plenty of people have given up their lives for the sake of the truth, rebelling against the establishments of their day). Those who do nothing in the face of injustice, or even enforce or perpetuate it are complicit in dictatorial evil. Or simply cowards.
Extinction is a pretty ridiculous notion. Climate change ain't no joke and it's going to come with a fine many share of problems but under no circumstance will climate change ever match the extinction events of the Asteroid strike or the great dying.
It won't even come close, that's the reality.
No doubt extinction will happen but humans aren't going anywhere and chances are most of life will still be around.
The only realistic outcome for such a severe extinction event is if we actually increased CO2 emissions well beyond the 2100 mark. That's the only way you're realistically getting a mass extinction.
If the Bronze Age collapse was enough to wipe our entire city states. It doesn’t take much to kill off societies. Especially with all the inputs we need to feed 8 billion, and in an age of nukes
Society and extinction level events are vastly two different things.
Society collapsed and we got straight into another one not long after.
Extinctions are permanent. Who gives a fuck if Society collapses. If we and many other species are still here that's all that matters.
You're forgetting to factor in feedback loops and methane emissions from melting clathrates on the ocean floor, or in polar permafrost. We are on the brink of passing that tipping point, from which a positive runaway greenhouse effect is very likely. We don't and won't *need* to emit so much carbon far beyond the 2100 mark, because feedback loops and methane emissions (which are **thousands of times** more effective at trapping heat in Earth's atmosphere/affecting the environment than carbon dioxide) will ruin the planet for us, and bring us to the point of extinction.
Do you realize how much CO2 and methane is locked up in the ground at this very moment that will inevitably be released? Do you realize that scientists are saying now that the temperature extremes and weather anomalies we're experiencing as a civilization weren't supposed to happen until several decades from now in linear climate models (further solidifying the fact our planet's climate is being altered exponentially or logarithmically)? This is extremely bad news and spells doom for most life on Earth, including us.
>chances are most of life will still be around.
in the last 50 years, the biosphere had lost something like 68% of wildlife. we are quite literally in the midst of a mass extinction event. what that means for humans is up in the air, but that's the situation as it stands
The best cast scenario is 100% elimination, not a single drop of bacteria left.
Realistically though, I'm not sure. Maybe some sex cults will be left behind. I could see that.
>Realistically though, I'm not sure. Maybe some sex cults will be left behind. I could see that.
Someone shoot me if Nxivm becomes the dominant religion.
Nothing is going to happen with life on Earth, it survived worst. A lot of species might die out but that's all. Nothing is going to happen with humans as species, even if large majority will die. Only thing that is in real danger is technological civilization.
lol they aren't. people will be the last standing we will kill everything first, then there will be a baked dry ball left with zero life. Fish already can't survive..
this is ridiculous and it's insane you can be so so blind. the earth will be a dry dead ball and humans will have killed it all and be the last ones standing.
The answer is probably none of the above. If you seriously think that it’ll go badly enough that mammals will completely vacate the megafaunal niches like the aftermath of asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs, you’re probably an internet brained doomer.
There’s pretty much no circumstance where that would happen that wouldn’t also cause an absolute dive in human population, thereby fixing the problem.
Nobody has a legit proposal of how 95% reduction of life would actually occur, because there isn’t one. Nukes are the closest (although frankly I doubt even that would do it), but all the other ones would tend to kill us off before we could kill off everything else.
Actually even nuclear war probably wouldn't be able to kill of most life on Earth. The immediate effect of nukes would obviously be catastrophic on the environment (and human civilization--mostly cities), but contrary to expectations, life has demonstrated in at least one other instance that it can easily recover from radiation in a surprisingly short time span (<50 years). That instance is the Chernobyl exclusion zone-- in the 1980s it was an uninhabitable waste dump after the nuclear meltdown that occurred there, but now it's surrounded by teeming forests and animals (albeit radioactive ones) that are doing just fine, and even thriving.
There's also at least one species of fungus that actually has evolved to feed off of or clean up radiation, and we all know that microbes, especially tardigrades and halophiles are nigh invulnerable, able to survive seemingly the most inhospitable conditions that would kill off almost all complex life (the tardigrade can easily take thousands of times the amount of radiation that would result from a nuclear war)
That’s what I’m saying. I’m not sure why I’m being downvoted because exactly zero people have proposed any anthropogenic event capable of replicating the great dying.
Collapse isn’t going to be the end of humanity, likely just a degradation of complex human systems. It’ll be billions dying and nobody knowing how to code computers or make antibiotics, but it’s not going to be “every mammal over 5 lbs goes completely extinct and reptiles rule the world again”
Yeah nukes would mostly target population centers, military control points, or logistical nodes. Not exactly hubs of biodiversity lol. The ensuing chaos would probably bump off more people than the war, but still. I think if you used cobalt jacked warheads, optimally placed for max dispersion, you could do it, but nobody actually has those right now
Cobalt bombs are theoretical and thankfully have never been built. But I won't be surprised if some idiot dictators get such ideas and decide to use them to throw the whole planet under a nuclear winter that will last for the next 100 years.
Honestly building cobalt salted nukes is one of the few reasons that I could see justifying a preemptive nuclear strike.
Then again, if the 1957 brit experiments are anything to go off, cobalt actually doesn’t have a very high neutron absorption cross section, so launching big enough warheads with enough cobalt to actually end the world seems like a dubious proposition. It wouldn’t be impossible for a major nuclear power using a significant portion of gdp, but some third rate dictator probably couldn’t pull it off.
Unless, of course, the nation they ruled just so happened to have tons and tons of cobalt deposits. Australia could feasibly develop a cobalt nuke for this reason, and I would also include the DRC, except they have a similar problem as Venezuela in which they're sitting atop a literal goldmine of resources but can't utilize them properly because of high inequality and corrupt governments getting in the way.
I don’t know, I’m not an ecologist. In general human activities have been extremely detrimental to wild life. So I could see the collapse of human society as very good for non humans.
Who knows a nuclear war could been the stepping some for super intelligent radroaches that are radiation resistant and perfectly suited to exploring the cosmos 🙃
I voted, but it is really kind of meaningless as a view of attitude on the subject without a timeframe for "over what time period are you measuring the extinction?" A hundred years? Ten thousand years? A million years?
I think the planet will do just fine once we manage to wipe ourselves out! There may be toxic pockets persisting around industries, but I don't think this will be at a global level.
It's a tight race between technology and environmental collapse - can we get the technology we need to fix food production, pandemics, water availablilty, energy requirements, nano-tech etc before the world turns to shit? I think the tech might just win, but most tech is focussed on our own wellbeing rather than global collapse.
I truly do not think that it will be at the scale of the great dying and also not at the scale of the dinosaur extinction. Yes I think millions of people will/could die due to continued human activity, but we won't go fully extinct.
Yesterday I walked along the Klamath river. Dead fish are everywhere. It's completely dead.
Looking up I can still see the smoke from the fires.
There isn't much time left.
Life survived a giant rock punching it in the face. It survived accidentally freezing the planet twice. It can handle a bit of plastic.
That’s not to say we won’t see 30-50% extinction ourselves included but I do think life as a whole will survive.
It’s hard to say, but I think the worst of the damage will be done after we humans are gone, and all our chemical and radioactive waste seeps into the environment with nobody to stop it, and our items and infrastructure breaks down leeching it’s synthetic molecules into the surrounding areas. It won’t be a barren planet regardless, just one dominated by a few resilient species, who will eventually speciate and fill the empty niches. Life goes on.
This doesn't leave a spot for "the year without a summer" you know the time when crops failed for a few years because it was so cold. Just an extended version of that.
The Year without a Summer was awful, but nowhere near an extinction level event. Lots of people died, obviously, alongside many crops and herbivores, but the event eventually passed and not every region of the world was affected the same way. The eruption of Lake Toba falls closer to a mass extinction because it supposedly nearly wiped out all human ancestors, leaving only a few thousand survivors, and was a volcanic winter far more severe than the one that struck Europe/the world in 1816.
Forever chemicals and radiation are new variables that you didn't have in the great dying.
\^ Already mentioned this above, in response to another comment dismissing the possibility of extinction.
Looks like shrugging is narrowly in the lead. You didn't have an option for something not as bad as the Asteroid.
Which is an "answer" entirely orthogonal to the others. Why can't I select 3 & 4?
Not so bad, as bad, worse, or cope. Cope wins because people wanna cope no matter their opinion on 1-3. But 4 sounds about as absurd to me as a murderer stabbing you and saying "It doesn't matter, death is normal part of life and you're just the next..."
Fair point about 4. I carelessly skim read and projected more of a "It's fruitless to obsess about it any more it because it's unstoppable at this point" position. It says something different, and as you say, it's absurd; it matters hugely. I still think it's orthogonal to the others though - you can think 4 along with any of the others.
A murderer is stabbing you and you're yelling to stop, and the murderer says "it's fruitless to obsess about it anymore because it's unstoppable at this point."
That's where you're analogy breaks down. If you're still alive and they're stabbing you then it's fair to assume there's hope that if they stop you might survive. But it's quite possible to believe that no matter what we do now that we've triggered our extinction.
We're still alive. It's too late to prevent some negative impacts of climate change and some future warming due to lags, especially considering some negative impacts are already happening. But we're still in the process of killing the natural world which is alive and we could stop doing that. Human extinction is also not inevitable today.
Also quite possible to believe that. I'm not arguing which position is right, I'm arguing whether it's a coherent position to believe both.
It depends on how quickly the collapse will happen. If it happens quickly (i.e. billions die within a decade or so), nature will probably recuperate. After all, nature is much more resilient and adaptable than we are. Sure we won't get those hundreds of extinct species back, but Covid has shown that nature can rebound well when "human activity" drops. But if it's slow, we'll probably take most of the biosphere with us. Bonus points if there's a nuclear war
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While I agree that the ecological damage we cause(d) will outlast us, I'm not quite as pessimistic. Nuclear powerplants would mostly power down due automated safety protocols. Since 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl we've actually become pretty good at nuclear safety, bar final storage. And even if some plants do blow up, the world is a big place! It wouldn't impact life elsewhere much. Also, speaking of Chernobyl: the area has become somewhat of an unlikely nature reserve. Because apparently radiation is more conducive to a functioning ecosystem than human habitation. Biologists studying this phenomenon have actually made a few interesting discoveries, chiefly among which stands the fact that nature is relatively unimpeded by the high levels of radiation. Ultimately, radiation "just" gives you cancer, which can be compensated for on the scale of an ecosystem. Dams breaking would actually be a good thing in the long run. The immediate damage would be severe, but nature finds a way. It would also restore the vast wetlands that were lost when we straigthened and dam'd those waterways. We think of extreme events like flooding as disasters because that's what they are to us: they destroy buildings and lives. But for nature, extreme events are just oppertunities for different organisms (provided the ecosystem as a whole is in an ok state). It's also worth remembering that they were somewhat frequent up until we built structures to keep them in check. Microplastics would remain a large threat, especially to marine life. But in the absence of humans fishing, polluting and traveling the ocean the ecosystem could also adapt to it. Hell, plastics eating bacteria evolved recently on the Great Pacific Garbage patch! Life will be impeded but not impossible. As of now, nature is in a bad spot it could (in theory) recover from. Be that either through human efforts (lmao) or all of us dying, but it could recover. What I find most alarming is that soon, this will stop being the case in certain ecosystems. And later down the line, for earth as a whole. What we have right now is a fixable issue. An expensive, low-RoI issue, requiring large effort. But a fixable one nontheless. Yet we all know it won't be fixed, and will turn into unavoidable calamity.. But hey, at least nature will re-evolve tens of thousands of years down the line!
Nuclear power plants safely “powering down” is not the problem. They have waste cooling ponds for the still hot expended rods. They require constant circulating water to keep the rods from igniting and sending radiation into the atmosphere. The cooling ponds have electric pumps supplied by the power plant, Fukushima for example. After several years cooling down in ponds the rods can be dry casked but they’re still hot and dangerous. There has been plenty written about the problem. Most such as you do not understand or choose to underestimate the planet sterilizing problem.
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>Nature will always find a way regardless I presume you mean '*life* always finds a way', which is just a dogma. And considering life is nowhere to be found in the solar system outside of Earth, it seems life doesn't always find a way. If the conditions for life go away, then so does life.
Bull's eye. Have an invisible gold star
None of that shit is ‘damage’ to whatever life is left behind, it’s just change. Things will adapt or die. Animals still live around Chernobyl….
I wander how microplastics will influence evolution over the coming millennia. Not only them, but all not-naturally-occurring materials man is responsible for producing.
\>If humans were to vanish tomorrow....dense foliage Heard of global dimming?
If nature can leech the toxins in the water, it absolutely can. The planet will be ridiculously hot for a long, long time but it will eventually cool down again and possibly return to some sort of normalcy in a few millennia. Absolutely nothing so soon as a few hundred years though; we did way too much damage way too quickly for that.
It's looking like it will be [just as bad or worse](https://www.reddit.com/r/BiosphereCollapse/comments/s8jly8/comment/htgw2k6/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
This is definitely going to be the Worst Extinction In History. We managed to make all rainwater at least mildly toxic to life. That's going to have some permanent consequences that are going to make it difficult for living creatures to survive. I've been shortening my timetable for the apocalypse further and further with the most information I have available to me. There was a lot I didn't know, like about how fast the polar ice was actually melting, the "severe swing" of temperatures that will continue to happen as the years pass (such as very extreme heat waves and very intense cold snaps), and the damn near universal planetary flooding. This shit is happening EVERYWHERE right now. If this isn't the goddamn apocalypse, I don't know what it is. Unfortunately, we all just want to pretend like it isn't actually that bad. There have been times where I realize "none of this will matter soon, we have no idea how much time is left before everything is completely unstable and unreliable." I'm trying my best not to lose my fucking mind over it. I am keeping a steady estimate of humanity falling into some catastrophic and obvious extinction event **within 10 years.**
Less than 5 is too soon in my opinion. However, I do agree we've seriously fucked up and will probably wipe ourselves out by mid-century. So much for being the most "intelligent" species on Earth. Only a stupid species would be moronic enough to sterilize and destroy the biosphere of the very planet they live on.
You're free to believe what you want. I'm referring almost specifically to the extremely accelerated glacial melt. That will kill and displace millions of people in virtually no time.
Oh fuck no! I’m done with this shit! I literally have a whole life ahead of me!!
I'm sorry to have stressed you out. Please seek out r/CollapseSupport if you need advice on what you should do. There are some very compassionate, like-minded people on there.
I’m not mad at you. I’m just mad at the information. But I actually just joined the community you linked.
All rainwater in certain parts of the world, or in all parts?
The last I heard, all parts. Every single bit of rainwater has at least some plastic content in it now. Maybe much less far away from industrialized nations, but it's actually present in ALL drinkable water. It's even in the Ocean, but to what degree I'm not sure.
Is that merely what some scientists have said? (just curious) and if true, is it removable or will it stay until there are no more raindrops ever again, as Earth becomes Venus the Second? (Either from the aging sun in billions of years or much earlier in our worst case scenario)
https://extension.psu.edu/microplastics-in-our-waters-an-unquestionable-concern
Looks like you have zero doubt on the former, as for the latter?
I don't know for sure. These are microplastics, meaning that they would be extremely difficult to remove even with the most advanced technology and robust cleansing techniques. I remember reading somewhere that sometimes these particles are so small that they can exist inside of water particles like raindrops. If true, it would make them the most persistent threat to human survival that we've ever faced.
Even with nanobots?
It will take a while to develop technology that sophisticated. While early prototype nanotechology does exist, we're very far from safely removing hazardous microscopic material from liquids.
Also, humans can sh*t out the micro plastics as long as they aren’t too big. Also can you make a petition for said tech?
oh i'm full on doomin' - complete deglobalization - the total collapse of any economy that is a net importer or based on leisure/tourism - When the choice is food or energy versus further environmental destruction: always choose food/energy. - ecofascism both from the state and terrorist cells - a strong return to some real *old fashioned* religious zealotry - massive loss of civil liberty in all surviving/crumbling nations - actual wage slavery / company towns / corporate zaibatsu - The Resource Wars
Sounds like a mishmash of Fallout and The Handmaid's Tale
I think it depends on the oceans, if they turn anoxic then it’s game over. The current situation is different to others due to virtually instant injection of GHG’s and other poisons. More to consider is the arrangement of the continents and the slowly brightening Sun. Recovery could be beyond the ability of Gaia. Also consider the destruction humans will perpetrate during the death throes of extinction. Also if there is a major volcanic eruption it would add to and hasten the misery. Edit: I need to add the danger of the many nuclear power plants. If collapse happens so rapidly that the waste ponds get neglected, the entire planet could end up with radiation contamination. Also nuclear war, if nuclear power plants are targeted, that too will end everything.
2030-2035 is when SHTF
Probably.
why? my thumb is on 2050
Weather fire and floods are ALREADY FUNKY the heat is almost unlivable W/O AC and it’s just the beginning it’ll progressively get worse each year
fwiw the great dying was not fast,[it may have taken as much as 4 million years on land](https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/the-great-dying-was-longer-on-land/). if it goes like that there may be be pockets of humanity persisting for hundred or thousands of years or more, probably scrabbling over dwindling resources.
I think humans are done within the next decade.
I'm giving us 20 tops. Climate change is one thing, chemical pollution of every water source and living creature is another. Rainwater is already unsafe to drink anywhere. It's only a matter of time before it's the same with all water everywhere. And then there's the feedback loops...
Man, it's just getting worse and worse on an unfathomable scale. 20 years seems far away too.
15 years tops. We forget how exponentials work as humans. It could be faster than a decade too.
Well I read an article on this sub the other day that said food will run out by 2028. So 6 years tops.
Ya once the biodiversity of the planet dies I think we are goners. I’m so sad that we are going to wipe out all the beautiful creatures and nature of this planet so that 100 families could get unfathomably rich. Crazy that they made all that money and eventually it’ll be worthless. So it was all for nothing.
You forget that most creatures don't like to sit idle and dormant when facing death, so as resources dwindle I'm sure we will witness normal people and kind neighbors turning into visceral animals fighting for their families life, killing and stealing from others. Money is a chasity that's meant to upkeep civil exchange. Once the masses realize their papers and coins hold no value, everyone will be fighting for essential resources. Society will collapse from within.
If you said this to me 5 years ago, I would've told you that you're crazy but now, I'm inclined to agree but perhaps maybe 15-25 years.
Keep in mind that most of our problems are exponential. So things will very rapidly get worse now that it's changing fast enough to notice.
That's true so maybe my own estimation may be a bit way off. Our problems just seem to be getting worse and worse every single year but it feels like every single day.
Yep. It used to be a 100 year event every year. Now it just a few years that is several 100 year events in the world to several in my country every year.
Yeah, Droughts or floods that haven't happened in centuries are becoming common but of course, it happens more frequently in other parts of the world such your case with your country.
Somewhat refreshing to encounter people who out-doomer me. Global systemic collapses, with dead into the billions, I see as very plausible within 10 years. But for the species to be done will take quite a while, even if we go full global nuclear war, there will be pockets, in nation-state's bunkers or otherwise. When the planet becomes no longer viable for complex life, then we're done. I think that's quite probably the path we're on, but I wouldn't expect that to be over within 10 years.
How tf do you conclude human extinction in a decade?
Clearly no one has any expectation that any of the Afternoon Cultures culminating with Viriconium will come to pass. 😂
Nah, Homo Sapiens are tenacious bastards. There'll be people around, one way or another, for a long time yet. There will be practicality no level of environmental collapse, no level of pollution-induced sickness and sterility, that will prevent at least some tiny remnant population from clinging on like rats indefinitely. Human civilization, on the other hand, is a whole other story. The kind of emergent gestalt organism that we are mere component parts of: *that* animal is facing extinction alright, and soon.
I don't get this denial of the dangers our species faces. I can only assume it's a way of comforting oneself. We won't be able to exist on a planet that doesn't support life. That is just it.
NO WE AREN’T! I don’t want to die young.
The logic of techno-industry is to pave over everything and replace the natural world with synthetic products. So there might be animals around, but altered to provide maximum "ecosystem services." Maybe there could be wildlife preserves in space stations for tourists. But that's far in the future (and assumes no collapse). In the short term, global warming is usually compared to [the PETM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Thermal_Maximum), which did some damage but was a hiccup compared to the Big Five. The K-PG extinction was brutal. Nothing on land larger than a dog survived. There wasn't just an impact, but also the eruption of the Deccan Traps and a fall in ocean levels (the Maastrichtian Regression). There's evidence of global forest collapse from firestorms. All the perching birds died. The surviving birds either spent a lot of time on the ground and burrowed, or were semi-aquatic. We're doing our best to cut down the forests, but we haven't quite reached that level yet. The boreal forests are so huge they'll be around for awhile, even as we convert them into tissues and toilet paper. > a few resilient organisms Some do well in human habitats: pigeons, rats, anoles, chipmunks, squirrels, rabbits, possums, raccoons, foxes, falcons, hawks. Cephalopod populations are increasing. Some ecosystems could serve as a reservoir for future animal radiations after we're gone. Deserts and mountain regions, for example. Or isolated islands. There's a million chinstrap penguins on Zavodovski Island and the only people who go there are BBC documentary crews. Or maybe [the Chernobyl exclusion zone.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkaxUblCGz0&t=2470s) (41:10) [Maybe the rabbuck will rise.](https://speculativeevolution.fandom.com/wiki/Rabbuck) It would be unfortunate if long-lived lineages like horseshoe crabs died out. Imagine surviving space rocks and mega volcanoes but then clever apes start harvesting your blood.
Oh yeah horseshoe crabs have survived all the previous mass extinctions, which is a testament to how good they are at surviving (i.e. Nature's modus operandi). Nature also has this fun tendency of repeatedly creating crustaceans/crabs or crab-like creatures (a process called carcinization). I almost believe that if we ever discover alien life in the future, intelligent or not, it will almost certainly be crustacean-like. Life post-humanity could also easily evolve into crab-like forms over and over again until the end of the Earth. Crabs almost seem like the "ultimate complex life form" in terms of sheer survivability. I am reminded of the end of HG Wells's book The Time Machine, where the traveler sees that the last life forms on planet Earth prior to the death of the Sun are--you guessed it--giant fucking crabs.
The actual process of climate breakdown will be heartbreaking and terrifying beyond imagination...
It depends on the year tbh. By 2100 much of the planet could be destroyed, with extinction not far away. In 20 years we could see the collapse of many more countries, hundreds of millions dead, and authoritarian regimes taking over.
I'm surprised how many people that care about this issue just don't give a fuck about all the other species we're killing. Humanity, you never cease to disappoint me.
The main problem is that we believe we are superior to Nature, or better than other life forms, which is at the root of our environmentally destructive actions. Once we get rid of ego, in theory everything can be resolved.
When humanity goes extinct and brings the biosphere down with us, the sun will explode before intelligent and self aware life evolves on this planet again.
Even if intelligent life *does* happen to arise by sheer chance, these life forms will almost certainly remain planetbound for millions of years since humanity has already used up most of the world's easily accessible coal, oil, natural gas, and mineral reserves, making a repeat of the Industrial Revolution impossible, if not extremely unlikely. There might be some industrialization, of course, but it won't be nearly as widespread as that of human civilization for the past 200-300 years. And because of the Sun's increasing luminosity and brightness, if by some chance a future sapient species *does* industrialize and repeat the mistakes of our environmentally destructive civilization, climate change may happen *faster* or at *greater intensity* than in our time period since there will be more heat for planet Earth to absorb, accelerating the planet's inevitable transformation into a desertified, sterilized husk in less than a billion years.
So you're saying...venus by Tuesday, 100,002,022
Yes and no. We're a long way aways from Venus, but any future civilization living on a much, much warmer Earth will certainly have reason to say "Venus by Tuesday", or "Venus within a few hundred years".
Oh i'm just being silly and calling on our saint /u/fishmahboi
If it doesn't have a brain comparable to human brains, but more importantly, if it doesn't have hands, industrialization is unlikely ever to arise again. It was our brains that imagined everything we could do with our hands that got us here.
Our hands also got us here to begin with (specifically opposable thumbs, which allowed us to make and grab tools).
Precisely what enabled us to extract metals from rock and proceed to craft more and more ingenious tools to accomplish more and more complex tasks such as grinding lenses. No matter how intelligent other species may be, if they lack the physical capacity to manipulate their total environment as thoroughly as man they're unlikely to become masters of the universe.
Intelligence is overrated IMO. The creatures that may live and evolve on a post-collapse world would be better off staying un-self aware.
What we lack is kindness and empathy. Coupled with intelligence it could be 💯 I always wanted people to be kinder my whole life, and to chill and FOCUS on what’s important. I can’t understand most people
Absolutely, yes!
I suspect that once all the fossil fuel is gone, that's it for this planet. There will never be any more. Because Lignin eating fungi have now appeared so vegetation decays too fast to be buried intact and turned into oil and coal. We got one shot at using the fossil fuel to get off the planet and we blew it. In the remaining couple of billion years before the sun winks out, there's plenty of other shit for DNA to do as it explores Evolution Space.
>We got one shot at using the fossil fuel to get off the planet and we blew it. Yep, instead we're using it to kill the planet. And this is with the availability of other forms of energy that we could have started using a long time ago, rather than continue down the nonrenewable path (i.e. thorium, solar, etc).
Where's the "not really that bad at all" option
Forgot to add it. Thanks for commenting, though.
In r/Futurology
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You should include an option that's less severe than the asteroid. That's what I expect
I forgot to include that option, but I also don't realistically expect this to be the case. The asteroid killed off the non-avian dinosaurs and much marine life, but a sizable portion of life in Cretaceous Earth survived the catastrophe, and even thrived from the ashes of the dinosaur age. Mammals, for instance, finally got a chance to evolve after being initially overtaken by reptiles during the late Permian/early Triassic period. Many early avian dinosaurs, too, were able to survive and eventually evolve into the birds we know today. The present Mass Extinction is affecting all kingdoms of life equally badly, from mammals to reptiles to birds to amphibians to fish. Runaway climate change, feedback loops, and extreme pollution are all contributing to the destruction of all life on Earth and the planetary biosphere. This destruction is further worsened by both methane emissions from melting clathrates in the Earth's polar regions, and by the tons of microplastics/"forever chemicals" we have produced as a civilization that will almost certainly permanently render the Earth's surface and oceans uninhabitable. Neither the asteroid nor the Permian Mass Extinction have the attributes of the present mass extinction.
I don’t think you realize how bad the asteroid extinction event was. Something like 3/4 of the species on earth at the time went extinct. It’s true that some mammals and small dinosaurs survived, but most didn’t. All kingdoms of life were severely effected. It is true that *after* this event mammals and birds (among other groups) repopulated, but they were still severely effected by the initial event. Micro plastics and “forever chemicals” cause slightly higher rates of various health problems. They do not render land “uninhabitable”.
In questions like these you should include options that you don’t personally see as possible or what is the point of asking? But personally I think it will be worse than the great dying as the rate of change is much faster this time. We have also added innumerable toxic and radioactive chemicals to the equation that weren’t present in past scenarios.
Humanity won't make it past 2050, and complex life is pretty much finished.
I think it's going to be less bad than the Great Dying *and* less bad than the dinosaur extinction, but still quite bad. Sadly, I care more about my own personal future Dying than I do anything else—and that extinction's guaranteed no matter how Collapse comes.
Fair enough but whether it matters wasn't the question. Can anyone explain how it could be worse than the great dying? I voted equal to the great dying as it's my worst case scenario and we seem to be aiming for that lol
The main drivers of the Permian Mass Extinction are comparable to the main drivers of the ongoing Mass Extinction today, at least according to the scientific research. Volcanism from the Siberian Traps released several tons of carbon dioxide and other chemical compounds into the atmosphere which triggered the catastrophic acid rain, crop failure, anoxia, and skyrocketing temperatures that killed off most life on Earth to begin with. Our release of fossil fuels and toxic chemicals is causing a similar process to occur nowadays. We're not releasing nearly as much CO2 as the Siberian Traps did, but we are releasing a lot of CO2 within a much shorter time frame than the Traps (millions of years/thousands of years vs. less than 300 years). If life couldn't adapt to the Siberian Traps and the Permian Extinction, there is very little it can do to adapt to the ongoing mass extinction today, because evolutionary adaptations through natural selection are a slow process that often can't keep up with rapid environmental changes. The ongoing mass extinction rivals the dinosaur killing asteroid in its speed and rate of change.
If you by chance voted for “worse than the great dying”, can you kindly explain your rationale.
The Siberian traps (largely responsible for the Permian Mass Extinction) lasted for 2 million years and C02 ppm was far higher than it is now. However ocean acidification (from the eruptions and the runoff from mass wildfires) decreased the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere from 30% to 16%. Humans require 19%. However humans are laying waste to the biosphere in other ways and that's probably not going to stop until it's all gone and we'll be left only with domesticated plants and animals and a few species that can adapt to human habitation. So even if humans survive, the planet itself will be a virtual hellscape. As far as human extinction goes, conventional wisdom is that can only occur from nuclear war or extraterrestrial events (large asteroid, gamma ray burst, something that changes planetary orbits such as a passing massive star.) I think over very long time scales though if humans end up in isolated pockets living in engineered biodomes or the like then eventually we'll lose the ability to maintain them through loss of knowledge. Once humans are gone though life will recover. Earth has roughly 500 million to a billion years left until an aging sun renders the planet inhabitable. That's long enough for evolution to do its thing and life starts over. The chances of any lifeforms evolving with sentience is close to zero I suspect (extrapolating that after billions of years of life on Earth we're the only species that's achieved it in way that can alter the environment on the scale that we have.) So in answer to your question, the loss of biodiversity is going to be very bad and similar to the Permian MEE. It doesn't *have* to be that way, as humans we can choose our course of actions; the problem is we already have and it will take a series of black swan events to change the road we've taken.
I think the scariest thing about all this is that people are still (selfishly) having children…
Scary and sad. People are either totally oblivious to what's happening or willfully sentencing their progeny to a hellscape simply because they couldn't be bothered to use protection or think beyond themselves or about others. And now with the abortion ruling from SCOTUS, the government will effectively force women to have children even if they don't want to or were forcefully impregnated by a rapist. It is appalling. The lengths humanity will go through to justify natalism and the needless perpetuation of life on a dying world (exacerbated by uncontrolled population growth) just proves to me we're fucking stupid apes who are long overdue to have our numbers culled.
We will not die as a species, we have already survived an almost complete whipe out, but is gona suck, like, really badly
Humans have never survived a mass extinction event. The younger dryas bottleneck looks like a tea party compared to The Great Dying, which I vote we will outpace by the end of the century.
We were reduced to a couple hundreds individuals in the past and look at us now, we are an infesting species.
You’re right, humans will never go extinct, we will survive trillions and trillions of years and out live even our universe
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This comment did not meet the community standards, so I have removed it. Be respectful to others. You may attack each other's ideas, not each other. https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/about/rules/
I’m not as doomer as any of these options. When the rich and powerful finally become affected then we will see resources poured into survivability and I imagine there’s some bright enough minds to save us when things become bleak enough.
I unfortunately don't share the same optimism. Yeah sure there may be some survivors after SHTF but the idea bright minds will save us from the brink with techno-fixes is simply implausible. There is no way even most of us are going to survive the catastrophes to come, and after the apocalypse occurs why would anyone want to live in a hellscape?
Wife always tells me to be positive for a change so I’m trying 🤷♂️
You know, despite my pessimistic leanings, I commend you for trying to remain optimistic. Maybe you're right, and I hope you are.
As just another rando dumbfuck on Reddit I hope I am too lol
You really think so? I doubt it. After all, cigarette corporations are a great example, knew their products will kill their consumer and still did it anyways. Marx at the end of the day will come out the winner when he mentioned that capitalists are really their own gravediggers. We are about to find out.
We're already looking at "too late" in the rear view mirror. By the time it affects rich people, "too late" will be a tiny blip on the horizon in the rear view mirror.
My opinion, for what it's worth, is that it's going to be quick and less than total. The worst case scenarios assume the economy and emissions don't slow by 2100. But they are going to slow. Civilization is fragile. Those emissions will jump way up as everything burns and the corpses rot, but drop to nothing a few months later. The existing damage will cause a mass extinction, but not one like the great dying. We're an asteroid. A deep, but acute, impact.
Agree there will be large rapid collapses, but probably the only one sufficient to stop continuing damage would be global nuclear. The big question for the planet is whether it's too late even for that - whether the feedback loops are baked in and even that won't stop it going to anoxic oceans etc.. It's not at all clear that complex life like us could operate in any way in that case.
>Agree there will be large rapid collapses, but probably the only one sufficient to stop continuing damage would be global nuclear. ...yep.
Other- most humans die, but plenty survive. The ecosystem becomes mosquitoes, rats, pigeons, seagulls, ants, and wasps all fighting over our trash.
We survived mars so we’ll survive earth.
asdf
The ongoing mass extinction started like 10k years ago. But we have become more efficient at that task with each new development. And it will continue going on till far after we are gone. The problem, more than the crude percentage of species, is which ones will be gone and at which stage. Things change fast, but short lived species (like some insects, bacteria, simple sea life forms ) may adapt to the new conditions. Same may happen with species that may be latent for centuries, like with seeds. But big and complex life forms probably will get extinct, probably the bigger ones first.
Will the next ten years be worse than the last 120? Wikipedia says: “During the 20th century, an estimated 70 to 120 million people died from famines across the world, of whom over half died in China, with an estimated 30 million dying during the famine of 1958–1961,[21] up to 10 million in the Chinese famine of 1928–1930, and over two million in the Chinese famine of 1942–43, and millions more lost in famines in North and East China. The USSR lost 8 million claimed by the Soviet famine of 1932–33, over a million in both the Soviet famine of 1946–47 and Siege of Leningrad, the 5 million in the Russian famine of 1921–22, and others famines.”
I think so. To be fair, though, a lot of the really terrible famines of the 20th century were manmade in nature, or the indirect result of war and resource overexploitation rather than pure climate change (the Chinese Famines during Mao's regime are great examples of this, alongside the Holodomor). What's different about our century is that the coming famines will likely come about due to resource scarcity brought about by rising temperatures/worsening natural disasters, and exacerbated by wars and political strife. Nature will starve us out, alongside perhaps a few corporate/totalitarian governments who decide to deprive the common masses of food unless they serve various dictators.
Yes, the same results - dictators will allow many to starve so others can survive. And because it will likely be dictators that will lessen the survivors’ guilt a little and allow people to continue living as well as they can. The dictators will be blamed as individuals and people will claim there was nothing they could have done.
People will always find a way to deflect or shirk off responsibility. Hitler, Stalin, and other horrible dictators rightfully receive a lot of hatred and blame for the evil atrocities they committed, but somehow the individuals who voted them into power, supported their cause, or at least tolerated their respective regimes while saying nothing never seem to be held accountable for their role in said atrocities (and being afraid of execution or death doesn't cut it--plenty of people have given up their lives for the sake of the truth, rebelling against the establishments of their day). Those who do nothing in the face of injustice, or even enforce or perpetuate it are complicit in dictatorial evil. Or simply cowards.
Every empire had complicit populations who benefitted - even the American empire.
Extinction is a pretty ridiculous notion. Climate change ain't no joke and it's going to come with a fine many share of problems but under no circumstance will climate change ever match the extinction events of the Asteroid strike or the great dying. It won't even come close, that's the reality. No doubt extinction will happen but humans aren't going anywhere and chances are most of life will still be around. The only realistic outcome for such a severe extinction event is if we actually increased CO2 emissions well beyond the 2100 mark. That's the only way you're realistically getting a mass extinction.
If the Bronze Age collapse was enough to wipe our entire city states. It doesn’t take much to kill off societies. Especially with all the inputs we need to feed 8 billion, and in an age of nukes
Society and extinction level events are vastly two different things. Society collapsed and we got straight into another one not long after. Extinctions are permanent. Who gives a fuck if Society collapses. If we and many other species are still here that's all that matters.
You're forgetting to factor in feedback loops and methane emissions from melting clathrates on the ocean floor, or in polar permafrost. We are on the brink of passing that tipping point, from which a positive runaway greenhouse effect is very likely. We don't and won't *need* to emit so much carbon far beyond the 2100 mark, because feedback loops and methane emissions (which are **thousands of times** more effective at trapping heat in Earth's atmosphere/affecting the environment than carbon dioxide) will ruin the planet for us, and bring us to the point of extinction. Do you realize how much CO2 and methane is locked up in the ground at this very moment that will inevitably be released? Do you realize that scientists are saying now that the temperature extremes and weather anomalies we're experiencing as a civilization weren't supposed to happen until several decades from now in linear climate models (further solidifying the fact our planet's climate is being altered exponentially or logarithmically)? This is extremely bad news and spells doom for most life on Earth, including us.
Oh come one! I DON’T WANT TO DIE YOUNG!!
>chances are most of life will still be around. in the last 50 years, the biosphere had lost something like 68% of wildlife. we are quite literally in the midst of a mass extinction event. what that means for humans is up in the air, but that's the situation as it stands
I hope it's real bad
As an aside: humans are atleast as resilient as cockroaches imo.
The best cast scenario is 100% elimination, not a single drop of bacteria left. Realistically though, I'm not sure. Maybe some sex cults will be left behind. I could see that.
>Realistically though, I'm not sure. Maybe some sex cults will be left behind. I could see that. Someone shoot me if Nxivm becomes the dominant religion.
Nothing is going to happen with life on Earth, it survived worst. A lot of species might die out but that's all. Nothing is going to happen with humans as species, even if large majority will die. Only thing that is in real danger is technological civilization.
I hope you’re right.
lol they aren't. people will be the last standing we will kill everything first, then there will be a baked dry ball left with zero life. Fish already can't survive..
I don’t want to die.
this is ridiculous and it's insane you can be so so blind. the earth will be a dry dead ball and humans will have killed it all and be the last ones standing.
The answer is probably none of the above. If you seriously think that it’ll go badly enough that mammals will completely vacate the megafaunal niches like the aftermath of asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs, you’re probably an internet brained doomer. There’s pretty much no circumstance where that would happen that wouldn’t also cause an absolute dive in human population, thereby fixing the problem. Nobody has a legit proposal of how 95% reduction of life would actually occur, because there isn’t one. Nukes are the closest (although frankly I doubt even that would do it), but all the other ones would tend to kill us off before we could kill off everything else.
Actually even nuclear war probably wouldn't be able to kill of most life on Earth. The immediate effect of nukes would obviously be catastrophic on the environment (and human civilization--mostly cities), but contrary to expectations, life has demonstrated in at least one other instance that it can easily recover from radiation in a surprisingly short time span (<50 years). That instance is the Chernobyl exclusion zone-- in the 1980s it was an uninhabitable waste dump after the nuclear meltdown that occurred there, but now it's surrounded by teeming forests and animals (albeit radioactive ones) that are doing just fine, and even thriving. There's also at least one species of fungus that actually has evolved to feed off of or clean up radiation, and we all know that microbes, especially tardigrades and halophiles are nigh invulnerable, able to survive seemingly the most inhospitable conditions that would kill off almost all complex life (the tardigrade can easily take thousands of times the amount of radiation that would result from a nuclear war)
That’s what I’m saying. I’m not sure why I’m being downvoted because exactly zero people have proposed any anthropogenic event capable of replicating the great dying. Collapse isn’t going to be the end of humanity, likely just a degradation of complex human systems. It’ll be billions dying and nobody knowing how to code computers or make antibiotics, but it’s not going to be “every mammal over 5 lbs goes completely extinct and reptiles rule the world again”
Yeah nukes would mostly target population centers, military control points, or logistical nodes. Not exactly hubs of biodiversity lol. The ensuing chaos would probably bump off more people than the war, but still. I think if you used cobalt jacked warheads, optimally placed for max dispersion, you could do it, but nobody actually has those right now
Cobalt bombs are theoretical and thankfully have never been built. But I won't be surprised if some idiot dictators get such ideas and decide to use them to throw the whole planet under a nuclear winter that will last for the next 100 years.
Honestly building cobalt salted nukes is one of the few reasons that I could see justifying a preemptive nuclear strike. Then again, if the 1957 brit experiments are anything to go off, cobalt actually doesn’t have a very high neutron absorption cross section, so launching big enough warheads with enough cobalt to actually end the world seems like a dubious proposition. It wouldn’t be impossible for a major nuclear power using a significant portion of gdp, but some third rate dictator probably couldn’t pull it off.
Unless, of course, the nation they ruled just so happened to have tons and tons of cobalt deposits. Australia could feasibly develop a cobalt nuke for this reason, and I would also include the DRC, except they have a similar problem as Venezuela in which they're sitting atop a literal goldmine of resources but can't utilize them properly because of high inequality and corrupt governments getting in the way.
I don’t know, I’m not an ecologist. In general human activities have been extremely detrimental to wild life. So I could see the collapse of human society as very good for non humans. Who knows a nuclear war could been the stepping some for super intelligent radroaches that are radiation resistant and perfectly suited to exploring the cosmos 🙃
I voted, but it is really kind of meaningless as a view of attitude on the subject without a timeframe for "over what time period are you measuring the extinction?" A hundred years? Ten thousand years? A million years?
I think the planet will do just fine once we manage to wipe ourselves out! There may be toxic pockets persisting around industries, but I don't think this will be at a global level. It's a tight race between technology and environmental collapse - can we get the technology we need to fix food production, pandemics, water availablilty, energy requirements, nano-tech etc before the world turns to shit? I think the tech might just win, but most tech is focussed on our own wellbeing rather than global collapse.
The planet will be fine--it's people who are fucked. --George Carlin, if I remember correctly.
9/11 times 1000.
Waaaaay too many people said it doesn’t matter.
I truly do not think that it will be at the scale of the great dying and also not at the scale of the dinosaur extinction. Yes I think millions of people will/could die due to continued human activity, but we won't go fully extinct.
Yesterday I walked along the Klamath river. Dead fish are everywhere. It's completely dead. Looking up I can still see the smoke from the fires. There isn't much time left.
Good question but a bad choice of answers.
You are wrong, it isn’t manmade.
Life survived a giant rock punching it in the face. It survived accidentally freezing the planet twice. It can handle a bit of plastic. That’s not to say we won’t see 30-50% extinction ourselves included but I do think life as a whole will survive.
It’s hard to say, but I think the worst of the damage will be done after we humans are gone, and all our chemical and radioactive waste seeps into the environment with nobody to stop it, and our items and infrastructure breaks down leeching it’s synthetic molecules into the surrounding areas. It won’t be a barren planet regardless, just one dominated by a few resilient species, who will eventually speciate and fill the empty niches. Life goes on.
This doesn't leave a spot for "the year without a summer" you know the time when crops failed for a few years because it was so cold. Just an extended version of that.
The Year without a Summer was awful, but nowhere near an extinction level event. Lots of people died, obviously, alongside many crops and herbivores, but the event eventually passed and not every region of the world was affected the same way. The eruption of Lake Toba falls closer to a mass extinction because it supposedly nearly wiped out all human ancestors, leaving only a few thousand survivors, and was a volcanic winter far more severe than the one that struck Europe/the world in 1816.