• nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    Insect die offs really scare me, so many fruits and plants are pollinated by them, or things just up the food chain from them. Then I just can’t help imagining a chain of collapse from there.

    I think humans will be the last living things to go unless we engineer our own extinction early.

      • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Yes, debates don’t really center on the issue of sterilizing the whole planet (fyi there are deep-rock bacteria everywhere so “just” molten surface isn’t enough), but rather on the loss we are causing.

        Ie ending species that without us would have no issue evolving & continuing to be part of the ecosystems.

        Also from bacterial life to complex fauna its easily a billion years (+/- a lot).

          • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            No. If cats dont have anything to eat bcs their food is also extinct then they absolutely cannot just continue fine without us.

            Same with plants, all of them require eg water of certain qualities etc.

            We are changing habitats (and killing species trough that), not killing specific species directly (eg hunting, pesticides, etc) and via the lack of them changing the habitats.

            And by changing the habitats I mean at speeds far beyond what evolution can keep up with, so it comes to more of a reset. So the sadness of this wiki/Biodiversity_loss followed by booms like wiki/Cambrian_explosion, but ofc note the timescales.

    • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Exactly. Plus the whole underwater portion of ecology we have basically no data on (yet it’s of huge global importance). Scary, sad, infuriating stuff.

      Unfortunately I too think that we will outlive our consequences for long enough to take a proper mass extinction event levels of biodiversity collapse with us.

      But let’s focus on the positive - biodiversity boom between mere 10 million years from now to like 50 or 100 million years from now (which in the scheme of things isn’t that long, just very unnecessary that it will come to that for something like capital/amassing of power of one species over others of the same species).