• Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
      9·
      9 months ago

      For sure.

      But tbf it’s still a bold assumption that afte only a million years biodiversity would rebound to the point to support (mega)fauna like that again.

      Hoping for the best.

      • Johanno@feddit.de
        6·
        9 months ago

        Actually the fauna comes back really quick. After only a hundred years when nothing is maintenaned the plants will cover most of our infrastructure.

        After probably 500 years most constructions are probably only hills.

        • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
          5·
          9 months ago

          No, not extinct species.

          I don’t believe we will leave isolated, big, and diverse oasis of specimens to just repopulate vacant areas.

          We are well into a huge (and particularly very fast) mass extinction event, sure only a few headline megafauna species get press coverage, but the amount of invertebrates alone that go extinct and in contrast a single or a few species temporary takes its place in turn expediting the imbalance levels & collapsing entire ecosystems is staggering.

          • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            3·
            9 months 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.

            • HiddenLayer5@lemmy.mlEnglish
              3·
              9 months ago

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

              Evolution happens as long as there is life. Unless we turn the planet surface into a giant ball of lava, it is impossible to kill all life and it will continue without us. Even if there is only bacteria left after we go, they will simply evolve into complex life all over again, in fact it’s not the first time that has happened. In the grand scheme of what life has withstood on this planet, humans are a speed bump at best.

              • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
                1·
                9 months 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).

                • HiddenLayer5@lemmy.mlEnglish
                  3·
                  9 months ago

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

                  That’s not true though. Even the animals we’ve created, like cats and dogs, can live on just fine without us. As can most small and micro herbivores like mice, rabbits, certain songbirds, and most of the “pest” insects; as well as mesopredators (middle of the food chain predators) like foxes and the aforementioned cats and dogs. Plenty of plants are asexual and do not require external pollination, including many of the invasive plants that we can’t kill despite our best efforts.

                  Actually, invasive species in general are a major counterexample. We’ve been trying to drive many of them to extinction, they are not going extinct. Australia is trying to kill feral cats, that’s not working. The US spends billions on herbicides against invasive plants, that’s not working and many argue that it’s doing more harm to native plants in some cases than the invasive plants themselves. They also tried to kill European sparrows and starlings which are also not working. Same with fire ants. Same with invasive fish. Same with invasive seaweed and algae.

                  In fact, in environmental sciences which I majored in, there is increasing discussion on whether calling species “invasive” even makes sense. Humans are also part of the ecosystem and of “nature” despite us claiming to be the masters of it. We are subject to its laws just like all other life, so if a mite can hitch a ride on a bird across the ocean and that’s considered natural migration, why shouldn’t a mouse that hitches a ride on a human boat across the ocean be considered natural migration? There is no morality in nature, it just is and everything is fair game, so we really need not worry “for nature,” we should be worrying for ourselves about losing our place in it by going extinct. Adapt or die, that’s nature’s one and only rule, so if we don’t want to die we need to adapt and clean up our act basically.

            • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
              1·
              9 months 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).

          • HiddenLayer5@lemmy.mlEnglish
            1·
            9 months ago

            We have maintained huge megafauna populations though, who are ready and able to take over the moment we go. Cows, sheep, and yes, horses like shown in the comic, are prime examples. We’re also doing a damn good job of killing all their natural predators, namely wolves and big cats.

            Horses have actually become an invasive species in some parts of the Americas and driving out native large herbivores. Ever heard of American wild horses? They’re technically “feral horses” because they did not exist in this hemisphere before Europeans came.

      • AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
        7·
        9 months ago

        You need only look at how our species treats one another, despite claiming to know better, to understand why. Endless styles of cruelty of the many by the few in the name of greed, gluttony, power lust, and schadenfreude. The few voices of sanity and compassion assassinated, mowed down, blacklisted, and threatened into contrition. Literally destroying civilization pumping carbon shit into the air, fully aware of what we’re doing, to continue stoking the ego scores of a handful of sociopaths.

        If you’re proud of our species, good for you. Take the bliss, Cypher

        • GracchiBros@lemmy.world
          2·
          9 months ago

          I do think there’s something positive about being the only species we know of with the intelligence and knowledge developed over generations to even realize these things and much such judgements. The plants that filled the atmosphere with oxygen killing almost everything couldn’t know any better or do anything about it. Past species and humans before modern times changed their environments and caused extinctions without even knowing. And while we might not end up doing so, we do have the capabilities to do better.

          • AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
            2·
            9 months ago

            I’ve thought about that and to me it makes it worse. We have glimmers of knowing better, of doing the right thing, just enough to demonstrate that we *can, * but 99 times out of 100 we don’t.

            You can’t get angry at a lion for following it’s genetic programming, it doesn’t have the capacity for introspection about its nature. Its sentient, but not sapient. We can know better, with our cognitive abilities combined with tools of historical recording most of us do know better, but when presented the chance to take either our share of the pie with our brothers and sisters, or to take the whole pie and leave them hungry, we pick the latter like clockwork.

            The tragedy is knowing that we have the capacity to be a great people that accomplishes wonders together, but we still choose to fight one another for the biggest banana pile like impulsive beasts almost every time throughout recorded history. We refuse to learn. We refuse to heed the lessons of history for longer than a single generation. We can glimpse enlightenment, but choose the easy dopamine hit. It’s maddening.

  • Chickenstalker@lemmy.world
    28·
    9 months ago

    Ha ha, no. In a million years, mankind would have paved the entire planet’s surface, including the oceans. Our numbers would be in the hundred billions and most will live underground. The few elites would live on the uppermost levels and even have real gardens and plants. Wildlife would be extinct, save for a few robotic simulacra in the Imperial Zoo. Ironically, you would have to go to the Outer Colonies to see some animals that are extinct on Terra.

  • Omgarm@lemmy.world
    27·
    9 months ago

    Are the horses a million years old or did humans go extinct recently and are they being snarky about it?

  • Sordid@lemmy.world
    26·
    9 months ago

    That’s cute and all, but it ain’t gonna be birds and deer who gets life off this rock once the Sun starts threatening to swallow it in a few billion years. We’re screwing up badly in the short term, but we’re the only hope Earth life has in the long term.

    • letsgocrazy@lemm.ee
      18·
      9 months ago

      A thousand times this.

      I’ve used this argument before arguing with hippies about “integrating with nature”.

      Any society that isn’t on track to developing the science and engineering necessary for interstellar tavel is a dead end.

      It’s a tragic waste of human intelligence to keep making the same bamboo huts indefinetly.

      So some noble savage can live their lives on repeat for hundreds or millenia, and that’s somehow better than inventing an arc that can save every form of life on this unique Planet?

      Bloody stupid hippy nonsense.

      • emeralddawn45@discuss.tchncs.de
        13·
        9 months ago

        What makes life on another planet more worthwhile than life here? Also humans didn’t take that long to evolve so there’s plenty of opportunity for a successor to us to reach the stars in a way that causes less suffering. For that matter, we could have simply taken a couple hundred extra years to get there and reduced human suffering by like a thousandfold with a more equitable society. Bloody stupid capitalist nonsense.

        • Sordid@lemmy.world
          2·
          9 months ago

          there’s plenty of opportunity for a successor to us to reach the stars

          No, there isn’t. We’ve already used up all the easily accessible sources of fossil fuels, so whoever comes after us won’t have the energy sources necessary to have an industrial revolution and will be stuck at a pre-industrial tech level forever.

          • SimplePhysics@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            2·
            9 months ago

            That’s right, if we kick the bucket, a new intelligent civilization would not have the resources to advance at our pace. They may figure out the atom, but they won’t have the resources to utilize their knowledge. Then there is the ever looming threat of a disaster, and these preindustrial civilizations will be wiped out with zero warning or preparation.

            Also: what are the chances a species similar to us in intelligence will emerge again on this rock? I’m going to bet it’s pretty darn tiny.

                • Daft_ish@lemmy.world
                  2·
                  9 months ago

                  Write for me 4000 words on how technological advancement is a linear progression that always follows the same path and needs the same exact external stimuli to occur.

          • Blyfh@lemmy.world
            2·
            9 months ago

            Great! So they’ll skip the fossil energy era and jump directly to renewables? We paved the path for them to avoiding another climate change.

            • Sordid@lemmy.world
              1·
              9 months ago

              We’re having quite a bit of trouble making that transition even with the benefits of a couple centuries of fossil-fueled industry. I find the idea of jumping directly from horse-drawn wagons to wind turbines and solar panels rather implausible.

      • macrocephalic@lemmy.world
        8·
        9 months ago

        We’re not going to make it until the sun swallows the earth. If there’s anything related to us left at that point then it wouldn’t be recognisable to us.

      • Queen HawlSera@lemm.eeEnglish
        7·
        9 months ago

        Amen, all those movies where “All tech stops working, people learn to do things for themselves! Utopia acheived!” are garbage

      • blind3rdeye@lemm.ee
        3·
        9 months ago

        As individuals, a lot of people are content to live a simple life of prosperity. They have a basic job, and a small family, and some basic luxuries - and they call it enough. Some people have a one-eyed focus on increasing their wealth throughout their lives; but not everyone is like that. People generally recognise that their lives are finite. Some try to aim for some kind of imaginary high-score in their life, and others just live a ‘normal’ life.

        I’m now making an analogy. As a species, we can recognise that are time is finite; and we can choose to live that out in a stable simple prosperity, where we just look after our world (house) and get what we need for some basic luxuries, and be content. We could have a billion years of that. It’s a very long time. Or… we could aim for endless growth. We could consume as much as possible, and always aim for more. As we run out of resources and livable habitat on Earth, we must look to interstellar travel and spread to other planets. I don’t necessarily think that is a better choice.

        When I was young, I use to think that humans needed to settle on other planets. But I don’t think that any more. Partially because I learnt about special relativity, and decided that unless we’re very very wrong about science so far, having connected colonies on other planets is not possible. But also because I realised that there is no intrinsic goal to spread human life as much as possible. There are other things of value. We don’t need that particular goal. I also use to think that personal immortality would be a good thing. I don’t really think that any more.

      • Daft_ish@lemmy.world
        2·
        9 months ago

        Until you find out unity with nature allows humans to transcend human form and ascend to a higher plane of existence. While technology fights a losing battle to compete with the universes slow entropy into darkness. Oops.

        • ???@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          1·
          9 months ago

          I call bullshit. You know why?

          I literally had a dream that predicted the worst year of my life, 5 years in advance, by having a friendly dream character tell me I died and went to a dream afterlife.

          The catch was that I am autistic and I acted and act much like I did when I was 10 years old, and that was reflected by me taking the form of the kid sidekick in the fictional world that I was trying to write a story about at the time. I was told I was adorable and intelligent-looking (I was not the smartest kid but I was well-read and paid attention to what was in my textbooks) and not particularly unlikeable, and all of that was because that dream afterlife was a place where your personality determined your appearance. Yet despite the fact that I did not look monstrous or untrustworthy and that people who died quickly realised that in the dream world people are exactly what they appear to be, I was warned people would discriminate against me anyway, and there was nothing I or my apparent dream friend could do; said dream friend told me they thought I at least deserved to know it would happen and to just try and enjoy eternity, since I would never wake up, but that it would be hard because people would hate me unfairly.

          I woke up anyway. That’s not why I call BS. I recorded that dream in a text file and I keep backups of all my unique files.

          I’ll finish editing this soon but my phone is at 2% battery…

          • Daft_ish@lemmy.world
            2·
            9 months ago

            Please do.

            I will say, though, I don’t really have any stakes in this argument especially when you consider my contribution to humanity will probably be dead end evolutionary branch responsible for creating higher order carbon based polymers.

            • ???@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              1·
              9 months ago

              5 years later, sure enough, everything I value became critic-repellant in the writing industry; “you have to grow up”, “dark and edgy is realistic and realistic is mandatory”, “escapism is evil”, “children are spoiled little shits”, etc.

              I now am extremely certain the dream characters who talk to me are avatars of my unconscious. I know that sounds really weird and I have no proof, so believing me on that detail can be taken with a grain of salt. As for my sanity, if I was crazy, I’d be seeing or hearing my unconscious while awake, I swear this is just in dreams that this being talks to me and it gives advice like “don’t worry about the average fictional character, they’re just inanimate puppets, it’s the ones who are people’s favorite hats to wear that - like you - are important because some hats are helmets that keep the wearer alive” rather than “KiLl EvErYoNe It WiLl Be FuN!!!11!1!” so my best guess is my unconscious mind is trying to communicate with me on a level my conscious and subconscious mindstates can understand.

              I damn well know there’s more to dreams than they appear, that’s WHY I call BS, because a year ago, a dream character that was the first character to appear in two different dreams of mine since ever, and I asked it “Is there really a dream afterlife?” and it said “No.”

              I also asked it in another dream to be sure, even broadening from “dream afterlife” to “any afterlife at all”, this time using an old red landline telephone and voice contact. In a snooty french accent, it confirmed and warned me very strongly and angrily not to ask again. The only upside is it said it didn’t know for sure whether it is possible to create an afterlife using technology and/or biology.

              I’m sorry but unless someone builds one, there is no afterlife or ascension to another plane. I literally have the info directly from the source.

                • ???@lemmy.dbzer0.com
                  1·
                  9 months ago

                  I wish I was making this up or delusional or cynical. I want more than anything for souls to be immortal. I would have no problem living in my dreams forever, but I’m not the one who said it (or if my unconscious counts as being me, I’m not able to type a fediverse post using the part of my mind which is more aware of why there’s no afterlife).

                  If anyone can post scientific evidence disproving how I’ve come to interpret what I experienced, I’m content to let that have the final say rather than make any attempt to dispute it. For now, I know it sounds insane but this is literally a Cassandra Truth, so at least recognise that I don’t expect you to believe it’s the truth, only to recognize that if ascending to the astral plane could be done, I would be persuing doing so at this very moment.

                  I’m sorry, but I know what happened between me and my unconscious mind, and I’m not just relying on my memories but also my now-decade old dream logs. I asked it for the honest truth. It said the truth is what I feared, death is not (yet?) followed by anything but oblivion.

                  To be fair, if you’re not happy about that concept, neither am I because fuck the Atheists and screw the guy who wrote His Dark Materials. I’m just one poorly-recieved sci-fi writer, though, I never even got to go to university. I am not qualified or capable of building an afterlife, or determining whether souls are singular entities unto themselves or merely a process that our minds use as “the third rail of the subconscious train of thought”, or testing if continuity of self across time is real or illusionary.

                  Aside from that, I will say one thing; I have never ingested hallucinogens, at least not to my knowledge, and I don’t go to parties or have any IRL friends. So no, you don’t get to say I’m high when the only way I got OUT of the maddening despair I experienced in 2017 was because my dreams helped pull me out of a complete mental breakdown. Fight me, I don’t care if you think I’m telling the truth and I don’t need you to believe your unconscious mind is somehow independently acting on your behalf, but don’t fucking tell me I’m not sober when I’ve been completely sober of everything including tobacco and alcohol my entire life.

    • tubaruco@lemm.ee
      5·
      9 months ago

      eh, birds are already very intelligent. one of the species wil probably end up creating technology at some point (assuming all humans die without ending all life on earth)

      • Sordid@lemmy.world
        6·
        9 months ago

        There is enough time for another intelligent species to evolve after us, the problem is that we’ve already used up all the easily accessible fossil fuels. That means they won’t have the energy sources necessary to have an industrial revolution and will be stuck at a pre-industrial tech level forever (or rather until the oceans boil off).

        • kase@lemmy.world
          2·
          9 months ago

          Is that true? My understanding was that there’s still plenty of coal, oil, etc, we just can’t keep burning it cause of the greenhouse effect

            • kase@lemmy.world
              1·
              9 months ago

              Ah, thanks. I guess our technology probably wouldn’t be around by the time another species replaces us, but it’d be cool if they could just pick up where we left off technologically (of course, they’d have to make good choices to not end up like we did except way faster, and I don’t have that much optimism lmao).

              Then again, I wonder if there’d be new fossil fuel deposits by then. I mean, if the conditions were right and given enough time. I don’t know a whole lot about how this all works, it’s fun to think about though.

              Then again again, maybe if they had no fossil fuels, they could sidestep the whole anthropogenic (pls don’t bully my spelling, I have no idea) climate change problem. I’m sure it would take longer, but maybe they’d eventually figure out how to produce lots of energy without ruining the planet for themselves (or at least ruin it differently than we did). ¯⁠\⁠(⁠°⁠_⁠o⁠)⁠/⁠¯

              • Sordid@lemmy.world
                3·
                9 months ago

                I wonder if there’d be new fossil fuel deposits by then.

                Probably not. Coal is basically trees that didn’t rot, and the reason they didn’t rot is that there were no microorganisms that could digest wood at the time. Between the evolution of wood and the evolution of organisms that could digest it, dead trees would just pile up on top of each other and sink into the ground under the weight of new layers of dead trees above them. Now that there are microorganisms that digest wood and dead trees rot away, new coal is not forming.

                Oil does continue to form in some ocean areas where there is a layer of water without any oxygen on the ocean floor. Since these areas support no life, any organic remains that descend to the bottom (mostly plankton) remain unconsumed and eventually get buried and turn into oil. But it is a slow process. Estimating oil reserves is notoriously difficult, but it seems there’s about as much left in the ground as we’ve burned in the last fifty years. So in other words, four billion years of oil formation gets you about a century or two of industry. Since the Sun is about halfway through its lifespan, that means the Earth can potentially create enough juice for one more industrial civilization like ours. That’s assuming that those oil reserves are allowed to build up and don’t just get used up piecemeal by smaller civilizations arising in the interim. And also assuming that that final civilization is even able to make use of that oil, which is much harder to handle than coal (extraction, refining, transportation, etc.), without using coal as a stepping stone. And also assuming that no anaerobic microorganisms evolve that can survive on the ocean floor without oxygen and consume those organic remains, which could put a stop to oil formation just like wood-eating microorganisms put a stop to coal formation. Yeah, that seems like a lot of ifs to me…

          • ???@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            2·
            9 months ago

            It’s only recently been proven untrue… IIRC… because it apparently turns out crude oil is actually the poop of a particular ancient microbe that is still around and that’s partially (along with Oil Fracking) why we still have fossil fuels and why a far future non-human civilization will have plenty of fossil fuels to work with.

            You’re right, though, we have 5x more fossil fuels than have been burnt since the beginning of the industrial revolution. If we DO use the rest, the climate would be so unrecoverable that 99% of multicellular life will die, but even the most corrupt oil executive would be dead years before the last animal because most - especially the wealthiest - humans need agriculture to eat, and if shit hits the fan the poor outnumber the rich and the crop-killing pests outnumber the poor.

    • BlackLodgeCooper@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      9 months ago

      When the tectonic plates collide again to form another supercontinent, it will create enough heat to kill off most, if not all, mammals. And it will happen before the sun destroys everything, probably in around 250 million years or so.

    • gandalf_der_12te@feddit.de
      15·
      9 months ago

      I believe it’s more like a hundred thousand years for humans on earth to go extinct, and another nine hundred thousand to clean the traces.

      • jarfil@lemmy.world
        3·
        9 months ago

        Or a hundred (not thousand) to become transhuman and have every short living species forget we existed.

        (my regards to SkyNet, StarlinkNet, The Matrix, or whatever)

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
        3·
        9 months ago

        Whatever comes after us will be a consequence of us. Sort of like how all our modern bird species are echoes of the giant lizards of the crestatous period.

        The world will never be “clean” of humanity’s traces. No more than it is clean of trilobites that gave us all this limestone or the carboniferous plants that gave us coal and oil.

        The future will be whatever species are most fit to live in the world we have created.

  • Steak@lemmy.ca
    16·
    9 months ago

    “why does this grass taste like plastic?”

    Not that they know what plastic is but ya know.

  • electric_nan@lemmy.ml
    14·
    9 months ago

    In the year one million and a half/

    Humankind is enslaved by giraffes/

    They will pay for all their misdeeds/

    When the treetops are stripped of their leaves!

    • samus12345@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      Of course, the year one million and a half is a mere 997,977 years from now. And 996,990 years from when they used the time machine.

  • ParsnipWitch@feddit.de
    10·
    9 months ago

    The sad thing is, if we want life as we know it (that includes horses happily munching on grass) to continue existing, humans are it’s only shot.

    It might be edgy and cool to wish humanity would go instinct, but with it, potentially all life will go instinct.

    • SmoothIsFast@citizensgaming.com
      7·
      9 months ago

      I mean not really once costal areas flood and the locations best for growing food change we will see massive issues with humanity surviving, the rest of the ecosystem would adapt, migrate and evolve to survive. Hell even chernobyl basically shows us even if we went the full nuclear option wildlife would bounce back better than before with just maybe shortened life expectancies. We are a lot more prone to die from changes than the wildlife on this planet is.

      • cm0002@lemmy.world
        3·
        9 months ago

        I think you’re underestimating our ability to save our own asses through technology.

        Even if all the soil for growing food goes to crap, we can just engineer food crops that can grow in that soil. Hell, NASA has a research project exploring how to grow crops in moon (Or maybe it was martian) soil. Humans are one of the most adaptable species, because if natural processes are too slow we can just augment it through our technological prowess.

        • SmoothIsFast@citizensgaming.com
          2·
          9 months ago

          Even if all the soil for growing food goes to crap, we can just engineer food crops that can grow in that soil.

          It’s not about soil going to crap its about the climate surrounding those areas changing. Moon and Mars experiments are about indoor climate controlled greenhouses which sure can be done anywhere but not at the scale needed for our current civilizations or to replace the agriculture infrastructure at scale we have now.

      • ParsnipWitch@feddit.de
        1·
        9 months ago

        Short term, yes, no question. But long term (a million years and beyond) we look at different challenges life on earth will face.

        It’s a fact that it won’t simply continue existing indefinitely. And definitely not in the diversity we know now. It’s not likely for rabbits or another species to suddenly rise up to the task of inventing space travel. That would need way more time than what it takes for earth to be hit by an asteroid big enough so that life won’t bounce back. The same goes for other types of mass extinction. Only humans have at least a slight chance to make life endure beyond earth.

          • ParsnipWitch@feddit.de
            1·
            9 months ago

            Why shouldn’t we care, though? Personally, I see no reason why we should not try to preserve life, especially when perhaps it’s the only example of life there is.

            Rationally, since we don’t know whether there is a reason for anything, the only thing we can do is to insure that someone in the future will be able to find it. That chance is 0 if life stops existing altogether.

        • SmoothIsFast@citizensgaming.com
          1·
          9 months ago

          I mean realistically even then we don’t know for sure, it took humans and our ancestors a couple hundred thousand years to develop to to where we are at now. It’s not to say any other of our closest relatives could end up on a similar path without us in the picture in a much more tropical climate as they are used too. The question is will the earth stabilize itself when we get to that point or will we take it out of balance so severely that it goes into run away warming like Venus ending all life.

  • nyonax@lemmy.zip
    9·
    9 months ago

    🎶 We are a fluke
    of the universe.
    We have no right to be here.
    And whether we can hear it or not,
    The universe
    is laughing behind our backs. 🎶