[DickingAround]

I get that humans are wiping out a lot of less capable species. This will turn out to be wrong if humans are themselves wiped out. But from an evolutionary sense, this is a pretty clear cut case; humans are wiping out everything else because we're so powerful. We out compete everything.

And before you assume that's bad, don't forget that evolution makes organisms that do that. It's a core part of the cycle of evolution. I gather the first single celled plants wiped out a lot of other stuff with their oxygen production. Now, the trees grow tall so they can wipe out other plants who can't cut it. In the process the trees are littering their tree bits all over the place. You can barely see 100m in most parts of the world through all the tree crap everywhere. I've been to forests where you cant even touch the ground; it's just like 4 ft of old logs that aren't decaying fast enough (dry forests do this). To trees all that tree crap is trash and it even kills baby trees. To us humans, it's beautiful. And when we pour a bunch of concrete and steel all over, maybe it's trash, or maybe it's beautiful in a different way. I'm just saying 'nature' includes us and the stuff we make. We took over this planet. For better or worse it's a people planet now. We'll see what happens after people (e.g. gen-eng driven specation), but it might be that this is already nice in a way we just don't find 'natural' or 'normal' yet and the next one will also be nice in it's own way that's different from the past.

[macksd]

>> And before you assume that's bad, don't forget that evolution makes organisms that do that

I'm not exactly a highly qualified expert on evolution, but I hear this step in lines of thinking a lot and it strikes me as being a logical fallacy. As a more extreme example, I often hear "these climate changes activists make no sense because they're also the ones pushing evolution: why would a species evolve and then destroy the planet it evolved on"? It's also circular logic. Sometimes evolution results in weaker things dying off. But that doesn't mean that weaker things dying off is inherently a good thing and that because we have evolved we probably do it at the optimal rate.

What you're seeing as the result of evolution is everything that survived SO FAR. It wasn't intentionally planned to keep surviving. It's just that those two things tend to go together. We could annihilate every living thing on the planet with an all-out nuclear war later this afternoon, and it wouldn't be inconsistent with the theory of evolution.

[Isinlor]

We are not capable of annihilating life on this planet.

If we detonated all nuclear arsenals the planet would barely notice.

Chicxulub impact event had yield comparable to 100 million megatons of TNT.

Assuming we have 10 000 nuclear warheads each with yield of 100 megatons of TNT it would be still ~100 less than Chicxulub impact event.

Also, we already did destroy most of megafauna, but the whole life is just a different ballpark.

We would need to change Earth into Venus end even then it may not be enough.

BTW - It is also true that all pain and misery on this planet is the result of evolution.

[neolog]

All we have to to replicate Chicxulub is build a million copies of a bomb we've made before? The iPhone might be harder to make than a bomb, and we've made 200 million of those.

[Isinlor]

Probably easier option is just redirecting an asteroid bigger than Chicxulub impactor. But the point is that even that is not enough to eradicate life.

As I said, you would need something like Late Heavy Bombardment or Venus like greenhouse effect and even that may not be enough.

Based on the Moon craters Late Heavy Bombardment would include:

- 22,000 or more impact craters with diameters >20 km (12 mi),

- about 40 impact basins with diameters about 1,000 km (620 mi),

- several impact basins with diameters about 5,000 km (3,100 mi)

It's also important to highlight that everywhere were our ancestors appeared soon after megafauna population got reduced by 20% - 70%:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction#/media/Fil...

In the last 100 years we just entered path to near total eradication of megafauna. E.g. wild mammals account now for ~4% of mammals biomass.

Complex life is nowhere near as robust as simple life forms.

[neolog]

If I'm reading this right, it took evolution about 3.5 billion years to get animals, and there's only 1.3 billion years left until it's too hot for eukaryotes.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_evolutionary_h...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Ear...

[ifdefdebug]

Who said we don't belong to the weaker things? Us dying off would just be the proof that we belonged to the weaker things, if weaker things means by definition things that don't survive.

Also I don't believe that we have the power to annihilate every living thing on the planet, no matter how many nukes you throw on it. If we die off, then those who survive us will have been proven to be the stronger things.