[r3trohack3r]

This planet has a clock that is running out.

If left to itself, even if humans never evolved on this planet, Earth dies in roughly 500m years. A complete total extinction event, as the carbon cycles break down and life on earth slowly starves.

More than 75% of the time life gets to enjoy on this planet is behind us.

500m years seems like a long time. It is not. 75% of life has passed us by, and we have only a single species so far that looks like it might be printing a golden ticket to get life off this rock. If this exercise fails, either another species rises to the calling (squids maybe? Idk), or everything goes extinct.

Human intervention on this planet is necessary. And getting life off this planet is necessary.

Advocating for anything else is advocating for letting all life on earth die.

[macNchz]

> 500m years seems like a long time. It is not.

I mean...talking about timelines like that is difficult because of the way we perceive time, I think most people can't have any reasonable discussion about something that far out. If we try to make it more comprehensible by saying humans have existed for 200k years and have 500m before Earth is uninhabitable, humanity is the equivalent of 12 days old in the scope of an 85 year life expectancy. We're newborns in diapers drinking milk, thinking about what kind of inheritance we'll leave for our great grandkids.

[r3trohack3r]

> We're newborns in diapers drinking milk, thinking about what kind of inheritance we'll leave for our great grandkids.

I know, aren't humans awesome?

Most species just eat all the corn and die, or convert the atmosphere oxygen causing a mass extinction.

Humans are looking up and going "oh wait, we are causing a problem, how do we solve this?" and then they follow it up with "and even if we solve it, we need to do something about the whole carbon cycle thing ending, how do we get life off this rock?"

I don't know of any other species that has gotten anywhere close to this.

Humans are great.

[nativeit]

*Citations very much needed to pretty much everything you just said.

[r3trohack3r]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

A good entrance to the rabbit hole.

[withinboredom]

Exact numbers vary… but I think it safe to say no matter what, it’s beyond our capabilities to understand. Either way, eventually the “sun goes boom” and we need to be long gone, or dead, as a species.