The land may become uninhabitable by humans, but something tells me aquatic life will be alright… Maybe not all of it, but there will be adaptation and life will go on.
That’s not to say destroying our ecosystems is ok, just that we’re probably not going to end life entirely.
Reminds me of a quote from A Canticle for Lebowitz:
The horizon came alive with flashes as the monks mounted the
ladder. The horizons became a red glow. A distant cloudbank was
born where no cloud had been. The monks on the ladder looked away
from the flashes. When the flashes were gone, they looked back.
The visage of Lucifer mushroomed into hideousness above the
cloudbank, rising slowly like some titan climbing to its feet after ages
of imprisonment in the Earth…
…The breakers beat monotonously at the shores, casting up driftwood.
An abandoned seaplane floated beyond the breakers. After a while the
breakers caught the seaplane and threw it on the shore with the
driftwood. It tilted and fractured a wing. There were shrimp carousing
in the breakers, and the whiting that fed on the shrimp, and the shark
that munched the whiting and found them admirable, in the sportive
brutality of the sea.
A wind came across the ocean, sweeping with it a pall of fine white
ash. The ash fell into the sea and into the breakers. The breakers
washed dead shrimp ashore with the driftwood. Then they washed up
the whiting. The shark swam out to his deepest waters and brooded in
the cold clean currents. He was very hungry that season.
There is life deep within the earth that will likely survive no matter what happens to the planet. The sun could fade, we could nuke the surface, have an asteroid completely resurface half the planet, and microbes will survive and eventually recolonize the entire world.
Not that we’d want a mass extinction of so many unique and beautiful things, but it is a comforting thought to realize we can’t really do anything that would render earth entirely devoid of life. And even if everything we know was lost, life would rise again to reclaim the rubble.
The land may become uninhabitable by humans, but something tells me aquatic life will be alright… Maybe not all of it, but there will be adaptation and life will go on.
That’s not to say destroying our ecosystems is ok, just that we’re probably not going to end life entirely.
Reminds me of a quote from A Canticle for Lebowitz:
There is life deep within the earth that will likely survive no matter what happens to the planet. The sun could fade, we could nuke the surface, have an asteroid completely resurface half the planet, and microbes will survive and eventually recolonize the entire world.
Not that we’d want a mass extinction of so many unique and beautiful things, but it is a comforting thought to realize we can’t really do anything that would render earth entirely devoid of life. And even if everything we know was lost, life would rise again to reclaim the rubble.
One could also say that the lack of a mass extinction event is preventing appearance and evolution of many more unique and beautiful things.
The end of one era is not “the end”, but merely the start of another era.
I like this world. I don’t want it to end.
And thus began the epoch of the tardigrades
“Life finds a way” is a threat, people just forgot that part. Life itself is unstoppable.
Don’t worry, our Sun will take care of life when it starts running out of fuel, expanding and boiling away everything on the surface of our planet.
By then we’ll have had every iota of fun imaginable, and some fun that yet remains unimaginable. You’ll have to nihilism harder to bum me out.