Mother Gaia and Humans

"The planet is fine. The people are fucked."

George Carlin

Aside from the thousands of species we killed in the process

It's a recurrent theme in the history of the world you know, thousands, hundreds of thousands, tens of millions of species killed, never to be seen again.
No species ever lasts that long.
- There have been many extinction events, and we won’t be the first “nature based extinction event” the planet has seen either.
  Just one of the dumber ones.
- No species ever lasts that long.
  Sharks enter the thread.
  Awkward silence ensues
We are committing a mass extinction on Earth's life, there will be a geological record one day of where life suddenly fell off.
And what's really wild to think about is that while tragic to us and our perspective of the beauty of the world... in the larger picture, it will still be utterly insignificant to Earth's history. The next million years will see massive portions of life die off, climates will change, new species will emerge and grow into new ecosystems, and there will be an entirely new set of fauna and flora, and humans will be a distant memory, a rust-colored line on the strata.
And that coming million years? Also a blink of an eye in Earth's history. A fraction of a fraction of our planet's history of life's abundance and drama. All the life we see around us represents a sliver of a fraction of a fraction of Earth's biological history. It's so, SO much bigger than any of us can imagine and it should have the effect of humbling us.
- dont forget about our deep space probes, pioneer, and voyager.
  Those will still exist without us. A drifting reminder of our pitiful existences, hurtling through the vast emptiness of space, hoping to find something capable of discovering it.
250 millions years ago, there was a mass extinction that killed 95% of life on earth.

Climate protection was never about saving species or eco systems.

It is about not fucking the whole planet wide eco system so that we can't live anymore on this planet.

However even that we dropped for profits.

I mean basically anything relating to energy would have costed the double amount (at least).

Now we have also to reduce the co2 that was produced 200 years and the one that is triple the amount of the next 10 years.

Great filter theory: can intelligence evolve fast enough to outpace stupidity?

I get the sentiment, that we're not killing nature, just ourselves, but "nature" is not one thing. Killing nature amounts to humans causing incredible suffering to untold trillions of individual animals each with a lilfe, a consciousness.

I saw my Kitty suffocate due to embolism and had to put her down and it's no less of an awful event because it was a cat and not a human, it screwed me up and it was years ago. I imagine that level of needless suffering happening every day X 1 billion due to human greed and apathy.

"Nature" also has lots of suffering in it even without our help. I agree we shouldn't cause undue harm, but the suggestion that animals won't suffer without us is naïve at best.
My condolences for your kitty, but nature would not have granted her the more peaceful end you gave her.
- i like the ever so slight implication here that a handful of deer could presumably cause global warming if we just didn't exist now.
  I wonder how likely that is to be true.
- Pretty sure I already specified unnecessary suffering, I didn't suggest that animals wouldn't suffer without us.

Nature just wanted plastic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rld0KDcan_w
- I feel like more than a few people were clapping at first because they were thinking "yeah fuck recycling and taking care of the environment, we're gonna be just fine!" Only to be hit with the punchline, "the planet and humanity is not 'we'. 'We' humans are fucked."

Mother Gaia is a cruel and brutal bitch. Just read up on Darwin. No nazis killed as many beings as natural selection

Or limited and fallible.

yep.

Unfortunately for nature we're like cockroaches. You can kill the majority of humans with a big enough asteroid, but actually wiping us out while persevering vertebrate life is a tall order. Hell it was a tall order before we even got out of the paleolithic.

"Humanity survives adversity well" is not not something I would think of as "unfortunate."
- Unfortunately for nature but depending on your perspective it's unfortunate for humans as well
"We're a virus with shoes." -- Bill Hicks
Fun fact: the Oxygen Catastrophe wasn't a one-time event. It happened repeatedly in waves until life finally evolved a way to use the Oxygen.
When humans emerge from their bunkers, they'll quickly rediscover nuclear weapons and greenhouse pollution.
Are we? We haven’t been around that long enough relative to the planet. We won’t be here in another billion years.
- Nothing will be here in a billion years. Setting aside the fact that no species lasts that long anyway, Earth only has a few hundred million years of habitability left, if "nature" has its way. The sun's steadily brightening as it ages and tectonic processes are causing changes in Earth's atmosphere that will eventually prevent photosynthesis from operating, at which point Earth become the domain of a few hardy strains of bacteria again.
  That is, unless humans (or our very distant descendants) decide to do some meddling to keep Earth alive. There's various ways to do that, from solar shields reducing the solar influx to moving Earth's orbit farther out to stripping material from the Sun itself to moderate its output.
  "Gaia" has no foresight. She will sorely miss humanity's technological descendants once the planet gets in that situation, there's nothing she can do about it herself.
- I'm saying even humans with the ability to make pottery were able to survive in niches that our pests can't even survive in, from the desert to the artic. We outcompete everything even without industrial technology and can survive on some pretty crazy diets. Invertebrate life could survive an extinction event that wipes us out, but I can't imagine any vertebrate doing so (including the ocean ones).
- We were the one bipedal line out of 7 or more, that only almost died out. We are made to be more adaptable.
- We won’t be here in another billion years.
  I don't know about you, but I sure won't be

story of my life, i hope.

I think it'll be funny to have a well known legacy, but without people having any idea of who the fuck i am.

God speed humanity, you fucking suck.

Mother Gaia is Savage 😳

I've been saying this for years.

Mama loves you even so

Papa Nurgle moment

The Earth will shrug us off and carry on. It would be interesting to see what's next. I suspect a marine mammal, jellyfish, or crab people.

Fun fact : this was the (slightly hidden) premise for Splatoon.
Those happy, colourful descendants of squids and other marine animals are playing paintball over the ruins of our civilization, long after human extinction.
They worship an old fax machine they found, too, for some reason.
- They worship an old fax machine they found, too, for some reason.
  That tracks. Fax technology probably will outlive us all.
- Holy shit, is this for real?! I always thought octopuses would come next.

Nature doesn't have a consciousness, it just is. I think to anthropomorphize it as having one, to conceptualize it as being some kind of actor with goals or morals, is kind of to not understand it fundamentally, or to accept what it is. It's just another extension of the naturalist fallacy.

That's not really to advocate, you know, for climate change, or what have you, but I also don't really believe that this is going to be the thing that takes people out, weirdly? I mean, certainly, the holocene extinction is going to be a thing, and it's going to cause mass human and animal suffering and extinction on a scale that is only precedented by meteors and the like. That's looking pretty inevitable, at this point, to me. The thing is, I don't think the species as a whole, the human species, really needs or relies on nature to survive, at this point. Pollinators, maybe, but aren't we at a point where corn and other crops upon which we rely for a good, like, 50% of our mass produced highly processed food is really reliant on a lot of "natural" things. Or, isn't reliant on like, nature, as a whole. It's all as a result of discrete resources which are highly individualized and pretty isolated. Maybe large amounts of the land becomes non-arable, I dunno.

I think more broadly though, what I find to be slightly more probable than that as a counterargument is frankly that I can kind of imagine the end of the world, without the end of capitalism. Most people say it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, right, but they still imagine the end of the world as being kind of mutually inclusive to the end of capitalism. No, I think capitalism, I think capitalists, our plutocrats, our idiots in charge, would probably rather keep the planet on a tenuous kind of life support, where you don't really have non-globalized, local ecology, environmental variation, the like. I think they would rather prevent the apocalypse by whatever margin is most deemed most profitable. We have schemes for cloud-seeding to block out more UV light, which would probably kill a bunch of plants and mess up a ton of ecosystems from geographically irregular and potentially unpredictable irrigation. We have schemes for dumping huge amounts of iron oxide into the ocean to kickstart massive algae blooms that can sequester carbon dioxide and probably increase ocean acidification. We have schemes for genetically modifying human and food supply-threatening viruses and invasive species to start to self-terminate after the genes propagate to like, the seventh generation. Hell, there's even some level by which people might argue that invasive species are good, because they provide an inherent surplus population sourced from natural ecology that humans could kind of skim the top off. When those things end up going sideways, or otherwise threatening the bottom line, we'll probably start seeing people just implement more short term solutions, that kick the can five years down the road, while mass ecological and human extinctions are constantly ongoing and potential quality of life plummets for the general population. Apocalypse as an ongoing process, rather than as a singular event.

Thinking that an ecological apocalypse would be the end of it, that humans are that easily crushed and nature can/will just go on totally unbothered, I think that's a rather optimistic viewpoint. It also missess the mass amounts of suffering which are currently ongoing by looking to some theoretical future, much like AI tech evangelists do with the singularity, idiot leftists tend to do with "the revolution", evangelicals do with the rapture. We need to, uhh, maybe figure out a better structure and approach, here.

We rely on nature for everything. The water wars will make that more apparent, I suppose.
- Yeah see, that's what I'm talking about. Like what the fuck would the water wars even be? That shit don't make no sense, it's not like water is a non-renewable resource. Freshwater is maybe a larger concern, right, but climate change means more solar heat which means more water evaporation which means more fresh rainwater and not less. Maybe in combination with increased acidification because of emissions and related things, maybe in combination with a decreased capacity to absorb that rainwater because of desertification and much increased rainwater runoff due to too large a volume of water for a dried out landscape. No part of that really involves a water war, though. That's just some pop culture shit.

Guy is cute. Wanna hug him too 🥰

You think Gaia would embrace me in those tig ol'bitties