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Comment by rib3ye | Hacker News Reader

Humanity on Earth is doomed, the planet will be fine.

Firstly, I think this distinction is pedantic and unhelpful. It's like saying your car wasn't destroyed in a high speed collision, it just got mashed into a form that is no longer useful for human transportation. Yes, the giant mass of mostly rock called Earth is not going to literally be destroyed and cease to exist due to human activity. That's not what people are claiming, and I think that is clear.

Secondly, we're making the planet a lot worse for more organisms than humans.

God I'm tired of hearing this platitude. Define "Fine" when 90% of the animals on earth are extinct? What is "fine" to you about that, exactly?

> Define "Fine" when 90% of the animals on earth are extinct?

If humans go extinct, human timescales cease to be relevant. Since we're talking about the Earth, reverting to geologic timescales makes sense. Earth 10 or 100 million years after humans may not be that different with or without humans.

(I agree, however, that the platitude is unhelpful. We're human. We care about the Earth on a human timescale.)

Humanity along with 90% of the plant and animal species evolved in the last 66 million years.

Actually it depends on how far it all gets

What do you mean? If if there was a nuclear war to end all nuclear wars and all humans died and the surface of the earth was irradiated so that most animals died, there would still be life. Slowly the surface would be replaced though tectonic action. New life would flourish and grow without human intervention. In a billion years or so you probably wouldn't even know humans had ever been here. The planet would be just fine.

Probably, but you can't really know for sure. Humans is something which never happened to this planet before. I wouldn't bet 10$ on life surviving here in the case things continue to go the way they are going today.

Life has been found far far underground, under the greenland and antarctic ice sheets, and in other even more inhospitable places. There is no way humans could eradicate all life before we managed to off ourselves. Only the destruction of the entire planet so that all that is left in the earth's orbit around the sun is a dust cloud could maybe kill all life (and even then I wouldn't bet against it).

In about 600 million years photosynthesis will stop working killing off all plants and we'll lose oxygen from the atmosphere. In a billion years the oceans will start boiling away and plate tectonics will stop.

The next few hundred million years is all the Earth will get before it loses it's amazing uniqueness and turns into another boring rock.

> In about 600 million years photosynthesis will stop working killing off all plants and we'll lose oxygen from the atmosphere. In a billion years the oceans will start boiling away and plate tectonics will stop.

Do you have a source for this? I assumed that the changes to earth was still billions of years away, when the sun finally goes supernova.

Here under Climate Impact and Loss of Oceans sections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth

Ah, I imagine life will adapt at least to the photosynthesis issue. The water I got no idea though.

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