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> "Oh but there are extremophiles that survive insane conditions!"

> And what do they feed on?

You are underestimating the diversity of metabolism in bacteria/archaea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaea#Metabolism

As a weird example, there is an isolate cave in Romania, with a weird source of energy http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150904-the-bizarre-beasts-l... . (If that's all life that all life that will survive, it looks like a nightmary scenario. But killing completely all the biosphere is very hard.)

Also, Cyanobacteria will probably be fine. They almost killed accidently everyone else in the past, but there are not hard feeling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanobacteria

Even if a handful of unusually adapted species survive, do you think they'll survive for any meaningful amount of time in the absence of any other meaningful biosphere?

And even if they do, why do you assume they (species adapted to environments entirely distinct from 99.99% of Earth) will somehow exist long enough to speciate into a robust planet's worth of species?

The species that exist today have largely survived because collectively they exist in homestasis and regulate their environment. If every tree suddenly disappeared the human race would be gone within hours. Similarly if every warm blooded animal suddenly disappeared plants would start dying in droves within a few days.

Honestly, your comment and prediction terrifies me. Do you have kids? What do you tell them? If you believe what you write, what still gets you up in the morning? Do you by any chance have Savant syndrome/autism/aspergers (I ask this question objectively. I do not mean to make a negative value judgement about you)?

You write below that you work in mathematical biochemistry. What research are your conclusions based on; which authors, measurements etc.?

> All of us reading this right now are going to die just barely seeing the true extent of the outcomes.

Do you feel scared of this collapse you are predicting? Are you distraught by humanity's destruction of our home, because you would you like to see Earth and humanity's beauty continue?

I guess the overarching theme/question for me is: if all this is true, where, and in what, do you find meaning?

Edit: to be clear, I am asking for your personal experiences and strategies. I am not looking for any advice.

Widespread crop failure and fisheries collapse due to extreme weather and acidic oceans could be just around the corner. I can't say that with complete certainty (and I really hope it doesn't happen), but I can't dismiss it with any confidence either.

I work in mathematical biochemistry. I'm personally confident everything you've described is around the corner.

That doesn't mean that a total collapse in our food supply is around the corner, but it does suggest a collapse in the availability of certain micronutrients to a large proportion of the population.

What that means is that the outcomes of certain nutritional deficiencies will likely become commonplace diseases societies will now how to cope with. That will of course also affect politics.

Are you able to sketch out the reasons for your confidence?

[Edit: Just realized you wrote the comment I was replying to - so OK I see what you're saying]

I'm not gonna be "that guy", but I will say that I fully expect cockroaches and tardigrades to survive. Precious little else will. Kiss mammals goodbye.

The biosphere has already got a match in our insane devouring of habitat and industrial-scale poisoning program known as modern agriculture. Not to mention the ocean acidification, garbage patch, and overfishing. People look at me a little nutty, but I seriously think in 100 years the oceans will have nothing alive in them larger than your finger. There will be no tigers, no elephants, no bison, no deer, few or no birds.

What will they eat? Even if they could survive, the ecosystem that supplies their food won't.

Things that photosynthesize will be able to hang on as long as they can tolerate their local climate and have access to water, nitrogen, and CO2, which are the only building blocks they need. Climate change will destroy a wide variety of intricate networks, and make large parts of the planet uninhabitable, but life will cling to temperate zones.

Surprise! I'm a mathematical biochemist.

The necessary reactions to make a photosynthetic carbohydrate production chemical pathway energetically feasible actually only exist within extremely narrow temperature bounds.

You honestly don't understand how naive you are. You're disguising hope by what sounds vaguely scientific.

Not to mention: exactly where do you think those temperate zones will exist?

> You honestly don't understand how naive you are.

I don't hang around hackernews to get insulted. It's not what we do around here.

I don't hang around HN to have every other commenter confirm my existing opinions either.

Being told by someone that they think you're wrong isn't an insult.

If you buy the reassuring yet nonsensical idea that "the humans are fucked, the planet will be fine", you can be adequately classified as cherry-picking a minimally discomfiting worldview, against all evidence. That's not an insult.

No, but check your wording. Calling someone naive and unable to see it is insulting. Just to give you an additional perspective.

There’s a lot of very low brow discussion going on here so I understand why you’re frustrated. HN does tone police, though, so if you want to participate probably best to play along.

The stuff at the bottom of the ocean in the pitch black doesn't even need a star, it's running on some primitive chemistry and the internal heat of the planet, which is in turn driven by radioactive decay. It isn't going anywhere regardless.

It's running on the organic silt that filters and falls down to it. Where do you think that comes from?

It's chemosynthesis fueled by a continuous stream of organic silt from above and volcanic vents, not magical planetary heat.

Are you putting volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean? No. They're there because the core is hot, which it is because of radioactive decay as I explained.

> And we'll likely all die reasonably content knowing it's not our problem.

That's exactly the kind of thinking that caused this mess (i.e climate catastrophe) in the first place.

Had people prioritized their grandchildren and great-grandchildren instead of short-term profits then the effects of climate change would have been mitigated long ago. For example, companies like Exxon knew of what lay ahead. They chose to condemn future generations using precisely the same logic as you.

Oh, to be clear, I'm not saying my logic is normatively correct.

You're (I think) likely objectively completely right.

Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification. :)

If we do end up a failed experiment, it is more than likely the great filter theory is correct and we are just one in a billion of endless repetitions that reached their critical mass and fizzled out.

Time literally means nothing to the universe. So the idea we can kill all life in the universe, or are somehow responsible for the creation we live in is oddly religious to me.

Yet you place no real import in the demise of humanity so I'm not sure how to parse it.

> Time literally means nothing to the universe.

This simply isn't true. I don't know where you absorbed such a dumb and naive idea, but the current theory pretty much completely rules out your completely unsuppported take.

Gravity is to our best knowledge not symmetric in time, and neither is heat. (Every other fundamental force in QCD is though.) The likelihood of the emergence of life decreases as overall entropy increases.

Moreover, the emergence of life at any point in the universe is already vanishingly unlikely.

If we kill life on Earth, the likelihood of life emerging again is strictly less than that of life on Earth existing as it does. And beyond a certain temperature bound, it's simply impossible. The viability of informational molecules like RNA (even silicon based variants) vanishes above around 60-70C.

> This simply isn't true. I don't know where you absorbed such a dumb and naive idea

Lol. The fermi paradox is not my idea, neither is the great filter as one the possible explanations. But the presumption in both is that we are not alone as intelligent life, not to mention simple life.

You mention the goldilocks theory, which indeed states that life probably has an incredibly thin temperature band in which it survives. But that just means life is unlikely on most planets, which means almost nothing in infinite space and time.

The fact life started once, makes it likely it has done so before us and will keep doing so. When I say time doesn't matter, I mean it could take billions of eons, and in the context of the universe that doesn't matter.

There is no actual evidence of an infinite universe.

If anything the most likely situation is finite but comtinuosly expanding.

> The fact life started once, makes it likely it has done so before us and will keep doing so. When I say time doesn't matter, I mean it could take billions of eons, and in the context of the universe that doesn't matter.

This is still entirely wrong, on the basis of basic thermodynamic principles that are relatively well empirically supported.

Even if life has emerged before us, the probability of it happening again only decrease over time.

And also: low probability in finite domain doesn't magically imply high probability in an infinite domain. That's not how math works.

> There is no actual evidence of an infinite universe.

The drake equation and fermi account for that, using something like "The universe has 10 million, million, million suns".

Most of these ideas are probabilistic based on sizes that are just immense beyond comprehension. But I still find them more grounded than the pre-Copernican hubris that we are somehow central to all this.

> And also: low probability in finite domain doesn't magically imply high probability in an infinite domain. That's not how math works

How do you figure that?

A vanishingly small probability on a finite sample still implies nothing beyond a vanishingly small probability over an infinite population.

To analogize: the vanishingly unlikely probability of landing a dart precisely in the center of the bullseye on a finitely sized dartboard implies nothing more than the same for an infinitely large dartboard.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely (in particular the mathematical concept of "almost never")

> See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely (in particular the mathematical concept of "almost never")

You're confused here, did you read the mathematical definition of your own article?

It has nothing to do with what you think, it starts with the presumption of P(E) = 1 or P(E) = 0 for almost never.

That's not what we are talking about with small probabilities.

I mean, as long as our economy is going great then why does it matter? /s