Earth might be experiencing 7th mass extinction, not 6th
news.ucr.edu
news.ucr.edu
See, because of the way they have framed it we now have people in the comments arguing about global warming.
While I certainly believe that we are doing a lot of damage to the planet right now, we dont need to incorporate every news article into the permacrisis narrative
If thieves trigger your car alarm once every year you'll jump to chase them away. If they trigger it once every minute you'll sell the car. You can't sell this car. We need some focus on which crisis is the priority but I'm less and less qualified to judge what deserves an air raid siren, and what deserves an alarm clock.
All the issues mentioned by other comments below always existed in one form or another, almost exclusively worse than today (Extremist leaders? Countries on the brink of collapse? Society upheaval? Threat of invasion?). It wasn't much different some decades ago. The baseline was set differently but the same concerns were expressed since forever. We just had something like a Cold War, fear of nuclear attack, fear of invasion, etc. that topped the charts so hard (for a while) that everything else subsided. And then slowly things were normalized and we could start seeing the "day to day" crisis.
This is partly why people have taken to action like throwing paint at art and gluing themselves to roadways. Some people are not prepared to accept the normalization of human extinction and want to constantly provide new alarm stimuli.
There is a beautiful analogy with what some protestors are doing and what we are doing to the planet we inhabit.
The latter should trigger an equally strong response but somehow we lay dormant.
Irrespective of how useless you feel their protest is, they are indeed making us talk about it. Which I think is a dire need we have at the moment with so many other trivial things stealing the spotlight of media focus.
How about letting china into wto and beginning by kicking out Taiwan from UN (or they gave up). The whole series of event of key china out and not balance with in will be one of the major disaster of humanity … but is it? That is the big question. I think it is. But without hindsight you do not know. Hence we have to work on. But ignoring key event (and just crisis) will doom humanity. After all, most species died why not human.
If you'd like to split hairs here, "established science" is also doing noone any service. Climate change is an established field of study that more generally researches human impact on the planet. There is strong consensus that we have made an impact on climate and that there could be major negative impacts on existing civilizations if we don't act. It's worth remembering, though, that climate research is almost entirely based in modeling data. Models are useful for finding signals, especially in a complex system, but blindly claiming "established science" without any further context makes it sounds as though it is fact.
The fact is we are in a permacrisis situation:
- climate change is accelerating, scenarios expected in decades are reality now (e.g. ice shelf melting, the drought that has hit Europe last summer)
- the invasion of Russia in Ukraine and all of the associated fallout (risk of a nuclear catastrophe at Zaporizhzhia NPP, delivery chains based e.g. on steel of Mariupol or of Ukrainian grain straining and breaking)
- wealth and income inequality tearing apart both Western societies in itself as well as the "Global South" from Western societies
- record inflation without corresponding wage rises accelerating the above, helped by many decades of effective wage stagnation
- multiple Western societies taking a sharp turn towards the right wing, authoritarianism and (e.g. in Italy) towards outright fascism
- large parts of Africa collapsing or nearing collapse from a variety of factors (climate change rendering territories uninhabitable, dictators/kings/warlords/corrupt elites looting their countries, China behaving just as bad as the late European colonialists), threatening mass migration events
- China's internal economy collapsing due to Covid (shoddy vaccine leaving no other containment option than brutal lockdowns), financial mismanagement (e.g. Evergrande) and governmental incompetence
- China increasingly threatening Taiwan with an invasion, an event that would instantly both trigger a China-USA war and, assuming that TSMC is rigged with explosives for a "leave nothing but scorched earth" scenario, many years of a complete shortage of chips, leading to an unprecedented world-wide economic crash
- regional powerhouses in the Middle East (Turkey, Iran) are getting into problems or collapsing, threatening further instability in an already explosive region
Out of all the crises I mentioned, the only one where improvement is in sight is the Russian invasion, given just how hard Ukraine kicks Russia's behind currently - but even with all the progress Ukraine is making, it may very well take a year or more until all of Ukraine is free of Russian invaders again.
Journalists are well advised to point out that humanity is in a state of long-term multiple crises, and that action needs to be taken instead of letting more Conservatives or the far-right into power.
What is different today: You can now watch all of these events unfold in real-time, and have journalists who no longer are out to tell stories, but to foster your fear so that you create more ad clicks.
But fear and dread are bad advisors. Let's not buy into them, and see the problems as what they are: challenges to solve. Because, just like any of the crisis' of the past, if we don't solve them, they will blow up in our faces.
Unfortunately, without fear and the resulting public pressure, nothing will change. That used to be what drove change in the past: scientists raised the alarm, activists followed up, politicians acted. When acid rain was an issue, politicians regulated sulfur content of fuel. When the ozone layer got a giant hole, they regulated CFC gas production and usage (by almost completely banning both). When species got threatened, they got under special protection statutes, some of which more-or-less globally banned trade of them (e.g. ivory, whale and dolphin products).
Today? Scientists have raised alarm about a lot of the issues I listed. Even the rise of Trumpian authoritarianism, the threat of Putin invading Ukraine or Putin using gas dependency as a weapon against Europe was foretold. But politicians openly sharted on these predictions, they did nothing at all to prepare, and as a result societies were caught pants down. Even on this very forum we're discussing on, people are regularly acting like COVID isn't a crisis or that following libertarian "free speech" interpretations is harmless and won't lead to problems despite evidence to the contrary being available just one Google search away.
Science denialism has become commonplace, and I think this is what depresses me the most about our future. We have so many tools, almost every person on this planet has access to the entire knowledge of humanity in their pants pocket, and yet so many people refuse to do so for ideology, religion or out of simple foolishness and arrogance.
Where are, for example, sanctions against Brazilian products like beef that are made on razed rainforest lands? Where are actually impactful sanctions against China? Where are deliveries of MBTs to Ukraine to help drive out Russia? Where are sanctions against Qatar for bribing FIFA and letting thousands of people die in building the WC stadiums? Where is material support for the protesters in Iran fighting against a murderous regime?
As a nation state, you only have that much political influence, both in the world as well as within your borders, and you will soon find yourself in trouble when people can't afford to eat anymore, or there are no more goods imported from China, or when Qatar gets cranky, or Iran for that matter.
As for Ukraine: The west has no interest in a quick end of the russoukrainian war. It's a perfect testing ground, why stop the fun when you can sell everyone in the neighbourhood so many weapons with the Russian bogeyman getting beaten up with western technology in full view? This conflict will be perpetuated as much as possible, at least another year, after all, Ukrainians do not vote in US elections, but Lockheed Martin engineers do. War is good for business. We all know that, but we like to conveniently forget about that, because our own wallets are closer to our hearts than some kid dying in a trench on the other side of the globe - and that has been true since forever.
Wielding fear as a political tool can only end in ruin of the free political system - ultimately, there is no qualitative difference between invoking fear of climate change or fear of immigrants, it creates a split in the populus: those who will subscribe to the panic, and those who think the panikers are irrational. Such splits, we have seen in the past, will lead to political divides, and ultimately, if civil society cannot mend them, to civil-war-style uprising and the end of free societies. We are seeing this all around the world right now, but most prominently in the US and the UK.
At the same time: once fear has been normalised, people will buy into snake oil, like arming themselves, or a massive upbuilt of CCTVs until privacy is gone, or accepting the TSA as a necessary evil, or submitting themselves to curfews, or abandoning social contacts because travelling cross-country to their loved ones is ecologically unsound. A fearful society is a society that falls prey to anyone who promises them safety - and those rarely stay democratic leaders.
We would do good not to consider "scientists" as the high-priests of a new religion with a infallible dogma: "The science says X" is a religious statement of belief, when science should be "we have this theory, this is the data that supports it, but we may be wrong". Whenever I do see scientists in the media today, they do no longer seem to see themselves as explorers of knowledge or professional doubters, they see themselves as the ultimate beacon of truth. That is dangerous, it leads to arrogance both in them as well in the part of the populus that agrees with them. As a reaction to that, it is no wonder anti-science sentiments rises.
> and yet so many people refuse to do so for ideology, religion or out of simple foolishness and arrogance.
Indeed.
What I find fascinating about this is that there are new discoveries of underground structures that really changed the game.
It solves the mystery why ancient megasites are looking at summer and winter solstice, because that's where the danger would come from.
It ties in with flooding myths that are found in many cultures.
I’m assuming you are referring to Graham Hancock? In which case, I wouldn’t put too much stock into it. He’s been hawking conspiracy theories for a long time. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/nov/23/ancient...
I think about the story of he discovery of H. pylori as contributing to peptic ulcer disease. The theory was widely rejected but ultimately proven. The mitigating factor in accepting the theory was that the researcher did not have a reputation of peddling quack theories.
Past behaviour predicts future behaviour.
Given the highly falsifiable nature of his claims it should easy enough to disprove them. That nobody chooses to do so is quite curious. I can watch a hundred spirited debates and proofs on both sides of flat-earth, fake moon landing, essential oils curing cancer, and evolution vs young-earth creationism. What is so special about archaeology that it needn't mount a similar, vigorous defense?
I'm not sure how a fever dream about something that happened 12,000 years ago is falsifiable.
What evidence would you propose falsifies his theories?
If you believe you can watch a hundred proofs on both sides of flat-earth, you may want to reconsider your understanding of the word "proof".
Proof is the burden of the claimant.
If he had presented a plausible proof, there would probably be a spirited debate.
It is curious that ignoring someone is considered "suppression" by those ignored.
Because it isn't worth anyone's precious time and effort in academia to respond to such obvious bunkum?
I liked this one[1] better. He makes some good points, particularly that there is no genetic trace of Hancock's advanced civilization in our DNA. And that if a global seafaring civilization existed around the last ice age, then we would've seen a mixing of agriculture well before Columbus. Worth a watch.
99% of the time you'll be correct labeling people as conspiracy theorists with the blanket rule - any time they are not mainstream approved. You'll end up being horribly wrong on that 1% that actually matters.
Hancock isn't a scientist, and has never claimed to be. He presents himself as an investigative journalist. What he explores in his work are a series of "what if" questions that science either can't disprove, or hasn't been actively researching, for whatever reason.
The show is beautifully shot and produced, and provokes some interesting thought experiments. Besides "free thinkers" making an appearance, there are also "mainstream" scientists from renowned institutions around the world, who seem to side with Hancock in many ways.
If the show does nothing but raise more public awareness about these topics, it might lead to funding actual scientific research in some of these sites, which would be a good thing.
So far from being a "dangerous show", it's actually an interesting and well-shot documentary. People who see it as proof of anything factual are likely already conspiracy theorists, and are a lost cause for logical thinking anyway.
It could mean some other promising research doesn't get funded
This is clearly not the case, as you’ve just laid out about Hancock, not to mention there’s plenty of misinformation on the NYT as well.
Most often the reason is lack of evidence in proportion to the claims.
This is unlike other "proper" conspiracy theories that claim to know the facts, and present made-up evidence to back up their claims, while ignoring any actual scientific proof that works against them.
Critics can ridicule his claim that an advanced ice-age civilization existed all they want (and there are good counter arguments that do just that[1]), but it's certainly curious that advanced structures were built by what modern history tells us should've been hunter-gatherer groups, millennia before the birth of the oldest civilizations we know about. This is worth thinking about, but more importantly, scientifically researching, so that we can have a better understanding of our past and ancestors.
The more Hancock is ignored, ridiculed and labeled as a crackpot, the more it feels like the scientific community doesn't want to research this for whatever reason, thus proving some of his points.
Why should they, though? He seems to be staking much of his credibility on vague accusations that someone is not doing the work. Mostly the case seems to be that his propositions are not being ignored, they simply lack substance.
The thing is, the less evidence you have, the easier it is to come up with any number of stories that "fit" the data points. Historians therefore need to be extremely conscious about only drawing conclusions that have an undisputed record supporting them. That is the whole basis of the scientific methodology; if you can't get the evidence, you have no argument.
The period Hancock has chosen to focus on is commonly called "prehistory" for a good reason, as without any written records, there's not much of a basis to build any kind of narrative that stands up to scrutiny. Especially if you only cherry-pick data points that fit your assumptions, and wilfully ignore a gigantic void in the rest of the known record.
Surely that is a problem with the credibility of the claims themselves, and not the rest of the world.
Because of what I mentioned in my previous comment. Because we don't have a scientific answer to how a group of nomadic hunter-gatherers would be able to construct some of these complex monolithic structures, millennia before the dawn of modern civilizations. The timelines we're talking about here certainly make it difficult to gather any conclusive evidence, but the fact that these structures are understudied points to deficiencies in modern archaeology.
Hancock never claims to have the definitive answer to these questions, and from my exposure to his work, he always phrases his claims as a "what if ...?" scenario. He weaves some loosely related myths into a somewhat coherent narrative, but it's clear that as a journalist, he has no scientific qualifications, nor has he done scientific research to present any definitive conclusions.
My point is that any reasonably well educated person who is not already prone to conspiracy theories shouldn't find his work to be conspiratorial or untrue, but mostly interesting and entertaining. Rather than dismiss his wild ideas as being "pseudoscientific" (which is ridiculous, considering he never claims to be a scientist), we should invest more in funding actual scientific research so that we can get some valid answers. Until then, I'll find shows like Ancient Apocalypse very entertaining.
The "random link" to the Guardian article is about the Hancock documentary and reasonably valid to mention, even if it is an opinion piece. The article does not conflate the Younger Dryas theory with Hancocks pseudoscience, in fact there's no mention of the theory. Also if you read the Guardian article to the end it has an interesting observation:
"If you don’t like Hancock’s story about the super-intelligent advanced civilisation being wiped off the face of the planet, here’s another that might explain how Netflix gave the greenlight to Ancient Apocalypse: the platform’s senior manager of unscripted originals happens to be Hancock’s son. Honestly, what are the chances?"
The problem is that we have a real problem: we teach kids things we don't know for sure.
I swear I am not 300 hundreds years old and they thaught me in school - science unequivocally says that - the Neanderthal men were the ancestors of the Sapiens, we have proof, we simply miss the link between Lucy and the Homo erectus and we're done, we explained everything!
Turns out there were 12, no wait 14, no wait 15, no wait 21 different species of hominids and many of them were contemporary to the sapiens and 90% of the humans bear Neanderthal DNA.
Just like there were no baby dinosaurs because we thought the smaller ones were different species.
Archeologist and historians need to go out and say loud: we don't know anything about human history, but we have many good theories! please help!
According to mainstream, Göbekli Tepe should not exist.
I was thaught in school that there were no settlements at the time, absolutely impossible, scientific truth (tm)
Sorry you had shit school teachers that didn’t help you understand that. I can understand the feeling of being betrayed when something you thought was an irrefutable fact turned out to be wrong by advances in the same field.
Of course.
Now imagine me at 8 learning one thing "said to be taken for granted because <<science>>!" and me at 20 wondering how was it possible that everything was completely wrong and ancient history as we knew it wasn't much different from reading Nostradamus.
It all literally radically changed in 15 years, we got it completely backwards, it wasn't simply "a period of understanding", everything was simply wrong.
Everything, not just something.
One example among too many: we thought and we were taught and students at university were taught that the size of the brain mattered and was unequivocally linked to intelligence (we know now it's simply a correlation), so Sapiens obviously had the biggest brain among humans and hominids.
That was false too!
Neanderthal had bigger brains.
Does it mean they were more intelligent?
*we don't know!*
Another example: many dinosaurs had feathers, when we discovered it, I was already a young adult.
And not just some of them, but hypothesis (is) that many, if not all non-avian dinosaur species also possessed feathers in some shape or form.
Stonehenge and all the other cromlechs were believed to be built by the druids until the 60s of 20th century!
There are 3 thousands years difference between the construction of Stonehenge and the first records of the druids, still the knowledge of them being "magical places" is still the most common among people.
> Sorry you had shit school teachers that didn’t help you understand that
Don't be so dismissive, if you read papers from the 80s, when I was a kid (I-m actually from the 70s), you'll see it wasn't my teachers, it was scientifically accepted, you could read about that in every book you could lend your hands on.
No one contested that knowledge in public, it was "the truth".
The only ones contesting those theories were the religious people, my city hosts the Vatican, you can imagine they were quite vocal about it.
It wasn't so easy to shed some light on the topic even putting some effort into it.
We were simply sitting on bogus knowledge, everything prior to 6-7 thousand years ago is obscure and cloudy, everything could either be and not be, except maybe aliens.
We don't know, Hancock is obviously not a scientist and his theories are laughable, but could a civilization have existed before the ice age and have survived it?
We don't know!
We even miss a billion years of Earth geological history, it's almost a quarter of its entire existence.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02450-5
It's easy to understand why people can believe to crook theories about Atlantis and the saviour from the sea, it's actually interesting and if mainstream theories can be proven utterly wrong every 2 decades, who can say they are not true?
It's the reason why religion still goes so strong, we need to be upfront and say that we don't know anything and the things we know are probably mostly wrong or we risk that history in the future will be taught by the Hancocks.
Thank you for writing this.
The point also should also be made that the burden of proof should be on the claimant. It’s perfect reasonable to take crackpot theories and say “there is no evidence to support that this is true” rather than “we don’t know”. And again in my experience it’s crackpots like Hancock that try to dissemble about how much we actually know.
True, but they are now.
When Evans discovered (and named) the Minoans in Crete, he did not know that they probably made human sacrifices, so in his eyes they were all modern and elegant like "la parisien" *
Also, after each mass extinction, there was a massive radiation of new species, for example the Cambrian explosion. No new species without extinction. Evolution, baby!!!
Five great apes exist on earth today, two of them are on the brink of extinction, two are decreasing rapidly in population, and one is the most abundant primate species on earth.
Orangutans and gorillas are critically endangered. Chimpanzees and bonobos are endangered. Humans are expanding.
> Although unclear whether this represents a true “mass extinction,” the percentage of organisms lost is similar to these other events, including the current, ongoing one.
> The researchers believe environmental changes are to blame for the loss of approximately 80% of all Ediacaran creatures, which were the first complex, multicellular life forms on the planet.
Pretty bad, but a very old extinction, and order of magnitude older than the dinosaurs' extinction.
Who or what will pick the baton?
I'm not extremely optimistic on our ability to do what it takes.
Personally, I don't think we are going to continue to increase the rate of extinction as long as we continue to modernize the rest of the world. As people are lifted out of poverty they have more time to spend worrying about their environment and the animals that inhabit it. The best thing we can do is to make sure that no one on Earth lives in poverty that requires them to cut down and burn wood for fuel and heat, make sure they have fertilizer so they can get the best crop yields out of limited land without having to slash and burn wildlands, have access to refrigeration so they don't waste l3% or more of the food they grow, and have proper infrastructure so they can manage their waste water and garbage disposal without polluting natural water ways and the land surrounding urban centers.
A material minimum to sustain biology and abundance of time for altered states of such resolution and variety produced through nascent regenerative medicinal therapies like bio electrics is way more interesting; hack realities fields directly versus build synthetic machines to upgrade forever? Sign me up.
IMO more building of synthetic stuff to appear different and novel is the wrong path. It’s classical physics.
It may reduce industrial consumption as the outputs are the uniform means of producing a variety of experiences not a literal variety of things necessitating bespoke assembly lines.
But humans are so literal. Carry on with rockets because Star Trek. Few think “take pill, believe I’m Captain Kirk with Orion cadet for an hour.” Drugs are bad, mmmk.
I guess what I’m saying is that optimizing for stability and comfort almost certainly is at odds with optimizing for longevity. Unless we eventually have some good reason to think that we’ve discovered all the long-term existential threats and are protected against them.