It does make you wonder whether life as we know it was a preceding civilization that launched life into the wider universe for the continued existence of life. But on tectonic timescales, any traces that e.g. a carrying vessel would have left behind are long gone.
Coal was only made once. Maybe if abiotic theory of petroleum is true, you get that back over immense timescales, but you don't get a second shot at coal. Without coal, you can't even do metallurgy at scale. Is there some gotcha that I'm missing?
Most projections suggest coal use is going to plummet over the next 50 years, both because we have better options and because we have little choice.
There’s enough coal in the ground to make earths atmosphere actively lethal to humanity. At ~70,000 ppm people are rendered unconscious in minutes and there’s enough coal go well over 100,000 ppm. There’s no way for humanity to use up the worlds coal as fuel, perhaps we could ship it into space as carbon source but that seems unlikely.
Sure. Already industrialized civilizations have better options. But if you're starting from scratch, you don't get to jump immediately to photovoltaics or whatever.
> and we’re running into environmental issues by burning ~1/1,000th of it.
But which 1/1000th? We didn't dig out the deepest coal first. "Economically viable coal" by 21st century standards isn't the same "economically viable coal" by the standards at the dawn of the industrial revolution.
Across geologic timescales what’s accessible changes. It makes a huge difference if deposits are above or below sea level for example. The Industrial Revolution kicked off in a small geological area which would have looked very different even 100k years before.
Even beyond that we’re actually more selective not less when it comes to coal mines. Unlike say copper/silver/gold/etc there’s so much coal that what would have been a perfectly viable mine 150 years ago simply isn’t today. Larger equipment means fewer workers but it also requires thicker coal seams. Similarly we’re a lot more picky about sulfur content etc.
That’s also somewhat true of stuff copper, gold, etc. The minimum concentration required to make ore viable has decreased dramatically, but only when there’s huge quantities of ore. Plenty of potential mines could be worked by hand, but can’t complete with industrial scale mines or be used as one.
PS: It’s worth remembering even if things aren’t quite as efficient they can be viable. Building canals takes more effort than rail lines but they can still transport bulk goods on the cheap using minimal technology. Similarly solar smelting can reach extreme temperatures, just not 24/7. Wood plus just about any rock can get you to steel with enough effort and know how. It might take slightly longer but our history isn’t the only way to get to transistors and spacecraft etc.
Edit: actually it seems like the coal resulting from lack of tree-consuming microbes theory isn't so widely supported these days.
Heck even the Himalayas have formed only 50 million years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ice_People_(Barjavel_novel...
Or left it on the moon, I guess.
The moon is a harsh environment and (like most places in the solar system) exposed to significant danger from meteorites over geological timescales.
Paradoxically, "survival" assumes adapting to ever-changing circumstances, which means that homo sapiens, given enough time, is bound to evolve into one or multiple new species given enough time. Regardless of that happening elsewhere or on Earth.
Arguably, a species is just a mode of survival for a genome; a convenient vessel through time as the genome reproduces. The language we use is, ultimately, a social construct, but biological speaking by and large inconsequential in so far that language is a trait that fosters survival. Evolution isn't opinionated, it just 'is'.
The fate of the Neanderthal people feels apt here. While the species is extinct, our Sapiens genome still caries 1-4% of Neanderthal genes to date. Some of that influences traits in modern humans, some of that just doesn't. (Evolution is messy, in that regard) Now, maybe Neanderthals wondered - just like us today - what would become of them aeons in the future. Little did they know that we, Sapiens, are distant relatives to them.
In the same vain, our written record and collective memories spanning no longer then a few millennia, distant relatives in the far future may look back at our detritus in the soil and in their genes and maybe wonder the exact same thing.
Maybe the Great Filter isn't some civilization destroying event. Maybe it's just evolution. Maybe become a space-faring species might be the biggest mistake we could make. I think more then a few sci-fi authors coined the notion of the arrival of malevolent alien species in a distant future which turned out to be our distant relatives from space-faring humans who left Earth eons ago. Of course, that's just speculation. But there's some poetic food for thought there, it's a probability one can't readily exclude.
There's data out there about the First Ancestral Race but AFAIK they've never released the unredacted version of the Secret Dead Sea Scrolls, so it's hard for the public to say.
But now after being exposed to the true collective nature of mankind, it doesn’t matter. This species is a net negative for the universe. Just a bunch of monkeys squabbling over stupid things.
We're not important enough to be net negative, nor have we been around long enough. I am still hopeful that 10 million years from now, we'll have rampaged across the supercluster, spreading despair and wickedness in our wake.
Then, and only then, will we have achieved net negativity. Do your part, help us become that.