Don’t give us too much credit just yet. Dinosaurs were around for about 180 million years.
Our earliest ancestors are about 2 million years ago, our closest ancestors are about 300,000 years and our actual ancestors who are like us are only about 50,000 years.
We’re still just a tiny blip in earth’s history and if we wipe ourselves out, it’ll be pretty hard for any future archaeologist to figure out who we were and what we did, or even to know that we were even here.
The sheer volume of microplastics that will be in our respective layer of rock stratigraphy will be unmistakable evidence that some rather stupid species was here.
man what ever species rises next will be stoked to find out what kind of super fossil fuels you get when you lay down a bed of petrochemicals, then lay literally all our organic matter on top, then cover with more petrochemicals and bake at runnaway global warming temps for 200million years.
Sure, but forget 50 kiloyears. Just considering the events of the last century is sufficient to make me marvel that we haven’t sterilized ourselves – and the rest of the planet. But, as you say, it’s early days yet. I’m sure we’ll manage to irrevocably cock it up any moment now.
That too, yeah. There’s plenty of options. It’s like once humanity heard of the Great Filter concept, the response was to collectively go: “Yes, but are we absolutely sure we’ve discovered all the anthropogenic causes? Maybe we should explore that some more. The best learning is by doing, you know?”
What about our megafauna extinctions, nuclear tests, mass biosphere degradation and destruction, the Anthropocene extinction event, the fish bones of 2-6 trillion fish we torture to death every year, the bones of trillions of monstrous chickens, anthropogenic climate change, plastic… and soon the upcoming anthropogenic climate-change cascade and the Anthropocene mass-extinction event?
Don’t give us too much credit just yet. Dinosaurs were around for about 180 million years.
Our earliest ancestors are about 2 million years ago, our closest ancestors are about 300,000 years and our actual ancestors who are like us are only about 50,000 years.
We’re still just a tiny blip in earth’s history and if we wipe ourselves out, it’ll be pretty hard for any future archaeologist to figure out who we were and what we did, or even to know that we were even here.
The sheer volume of microplastics that will be in our respective layer of rock stratigraphy will be unmistakable evidence that some rather stupid species was here.
man what ever species rises next will be stoked to find out what kind of super fossil fuels you get when you lay down a bed of petrochemicals, then lay literally all our organic matter on top, then cover with more petrochemicals and bake at runnaway global warming temps for 200million years.
Sure, but forget 50 kiloyears. Just considering the events of the last century is sufficient to make me marvel that we haven’t sterilized ourselves – and the rest of the planet. But, as you say, it’s early days yet. I’m sure we’ll manage to irrevocably cock it up any moment now.
I mean climate change might’ve already done it. Just need to wait 500-1000 years for the full effects to all take place.
That too, yeah. There’s plenty of options. It’s like once humanity heard of the Great Filter concept, the response was to collectively go: “Yes, but are we absolutely sure we’ve discovered all the anthropogenic causes? Maybe we should explore that some more. The best learning is by doing, you know?”
Dinosaurs is a clade, not a species. Humans belong to the clades hominoids and simians, which have been around for 13 and 42 million years.
What about our megafauna extinctions, nuclear tests, mass biosphere degradation and destruction, the Anthropocene extinction event, the fish bones of 2-6 trillion fish we torture to death every year, the bones of trillions of monstrous chickens, anthropogenic climate change, plastic… and soon the upcoming anthropogenic climate-change cascade and the Anthropocene mass-extinction event?