SuicidalGuidedog t1_ixaa67n wrote
Reply to comment by Siggi_pop in TIL that in 2003, scientists "resurrected" an extinct species of Ibex, bringing back one living specimen, only for it go extinct again seven minutes later when the specimen died of a lung defect by mausoliam95
There's always a reason. For the last thousand years that reason tends to be the same thing: us humans.
Actiaeon t1_ixamtpe wrote
Last thousand years, more like the last 100,000 years.
SuicidalGuidedog t1_ixauovq wrote
I agree. While that's true, I didn't want to give someone the ability to question some 'natural' extinctions. Human mechanisation has vastly increased the speed of extinction. For example, Aboriginal Australians possibly hunted the Diprotodon to extinction, but that type of thing is just a curious anecdote. Real extinction is directly due to hunting with guns and removing habitat at an industrial level.
But I take your point and don't disagree.
Actiaeon t1_ixawlpu wrote
Oh yeah, industrialization has been causing species to die off faster and faster. Also with the megafauna, it was probably a combination of hunting and climate. Now we are also causing the climate to change as well, not great for animals right now.
But I feel it is important to recognize that humans have always had the potential to cause extinction events and will require real effort on our part if we wish to change that.
InfernalCorg t1_ixamd7z wrote
I mean, we could just generalize to "failure to adapt and compete" and it'd be accurate for the entire history of life.
FjorgVanDerPlorg t1_ixannuk wrote
We're fucking up this planet and extincting species soo fast, we're most likely gonna extinct ourselves. Climate change is only one of the apocalypses we're balls deep into creating.
InfernalCorg t1_ixaoa0v wrote
I understand the pessimism, but we're unlikely to go extinct. Most extinction-level threats that we control involve rogue general AI.
Mass population reductions on a biblical scale, now, those are likely. It's going to be a rough few decades.
FjorgVanDerPlorg t1_ixapdmd wrote
It may well be plastics that get us. I dont think its a coincidence that the rise in plastic pollution coincides with a global decline in fertility rates.
But even if it doesn't, something else will finish us off. Because the problem is that we are trying to extinct ourselves in pretty much every imaginable way. Imo it won't be one thing like climate change, or rogue AI, or war, or plastics pollution etc, it will be a whole bunch of crises all going toxic at the same time.
InfernalCorg t1_ixaw13d wrote
> I dont think its a coincidence that the rise in plastic pollution coincides with a global decline in fertility rates.
You don't? Why does fertility rate correspond more closely to economic development than plastic use, then?
>Because the problem is that we are trying to extinct ourselves in pretty much every imaginable way.
There are quite a few more people trying to not go extinct. There's no plausible scenario (barring a gamma ray burst, asteroid, supernova, etc) where the human race goes extinct. The climate's going to suck for a century, but things will still be livable. War isn't fun, but even a thermonuclear war results in most humans living - the global south finally lucks out for once.
It's possible we go out via some sort of confluence of negative events, but it doesn't seem likely enough to dwell on it. Doomerism isn't productive.
FjorgVanDerPlorg t1_ixaxyc9 wrote
The problem is that currently both you and science are looking at these risks individually, not studying the cumulative effects of multiple crises going critical in the same time period.
While we are fucking this planet in every way we can dream up, while consistently ignoring all warnings from the experts, with all our "efforts" to counter these problems coming up way short of the mark - through all that I think it's pretty naive to think that we will get lucky and these crises will won't converge into some apocalyptic cluterfuck.
There's also the fact that as things get much more dire, we will try stupider and more dangerous "solutions", which may very well make things considerably worse.
InfernalCorg t1_ixayd0k wrote
> both you and science are looking at these risks individually, not studying the cumulative effects of multiple crises going critical in the same time period.
How? What are we failing to account for? A nuclear war mid-climate change would still be catastrophic, but unless I'm missing something it wouldn't have that many synergistic effects.
> with all our "efforts" to counter these problems coming up way short of the mark
You understand that this is mostly because we don't have the political willpower to fix things, not because we don't know how, right? When things get dire, even billionaires will pick survival over money.
FjorgVanDerPlorg t1_ixb0tll wrote
Lol you're putting your faith in the same science that has consistently said "we got it wrong, it's actually much worse/happening much faster than expected", for the last decade - that has been the climate change song.
Systems are complex and their interactions often have wide reaching consequences.
Try maybe: a series of lethal Pandemic outbreaks caused by thawing permafrost, including a novel virus with a long incubation rate and also a very high mortality rate, at the same time as that same permafrost releasing gigatons of methane to poison the air (clathrate gun hypothesis), oceans dying along with the amazon, resultant shortages triggering a nuclear war/use of weaponized nanotech, viral/eugenic warfare, country's facing extinction deciding to fuck everyone else at the same time (US for example could carpet nuke most of the planet), on and on.
KingVolsung t1_ixaqek0 wrote
If human population crashes too far, we will lose the majority of the skills, technologies and knowledge we've developed.
If we've fucked up the environment too much (like we're in the midst of doing), we're gonna die off with the rest of the planet.
InfernalCorg t1_ixavmj7 wrote
Hardly. A particularly bad catastrophe might take is back as far as 1970s tech, but a single decent library'd be enough for us to rebuild from more-or-less scratch.
And even if we went full "atmosphere not oxygenated enough to sustain human life" we'd still have holdouts in bunkers with life support. There are eight billion of us and we're remarkably hard to eradicate.
KingVolsung t1_ixax8rn wrote
Those bunkers would need sufficient access to new materials for indefinite use (particularly energy production). You could not produce a full supply chain to produce the necessary tech to replace aging components in the bunkers, from inside the bunkers, within a few decades. At which point, your motors, batteries, ICs, etc would all start to die, and with them, us.
InfernalCorg t1_ixaxouy wrote
Or you'd operate in low-oxygen environments via rebreathers, yeah. I'm not suggesting it'd be trivial, only that even drastic changes to our environment are unlikely to wipe us out.
KingVolsung t1_ixayqro wrote
Rebreathers are not sustainable, they require a supply chain to be able to keep using them. The scale of the supply chains required to keep humanity alive in such a situation is far beyond what can be achieved through bunkers.
The only way we could survive such a situation is where the environment will become survivable within decades, which in evolutionary/geological timescales is a blink of an eye.
No one is building and preparing bunkers for surviving centuries to millennia, because it's not feasible.
SuicidalGuidedog t1_ixavnkc wrote
The phrase "failure to adapt and compete" is rather facile in this context. I mean, sure, it's true, but to what end? It's essentially placing the blame on the victim of extinction. It's the equivalent of cutting down a jungle and then when a tiger walks out you shoot it in the face and shrug "I guess he failed to adapt". Yeah, to the actions that we all took.
I'd argue it's more valuable to just say that we're clearly damaging our own environment and causing the shockingly fast extinction of multiple flora and fauna. When you get to the stage we humans have of having this level of control on our environment, it's no longer the case where other species need to adapt.
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