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People forget that life on earth has been around for an extremely long time. We believe that single cellular life first appeared around 3.5 billion years ago. We also believe that the universe is around 13.8 billion years old. That means life has been around and evolving for around 25% of the time the universe has existed. Life operates on a scale far beyond our comprehension.
Another fun fact about life. We think that multicellular life only appeared around 600 million to 1.2 billion years ago. So life was probably single cellular for billions of years. The complexity of life has rapidly increased since then and will continue to do so.
Edit: new research suggests that complex multicellular life may have appeared around 2.4 billion years ago.
and will continue to do so.
Humans: hold my beer.
Even if humans manage to kill off most life on Earth it will continue to exist, propagate, and become more complex. Again we’re talking about billions of years. There have been huge shifts in climate and mass extinctions many times before and yet here we are.
Yeah I think most people don't know or comprehend that there have already been like 5 mass extinctions in our planets lifespan. It's going to take something like getting hit by 4 gamma ray bursts at the same time to completely wipe life off of planet earth.
true, we're just gonna be like a soft reset button, like a windows reinstall without formatting, where it just shoves everything into windows.old
True, it would be difficult to completely turn Earth into a lifeless rock, but I think humans are up to the task.
There are plenty of things we can't kill and, in fact, live on things we might use to kill them. Extremophiles that live in environments nothing else can. Bacteria that live off gamma radiation. We would have to dedicate ourselves to ridding all life on purpose to kill everything. We would have to live long enough to be the last things to kill if that was the goal.
Eh I doubt it. Every single nuke ever built combined still doesn't come close to the power of the Chicxulub asteroid (the one that killed the dinosaurs) and even that impact didn't come close to eliminating all life on Earth. Unless someone accidentally compresses a mountain into an artifical black hole or something there probably is no way to wipe out all life on Earth.
Mars was once habitable but lost it's magnetic field, wiping it's atmosphere. Venus was once habitable but taken over by a runaway greenhouse effect.
I'm not saying they ever had life or that we're going to suffer the same fate, but it's definitely possible to wipe a planet clean.
Demagnetization 2024, We Can Get There™
Conservatoves would unironically do this to own the libs.
75% estimated extinction rate is quite close to me. :)
75% of all species, not all life. Larger species and photosynthesizers were more heavily affected, while smaller species, scavengers, and deep sea life were less affected.
And I'm not a biologist, but I'm pretty sure even 75% of all life, not species, still wouldn't be close to completely ending life on Earth, cause in the end as long as some microbes survived around a hydrothermal vent somewhere total extinction would be avoided.
I still think that "lifeless rock" does not specify how lifeless - theoretically extinct or just lifeless enough to make human life either extinct or just miserable. I took it as the latter, and in that case even lesser cases than 75% of all species would suffice.
The first case, the theoretical and non-human focused pov is quite another thing. Like you said, there's so many opportunities and adaptations for life to seap through the combs of doom :)
Going a couple comments up the chain:
Even if humans manage to kill off most life on Earth it will continue to exist, propagate, and become more complex. Again we’re talking about billions of years. There have been huge shifts in climate and mass extinctions many times before and yet here we are.
So I took it to mean all life on Earth being dead. As long as one microbe survives to reproduce and start evolving it doesn't count.
Life will always be there. We just wouldn't be involved.