Humans are so invasive that they have gone to places that can’t even support human life for prolonged periods of time. Deep sea trenches, tall mountains, polar ice caps etc. Even the Moon isn’t safe from humans, and now they are also planning to invade Mars. Once they’ve spread all over every planet, moon and asteroid in the solar system, they’ll probably try to land on the Sun.
They'll collapse their own civilization well before all that becomes possible. Personally, just the idea of Mars colonization strikes me as just cringingly deluded. Forget the hard limits imposed by relativity, even to get something as tiny as a satellite into space requires the full stack of today's civilization to be up and running - i.e. everything from the food and energy system required to keep 8 billion people alive to the advanced microchip factories. All of this depends on a climate that humans are currently turning upside down and on an ecological substrate (soils, oceans, freshwater, biodiversity) that we're pounding into oblivion. To anyone who can see in front of them, some kind of collapse is literally inevitable. Forget Mars colonies, we'll be lucky if we're eating. A few decades at most.
PS: This comes across as a bit depressing but I don't mean to spread hopelessness. Personally I'm not a cynic or even really a pessimist. After all, there's always some way that we can make things better than they might otherwise be. It's important to be realistic but nothing about the future is inevitable.
Yeah, you’re right. None of these absurd journeys can take place if the rest of the population struggles to survive. My guess is, wrecking the whole planet beyond repair is the only thing that will force governments to start banning fossil fuels and investing in carbon capture and storage technologies.
And the most destructive. Seriously, I hope enough of us can get a grip and make world governments get their shit together.
Algae literally caused the extinction of nearly all life on Earth at one point, we’re still not at that level yet, give it a few more decades of unchecked global warming though.
Wouldn't that mean that we would have had to be transported by some other species into environments where we previously weren't? We didn't "hitch a ride" on anything else; we went on our own.
Interesting point and actually quite hard to refute!
We're even invasive to ourselves.
Go invade yourself.
What about ants? Aren't there like 3 trillion septillion or something?
You don't know reynoutria japonica.
Let's look at humanity as natures' invention that could protect the Earth against total destruction of life from huge meteorites : in this context, our actual partial destruction of the biosphere (and of 99.99%? of our civilisations) is not so important.
That's an original take. But it feels a bit forced. We're already halfway thru Earth's allotted quota of 9 billion years of habitability. Life has been here most of that time so it seems odd that nature would suddenly think up such an extreme version of life insurance. Not least because humans look likely to do a better destructive job than at least a couple of the previous mass extinctions.
We don't know yet if humanity will succeed. And you are absolutely right : my proposition here is quite forced and incomplete. Yet, if we consider a broader perspective : on many planets, similar to the Earth, there must be somewhere, at some moment, a sentient species succeeding in something like this.
Might be an unpopular opinion but I don't think we are an invasive species. We naturally shifted and took over.
