Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr.Coffee
"It can be difficult to estimate this rate, also known as the background rate, since humans do not know exactly what happened throughout the course of Earth's 4.5 billion year history."
This right here is the problem with the article and why it needs to be taken with an enormous grain of salt. However, even besides this point, humans are facing population issues, not extinction issues. How does this planet sustain our existing trajectory on population growth?
Furthermore, if there is a mass extinction event, how many decades or centuries does it take to fully execute? My children's children children? Maybe? Earth time is not human time. Earth time is like generations of us, and by then we'll have colonized elsewhere anyway.
There's no real prediction in the article as to the timing of this. It's like saying, one day, all humans will probably perish, but that isn't really something new, is it? It's going to happen, but probably not even in the conceivable future realistically.
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You are right. Human time is very different than earth time. Humans have been here anywhere from 100,000 to 1 million years. That would be a step in time within an extinction period.
However, I am troubled that you brush off colonization like it's guaranteed. That is a loooong way off. You talked about children's children's children. Do you think it's that close? Longer?
We've got nowhere to go. Sure we could colonize Mars with serious terreforming, but even that's realistically 100 years away, and would serve what, a couple thousand people? A million eventually? Not to mention, they'll have little to sustain themselves. It'll be ghetto compared to living on this beautiful blue orb. Further than that? Hope you know how to break the space/time barrier...
It's funny. We get wake up calls every year now, and people still brush it off as alarmist. It's a good thing we won't have to directly answer to our children's children's children. Because we would have nothing to say to them.
