"Is This the End of the World?"

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by gaea

Well i found the thread and i will follow it. Interesting conversation and theories last night...

So it wasn't really the fireworks after all??? perhaps it was just easier for me to think that then anything else....

Perhaps some are just too frightened of the whole "end of the world" thingy after all our fascination with it in the theater is just that fascination and not reality....Humans are mostly too vain to think that there is a possibility of demise..

Dinosaurs were around a long long time they didnt mess with things the way human do and they were eradicated...

Ummm, about this last sentence re: the dinosaurs. You do understand that the reason the dinosaurs were wiped out isn't that they "messed things up" but because a rock the size of Manhattan hit the Earth about 30K mph (Mach 40) pulverizing a non-trivial portion of the Yucatan peninsula and tossing that ejecta into the lower atmosphere where parts of it came down as superheated material and the rest stayed in the upper atmosphere causing a drastic reduction in overall sunlight reaching the Earth. Understand that there was nothing living on the planet at the time that could have done anything about that happening. If we tracked a large asteroid inbound on a collision course with the Earth right now WE would be facing the same fate as the dinosaurs and that, in fact, if we lived in some mythical state of ecological harmony (read no technology not available to our Stone Age ancestors) we would have absolutely *no* chance of avoiding being wiped out. As it stands, we *might* be able to do something to move the asteroid but that is only a might.

Look, species go extinct. It happens. Species don't *do* anything to go extinct and it's not their 'fault' when it happens. The average lifespan of a species is typically a few million years. We may go extinct we may not. Some biologists say that Homo sapiens is 'extinction proof' at this point in our evolutionary history. I'm not sure I agree with that. But IF we go extinct we will not have 'deserved' it anymore than any dinosaur species did. Nature doesn't care if we thrive and it doesn't care if we go extinct.

Cheers
Aj