Reminds me of the classic George Carlin bit:
"The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?”
> It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed.
Sadly this really isn't the case, and there are a lot of things we can do that will permanently fuck the planet. It can't be certain that we will kill ourselves off before we cross some tipping point that will eventually turn the Earth into just another lifeless rock in our solar system.
Well, "permanently fuck the planet" can be a matter of perspective. The great oxidation event "fucked up" the planet for anaerobic life, but we would not exist without it, so it was a huge blessing for us. Even human CO2 emissions could be viewed as a huge blessing for biosphere in the far future since it releases captured carbon ("the currency of life") thus significantly delaying the timeline of atmospheric CO2 depletion to levels at which photosynthesis becomes impossible.
So you are telling me that after eons, people will rise again as Lego figurines?
Natures capacity to bounce back has been overestimated it turns out https://phys.org/news/2026-10-nature-capacity-species-lost-v...
That’s only in the short term. It doesn’t touch on natures capacity to bounce back over millions of years. We could kill off entire branches and trunks of the tree of life, crash every ecosystem on the planet, and life would still bounce back eventually. Molds would grow on the debris, some would find the slurry of radioactive plastics a tasty treat, and eventually it would rebuild.
We could ruin the planet in the “short” term, but we probably cannot extinguish life, even if we tried our hardest.
I think it's better we just change course now and I wrote a book about how we can do that. If you are interested the link is in my profile description.
We probably couldn't sterilize the earth even if the entire humanity wanted it more than anything else and threw everything it had to make it happen and then some more.
Even destroying the entire humanity would be hard, civilization could go, we have plenty of scenarios for that, but killing every human, even the odd tribe of refugees who could survive in a cave somewhere is something else. I'd say it is the maximum extent of what our technology could do. By that I mean nuking everything we could nuke, including things like volcanoes, mass produce all the greenhouse gases, the ozone depleting ones, the poisonous ones just to release them all, have our finest biologists prepare a pandemic, we may even try to bring in some asteroids.
To sterilize the Earth we would need to destroy all the extremophile bacteria, the tardigrades, the deep biosphere,... That's not happening. Note that we are very careful to sterilize Mars rovers, so that we don't contaminate Mars with Earth life. That's how hardy we consider life to be.
> We probably couldn't sterilize the earth even if the entire humanity wanted it more than anything else and threw everything it had to make it happen and then some more.
That's a rather fun thought experiment. If we were outright trying to destroy the earth it'd be pretty easy!
There are already concerns about what irreversible harm geoengineering could do accidentally. We'd just have to intentionally destroy our ozone layer again and let the runaway greenhouse effect heat the planet up enough to boil off the oceans and send the water into space via atmospheric escape. We (and most living things on Earth) wouldn't survive long enough to see the oceans become desert, but we could set the feedback loop up to continue without us.
Very little can survive without water and once the water is gone it's gone. Water wouldn't return to Earth unless it came on the backs of asteroids (which would be its own problem). The extra solar radiation would help finish off what was left.
If we were going to actively bring in asteroids, the goal shouldn't be to hit the planet with them, the goal should be to use their gravity to move the planet into a less habitable zone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Earth) or even into the collision path of another planet.
We could also put all our resources into making Grey goo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo) happen.
What conditions do you need for runaway greenhouse effect at 1 AU. earth has had over 20% CO2 in the past, but the sun was cooler then.
Moving the planet and pulverising with an impact large enough to kill everything are firmly in the bounds of not currently feasible.
I really doubt humans could do it, it would have to be done in one fell swoop, because any attempt to push the earth beyond a tipping point for bacteria to be killed would require pushing for longer than we, the pushers, could survive.
We would have to be better at designing than evolution to make Grey Goo, otherwise evolution would probably have already done it, and it has, to date, designed some pretty out there things.
> What conditions do you need for runaway greenhouse effect at 1 AU
If you want specifics you might check out this paper which concluded that "runaway greenhouse could in theory be triggered by increased greenhouse forcing" (https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo1892). It's going to happen eventually (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_the_Earth#Loss_of_oc...) so all we'd really be doing is speeding up the process.
> Moving the planet and pulverising with an impact large enough to kill everything are firmly in the bounds of not currently feasible.
I mean, it sure seems unlikely, but I'm not as qualified as Dr. Greg Laughlin and his team at NASA, so without at least some kind of evidence indicating that we couldn't do it, I'm okay with trusting them on it being "not at all far-fetched".
'The technology is not at all far-fetched,' said Dr Greg Laughlin, of the Nasa Ames Research Center in California. 'It involves the same techniques that people now suggest could be used to deflect asteroids or comets heading towards Earth. We don't need raw power to move Earth, we just require delicacy of planning and manoeuvring.' (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2001/jun/10/globalwa...)
Obviously, their plan wasn't to destroy all life on Earth, but to just move the Earth a helpful distance away and then stop, but even in that case they were concerned about sterilizing the planet.
The plan has one or two worrying aspects, however. For a start, space engineers would have to be very careful about how they directed their asteroid or comet towards Earth. The slightest miscalculation in orbit could fire it straight at Earth - with devastating consequences. It is a point acknowledged by the group. 'The collision of a 100-kilometre diameter object with the Earth at cosmic velocity would sterilise the biosphere most effectively, at least to the level of bacteria,' they state in a paper in Astrophysics and Space Science. 'The danger cannot be overemphasised.'
> We would have to be better at designing than evolution to make Grey Goo
Evolution is notoriously bad at designing. It's perfectly fine with a poor or half-assed job as long as the evolving thing typically manages to survive just long enough to make a baby or two. Survival rates can even be outright dismal and design choices absurd if the evolving thing pops out enough babies quickly.
Even a drunk engineer could have done better than evolution when designing a giant squid brain (http://ldtaxonomy.com/podcast/giant-squid/) or a hyena clitoris (https://www.wired.com/2009/07/st-best-5/). While I'm on the subject, putting the ostia at the top of the maxillary sinus instead of the bottom was a dick move.
There's a massive difference between intentionally designing something to self-replicate like crazy until all life on earth is either consumed or crushed and just settling for a replication rate that is "good enough, mostly".
I'd believe it when I see it. Global warming predictions even at the bad end aren't hot enough to boil the oceans.
Aslo life is plentiful miles underground https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/24/magazine/earth-geomicrobi... Even if you nuked everything on the surface there would be loads surviving, if only microbes.
Can you expand more on what these things are?
Life on earth survived both the Cryogenian period with 5°C mean surface temperature [1] and Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum with esimated 27.2–34.5°C mean surface temperature [2]. For comparison the current mean temperature is 15–16°C, the preindustrial was approximately 14°C.
I'm not even sure it's easy to exterminate humanity: our species has displayed an extreme ability to adapt. Surely, billions of humans could die in a big cataclysm but it's genuinely hard to imagine an event that will exterminate every last pocket of survivors. Even harder if we speak roaches and bacteria. The "lifeless rock" will happen when the sun turns into the red giant.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryogenian
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene–Eocene_thermal_maxim...
It's not self correcting indeed because there is no correct state.
Sure the preindustrial environment was cozy for cute and fuzzy things and ourselves.
But you are greatly underestimating life if you think we can kill it all off. Sure it might be slimes and jellies and fungi for a while but life has been there before.
That seems pretty arrogant that a hundred million years or more won’t restart life back on Earth. But I also might just be ignorant. What could we do to end all life on earth and prevent future life from forming?
Well there are some well-described scenarios of what could've happened to a hypothetical ancient life on Mars. There's some evidence suggestion methane-producing microbes may have lived on Mars 3.7 to 4.1 billion years ago that may have lead to the CO2 and hydrogen being replaced with methane, stripping away the planet's protection and leading to rapid glaciation and total extinction.
Indeed earth has itself had a few close calls with total extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medea_hypothesis
99.5% of life may have died during the Great Oxidation Event. 96% of all marine life may have died during the Permian–Triassic extinction event
TBH it's no short of a miracle that we're still here.
I love that word, “may.” The linchpin of so many suppositions.
Well yes, I don't shy away from explicitly calling them hypotheses and nothing more.
GP asked for a possible scenario and I think this is a valid answer.
Well there we go. TIL.
> And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable
I believe it's matter of time for having lifeforms degrading plastic. When trees appeared, there was nothing can degrade dead trees for a long time. And that became fossil fuels. So plastic would be degraded eventually. And some amount of it buried deep enough would be another kind of fossil fuels.
Yes, and this era of comedy is thankfully over. Carlin became quite preachy in his later years. He has way better material.
"Saving the Planet" (George Carlin)
https://youtu.be/7W33HRc1A6c?si=HqyW8mys0uNBuFdW&t=147
Humorous, but not inaccurate about what climate change means to primates. =3
The planet is fine; the people are fucked!
Well if leading scientist George Carlin says "the earth will be renewed" conjecture is true then it must be true. The science is settled everybody, no need to panic.
I don't think it's a question of science. More aesthetics as to whether you think an Earth cleansed of us lot is nice or not.
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