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One million years from now...
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this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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No, not extinct species.
I don't believe we will leave isolated, big, and diverse oasis of specimens to just repopulate vacant areas.
We are well into a huge (and particularly very fast) mass extinction event, sure only a few headline megafauna species get press coverage, but the amount of invertebrates alone that go extinct and in contrast a single or a few species temporary takes its place in turn expediting the imbalance levels & collapsing entire ecosystems is staggering.
Insect die offs really scare me, so many fruits and plants are pollinated by them, or things just up the food chain from them. Then I just can’t help imagining a chain of collapse from there.
I think humans will be the last living things to go unless we engineer our own extinction early.
Evolution happens as long as there is life. Unless we turn the planet surface into a giant ball of lava, it is impossible to kill all life and it will continue without us. Even if there is only bacteria left after we go, they will simply evolve into complex life all over again, in fact it's not the first time that has happened. In the grand scheme of what life has withstood on this planet, humans are a speed bump at best.
Yes, debates don't really center on the issue of sterilizing the whole planet (fyi there are deep-rock bacteria everywhere so "just" molten surface isn't enough), but rather on the loss we are causing.
Ie ending species that without us would have no issue evolving & continuing to be part of the ecosystems.
Also from bacterial life to complex fauna its easily a billion years (+/- a lot).
That's not true though. Even the animals we've created, like cats and dogs, can live on just fine without us. As can most small and micro herbivores like mice, rabbits, certain songbirds, and most of the "pest" insects; as well as mesopredators (middle of the food chain predators) like foxes and the aforementioned cats and dogs. Plenty of plants are asexual and do not require external pollination, including many of the invasive plants that we can't kill despite our best efforts.
Actually, invasive species in general are a major counterexample. We've been trying to drive many of them to extinction, they are not going extinct. Australia is trying to kill feral cats, that's not working. The US spends billions on herbicides against invasive plants, that's not working and many argue that it's doing more harm to native plants in some cases than the invasive plants themselves. They also tried to kill European sparrows and starlings which are also not working. Same with fire ants. Same with invasive fish. Same with invasive seaweed and algae.
In fact, in environmental sciences which I majored in, there is increasing discussion on whether calling species "invasive" even makes sense. Humans are also part of the ecosystem and of "nature" despite us claiming to be the masters of it. We are subject to its laws just like all other life, so if a mite can hitch a ride on a bird across the ocean and that's considered natural migration, why shouldn't a mouse that hitches a ride on a human boat across the ocean be considered natural migration? There is no morality in nature, it just is and everything is fair game, so we really need not worry "for nature," we should be worrying for ourselves about losing our place in it by going extinct. Adapt or die, that's nature's one and only rule, so if we don't want to die we need to adapt and clean up our act basically.
No. If cats dont have anything to eat bcs their food is also extinct then they absolutely cannot just continue fine without us.
Same with plants, all of them require eg water of certain qualities etc.
We are changing habitats (and killing species trough that), not killing specific species directly (eg hunting, pesticides, etc) and via the lack of them changing the habitats.
And by changing the habitats I mean at speeds far beyond what evolution can keep up with, so it comes to more of a reset. So the sadness of this wiki/Biodiversity_loss followed by booms like wiki/Cambrian_explosion, but ofc note the timescales.
Biodiversity loss and the loss of all life are two completely different things. Biodiversity loss and mass extinction has happened numerous times in the history of life. The one caused by us isn't even the most significant one. We're not even the most significant group of organisms that has caused mass extinctions, that probably goes to the myriad prehistoric species that caused the initial rapid rise in water and atmospheric oxygen levels which ended up killing most organisms including most of themselves (whom we owe our own existence to by the way, when species die out other species fill their place). Obviously not saying that we shouldn't do something about our ecological impact, but the idea that unless WE fix ourselves all life is doomed is just not true and is a pretty "white knight" attitude. The reason we should clean up our act is for our own survival, we shouldn't delude ourselves that all life on Earth is counting on us. "Nature" or "the ecosystem" as an entity really doesn't care what happens to it, nor does it have any ability to care.
How do you know the extent of mass extinction event caused by humans?
Exactly. Plus the whole underwater portion of ecology we have basically no data on (yet it's of huge global importance). Scary, sad, infuriating stuff.
Unfortunately I too think that we will outlive our consequences for long enough to take a proper mass extinction event levels of biodiversity collapse with us.
But let's focus on the positive - biodiversity boom between mere 10 million years from now to like 50 or 100 million years from now (which in the scheme of things isn't that long, just very unnecessary that it will come to that for something like capital/amassing of power of one species over others of the same species).
We have maintained huge megafauna populations though, who are ready and able to take over the moment we go. Cows, sheep, and yes, horses like shown in the comic, are prime examples. We're also doing a damn good job of killing all their natural predators, namely wolves and big cats.
Horses have actually become an invasive species in some parts of the Americas and driving out native large herbivores. Ever heard of American wild horses? They're technically "feral horses" because they did not exist in this hemisphere before Europeans came.