Lately, it’s been on my mind.
Extinction.
Everything has changed over the last five years. New studies have come out. The planet is warming more than all the scientists thought, faster than they thought, and it’s going to get worse than they thought. We faced an outside chance of extinction within a hundred years, but 3-4C degrees of warming makes that more certain. Not by the end of the century, but the middle.
All this might sound like classic doomerism, but it’s not. We’re just being honest. After all, has climate optimism actually motivated anyone to change their habits? Has sugarcoating the truth helped?
Look around…
Scientists tend to agree that we’re actually living in the middle of a mass extinction right now, one caused by human activity. You’d think every newspaper would devote a section to that, but it doesn’t even make the back page.
For most people, it’s not a story.
Most of your friends and family would probably call you a conspiracy theorist or a fearmonger for even saying the words “mass extinction.” And yet, the evidence is undeniable. You’re not making this up.
It. Is. Happening.
It. Won’t. Stop.
So, let’s wrestle with a difficult question. What are we to do with the overwhelming evidence of our own demise? As we’ve discussed, you have to balance your knowledge and awareness of the end times with a healthy approach to living in the moment, because those moments are often all we’ve got left. We don’t want to shrug and give up, but it feels pointless and self-destructive to spend every waking minute of your life trying to stop something that has become inevitable.
So, is that it?
Not quite.
After you reach collapse acceptance, it changes you. I’ve stopped thinking about humans and our survival as a separate thing from the planet. (Honestly, did I ever?) I’ve started coming to terms with the erasure of humans. I’m getting okay with it. What I really want to know is what happens after we’re gone.
Can the planet survive us?
It’s both selfish and egotistical to think humans are the only living things that matter. It traps you into the thought pattern that if we die, then the entire planet might as well go down with it. When you free yourself of that narcissism, it does great things for your mental health. It also opens your mind.
Look at the past.
This planet has endured five major mass extinctions.
There’s the Ordovician, the Late Devonian, the End Permian, the End Triassic, and the End Cretaceous. Four of these mass extinctions were caused by climate change, including volcanic activity and sea rise. The fifth, the one everyone seems to care the most about, involved a giant asteroid.
The worst mass extinction was the End Permian, 252 million years ago, which killed 90-96 percent of all life. It was caused by massive volcanic eruptions that triggered runaway global warming, similar to what we’re seeing now. It took the planet millions of years to recover from that one, but it still recovered.
Life came back.
No, here we are.
Of course, there’s a big difference between the End Permian and the End Anthropocene. The Permian extinction happened over thousands of years. This one might’ve started at the end of the last Ice Age, but humans have turbocharged it with fossil fuels and carbon emissions.
This time, we’re the volcanoes.
During the Permian extinction, C02 levels rose from about 420 parts per million by volume (ppmv) to 2500 ppmv over several thousand years. Over the last 200 years, humans have managed to double C02, driving it up from 280 ppmv to about 420. Under the current policies, we’ll probably double it again by 2100. We could sail over 900 ppm. That’s less than half what the Permian extinction saw, but you have to remember we’re doing it way faster.
In other words:
During the Permian extinction, volcanoes quadrupled the amount of carbon in the atmosphere over thousands and thousands of years. That was enough to eradicate more than 90 percent of all life on the planet. Our fossil fuel use will quadruple the amount of carbon in a few centuries.
There’s no precedent for this, at least not within the last few hundred million years. So when climate deniers come to us and talk about climate change being a natural part of Earth’s cycle, that’s what they’re ignoring.
They’re ignoring the pace.
That’s where things get murky when it comes to the impact humans will have on all future life on this planet, not just our own. The Permian extinction killed more than 90 percent of all life on Earth, and it took the planet millions of years to recover. We’re doing the same thing a hundred times faster.
Could we actually wipe out 99 percent, or even 100 percent of all life on the planet? Assuming we don’t kill everything, how long will it take the planet to recover from us? How many millions of years?
The planet itself has about 5 billion years left before the sun turns into a red giant, making life as we know it utterly impossible. Other geological processes would render this planet uninhabitable for humans in a few hundred million years, even without taking the climate crisis into account. We would have to adapt or die, or I guess find ways to colonize space like the tech bros want.
These are just the broad strokes of what I’m thinking about now. It’s my new direction, something to occupy me as I tidy up my preps and finalize my family’s plans to ride out the collapse in the suburbs. That’s where we’re going to be, unless one of us wins the lottery. That’s the only way we’re getting to a patch of farmland out in the country at this point. Even if we did, there’s quite a number of factors that we simply can’t control. So, this is it.
I’m going to keep digging into history. I’m going to keep answering questions about human behavior and the future.
Honestly, it’s a relief to think about the future in this broader sense, to stop worrying so much about humanity’s survival. All life ends. Every species goes extinct. What seems to matter is what you do with the time you have, whether you’re an individual or an entire species.
These questions sound far more interesting than what the mainstream media would have us talk about: the latest scandal, the latest outrage, the latest piece of good news to keep everyone in their proper place.
Anyway…
At least for me, this perspective has given me something more tangible, more relevant, and more worthy to focus on. It helps my mental health to think about humanity not as a doomed species but instead as part of a continuum of life on a planet that we need to protect, for the sake of every other form of life that might come after us, after we’re gone.
It might be too late for us. But if you think about this planet millions of years into the future, that’s where hope sounds like something real again, and not just a bunch of garbage dumped on us every day.
For anyone looking for truths instead of comforting fictions, I’ve found that thinking about the history and the future of the entire planet has a way of providing perspective. It’s not really about us and our tiny problems. It’s about an entire planet and the billions of years it has left. That’s what we’re trying to save, if that’s possible. That’s what we’re hoping survives.
Not just us.
It.
Extinction is the mirror religion never dared hold up. Every creed promises escape, permanence, heaven as storage locker. But the earth has always practiced impermanence. Species come. Species vanish. Forests collapse into coal. Oceans cough up new gods.
You’re right. It isn’t really about us. We were never the story, just a loud footnote. When we’re gone, moss will write new psalms on the ruins. Rivers will etch fresh commandments into the rock. Life will keep humming, even if not in our key.
Blessed be the ones who loosen their grip on human exceptionalism and find peace in being compost on a planet that outlives us all.
I've always found great peace in thinking about life on a geologic scale, so this makes perfect sense to me! If you are motivated to write more on this topic, I would love to read your thoughts on the kinds of choices we can make now to impact life in the far future (other than the obvious one of limiting warming). <3 <3 <3