Natural Reality Check

Saving The Planet

4.5 billion years ago, the primordial earth was a hellscape complete with molten surface, un-breathable gasses and life as we know it did not exist. It was only through the Late Heavy Bombardment that things necessary for Carbon based life, such as water, simple inorganic compounds that would become the building blocks of life and so forth got here.

Point is, long before humans were around to get all their big ideas, planet Earth was here. Sure it was getting smacked by space rocks and "sister worlds". (Thats why we have a gigantic moon is because during Earth's formation another world smacked into our planet.)

Earth has been host to various forms of life. In fact, the reason that the atmosphere had oxygen in it at all is due to life. Tiny little microbes related to cyanobacteria performed photosynthesis. Whereby they took photons of light to fix carbon into themselves and made energy for themselves. Their pollution is the oxygen they poop from photosynthesis.

Eventually this led to global cooling. Creating "Snowball Earth" and the first mass extinction event.

Billions of years later Earth has been through five mass extinction events. All caused by different things like asteroid impacts, massive volcanic eruptions on scales we haven't seen in human history, when things started eating each other instead of using photo or chemo synthesis.(Shocking, I know.) Here in the modern era, we're on the verge of a sixth mass extinction event due to climate change.

Every time a cataclysm wiped out most life on earth, there were survivors. They branched out and became the diversity of the next epoch until the next planet wide catastrophe.

Even if humans do go extinct due to a disaster they had a hand in creating, planet Earth will still be here. Until our sun starts expanding into a red giant and vaporizes our blue dot. (Don't worry, that's not going to come about for another 800 million years.)We won't save or destroy our planet.(Unless we survive and evolve as a civilization then maybe we can haul our little blue world away from the cosmic frying pan.)

So instead of shouting "Save the Planet" we should be shouting "Save the Humans from themselves" or "Save the way things are."

I admit to paraphrasing Neil deGrasse Tyson in the previous paragraph. That said, I think that astronomer makes a good point. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to save the humans other than adapting our behavior and attitudes and that is easier said than done.

We could reduce carbon emissions. Figure out a way, using microbes that eat green house gasses, such as methane and carbon dioxide to reduce the amount of these substances in our atmosphere.

We could also make ourselves floating cities that employ sustainable practices to make a living in the ocean. Yes it's challenging and maybe a little weird but it could help us weather the changes that we cannot stop. (Sorry, fact is, we are already headed for changes. Our species, if it wants to survive, must adapt we can't just keep going the same way. That's the rules. I didn't make them up.)

Humanity could potentially become a star traveling race and outrun the solar induced demise of our planet. But that requires multi-generational ships, a way to shield ourselves from cosmic radiation(including gamma ray bursts), a way to generate earth like gravity.(if we want to survive in a form we'd call human.) A way to feed ourselves and gain resources to make it all happen. It's lightyears between us and our nearest stellar neighbors.So we'd basically be cannibalizing neighboring worlds in our solar system. We're a long ways from being anything like Star Wars or Star Trek's ideas of humanity. We'll need to survive ourselves first before we ever leap into inter-stellar space.