• Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
      72·
      2 years ago

      For sure.

      But tbf it’s still a bold assumption that afte only a million years biodiversity would rebound to the point to support (mega)fauna like that again.

      Hoping for the best.

      • AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
        6·
        2 years ago

        You need only look at how our species treats one another, despite claiming to know better, to understand why. Endless styles of cruelty of the many by the few in the name of greed, gluttony, power lust, and schadenfreude. The few voices of sanity and compassion assassinated, mowed down, blacklisted, and threatened into contrition. Literally destroying civilization pumping carbon shit into the air, fully aware of what we’re doing, to continue stoking the ego scores of a handful of sociopaths.

        If you’re proud of our species, good for you. Take the bliss, Cypher

        • GracchiBros@lemmy.world
          2·
          2 years ago

          I do think there’s something positive about being the only species we know of with the intelligence and knowledge developed over generations to even realize these things and much such judgements. The plants that filled the atmosphere with oxygen killing almost everything couldn’t know any better or do anything about it. Past species and humans before modern times changed their environments and caused extinctions without even knowing. And while we might not end up doing so, we do have the capabilities to do better.

          • AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
            1·
            2 years ago

            I’ve thought about that and to me it makes it worse. We have glimmers of knowing better, of doing the right thing, just enough to demonstrate that we *can, * but 99 times out of 100 we don’t.

            You can’t get angry at a lion for following it’s genetic programming, it doesn’t have the capacity for introspection about its nature. Its sentient, but not sapient. We can know better, with our cognitive abilities combined with tools of historical recording most of us do know better, but when presented the chance to take either our share of the pie with our brothers and sisters, or to take the whole pie and leave them hungry, we pick the latter like clockwork.

            The tragedy is knowing that we have the capacity to be a great people that accomplishes wonders together, but we still choose to fight one another for the biggest banana pile like impulsive beasts almost every time throughout recorded history. We refuse to learn. We refuse to heed the lessons of history for longer than a single generation. We can glimpse enlightenment, but choose the easy dopamine hit. It’s maddening.

  • Omgarm@lemmy.world
    18·
    2 years ago

    Are the horses a million years old or did humans go extinct recently and are they being snarky about it?

    • marcos@lemmy.world
      21·
      2 years ago

      They are paleontologist supersmart-horses, many generations after their ancestors killed the last human.

      They are also in a dome, decorated with a picture of mountains and a blue sky, that they set up to protect themselves from the remaining of the recent nuclear war.

  • Chickenstalker@lemmy.world
    192·
    2 years ago

    Ha ha, no. In a million years, mankind would have paved the entire planet’s surface, including the oceans. Our numbers would be in the hundred billions and most will live underground. The few elites would live on the uppermost levels and even have real gardens and plants. Wildlife would be extinct, save for a few robotic simulacra in the Imperial Zoo. Ironically, you would have to go to the Outer Colonies to see some animals that are extinct on Terra.

  • Sordid@lemmy.world
    218·
    2 years ago

    That’s cute and all, but it ain’t gonna be birds and deer who gets life off this rock once the Sun starts threatening to swallow it in a few billion years. We’re screwing up badly in the short term, but we’re the only hope Earth life has in the long term.

    • letsgocrazy@lemm.ee
      1613·
      2 years ago

      A thousand times this.

      I’ve used this argument before arguing with hippies about “integrating with nature”.

      Any society that isn’t on track to developing the science and engineering necessary for interstellar tavel is a dead end.

      It’s a tragic waste of human intelligence to keep making the same bamboo huts indefinetly.

      So some noble savage can live their lives on repeat for hundreds or millenia, and that’s somehow better than inventing an arc that can save every form of life on this unique Planet?

      Bloody stupid hippy nonsense.

      • macrocephalic@lemmy.world
        71·
        2 years ago

        We’re not going to make it until the sun swallows the earth. If there’s anything related to us left at that point then it wouldn’t be recognisable to us.

      • Queen HawlSera@lemm.eeEnglish
        72·
        2 years ago

        Amen, all those movies where “All tech stops working, people learn to do things for themselves! Utopia acheived!” are garbage

      • blind3rdeye@lemm.ee
        2·
        2 years ago

        As individuals, a lot of people are content to live a simple life of prosperity. They have a basic job, and a small family, and some basic luxuries - and they call it enough. Some people have a one-eyed focus on increasing their wealth throughout their lives; but not everyone is like that. People generally recognise that their lives are finite. Some try to aim for some kind of imaginary high-score in their life, and others just live a ‘normal’ life.

        I’m now making an analogy. As a species, we can recognise that are time is finite; and we can choose to live that out in a stable simple prosperity, where we just look after our world (house) and get what we need for some basic luxuries, and be content. We could have a billion years of that. It’s a very long time. Or… we could aim for endless growth. We could consume as much as possible, and always aim for more. As we run out of resources and livable habitat on Earth, we must look to interstellar travel and spread to other planets. I don’t necessarily think that is a better choice.

        When I was young, I use to think that humans needed to settle on other planets. But I don’t think that any more. Partially because I learnt about special relativity, and decided that unless we’re very very wrong about science so far, having connected colonies on other planets is not possible. But also because I realised that there is no intrinsic goal to spread human life as much as possible. There are other things of value. We don’t need that particular goal. I also use to think that personal immortality would be a good thing. I don’t really think that any more.

      • Daft_ish@lemmy.world
        27·
        2 years ago

        Until you find out unity with nature allows humans to transcend human form and ascend to a higher plane of existence. While technology fights a losing battle to compete with the universes slow entropy into darkness. Oops.

        • ???@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          13·
          2 years ago

          I call bullshit. You know why?

          I literally had a dream that predicted the worst year of my life, 5 years in advance, by having a friendly dream character tell me I died and went to a dream afterlife.

          The catch was that I am autistic and I acted and act much like I did when I was 10 years old, and that was reflected by me taking the form of the kid sidekick in the fictional world that I was trying to write a story about at the time. I was told I was adorable and intelligent-looking (I was not the smartest kid but I was well-read and paid attention to what was in my textbooks) and not particularly unlikeable, and all of that was because that dream afterlife was a place where your personality determined your appearance. Yet despite the fact that I did not look monstrous or untrustworthy and that people who died quickly realised that in the dream world people are exactly what they appear to be, I was warned people would discriminate against me anyway, and there was nothing I or my apparent dream friend could do; said dream friend told me they thought I at least deserved to know it would happen and to just try and enjoy eternity, since I would never wake up, but that it would be hard because people would hate me unfairly.

          I woke up anyway. That’s not why I call BS. I recorded that dream in a text file and I keep backups of all my unique files.

          I’ll finish editing this soon but my phone is at 2% battery…

          • Daft_ish@lemmy.world
            2·
            2 years ago

            Please do.

            I will say, though, I don’t really have any stakes in this argument especially when you consider my contribution to humanity will probably be dead end evolutionary branch responsible for creating higher order carbon based polymers.

            • ???@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              12·
              2 years ago

              5 years later, sure enough, everything I value became critic-repellant in the writing industry; “you have to grow up”, “dark and edgy is realistic and realistic is mandatory”, “escapism is evil”, “children are spoiled little shits”, etc.

              I now am extremely certain the dream characters who talk to me are avatars of my unconscious. I know that sounds really weird and I have no proof, so believing me on that detail can be taken with a grain of salt. As for my sanity, if I was crazy, I’d be seeing or hearing my unconscious while awake, I swear this is just in dreams that this being talks to me and it gives advice like “don’t worry about the average fictional character, they’re just inanimate puppets, it’s the ones who are people’s favorite hats to wear that - like you - are important because some hats are helmets that keep the wearer alive” rather than “KiLl EvErYoNe It WiLl Be FuN!!!11!1!” so my best guess is my unconscious mind is trying to communicate with me on a level my conscious and subconscious mindstates can understand.

              I damn well know there’s more to dreams than they appear, that’s WHY I call BS, because a year ago, a dream character that was the first character to appear in two different dreams of mine since ever, and I asked it “Is there really a dream afterlife?” and it said “No.”

              I also asked it in another dream to be sure, even broadening from “dream afterlife” to “any afterlife at all”, this time using an old red landline telephone and voice contact. In a snooty french accent, it confirmed and warned me very strongly and angrily not to ask again. The only upside is it said it didn’t know for sure whether it is possible to create an afterlife using technology and/or biology.

              I’m sorry but unless someone builds one, there is no afterlife or ascension to another plane. I literally have the info directly from the source.

              • trashgirlfriend@lemmy.world
                11·
                2 years ago

                I think Harry DuBois just traveled to our reality to write this post after taking a large amount of “Magnesium”

                • ???@lemmy.dbzer0.com
                  1·
                  2 years ago

                  I wish I was making this up or delusional or cynical. I want more than anything for souls to be immortal. I would have no problem living in my dreams forever, but I’m not the one who said it (or if my unconscious counts as being me, I’m not able to type a fediverse post using the part of my mind which is more aware of why there’s no afterlife).

                  If anyone can post scientific evidence disproving how I’ve come to interpret what I experienced, I’m content to let that have the final say rather than make any attempt to dispute it. For now, I know it sounds insane but this is literally a Cassandra Truth, so at least recognise that I don’t expect you to believe it’s the truth, only to recognize that if ascending to the astral plane could be done, I would be persuing doing so at this very moment.

                  I’m sorry, but I know what happened between me and my unconscious mind, and I’m not just relying on my memories but also my now-decade old dream logs. I asked it for the honest truth. It said the truth is what I feared, death is not (yet?) followed by anything but oblivion.

                  To be fair, if you’re not happy about that concept, neither am I because fuck the Atheists and screw the guy who wrote His Dark Materials. I’m just one poorly-recieved sci-fi writer, though, I never even got to go to university. I am not qualified or capable of building an afterlife, or determining whether souls are singular entities unto themselves or merely a process that our minds use as “the third rail of the subconscious train of thought”, or testing if continuity of self across time is real or illusionary.

                  Aside from that, I will say one thing; I have never ingested hallucinogens, at least not to my knowledge, and I don’t go to parties or have any IRL friends. So no, you don’t get to say I’m high when the only way I got OUT of the maddening despair I experienced in 2017 was because my dreams helped pull me out of a complete mental breakdown. Fight me, I don’t care if you think I’m telling the truth and I don’t need you to believe your unconscious mind is somehow independently acting on your behalf, but don’t fucking tell me I’m not sober when I’ve been completely sober of everything including tobacco and alcohol my entire life.

    • tubaruco@lemm.ee
      42·
      2 years ago

      eh, birds are already very intelligent. one of the species wil probably end up creating technology at some point (assuming all humans die without ending all life on earth)

      • Sordid@lemmy.world
        62·
        2 years ago

        There is enough time for another intelligent species to evolve after us, the problem is that we’ve already used up all the easily accessible fossil fuels. That means they won’t have the energy sources necessary to have an industrial revolution and will be stuck at a pre-industrial tech level forever (or rather until the oceans boil off).

        • kase@lemmy.world
          2·
          2 years ago

          Is that true? My understanding was that there’s still plenty of coal, oil, etc, we just can’t keep burning it cause of the greenhouse effect

            • kase@lemmy.world
              1·
              2 years ago

              Ah, thanks. I guess our technology probably wouldn’t be around by the time another species replaces us, but it’d be cool if they could just pick up where we left off technologically (of course, they’d have to make good choices to not end up like we did except way faster, and I don’t have that much optimism lmao).

              Then again, I wonder if there’d be new fossil fuel deposits by then. I mean, if the conditions were right and given enough time. I don’t know a whole lot about how this all works, it’s fun to think about though.

              Then again again, maybe if they had no fossil fuels, they could sidestep the whole anthropogenic (pls don’t bully my spelling, I have no idea) climate change problem. I’m sure it would take longer, but maybe they’d eventually figure out how to produce lots of energy without ruining the planet for themselves (or at least ruin it differently than we did). ¯⁠\⁠(⁠°⁠_⁠o⁠)⁠/⁠¯

              • Sordid@lemmy.world
                3·
                2 years ago

                I wonder if there’d be new fossil fuel deposits by then.

                Probably not. Coal is basically trees that didn’t rot, and the reason they didn’t rot is that there were no microorganisms that could digest wood at the time. Between the evolution of wood and the evolution of organisms that could digest it, dead trees would just pile up on top of each other and sink into the ground under the weight of new layers of dead trees above them. Now that there are microorganisms that digest wood and dead trees rot away, new coal is not forming.

                Oil does continue to form in some ocean areas where there is a layer of water without any oxygen on the ocean floor. Since these areas support no life, any organic remains that descend to the bottom (mostly plankton) remain unconsumed and eventually get buried and turn into oil. But it is a slow process. Estimating oil reserves is notoriously difficult, but it seems there’s about as much left in the ground as we’ve burned in the last fifty years. So in other words, four billion years of oil formation gets you about a century or two of industry. Since the Sun is about halfway through its lifespan, that means the Earth can potentially create enough juice for one more industrial civilization like ours. That’s assuming that those oil reserves are allowed to build up and don’t just get used up piecemeal by smaller civilizations arising in the interim. And also assuming that that final civilization is even able to make use of that oil, which is much harder to handle than coal (extraction, refining, transportation, etc.), without using coal as a stepping stone. And also assuming that no anaerobic microorganisms evolve that can survive on the ocean floor without oxygen and consume those organic remains, which could put a stop to oil formation just like wood-eating microorganisms put a stop to coal formation. Yeah, that seems like a lot of ifs to me…

          • ???@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            2·
            2 years ago

            It’s only recently been proven untrue… IIRC… because it apparently turns out crude oil is actually the poop of a particular ancient microbe that is still around and that’s partially (along with Oil Fracking) why we still have fossil fuels and why a far future non-human civilization will have plenty of fossil fuels to work with.

            You’re right, though, we have 5x more fossil fuels than have been burnt since the beginning of the industrial revolution. If we DO use the rest, the climate would be so unrecoverable that 99% of multicellular life will die, but even the most corrupt oil executive would be dead years before the last animal because most - especially the wealthiest - humans need agriculture to eat, and if shit hits the fan the poor outnumber the rich and the crop-killing pests outnumber the poor.

    • BlackLodgeCooper@lemmy.mlEnglish
      31·
      2 years ago

      When the tectonic plates collide again to form another supercontinent, it will create enough heat to kill off most, if not all, mammals. And it will happen before the sun destroys everything, probably in around 250 million years or so.

    • Hydroel@lemmy.world
      46·
      2 years ago

      I don’t understand if this is sarcasm or if some people are actually that dense.

  • electric_nan@lemmy.ml
    122·
    2 years ago

    In the year one million and a half/

    Humankind is enslaved by giraffes/

    They will pay for all their misdeeds/

    When the treetops are stripped of their leaves!

    • samus12345@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Of course, the year one million and a half is a mere 997,977 years from now. And 996,990 years from when they used the time machine.