Comment on The Earth is reflecting less and less sunlight, study reveals
shalafi@lemmy.world 2 weeks agoWe’re not going extinct. FFS, we survived at least one ice age. At another point, scientists studying our DNA think we were down to as a few as a thousand individuals.
Humans are the AR-15s of the animal kingdom. Not the best at any one thing*, excellent at multipurpose roles. Like insects, we survive in any climate outside Antarctica. We can walk endlessly. I’m 54, not in great shape, pretty sure I could spend my entire waking day walking, stopping only to eat.
We’re social animals who stick together when the going gets tough. We love fucking and we can make babies every month of the year, no waiting to go in heat.
No animal comes close to our dexterity and advanced tool use. Stone Age man was more adept at tool use than every other animal combined. We’re stupid reliable, smart and tough as well.
* OK, we can throw and catch like nothing else on Earth.
archonet@lemy.lol 2 weeks ago
global warming at this rate absolutely does have the potential to extinct us, no matter how cool we think we are. Tenacity and versatility will only carry you so far when you fuck up nature so badly that all the things you’d eat for food are themselves extinct or almost extinct. At the point we were down to a few thousand individuals, I should imagine that the climate not being super hyper mega fucked helped immensely in ensuring those people had adequate food – you aren’t going to be running down a deer (or a rabbit, or any other wild game) in the post-climate-apocalypse world if all the deer are dead because the food chain supporting the deer population collapsed. You aren’t going to be farming because extreme weather variations will make it impossible, you might be in for a drought or a monsoon and you’ll certainly not have accurate weather forecasting to go off of by that point. Foraging? I sure hope none of the various food chains and water cycles supporting the growth of forage-able food has collapsed either (they probably will). Fishing? Ocean acidity, microplastics, and global warming are all fighting to be the thing that kills that off, take your pick.