That said, the Earth’s biome is more than capable of self-repair. Even we lack the capacity to sterilize every crevice of the Earth, life overall is too hearty for that, there’s innumerable species thriving where our technology barely lets us see that relies on geothermal vents more than solar radiation to keep entropic decay at bay.
Earth will rebuild when the dust settles, as it has done many times, even from one other time that we know of aside from ourselves when a costly, destructive mistake of evolution caused a mass extinction, the Devonian period, where trees captured too much carbon because the efficient means of their decomposition hadn’t evolved yet, causing the opposite of what we’re doing leading to an ice age.
We have already summarily executed swaths of entire ecosystems of species to build strip malls, parking lots, and oil refineries. And we’ve effectively ended many species we lock in cages for our amusement, wholly dependant on us breeding them having destroyed their natural habitats. Those species are ghosts, dead already, living trophies.
Long term, the species we take with us in our seeming dedication to self-annihilation will be a small price for the Earth to either be rid of us or more likelihood diminish us back to warring tribes having to subsist in a far less hospitable era of the world than the one we crawled out of and played pretend that we owned and could bend to our will. Most species that have ever lived came and went long before we arrived. Long periods of abundant life thriving in interconnected, interdependent ecosystems is whats important. Maybe it will one day birth something as remarkable, noble, sapient, and intelligent and we told ourselves we were one day, who knows? As long as theres life, there’s hope.
Am I supposed to feel bad for the bully in this story?