>> If a hypothetical outside observer were looking at our planet, >> trying to pick a species whose elimination would most benefit the >> planet and (the rest of) its inhabitants, I'd have trouble seeing >> how to justify any choice other than Homo sapiens sapiens. At least >> I certainly hope such an outside observer is hypotheical; I_am_ >> human myself. :-/ > Won't THEY be surprised when our nuclear plants explode, and our > chemical storage units start venting waste.
Depends on how our putative elimination is handled. I can imagine everything from just blink, one moment everything's going as normal, the next every human is dead, all the way to something like humanity's fertility rate falling to the point where despite our best efforts each person produces, on average, < 2 children per lifetime, and lets our population decay down to zero. Even the former I don't think would be that disastrous. Even if our chemical plants break down and vent stuff, even if our nuclear plants _did_ go critical (which I consider unlikely; they are designed to fail in the other direction), I think the planet could deal with the one-time hit. Might be disruptive, but probably not as much so as the late Cretaceous extinction event. It's the _continued_ dumping of assorted crap into the world around us that's so problematic. > Eliminating humans = destroying the planet. I don't think so. We couldn't destroy the planet if we tried. We might be able to sterilize the ecosystem on the surface, but even that would be hard. (We could, fairly easily, kill off major fractions of the large creatures on the surface; this is a long way from sterilizing it and a long _long_ way from destroying it. See http://qntm.org/?destroy for more.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [email protected] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B _______________________________________________ Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts. https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.
