This is why it’s silly hearing billionaires, who do the most damage to our planet, telling us how urgently we need to “get off this rock” which has supported life for millions of years in favor of some dead planet. It’s really just an extension of capitalism that demands infinite space to exploit, instead of being content with sustainability.
The good news is that it will never get to that point. Venus is a different planet with a different makeup and history.
The bad news, it doesn’t have to get nearly that bad to be bad for us and the rest of existing life. Not even close. Just a few degrees more, and we’re doing really well in getting there.
I’ve heard of the runaway greenhouse gas effect. Is there a limit to that?
The limit is our distance from the Sun. After a certain point the greenhouse gasses can’t make up for the fact that we just get less radiation than Venus does. The maximum potential I’ve seen is 10°C - almost all life would go extinct and we’d have to live on the tropical Antarctic archipelago, but not Venus.
Earth has been around for 4.5 million years. Humans have only been around for 300,000 years approximately. With only a few hundred years of the industrial age.
Would a few hundred years really cause an extinction event?
That’s interesting to think about… Perhaps it’ll take a few hundreds/thousand years to fix. If it can be fixed… Or we get hit by an asteroid first…
Between cutting down all of the trees and other pollutants, like these so called environmentalists flying around in their own private jets, it’ll be fun for a while.
Either the humans will die off due to global warming/runaway greenhouse effect before interstellar travel is achieved, or the humans will die off due to the suns transformation into a red giant before interstellar travel is achieved.
IDK. Either way, we won’t be here for long. But the earth will be long after us.
Will technology save the human race beyond the two inevitable events? Probably not.
