True title: ‘A climate of unparalleled malevolence’: are we on our way to the sixth major mass extinction?
adinhitlore · 8h ago
man i was expecting to see some yudkoskowian argument against AI yet what i got was "co2 > fluorine bishes!".
pfdietz · 8h ago
The answer has to be "not yet". The Big Five mass extinctions were incredibly nasty, much worse than even a nuclear war would be.
JKCalhoun · 8h ago
Your implying a nuclear war would be worst than several hundred years of industrialization that we've already seen? The articles doesn't even mention nuclear war.
Or do you mean an imagined nuclear war on top of several hundred years of industrialization?
pfdietz · 8h ago
No? Why would you think I implied that?
The point I was making is that true mass extinctions are so nasty surviving them becomes an exercise in post apocalyptic science fiction. The P-T mass extinction, for example, made the equatorial oceans so hot no vertebrate life could survive. And that extinction lasted 5 million years.
JKCalhoun · 7h ago
I think I get it: the article is saying we're in a minor mass extinction and you're suggesting the threshold for a large mass extinction is exceedingly high — we're not even close.
(And I am guessing you brought nuclear war in as an example of post apocalyptic science fiction that even still would not push us to the large mass extinction threshold.)
"If there is a geologic precedent for what industrial civilisation has been up to in the past few centuries, it is something like the volcanoes of the end-Permian mass extinction."
These kinds of things (mass extinction, health of the planet) are things that I increasingly show an abundance of caution for. Not doing so seems like the horrific alternative. I get that there have been some very high bars to make this #6 mass extinction, but also downplaying what is happening because it is not yet a record seems reckless.
pfdietz · 5h ago
The CO2 level in the P-T mass extinction may have been as high as 3%. I think global civilization would collapse before we reached that level and fossil fuel emission would end. I'm not even sure humanity could survive breathing air with that much CO2.
Or do you mean an imagined nuclear war on top of several hundred years of industrialization?
The point I was making is that true mass extinctions are so nasty surviving them becomes an exercise in post apocalyptic science fiction. The P-T mass extinction, for example, made the equatorial oceans so hot no vertebrate life could survive. And that extinction lasted 5 million years.
(And I am guessing you brought nuclear war in as an example of post apocalyptic science fiction that even still would not push us to the large mass extinction threshold.)
"If there is a geologic precedent for what industrial civilisation has been up to in the past few centuries, it is something like the volcanoes of the end-Permian mass extinction."
These kinds of things (mass extinction, health of the planet) are things that I increasingly show an abundance of caution for. Not doing so seems like the horrific alternative. I get that there have been some very high bars to make this #6 mass extinction, but also downplaying what is happening because it is not yet a record seems reckless.