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A comment on Long Before Trees Overtook the Land, Earth Was Covered by Giant Mushrooms (2013). Parent comment

Re:Long Before Trees Overtook the Land, Earth Was Covered by... by bena on Wednesday April 26, 2023 @11:00AM (#35714727)
It's something George Carlin has touched on as well. Paraphrasing a bit: We're not really trying to save the planet. The planet has been here for billions of years, it'll be here for billions of years after we're all dead and gone. The planet will be fine. The people? The people are fucked. That's what we're trying to save. We're trying to keep the planet hospitable to us.
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Re:Long Before Trees Overtook the Land, Earth Was Covered by... by louison11 on Wednesday April 26, 2023 @11:15AM (#35715003)
And the animals. There is more than planet and humans. If it was just us - to some extent - I’d say “we get what we deserve.” But animals vastly outnumber humans, feel pain just like us, and do not deserve any of it. At least that’s what I find myself experiencing when I think about the future of our planet.

Edit: I looked it up. Estimate is 20,000,121,091,000,000,000 or 20 billion billion animals. “Vastly” was clearly an understatement.

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Re:Long Before Trees Overtook the Land, Earth Was Covered by... by mr_toad on Wednesday April 26, 2023 @09:43PM (#35722242)
And most of those animals are livestock, and most would die along with us.
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Re:Long Before Trees Overtook the Land, Earth Was Covered by... by midoridensha on Sunday April 30, 2023 @10:52PM (#35768604)
Huh? No, most animals are not livestock; that's pretty ridiculous.

The vast, vast majority of animals are insects.

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Re:Long Before Trees Overtook the Land, Earth Was Covered by... by saiya-jin on Wednesday April 26, 2023 @03:39PM (#35718883)
Well billions may be stretching it, by some estimates in 1 billion years Earth will be be hotter by cca 25 degress. All kinds of runaway greenhouse effects will happen way before that, ocean will become probably unhospitable warm chemical gunk and some of it may evaporate out of Earth's atmosphere and then taken by solar winds out of gravity well.

Some primitive form of life will probably thrive for another billion years till Earth is slowly sterilized by Sun, but not complex life like us.

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