I don’t think life fears anything. Bacteria and fungi and grasses and small creatures have staying power well past nuclear wars and rapid climate change and super volcanos. People…may well be a failed experiment of life. By any metric: biomass, number, niche utilization …bacteria are the most successful life forms.
Discussion
You are of course correct! But we are 0.73 on Carl Sagan's interpolated Kardashev scale. 🤔
We have climbed 3 basis points since 1970. I think the idea of species probably gets blurry before we reach Kardashev I.
Will we have genetically specialised humans in my lifetime? It’s possible. Humanity started as 3 or 4 different species. It was Homo Erectus who invented cooking with fire. Not us.
We’re very conditioned to be precious about “human life”, but I will probably live to see that get blurry again as ethics and morals are projected onto “things”.
We’re also conditioned to think of things in terms of 1 life time. But 10,000 year timeframe probably gives you better context for almost any major forecasting of future.
If humans are smart maybe we find a way to seed our own resurrection should anything super bad happen?
A bit like the paperclip problem, but where we are the paperclip. Maybe that already happened with the solar system that was here before ours?
I don’t know a thing about that scale, but I’m delighted to have something new to read about today at work!
The closest I get to Carl Sagan is to read Lynn Margulis (his ex-wife) and her works on symbiogenesis