Earth might be experiencing 7th mass extinction, not 6th

https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2022/11/22/earth-might-be-experiencing-7th-mass-extinction-not-6th

by clouddrover • 4 years ago

134 83 4 years ago

news.ucr.edu

So the sixth wasn't too bad?

ASalazarMX• 4 years ago

occurred 550 million years ago, during the Ediacaran period. [..]
Although unclear whether this represents a true “mass extinction,” the percentage of organisms lost is similar to these other events, including the current, ongoing one.
The researchers believe environmental changes are to blame for the loss of approximately 80% of all Ediacaran creatures, which were the first complex, multicellular life forms on the planet.

Pretty bad, but a very old extinction, and order of magnitude older than the dinosaurs' extinction.

ImJasonH• 4 years ago

Good news everyone!

oxfordmale• 4 years ago

Climate change deniers were right after all, earth will be perfectly fine, it may just have to do with one less ape species /sarcasm

CameronNemo• 4 years ago

You kid, but two ape species are indeed on the brink of extinction. They get all of the costs of our civilization, such as rampant pollution and out of control infectious disease, with none of the privileges.

Five great apes exist on earth today, two of them are on the brink of extinction, two are decreasing rapidly in population, and one is the most abundant primate species on earth.

Orangutans and gorillas are critically endangered. Chimpanzees and bonobos are endangered. Humans are expanding.

https://www.orangutan.com/why-are-orangutans-endangered/

zython• 4 years ago

Buy 6, get one free.

zapataband1• 4 years ago

any ideas on how to stop?

epgui• 4 years ago

We need to better price in the cost of destroying ecosystems-- think like we're doing with the carbon pricing, but much broader in scope. Basically what the "E" in "ESG" should stand for, if the system made sense. And we need international, cross-party alignment on this.

I'm not extremely optimistic on our ability to do what it takes.

throwaway4aday3• 4 years ago

You could kill all life on Earth, then there'd be no mass extinctions after that. You could put all animals in zoos and maintain their populations at a constant level but that's not a 100% guarantee. Best way would be to continue advancing human society so that we reach a state of such abundance that no one on Earth needs to put undue pressure on wild populations of animals while at the same time achieving a mastery of the natural world that would allow us to avert any major disasters that might befall the Earth such as asteroid impacts, coronal mass ejections, super volcanoes, gamma ray bursts, rogue black holes, and the death of the sun. Look sharp, we've got a lot of work ahead of us!

qwytw• 4 years ago

You're assuming that almost all of those wild animal species won't be extinct by that point?

aew4ytasghe5• 4 years ago

The road to hell was paved with good intentions.

butMebbe• 4 years ago

How do we know material abundance (I’m assuming that’s what you mean) “is the way”? Perhaps that’s not what you mean but it’s not an unreasonable way of describing contemporary zeitgeist.

A material minimum to sustain biology and abundance of time for altered states of such resolution and variety produced through nascent regenerative medicinal therapies like bio electrics is way more interesting; hack realities fields directly versus build synthetic machines to upgrade forever? Sign me up.

IMO more building of synthetic stuff to appear different and novel is the wrong path. It’s classical physics.

It may reduce industrial consumption as the outputs are the uniform means of producing a variety of experiences not a literal variety of things necessitating bespoke assembly lines.

But humans are so literal. Carry on with rockets because Star Trek. Few think “take pill, believe I’m Captain Kirk with Orion cadet for an hour.” Drugs are bad, mmmk.

simlevesque• 4 years ago

Incredibly massive decrease in GDP. It'll happen regardless.

wahnfrieden2• 4 years ago

end capitalism and establish especifist anarchism

wahnfrieden2• 4 years ago

there's no technology solution that comes fast enough in an economic growth at any cost technocracy. graeber/wengrow already did the legwork on finding alternatives to be possible without needing to undo discovery of agriculture or unwind to smaller societies.

jsemrau2• 4 years ago

One thing that lately really fascinates me is the Younger Dryas impact theory. The discovery journey was Joe Rogan (Podcast) -> Netflix Docu -> Joe Rogan (Youtube) -> Other Youtuber. Which in itself is a content consumption cycle that I had before.

What I find fascinating about this is that there are new discoveries of underground structures that really changed the game.

It solves the mystery why ancient megasites are looking at summer and winter solstice, because that's where the danger would come from.

It ties in with flooding myths that are found in many cultures.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas

gnz11• 4 years ago

Netflix Docu

I’m assuming you are referring to Graham Hancock? In which case, I wouldn’t put too much stock into it. He’s been hawking conspiracy theories for a long time. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/nov/23/ancient...

HPsquared• 4 years ago

Not a great critique, limited to matters of personal taste rather than the actual content, while calling it "dangerous". Isn't there a better critique which covers the actual claims made in the series?

snidane• 4 years ago

They said the same about Galileo.

99% of the time you'll be correct labeling people as conspiracy theorists with the blanket rule - any time they are not mainstream approved. You'll end up being horribly wrong on that 1% that actually matters.

imiric4• 4 years ago

I'm in the middle of watching Ancient Apocalypse, and, as a lifelong skeptic, I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

Hancock isn't a scientist, and has never claimed to be. He presents himself as an investigative journalist. What he explores in his work are a series of "what if" questions that science either can't disprove, or hasn't been actively researching, for whatever reason.

The show is beautifully shot and produced, and provokes some interesting thought experiments. Besides "free thinkers" making an appearance, there are also "mainstream" scientists from renowned institutions around the world, who seem to side with Hancock in many ways.

If the show does nothing but raise more public awareness about these topics, it might lead to funding actual scientific research in some of these sites, which would be a good thing.

So far from being a "dangerous show", it's actually an interesting and well-shot documentary. People who see it as proof of anything factual are likely already conspiracy theorists, and are a lost cause for logical thinking anyway.

jsemrau2• 4 years ago

Yes this one. I think it resonates because he is challenging a status quo and at the same time provides an explanation that works (at least for me). Is it fully proven? Surely not. This is science. New ideas and theories come up all the time.

theteapot• 4 years ago

Younger Dryas hypothesis is not Graham Hancock's. Not even close. He is just a proponent journalist. You can't wave aside an entire scientific evidence base just because an eccentric journalist or two endorsed a theory. Lazy, random links to Guardian opinion pieces aren't helping convince anyone either.

peoplefromibiza3• 4 years ago

The problem is not Hancock, he is who he is and honestly he produces entertainment not different from the alien series on HC or the endless stream of pseudohistory or pseudo science, that can be fun taken with a grain of salt. The real problem with Hancock are the kinda white supremacists books.

The problem is that we have a real problem: we teach kids things we don't know for sure.

I swear I am not 300 hundreds years old and they thaught me in school - science unequivocally says that - the Neanderthal men were the ancestors of the Sapiens, we have proof, we simply miss the link between Lucy and the Homo erectus and we're done, we explained everything!

Turns out there were 12, no wait 14, no wait 15, no wait 21 different species of hominids and many of them were contemporary to the sapiens and 90% of the humans bear Neanderthal DNA.

Just like there were no baby dinosaurs because we thought the smaller ones were different species.

Archeologist and historians need to go out and say loud: we don't know anything about human history, but we have many good theories! please help!

According to mainstream, Göbekli Tepe should not exist.

I was thaught in school that there were no settlements at the time, absolutely impossible, scientific truth (tm)

m_dupont• 4 years ago

I really wish they hadn't framed it this way. They could have just said "Possible new historical mass extinction event discovered".

See, because of the way they have framed it we now have people in the comments arguing about global warming.

While I certainly believe that we are doing a lot of damage to the planet right now, we dont need to incorporate every news article into the permacrisis narrative

NetOpWibby• 4 years ago

But how else will the site get clicks?

rob74• 4 years ago

It also sounds pretty strange to me to take the number of 5 previous mass extinctions as unshakable fact. I'm not a paleontologist, but in the several billions of years before living organisms evolved shells/skeletons that could be fossilized, there could have been any number of mass extinction events that we no longer have evidence of?

zaarn• 4 years ago

There is evidence of a lot of mass extinctions. The Big Five is just the biggest 5 we know off (all of them feature atleast 75% of all species becoming extinct on a relatively short timeframe, with the quickest being the KT which lasted at most a thousand years, the biggest of them, the PT event, making 95% of all species extinct). For smaller extinction events, Wikipedia lists about 30 of them. But those aren't nearly as interesting because they didn't have that much impact.

javajosh• 4 years ago

I agree with this. In fact - it's reasonable to take the same attitude toward these numbers as "age of the universe, in billions of years" type numbers: the error bars are pretty big! But the OOM is basically correct, and that's Good Enough (tm) for most people's purposes, including academics in far away fields like climatology.

actually_a_dog2• 4 years ago

I love how you use the phrase "permacrisis narrative" as if climate change and its consequences are made up constructs. They are not. They are established science at this point. You are doing noone any service by claiming otherwise, even obliquely.

edanm• 4 years ago

I might be wrong, but I think you're reading things into that phrase that aren't there. Calling something a narrative doesn't imply something is made up.

osigurdson• 4 years ago

Climate change is established science. Predictions that Earth will become Venus 2.0 is a non-productive nihilist fantasy.

buran77• 4 years ago

I read that as the well known fact that if you are constantly under pressure you will eventually just normalize it and soon it becomes "the way things are". And when things are "the way things are" there is no real push for change.

If thieves trigger your car alarm once every year you'll jump to chase them away. If they trigger it once every minute you'll sell the car. You can't sell this car. We need some focus on which crisis is the priority but I'm less and less qualified to judge what deserves an air raid siren, and what deserves an alarm clock.

All the issues mentioned by other comments below always existed in one form or another, almost exclusively worse than today (Extremist leaders? Countries on the brink of collapse? Society upheaval? Threat of invasion?). It wasn't much different some decades ago. The baseline was set differently but the same concerns were expressed since forever. We just had something like a Cold War, fear of nuclear attack, fear of invasion, etc. that topped the charts so hard (for a while) that everything else subsided. And then slowly things were normalized and we could start seeing the "day to day" crisis.

_heimdall• 4 years ago

You're assuming her that "permacrisis narrative" was written as a slight targeted specifically at climate change research. It may be more easily read as a reference to the endless cycle of news outlets serving up stories about the next big event we should all be deathly afraid of. Remember the murder hornets?

If you'd like to split hairs here, "established science" is also doing noone any service. Climate change is an established field of study that more generally researches human impact on the planet. There is strong consensus that we have made an impact on climate and that there could be major negative impacts on existing civilizations if we don't act. It's worth remembering, though, that climate research is almost entirely based in modeling data. Models are useful for finding signals, especially in a complex system, but blindly claiming "established science" without any further context makes it sounds as though it is fact.

mschuster913• 4 years ago

While I certainly believe that we are doing a lot of damage to the planet right now, we dont need to incorporate every news article into the permacrisis narrative

The fact is we are in a permacrisis situation:

- climate change is accelerating, scenarios expected in decades are reality now (e.g. ice shelf melting, the drought that has hit Europe last summer)

- the invasion of Russia in Ukraine and all of the associated fallout (risk of a nuclear catastrophe at Zaporizhzhia NPP, delivery chains based e.g. on steel of Mariupol or of Ukrainian grain straining and breaking)

- wealth and income inequality tearing apart both Western societies in itself as well as the "Global South" from Western societies

- record inflation without corresponding wage rises accelerating the above, helped by many decades of effective wage stagnation

- multiple Western societies taking a sharp turn towards the right wing, authoritarianism and (e.g. in Italy) towards outright fascism

- large parts of Africa collapsing or nearing collapse from a variety of factors (climate change rendering territories uninhabitable, dictators/kings/warlords/corrupt elites looting their countries, China behaving just as bad as the late European colonialists), threatening mass migration events

- China's internal economy collapsing due to Covid (shoddy vaccine leaving no other containment option than brutal lockdowns), financial mismanagement (e.g. Evergrande) and governmental incompetence

- China increasingly threatening Taiwan with an invasion, an event that would instantly both trigger a China-USA war and, assuming that TSMC is rigged with explosives for a "leave nothing but scorched earth" scenario, many years of a complete shortage of chips, leading to an unprecedented world-wide economic crash

- regional powerhouses in the Middle East (Turkey, Iran) are getting into problems or collapsing, threatening further instability in an already explosive region

Out of all the crises I mentioned, the only one where improvement is in sight is the Russian invasion, given just how hard Ukraine kicks Russia's behind currently - but even with all the progress Ukraine is making, it may very well take a year or more until all of Ukraine is free of Russian invaders again.

Journalists are well advised to point out that humanity is in a state of long-term multiple crises, and that action needs to be taken instead of letting more Conservatives or the far-right into power.

DocTomoe3• 4 years ago

It may appear that right now, a lot of things are going the wrong way simultaneously and that that somehow is an unique point in history. But it's not. Several large-scale events with potentially horrific outcomes have happened simultaneously for centuries. There were plague epidemics during the Thirty-Years War. Conflicts in faraway lands did influence trade at home. Political turmoil happened during economic collapse. Animals went extinct in the medieval age, at some point we (Europeans) managed to essentially raze most of our forests, continent-wide, for construction and shipbuilding (just ask Iceland...). This is the human normal. Hell, for decades, we stared death in it's nuclear eye constantly.

What is different today: You can now watch all of these events unfold in real-time, and have journalists who no longer are out to tell stories, but to foster your fear so that you create more ad clicks.

But fear and dread are bad advisors. Let's not buy into them, and see the problems as what they are: challenges to solve. Because, just like any of the crisis' of the past, if we don't solve them, they will blow up in our faces.

julianeon• 4 years ago

Maybe the 8th. This article doesn't even mention one which is suspected to have happened, the extinction of megafauna when humans came on the scene. If we're talking about extinctions Earth might have experienced, that deserves to be mentioned.

actually_a_dog2• 4 years ago

Sure. However, I don't see how the exact number of previous mass extinctions is particularly relevant to the idea that we're probably experiencing one right now, and we (humans) are the primary cause.

nisegami• 4 years ago

Considering the time scales at which the other mass extinctions happened, I don't think it's reasonable to count that as separate from what's happening now. It might instead be better to rethink the whole thing as one somewhat prolonged extinction event due to the appearance and subsequent activities of humans.

DFHippie• 4 years ago

They are working from a particular definition of mass extinction which rules this event out. The megafauna that went extinct were a small percentage of the species in existence at the time.

adgjlsfhk1• 4 years ago

there weren't enough megafauna for their extinction to be comparable to the others.

Borrible• 4 years ago

It won't be the last.

Who or what will pick the baton?

Tepix• 4 years ago

Slime

mif• 4 years ago

Because people here talk a lot about extinction, I just wanted to point out that 99% of all species ever to have lived died out. What remained are the one we currently are in company with.

Also, after each mass extinction, there was a massive radiation of new species, for example the Cambrian explosion. No new species without extinction. Evolution, baby!!!

wruza• 4 years ago

Cambrian explosion is probably not a good example because one of the reasons (correlations) was oxygen levels and other planetary chemistry shifts. I mean yes, rocking the boat should probably restructure life in a more sophisticated way (like shaking a cup of screws makes it fill more gaps and settle better), but if the previous bacteria went extinct without these changes, that explosion could be unremarkable.

nathias• 4 years ago

I just want to add that 100% of all species will eventually die out. Cosmic death, baby.

Bricklace2• 4 years ago

This is interesting

Bricklace2• 4 years ago

This may still not be the last. We have a lot ahead

tamaharbor• 4 years ago

Hopefully, we will be able to adapt to the climate changes here on earth, much like we would if we were to colonize an alternative planet.

Earth might be experiencing 7th mass extinction, not 6th

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