The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. It took about a half billion years...

[TreasonousBastard]

to form the first life-- reproducible molecules. Something akin to viruses today.

It took another 3 billion years to get to mollusks.

Then things moved long and it only took another 500 million years to get to us.

So here we are. An extraordinary number of plants and creatures have evolved in this time and we are the ultimate creation/evolution.

And what it took the forces of nature 4 billion years to create, we are able to destroy in just a decade or two.

[lapfog_1]

1. yes, and no...

we won't destroy the earth (unless we were to incinerate it with nukes)... what we are doing is changing it from what humanity (along with countless other species) have been used to for the last, what few tens of thousands of years into something that won't sustain us.

The population crash, when it happens, is likely to be devastating to humans and the many species that have evolved in the inter-glacial time period.

The earth will be like a petri dish with too many microbes... expanding to the limits on the environment and then crashing to almost, but not quite, nothing.

At that point evolution will start over again.

A new and different set of creatures will come to inhabit the earth we ruined.

Who knows... the next "masters of the earth" may well do better than us mammals.

[BigmanPigman]

6. That is the best prediction I have read,

simple enough for me to understand too!

[mr_lebowski]

2. Realities which play a BIG part of why I'm totally convinced the world has never been 'visited'

Nor do I believe we will ever find any signal from currently-living intelligent life in the universe.

We MAY find some kind of evidence that there WAS a civilization somewhere at some point, but it'll be long dead.

Any higher species that developed anywhere else in the universe would've been shaped by the same set of physical/chemical laws that we were, by the process of evolution/natural selection ... and is therefore unlikely to behave all that much differently than humans have. They'd likely have similar life-spans, both as animals and as functional advanced societies.

Which is to say, they will have wrecked their world long before they developed what would essentially be a magical way to cover the vast universe-scale distances needed to visit far-flung solar systems. And that's IF that's even a physical possibility, which it may very well not be.

And it's not just the DISTANCE, it's the scale of TIME involved, which many people seem to not think of. If a civilization happened to develop 10M light years away from the earth, and sent out signals we could discern for say, 100 years ... our time, our own brief window of searching for such things here on earth ... assuming we just happen to look in the right direction for that signal ... would also have to JUST HAPPEN to be exactly between 10,000,000 years and 10,000,100 years later ... for us on earth to see it ...

What are the odds of that?

[rampartc]

3. my guess is that the alien species likes a warmer planet

with somewhat mote carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and have convinced the davos class that it is in their economic self interest to provide them with such a planet.

[mr_lebowski]

10. Interesting theory! Could be, could be! nt

[roamer65]

4. We are just about halfway to a late Cretaceous period planet.

That was when there were no ice caps, seas were 300 ft higher and average temp was about 4C higher than now.

That was about 66 mya.

It will definitely be a reptilian heaven.

[BigmanPigman]

5. 300 for 4 degrees! What will the sea level be when it is 2 degrees higher?

That is where they expect it to be by 2100, right?

[Wounded Bear]

8. About 40-50 feet, depending on whose estimate you follow...

That's about 15-20 feet for Greenland and another 20-30 feet for Antarctica. The arctic doesn't really count since it's floating ice already and floating ice doesn't raise the waterline when it melts.

Throw in another 5-10 feet for basic expansion of the water as the ocean continues to warm up and people better head for the high ground. Virtually all of the major metropolises are sitting at sea level. Get ready for the migrant crisis to get really bad.

[cbdo2007]

7. Hmmm....kind of. But not really.

You make it sound like it has all be rainbows and unicorns for the first 4.5 billion years and then we came along and messed it up.

In reality though, there have been floods, fires, volcanoes, meteor strikes, earthquakes, etc that have done more to try to destroy the Earth than us meager little humans could ever dream of, yet the Earth goes on creating new all around us each day.

Yes, we should do our part to help to not poison the earth as much as we can and be nice to animals and nature around us, but in the end humanity and the .01% of the Earth's timeline that we are a part of, will be insignificant. If it is a matter of us against the Earth...Earth will win bigly every time.

[unblock]

9. As George Carlin said, the earth is fine; it's the people that are f*cked.

Mass extinctions happen and many species are wiped out.

As far as the earth's biodiversity is concerned, were just one of many, many species.

The earth supported a wide variety of life before us and will continue to support it long after we're gone.

Even if it's just cockroaches and bacteria and such for a while.

[Caliman73]

11. As others have said, We cannot destroy the world.

We can destroy ourselves and many of the other plants and animals on the planet but as others have said, the earth has been hit by meteors, rocked by super volcanoes, it was covered in a two mile blanket of ice for hundreds of thousands of years. Volcanic activity for thousands of years continuously. The continents have moved apart, crashed together been under the ocean etc..

We are killing ourselves. Even if we were to launch a nuclear war and die off, the earth would likely eventually recover, even if it takes another few million years.

We need to stop talking about destroying the earth. We are destroying ourselves.

[Mendocino]

12. But even then

Keith Richards will still be alive.

[BigmanPigman]

13. We deserve it though...karma.

The poor animals and plants are innocent. Greed kills!