It’s a recurrent theme in the history of the world you know, thousands, hundreds of thousands, tens of millions of species killed, never to be seen again.
Others have been fairly random. GRBs sterilizing half the planet, asteroid impacts, simple microbiological species fighting for resources whilst unknowingly making their environments unlivable, etc., etc.
In this case, the writing has been on the wall for decades, completely preventable, but here we are barrelling into it head first none-the-less. Dumber indeed.
The problem is that not everyone shares the same values, and so there are people who are willing to let some species go in exchange for a more comfortable lifestyle (with “more comfortable” in some cases meaning “not starving to death”). Values aren’t objective.
Sorry, I was absolutely dehumanizing and generalizing us as a species. Individually, you’re absolutely right, but the people who need to make the tough decisions to save us all won’t make them and will selfishly take us all into the end with them. Differentiating the subjective opinions and values, at the end of the day, doesn’t really matter.
Why does the cow shark description say it’s unique in having six and sometimes seven gill slits compared to all other sharks having five. Then the frilled shark says it has six gill slits.
They’re both part of the Hexanchiformes order, which are seven gill sharks. So the cow shark article is wrong, there are two surviving families with more than five gills.
Thank you, I typically default to assuming I don’t understand or I’m confused when reading up things outside of my wheelhouse. I enjoyed reading up on the sharks you shared! I was trying to decide which one I would want to be if I could decide while laying in bed this morning. Felt silly but fuck it, I’m old, it’s nice to dream.
We are committing a mass extinction on Earth’s life, there will be a geological record one day of where life suddenly fell off.
And what’s really wild to think about is that while tragic to us and our perspective of the beauty of the world… in the larger picture, it will still be utterly insignificant to Earth’s history. The next million years will see massive portions of life die off, climates will change, new species will emerge and grow into new ecosystems, and there will be an entirely new set of fauna and flora, and humans will be a distant memory, a rust-colored line on the strata.
And that coming million years? Also a blink of an eye in Earth’s history. A fraction of a fraction of our planet’s history of life’s abundance and drama. All the life we see around us represents a sliver of a fraction of a fraction of Earth’s biological history. It’s so, SO much bigger than any of us can imagine and it should have the effect of humbling us.
dont forget about our deep space probes, pioneer, and voyager.
Those will still exist without us. A drifting reminder of our pitiful existences, hurtling through the vast emptiness of space, hoping to find something capable of discovering it.
Aside from the thousands of species we killed in the process
It’s a recurrent theme in the history of the world you know, thousands, hundreds of thousands, tens of millions of species killed, never to be seen again.
No species ever lasts that long.
There have been many extinction events, and we won’t be the first “nature based extinction event” the planet has seen either.
Just one of the dumber ones.
Others have been fairly random. GRBs sterilizing half the planet, asteroid impacts, simple microbiological species fighting for resources whilst unknowingly making their environments unlivable, etc., etc.
In this case, the writing has been on the wall for decades, completely preventable, but here we are barrelling into it head first none-the-less. Dumber indeed.
Hardly. We conserve when we want to.
The problem is that not everyone shares the same values, and so there are people who are willing to let some species go in exchange for a more comfortable lifestyle (with “more comfortable” in some cases meaning “not starving to death”). Values aren’t objective.
Sorry, I was absolutely dehumanizing and generalizing us as a species. Individually, you’re absolutely right, but the people who need to make the tough decisions to save us all won’t make them and will selfishly take us all into the end with them. Differentiating the subjective opinions and values, at the end of the day, doesn’t really matter.
Sharks enter the thread.
Awkward silence ensues
Shark species go extinct all the time. New shark species arise.
Except for these species, classified as living fossils:
Why does the cow shark description say it’s unique in having six and sometimes seven gill slits compared to all other sharks having five. Then the frilled shark says it has six gill slits.
They’re both part of the Hexanchiformes order, which are seven gill sharks. So the cow shark article is wrong, there are two surviving families with more than five gills.
Thank you, I typically default to assuming I don’t understand or I’m confused when reading up things outside of my wheelhouse. I enjoyed reading up on the sharks you shared! I was trying to decide which one I would want to be if I could decide while laying in bed this morning. Felt silly but fuck it, I’m old, it’s nice to dream.
I hope you picked Goblin shark. You get to be “ugly” and don’t give a fuck and outlive your enemies lives anyways.
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Terry the Trilobite too.
We are committing a mass extinction on Earth’s life, there will be a geological record one day of where life suddenly fell off.
And what’s really wild to think about is that while tragic to us and our perspective of the beauty of the world… in the larger picture, it will still be utterly insignificant to Earth’s history. The next million years will see massive portions of life die off, climates will change, new species will emerge and grow into new ecosystems, and there will be an entirely new set of fauna and flora, and humans will be a distant memory, a rust-colored line on the strata.
And that coming million years? Also a blink of an eye in Earth’s history. A fraction of a fraction of our planet’s history of life’s abundance and drama. All the life we see around us represents a sliver of a fraction of a fraction of Earth’s biological history. It’s so, SO much bigger than any of us can imagine and it should have the effect of humbling us.
dont forget about our deep space probes, pioneer, and voyager.
Those will still exist without us. A drifting reminder of our pitiful existences, hurtling through the vast emptiness of space, hoping to find something capable of discovering it.
250 millions years ago, there was a mass extinction that killed 95% of life on earth.
Yeah and we should maybe NOT CAUSE ANOTHER ONE wtf
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