Tuesday, September 25, 2007

In the Red

I noticed this in the Indy Letters page: Time is short to avoid a new mass extinction of species

Now I know that I'm easily impressed by titles, so I accord Prof. & Dr. perhaps more than I should, but this makes for interesting reading. I'd never heard of the Red List 'til now.

Read behind the lines of this: if a successor species exists that's able to understand [extinction] at all, as having had a completely new cause: humanity. There'll be an extremely thin layer of rock dividing deeper levels full of diverse fossils from shallower levels with hardly any. The marker layer will contain abundant plastic polymer molecules, radioactive decay products from artificial nuclear fusion, and distinctive concentrations of metals.

I don't know if the author means it this way, but my main take is that are simply too darn many of us. The rest are consequences of that. Nice to see our political leaders have their priorities right, then. Not.

1 comment:

Dave said...

The red list has being growing apace over the last couple of decades; the last few years it seems to have grown exponentially.

I really like this guy's geological/paleontological analogy.

As a species we have been around for a minuscule amount of time (geologically speaking), and in the last few decades of the few 100,000 years that we have been around we've managed to make a dog's breakfast of the entire planet. On top of that we have already been the direct cause of the extinction of many thousands (and probably millions) of other indigenous species.

He is right - mankind's entry into the paleontological record will be a very thin band of strangely polluted rock, and one that marks the mass extinction of millions of species, including, very probably, mankind itself.

The earth may take ten or twenty million years or so to recover, but it probably will do so, eventually. I doubt that humans will be around to see it though.