Edit: We survived an ice age and we’re very highly adaptable. Plus, we will hold on to some percentage of technical knowledge that will help us adapt faster.
Edit: We survived an ice age and we’re very highly adaptable. Plus, we will hold on to some percentage of technical knowledge that will help us adapt faster.
No species lasts forever—and the faster their environment changes, the sooner their expiration date.
When faced with a changing environment, a species has 3 choices: Adapt, Migrate, or Die.
Humans have apparently decided to vault past the first two and just yank that third lever.
I mean, why do you say that? I don’t know if any other species that lives in a greater variety of environments. There are humans living on every continent, including Antarctica. There are humans living with support in space and under the sea.
We have migrated, to everywhere. And we can adapt, to almost anything.
And to clarify, I don’t think we’ll all survive, but I highly doubt we’d all die.
Those other species weren’t the authors of the global ecosystem’s demise, even with an understanding of the situation and opportunity to change the course of events
Not really a fair comparison, is what I’m saying.
Depends on what you define as “lasts forever”. We are direct descendants of some kind of a rodent. Yeah, our species has changed “kind of much” since those days, but I wouldn’t worry about that kind of “expiration”. We are some rodents’ grand-grand-grand-…-grandchildren, and I think the rodent would be very much okay with us not looking very squirrellike, if they somehow was to find out they are our ancestor. They’d love us all the same :)
But of course, in our case, it won’t be that evolution changes us into something else. It’s rather, we will just vault 92’ify ourselves.
Some species are contesting that statement very strongly. Take the horseshoecrab, or the tardigrate or even the cockroach. Humans are known for their fast adaptability, so I’d bet my money on us joining that list.
None of those are species—they’re a family, a phylum, and a (partial) order, respectively. While those clades have been relatively stable morphologically, species within each clade still come and go.
I’m sorry for the confusion, I was using the old housewives definition of species.
No other species are quite like humans though
Meh, we wouldn’t be the first species to be so successful that we kill ourselves off.