“this is evidence that some very strange things will happen”
January 18, 2018 9:43 AM   Subscribe

 
Thanks for the round-up. Favorited, with depression.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:47 AM on January 18, 2018 [5 favorites]


I guess this is what a cascading biosphere failure looks like.
posted by Happy Dave at 10:59 AM on January 18, 2018 [5 favorites]


It is pretty fascinating that the saiga have a catastrophe recovery breeding style though. That suggests there is something weird in the evolutionary past that favored it somehow yet there isn't recent evolutionary evidence for catastrophes of this scale.
posted by srboisvert at 12:16 PM on January 18, 2018


It's just in the last year that it's really come home to me in an emotional way that being alive on Earth for this phase of its history is going to mean experiencing the extinction of many, many species. I hadn't realized how personally grieved I would be by this until now. It feels almost exactly like the times I've sat at the deathbed of a loved one.
posted by spindrifter at 12:16 PM on January 18, 2018 [13 favorites]


if it makes you feel any better wikipedia says about 99% of all species that have ever existed are extinct. A species tends to only exist 1-10 million years. Humans are about 300K-ish years in, we'll see if we even make it to a million.
posted by GuyZero at 12:29 PM on January 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


It's just in the last year that it's really come home to me in an emotional way that being alive on Earth for this phase of its history is going to mean experiencing the extinction of many, many species. I hadn't realized how personally grieved I would be by this until now.

At the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, just inside the entrance to the main hall, there's a display case of specimens of Hawaiian birds. Going from my initial reaction of "look at all these incredible birds! I've got to go find these in the wild!" to realizing they were mostly extinct in the span of 30 seconds... left an impact.
posted by junco at 2:07 PM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


we'll see if we even make it to a million

Will our uploaded descendants living their simulated lives in nuclear powered server farms on Mars count?
posted by flabdablet at 4:52 PM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Will our uploaded descendants living their simulated lives in nuclear powered server farms on Mars count?

Yes, until one of them segfaults the whole thing.
posted by GuyZero at 5:25 PM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Some more examples from closer to [my] home:

There was a leopard shark die-off in San Francisco Bay last May. Biologists think it was caused by a fungal infection triggered by an unusually wet winter. Major shark die-off in San Francisco Bay.

The Northern California kelp forests are dying. Because the kelp is gone, the abalone are starving to death. The 2018 abalone season has been canceled.

The commercial dungeness crab season keeps getting pushed back later in the year in California and Oregon because of domoic acid from toxic algal blooms. It doesn't hurt the crabs, but it makes them toxic to humans. It's also killing a lot of sea lions.
posted by ryanrs at 8:06 AM on January 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


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