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Friday, December 21, 2007

No civilization will last forever

While watching BBC’s Earth: The Power of the Planet I was pleasantly suprised I wasn’t confronted with the typical nature show patronizing speech on how our actions have caused global warming (or cooling? Lets say climate change) and how very bad we are in using (fossil) energy. Instead of all this, the TV series presenter ended with a very insightful speech which I feel captures the whole ‘we should all save the planet’ debat into what it really is all about:

our planet is really tough
and there is nothing to suggest that it is going to change anytime soon

in the long run, earth can cope with anything we can throw at it
we could clear all the jungles, but a jungle can regrow over a few thousand years
we could burn all earths’ fossil fuels, flooding the atmosphere with carbon dioxide
but even then, it will take the planet only a million years or so for the atmosphere to recover
even the animals we are wiping out will eventually be replaced by others equally rich in diversity
as a relentless work of evolution continues
it’s only a question of time
the earth will be just fine.

it’s not to say rapid changes we force on earth don’t matter
that is because humans operate on a different time scale
we have evolved to life in a world as it is now
so in changing this world, we are altering the environment that has allowed the human race to thrive
we could be creating conditions that threaten that long term survival of our civilization

so all this stuff about saving planet earth, well that is not the problem:
planet earth doesn’t need saving, earth is a great survivor
it’s not the planet we should be worrying about, it’s us.

(transcripted from: Dr Iain Stewart )

Posted by Yvo on 12/21/2007 | Permalink
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