I've been seeing alot of people talk about us heading to a point where life on this planet will become imposible to sustain due to the polution and other problems.

This imho is plain and totaly wrong.

Humans may be unable to stay here at a point in time because of the damage we caused the planet and we'll go extinct or have to move on to a new location. But life in general, will be far from dead at that point and life in general will repair the damage we did once we are gone.

Life in all its many forms and shapes is damn hard to truelly destroy.

Good examples of the ability of life to survive even the harshest conditions must be the teeming varieties of lifeforms found near deep ocean smokers and organisms found in permafrost icesamples. And thats only the extreem locations we have been able to studie up to now, who knows what kind of organisms thrive deep underground in soil or simply up in the air or deep in the oceans.

Life doesn't end when human kind goes extinct, we are only a small bit of the big puzle and if we go extinct, maybe "life" in general will even be better of then with us present.

If life on a planet like Mars once existed, I think it will still exist, even if the conditions for human like lifeforms aren't present anymore, even if conditions for any kind of organism found on current day earth aren't present there, life will still be able to exist there. Life in general adapts and adjusts to its environment, once life becomes present in a location, it won't go away untill the location stops to exist.

Only way to desimate life in its totality would be by destroying it and its environment entirely. And even then, you would have to dump it into something like the sun or a black hole, because just breaking it up won't be enough to kill microorgenisms.
They can survive as long as just certain chemicals are present for them to feed on and they don't eat all that much.

The dinosaurs supposedly went extinct because of a massive scale meteor impact that killed "nearly all life" on the planet. It did far from kill nearly all life, in fact, it only killed the small percentage of life on the planet that has a big body and lives on land, animals at sea were barely effected.
But since then, a flury of new animals emerged and it even brought us about, humans.

Life is not humans, without humans life still exists.

You are so very correct! The other thing that always drives me nuts, is the "no life could exist there because" atmosphere, no water, blaa, blaa blaa......other life forms may not need what we need....

Good Post, but we humans are like virus, we are destorying pretty much everything on earth.

Yes, some life may still live in places we can't reach, but those organisms would most probably stay there. So if we go extinct, we would take most of life with us, except those living in places where even light can't penetrate. Humans don't equal life, but they equal more than half of life.

Originally posted by surfupHumans don't equal life, but they equal more than half of life.

Where do you get that idea?

If you think 6 billion humans is much, think about the count for insect lifeforms. They are estimated over 1 billion billion and their total mass would be 12 times as much of that of all humans combined.

Ten years ago there were approximately 750,000 named insect species. Today, that number is over 1,000,000. And according to a recent article in Scientific American, entomologists estimate that there are likely over eight million different species of insects on Earth. When you compare that to 4,650 named and 4,809 estimated mammal species or the 72,000 named and 1,500,000 estimated fungi, it is easy to see that insects "out-populate" any other living taxonomic group on Earth.

Humans account for nearly nothing in the full scale of all life on the planet.

[edit on 13-8-2004 by thematrix]

It stems from the fallacy that humans are God's chosen species. We are natural, we are NOT special. If we are intelligent and/or lucky we may just survive. From us more intelligent species may evolve. Life is NOT static, it is dynamic. Life is NOT an abstract game. Life breathes, breathe with it.
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I'm not sure, but I think surfup didn't mean the term "more than half" in the sense of population count.

Not I didn't. I meant it in a different way. I meant that Humans occupy the most space, and consume the most reasources etc.

id have to agree with surfup. damn...sometimes i wish i lived in the middle ages

Originally posted by surfup
I meant that Humans occupy the most space, and consume the most reasources etc.

That's true. Also, along with occupying space and consuming the resources, we are proving harmful to other living organisms. Look at the deforestation, pollution of lakes, oceans, and air due to our technology. Too much hunting is adding to the extinction of so many species of animals! Not only we are using the most resources, we are exploiting them in a bad way.

That's true. Also, along with occupying space and consuming the resources, we are proving harmful to other living organisms. Look at the deforestation, pollution of lakes, oceans, and air due to our technology. Too much hunting is adding to the extinction of so many species of animals! Not only we are using the most resources, we are exploiting them in a bad way.

You have agreed yourself with me that humans are the most space, taking most resources and doing the most damage which is why humans equal pretty much all of life. None other have caused this much damage or destroyed this much life, so it is logical that we consider ourself human kind.

Originally posted by thematrix
I've been seeing alot of people talk about us heading to a point where life on this planet will become imposible to sustain due to the polution and other problems.

This imho is plain and totaly wrong.

Humans may be unable to stay here at a point in time because of the damage we caused the planet and we'll go extinct or have to move on to a new location. But life in general, will be far from dead at that point and life in general will repair the damage we did once we are gone.

Life is not humans, without humans life still exists.

Word! Thank you for making this distinction. I agree with you 100% and will even go as far to say that we may not be the last intelligent life form to inhabit this planet. Millions of years in the future after we have gone the way of the dodo or left the planet for good as a species, some microbe or simple life in the present could develop enough to gain intelligence as we currently define it to be just as we did.

Take care.