One million years from now...

Actually the fauna comes back really quick. After only a hundred years when nothing is maintenaned the plants will cover most of our infrastructure.

After probably 500 years most constructions are probably only hills.

You need only look at how our species treats one another, despite claiming to know better, to understand why. Endless styles of cruelty of the many by the few in the name of greed, gluttony, power lust, and schadenfreude. The few voices of sanity and compassion assassinated, mowed down, blacklisted, and threatened into contrition. Literally destroying civilization pumping carbon shit into the air, fully aware of what we're doing, to continue stoking the ego scores of a handful of sociopaths.

If you're proud of our species, good for you. Take the bliss, Cypher

I totally wanna read a short story about this now!

But that's just a few decades away

That's not even the worst one, before the dinosaurs a large volcano in What is now Siberia errupted, throwing Earth's climate into a catastrope, the oceans became stagnant and putrid, belching poisonous gases from anaerobic bacteria across the land and sea, an estimated 90% of all life on Earth was smothered by the event.

It's called the End Permian extinction and it's the closest life on earth has come to being snuffed out entirely. Though for some reason it's forgotten about a lot.

life still thrived eons later

After a 30k year reset period, sure.

What part of that was utopian?

Yeah this could easily mean that humanity left Earth.

Whatever comes after us will be a consequence of us. Sort of like how all our modern bird species are echoes of the giant lizards of the crestatous period.

The world will never be "clean" of humanity's traces. No more than it is clean of trilobites that gave us all this limestone or the carboniferous plants that gave us coal and oil.

The future will be whatever species are most fit to live in the world we have created.

Or a hundred (not thousand) to become transhuman and have every short living species forget we existed.

(my regards to SkyNet, StarlinkNet, The Matrix, or whatever)

So? Death from old age is inevitable too, that doesn't mean I'm going to stop breathing or eating. All of life is just postponing the inevitable, but just because the inevitable is inevitable doesn't mean we should stop postponing.

If human beings were the only intelligent life in the universe, then the difference between being wiped out by the sun versus the heat death of the universe is so mind boggling big, that it beggars belief.

So many - near infinite - civilisations could come and go.

Perhaps one of them would find a way to endure.

You're assuming an eternal universe (as opposed to, e.g., a big crunch), which seems likely given the observed accelerating expansion of the universe.

Earth will become a molten blob in a few billion years... then over a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion times later...

Whatever lives on Earth in a billion years from now, if it spreads out, will have a few billion times more billions of years to live.

250 million years?

Damn, guess I don't need to bother cleaning

How?

There is enough time for another intelligent species to evolve after us, the problem is that we've already used up all the easily accessible fossil fuels. That means they won't have the energy sources necessary to have an industrial revolution and will be stuck at a pre-industrial tech level forever (or rather until the oceans boil off).

OK but then they'll fuck it up worse.

What makes life on another planet more worthwhile than life here? Also humans didn't take that long to evolve so there's plenty of opportunity for a successor to us to reach the stars in a way that causes less suffering. For that matter, we could have simply taken a couple hundred extra years to get there and reduced human suffering by like a thousandfold with a more equitable society. Bloody stupid capitalist nonsense.

What makes them 'savage'?

We're not going to make it until the sun swallows the earth. If there's anything related to us left at that point then it wouldn't be recognisable to us.

Amen, all those movies where "All tech stops working, people learn to do things for themselves! Utopia acheived!" are garbage

As individuals, a lot of people are content to live a simple life of prosperity. They have a basic job, and a small family, and some basic luxuries - and they call it enough. Some people have a one-eyed focus on increasing their wealth throughout their lives; but not everyone is like that. People generally recognise that their lives are finite. Some try to aim for some kind of imaginary high-score in their life, and others just live a 'normal' life.

I'm now making an analogy. As a species, we can recognise that are time is finite; and we can choose to live that out in a stable simple prosperity, where we just look after our world (house) and get what we need for some basic luxuries, and be content. We could have a billion years of that. It's a very long time. Or... we could aim for endless growth. We could consume as much as possible, and always aim for more. As we run out of resources and livable habitat on Earth, we must look to interstellar travel and spread to other planets. I don't necessarily think that is a better choice.

When I was young, I use to think that humans needed to settle on other planets. But I don't think that any more. Partially because I learnt about special relativity, and decided that unless we're very very wrong about science so far, having connected colonies on other planets is not possible. But also because I realised that there is no intrinsic goal to spread human life as much as possible. There are other things of value. We don't need that particular goal. I also use to think that personal immortality would be a good thing. I don't really think that any more.

Until you find out unity with nature allows humans to transcend human form and ascend to a higher plane of existence. While technology fights a losing battle to compete with the universes slow entropy into darkness. Oops.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

Earth's new dominant life form

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

The Ferengi became warp capable before they allowed women to wear clothes. I think you're underselling us.

Because people could make money by not changing course.

(But you knew that...)

Yeah I don't disagree. But people are also pretty adaptable, I think we can survive some pretty apocalyptic stuff. (That doesn't mean we shouldn't do everything we can to stop climate change, I just think it's pretty likely at least two people will survive)

Have you seen the show Upload?

Yeah man immortality in the meta verse sounds rad lmao.

Wow, can't believe I forgot to put that part. Thanks for catching it!

I think you're underestimating our ability to save our own asses through technology.

Even if all the soil for growing food goes to crap, we can just engineer food crops that can grow in that soil. Hell, NASA has a research project exploring how to grow crops in moon (Or maybe it was martian) soil. Humans are one of the most adaptable species, because if natural processes are too slow we can just augment it through our technological prowess.

Short term, yes, no question. But long term (a million years and beyond) we look at different challenges life on earth will face.

It's a fact that it won't simply continue existing indefinitely. And definitely not in the diversity we know now. It's not likely for rabbits or another species to suddenly rise up to the task of inventing space travel. That would need way more time than what it takes for earth to be hit by an asteroid big enough so that life won't bounce back. The same goes for other types of mass extinction. Only humans have at least a slight chance to make life endure beyond earth.

Thanks a loot, I didn't known it !

It is! Source: I'm reading it right now

As long as I see a bunch of human-hating, ignorant bunch of teenagers and bots playing with their heads, I'm on it ;-)