(April 27, 2018 at 11:23 am)Anomalocaris Wrote:(April 27, 2018 at 11:20 am)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: We CAN screw it up so badly that a civilization isn't possible. That would leave grunting cave people.
We can cause existing civilization to collapse. But I don’t see how we can make a later recovery impossible without also effectively making ourselves extinct.
Mind you recovery doesn’t necessarily mean restoration of a industrial technological culture like our own. We may squander so much accessible mineralogical resource that it would make the rise of another industrial technological society challenging for many tens of millions of years, until geology had time to rearrange what is accessible. Recovery could mean a pre-industrial culture like that existed before the 19th century.
We can screw up the planet so badly that maybe 100,000 humans survive, too few to maintain the infrastructure we have now. Worst case scenario but still one possible scenario. Good luck to all ye who have to live through that.
