habitable planets

[Minimalist]

The way we are going this one won't be habitable too much longer.

[Succubus]

I think we missed a step. How do we get there?

Space is big, really big. You think it's a long way down the road to the...

You know the rest.

[Anomalocaris]

The way we are going this one won't be habitable too much longer.

I think we should not exaggerate.   What we are doing is changing the habitability parameters of the earth in a way that will cause great material wastage and damage to our own civilization, and cause a major change to the biosphere that had existed in the last 30-40 million years.   But even our worst excesses do not come anywhere close to actually making earth non-habitable ito humans or a biosphere that is still overall roughly like the one that had existed since the Cambrian explosion

Even the unpleasantness of the aftermath of an all out nuclear war with peak Cold War Arsenals won’t make the earth actually uninhabitable.

The environmental wastrels plays down how much even moderate disturbance to the environment can devastate the human society.   Many environmental activists exaggerate the scale of disturbance we can manage.   Both argue for effect rather than to inform.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

We CAN screw it up so badly that a civilization isn't possible. That would leave grunting cave people.

[Minimalist]

IOW, Trumptards everywhere you look!

[Anomalocaris]

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.

[Minimalist]

Creatards aside and they are easily dismissed as lunatics, the planet survived for a long time with either no life or simple one-celled life.  It will survive for a couple of billion more until the sun expands and swallows it up.

But we won't.

[The Grand Nudger]

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.

Alot of the surface resources we depended on to come up the first time are no longer present. Even the grunting cave people needed those.

-I like to think that we can run this hooker for a cool 200mil. Even in the event of complete devastation...we haven't really left much animal competition to deal with.....so I suspect that we have evolutionary time remaining to us, like any other creature that found itself in our position.

[CapnAwesome]

Considering that people died from being exposed to new continents, I'm skeptical that there is a habitable planet. We evolved for this one.

[Anomalocaris]

Considering that people died from being exposed to new continents,  I'm skeptical that there is a habitable planet. We evolved for this one.

Yes, but those new continents are still habitable.

There is a great range between “some people with great effort can live on it” one the one hand, and “not even the unprepared is likely to die on it” on the other.

You think of the estimated >400 billion planets in the Milky Way, not one will have conditions falling in that gap?