Patience, sinky. The planet may be your rotisserie soon enough.

I saw THIS recently on the History Channel. Absolutely fascinating!

The earth has gone through a lot of changes over the past 4.5 billion years. Life got started a number of times, only to be wiped out by some planet-wide catastrophe or other, some sudden, like a meteor strike or a massive volcanic eruption, some slow, like a drastic climate change—although not all climate changes were slow—some happened with startling rapidity.

Example: when plate tectonics brought what we now call the North and South American continents together (Central America bridging the two), it cut off the warm current from the (now) Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic (basically separated one ocean into two) and the result was an ice age about as severe as one can get:   the entire planet was covered by a deep coating of ice.

The meteor strike 65 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs allowed the chittering little mammals inhabiting the trees to grow beyond being mere lizard snacks and evolve into us.

If we manage to kill ourselves off by precipitating a runaway greenhouse effect and leaving the earth with a Venus-like atmosphere, not to worry. There are organisms right now living around volcanic vents in the oceans' floors, thriving in water temperatures of 700 degrees (water pressure at those depths allow the temperature to go way above what we regard as the boiling point of water). They derive their energy from the heat surrounding the vents, not photosynthesis or necessarily from eating each other. They may evolve, eventually find they can live on land in the Venus-like atmosphere, and continue to evolve to become. . . ?

Life on earth would continue. In the Grand Scheme of things, we would not be missed.

Don Firth

P. S. The History Channel had yet another show that tends to make one think a bit more long range that folks normally do. CLICKY