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There isn't any evidence that any previous "rulers" of the Earth also took entire ecosystems down wity tyem when they died out.
Humans are special. We're likely the first to be the cause of our own extinction, probably the first to destroy most of the other higher life forms in the bargain, and almost certaimly the first to make certain no life form following us has a chance to rise above the stone age, due to our exhaustion of easily accessible minerals and energy-dense resources.
We'll be the first to murder ourselves, everyone else, and stifle any advanced society in the future! That's pretty darned special, if you asked me.
Actually not true.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
There is no reason to think we prevented any life ahead of us from anything. Radiation from us will even one day fade.
But easily accessible surface metals, coal deposits, and oil fields aren't going to miraculously re-appear. The great oxidation event was 2 billion years ago. In 1 billion yearsfrom now, the sun will be so hot that life on Earth will be unsustainable.
We are Earth's last chance, mainly because we've used up all the easily accessible resources a civilization needs to advance past the stone age. The Earth isn't going to cycle enough metal to the surface, and life isn't going to create enough coal or petrolium deposits, before the sun cooks it.
Nah I'm still extremely skeptical. Humans have only been this way for like .01% of that time. There's no reason to think we've doomed anything.
GOE happened a long time ago but that doesn't matter. The point is the world has been changed often and life recovers and usually advanced further than it did before.
I think you missed the point that life doesn't have the luxury of time that we've had, because the sun is going to cook the planet in half the time as between us and the GOE. Our successors will have to advance farther, faster, and with fewer resources to escape the planet - which we still haven't, in any meaningful way - before the sun makes the panet uninhabitable.
If humans somehow survive in some form and we can cut out most of the evolving-to-big-brains time, most of the knowledge they might inherit will be useless, as it's based on resources they have no access to.
Sure, it isn't impossible, but the odds are stacked against anyone following us succeeding in escaping a planet which is 2/3 of the way through its goldilocks phase of life. The best chance is for us to get our shit together, and get some self-sustaining colonies out there. Preferrably in deep space, eventually.
Again human arrogance.
Animals have evolved just as long as we have my friend.
Humans are animals, and are the only ones who've evolved to prioritize big, expensive brains over every other survival characteristic. It took us a long time to do that, and even then, we spent a massive amount of time - most of it, in fact, running around not creating anything more complex than baskets. There is a lot of evidence - 2 billion years worth - that there are a huge number of variables that have to work out just right to produce something like what a human is.
We didn't prioritize big brains though. What we evolved to do lead us to big brains because we simply had great diets through cooking.
Other species can absolutely evolve cooking or at least a process of breaking down food to both be more calorically dense and easier to digest. After that it was what less than 1 million years to get here? Most of that happening in the last 100,000?
We've just not seen any species reach this point that doesn't mean they can't or won't. Also a bigger question, why should they want to? What have we accomplished actually?
We've managed to understand how ecosystems work. Destroyed most of them.
We've discovered how to manipulate material to prolong our life span or ease our workload to what? Oppress our own species and others?
I just don't see us being that great and also don't see it being impossible for other species to surpass us in ways we don't even consider because we are arrogant.
Many species on this planet are highly intelligent and arguably moreso than humans. If you judge a fish by it's ability to climb a tree you'll think it's a moron. Dolphins, fungus, ants, moss, fuckin water bears. They're all incredible creatures, why do we hold ourselves above them?
So... You want a hypothetical future civilization to repeat the same mistakes as we did?
Point being, there's no hypothetical future civilization because we've eliminated that possibility
Yes, but you're assuming that a future civ requires fossil feuls to advance.
Metals and plastic aren't a problem as they don't simply go away.
Plastics don't take recycling well, even today we can barely do it.
With metals, they're still around, but we've distributed them so widely, plus whatever gets lost to erosion and rust over time, that it would probably be impossible to collect them in any significant quantities.
Agree completely on a planetary scale. The chances are that we are very ordinary on a galactic scale, and that millions of other lifeforms on millions of other planets have risen to roughly this level of sophistication, and thereby become too powerful for their overwhelming stupidity, and died.
See: the Copernican Principle, the Great Filter, and Dissipation-driven Adaptation (in ascending order of how much time you've got)
Oh, yes, of course. I completely agree with you; I assumed the context was Earth.
My favorite theory to explain the Fermi Paradox is that we're one of the early intelligent life forms in the universe. Our goldilocks situation occurred fairly early in the overall lifespan of the universe, even considering only the exciting period, when stars are forming and growing their own planetary systems.
If we survive and get off the planet. we could be the mysterious "old ones" some future species discovers evidence of as they explore the galaxy.
If we can just survive ourselves.
I desperately want to believe your optimistic reading of the Paradox. I hope you're right, and, thankfully, I can't honestly say with any certainty that you're not.
The mass extinction that killed off the dinosaurs might be quite rare, especially if it was some kind of orbital event. In which case we might have accelerated advancement in comparison to other Goldilocks planets.
Not the first. The cyanobacteria that first figured out photosynthesis put so much oxygen into the atmosphere so fast that it cause mass extinction of much of the anaerobic life (and most things were anaerobic life back then). They also caused a literal rust belt (since many metals up to that point were now able to be oxidized en masse), and that rust layer can be seen in really old rocks ("banded iron formation").
Great Oxidation Event