Sheril Kirshenbaum

About 250M years ago, 90% of species on Earth died during the Permian extinction. All of that loss created a lot of vacant niches to fill. And not long after, the first mammals, our ancestors, appeared.

Life on this pale blue dot will continue to be resilient - whether or not we’re part of it. #Thanksgiving #science #history

Nov 25, 2023 at 4:12amMetatext
Show threadSheril KirshenbaumNov 26, 2023
We don’t need religion to recognize what a miracle it is that we arrived here, in this moment, at all. ✨ /2
Show threadCoach Pāṇini ®Nov 26, 2023

We’re all miracles of space dust.

https://www.netflix.com/us/title/81243961?s=i&trkid=258593161&vlang=en&clip=81634500

@Sheril

Watch Our Universe | Netflix Official Site

Witness the remarkable story of our universe over billions of years and its inextricable link to life on Earth in this sweeping documentary series.

Show threadFayeNov 26, 2023
@Sheril We don’t even need religion to share and trust in life… 🍀🌹
Show threadSon Light LifeNov 26, 2023
@Sheril Agreed! Miracles are real with no human intervention. Religion is man made.
Show threadBarry GoldmanNov 27, 2023

@Sheril we probly need something LIKE religion to help us remember to pay attention to that miracle. i think most of us don't take so much opportunity to sit back from the slog of life to pay attention to such miracles.

i would call science (a very organized social process) a tradition similar to religion in this respect.

religion does not need a god nor supernatural. just practices in the attention on what life IS.

Show threadWriting SlowlyNov 25, 2023
@Sheril this is setting a pretty low bar for optimism isn't it? It's like putting a skipping rope on the ground and calling it the high jump. First the fossil fuel industry encouraged us to think there was no problem and now it's encouraging us to believe there's nothing we can do about it anyway. I'm firmly in between. There is *plenty* to be done, and no reason to roll over and accept mass extinction as a done deal. How do I know? Where I live there used to be almost no humpback whales. Now more than 40,000 migrate past here each year, and growing - thanks entirely to activists who wouldn't give up. And just this Friday there was a mass demonstration run by school kids, a new generation putting adults to shame for their complacent fatalism. Yes, in the long run we're all dead, and nature will continue without us. But until then: action, not acquiescence.
Show threadgmsizemoreNov 25, 2023
@writingslowly @Sheril But all our problems are problems of _human behavior_. To what technology do we turn?
Show threadNoah CookNov 25, 2023

@Sheril In that vein, I recently finished reading Beasts Before Us by Elsa Panciroli, and it sorta begins where your post ends, with the end-Permian extinction and the rise of our synapsid ancestors, etc.

It also does a good job of explaining how diverse mammals have been as a clade, not just the groups we see today, but the vast diversity that existed in-between, the marsupials' metatherian cousins or the wild variety of Cretacious mammal niches.

https://www.amazon.com/Beasts-Before-Us-Origins-Evolution-ebook/dp/B092QZBLN6/

Amazon.com

Show threadSisyphus with a HatNov 25, 2023
@UncivilServant @Sheril I listened to the audio version a while ago, great book!
Show threadfloydgumpNov 25, 2023
@Sheril In the name greed humanity has sold its soul and its future.
Show threadhömmaNov 25, 2023

@Sheril @p_calleri

ah okay, all‘s well that ends well, so let’s just carry on in our habitual ways until we’re all dead - is that what you’re saying?

I hope not. I don’t think we have the right to destroy the home of all our fellow species, thereby killing most of them, even if we were all okay with a collective suicide, which I’m not.

Show threadzillaNov 25, 2023
@Sheril it is postulated that the current Holocene Extinction has a background Extinction rate similar to or perhaps greater than the PT event. If the Holocene Event, caused by man, continues unabated then it will rival the PT Event in magnitude.
Show threadBryan McElveenNov 25, 2023
@Sheril
Certainly not a proponent of his every statement, however George Carlin was fairly succinct in laying out that however much we destroy this planet, what we are destroying is this planet’s comfort zones for humans, not the planet itself. The planet will be fine. We, are fucked.
Show threadBryan McElveenNov 25, 2023

@Sheril

“The planet isn’t going anywhere… we are! We’re going away! Pack your shit folks! We’re going away and we won’t leave much of a trace either, thank God for that… maybe a little styrofoam… maybe… little styrofoam. The planet will be here, we’ll be long gone; just another failed mutation; just another closed-end biological mistake; an evolutionary cul-de-sac.

Show threadBryan McElveenNov 25, 2023
@Sheril
The planet will shake us off like a bad case of fleas, a surface nuisance. You wanna know how the planet’s doing? Ask those people in Pompeii who are frozen into position from volcanic ash how the planet’s doing. Wanna know if the planet’s all right? Ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble if they feel like a threat to the planet this week.”
Show threadOne World One PeopleNov 25, 2023
@Sheril TWW: While you may visit other places, other realms, this is the people’s world for as long as you can hold it. *Even closer for us are the two glacial periods we survived while migrating to everywhere. I see us mitigating the massive amount pollution caused by industry and surviving the atmospheric and oceanic turmoil here at the end of this interglacial period. It will be a more advanced and cohesive people that face the next glacial period. Strength in Kindness. OWOP
Show threadzombywoofNov 25, 2023
@Sheril
That's what many people just don't understand
Show threadgmsizemoreNov 25, 2023
@Sheril We will begin to change to living in small, high-tech (small science, though; no particle accelerators or reactors here) agrarian communities pre-apocalyptically (potentially avoiding disaster) or we will do so haphazardly post-apocalyptically. We will almost certainly not do the former - achieving that would require cultural engineering. How many "cultural engineers" do you know? The ones that brought you these world-destroying cultures?
Show threadMichael de Jong 🍉Nov 25, 2023
@Sheril Beautiful words, but past results do not guarantee future results. A runaway greenhouse effect could be forever persistent, ending the possibilities for life except some primitive life forms.
Show threadSlidingspacesNov 25, 2023
@Sheril Nature is a few 100 billion light years across and expanding. Nature will be fine, even if we do destroy this, the only known habitable planet. I recommend we don’t btw
Show threadCanadian CurmudgeonNov 25, 2023
@Sheril
Rather optimistic. There's a good chance the next extinction event - our climate apocalypse - might turn the planet into a heatsink hell like Venus. Nothing will survive that.
Nothing.
Show threadxs4me2Nov 25, 2023
@Sheril But of course… more people should realize this… Earth just gave us a chance, if we ruin it we will just be gone, and Earth moves on…
Show threadartnetworxNov 25, 2023
@Sheril Up until Sol fizzles out.
Show threadMy camera shoots fascistsNov 26, 2023

@Sheril

I volunteered on a couple dinosaur digs a long time ago and I asked the paleontologists there if they thought humans would be around in a million years. To a one they said "nope".

Chipping out a baby Parasaurolophus skull from solid rock, it was easy to imagine the wave upon wave of fabulous creatures that once roamed the earth at one time or another, only to become fossils by the time the next ones were leaving footprints in the sediments above them. In the future, in a length of time from now that is barely a rounding error in the last 4 billion years, Earth will be covered with another unimaginably weird and wild menagerie.

We're just messing it up for ourselves and the other creatures here at the moment. We could nuke ourselves 50 times over and the ecosystem from undersea vents would take over in a million years or two.

The idea that we're awesome enough to destroy the world is the same hubris that will lead us to destroy ourselves instead.

Show threadBrett ClubbeNov 26, 2023
@Mikal @Sheril it does appear we are determined to self extinct. Sad really. I kinda like this place.
Show threadAngelMountaineerDec 6, 2023
@Sheril or it won't, but that's also fine.