Post #3114875

If you keep up with earth sciences generally, you may be aware that the entirety of urban human existence was (and continues to be) possible because we are in an "interglacial" period - an interval between ice ages, basically - an unusually long and stable one, beginning with the retreat of the last real ice age 15,000-12,000 years ago. When that ends - and it will; our current climate crisis aside, the planet's geologic processes dictate an end to the interglacial - the conditions that made modern humanity possible will also end. It made me think of the ecologies around the deep sea vents at the bottom of the ocean. The vents come and go. Large and complex communities of life form around the vents when they open... and then, when they close, those communities either move or die. The shifts are more far rapid than on the surface world, but it's the same dynamic. It's a strange and complicated thing to think about: at the same time we are overheating the planetary ecosystem in the short- to medium term (thinking in centuries here), we are also in the middle of an interglacial period that in the long term will lead to another ice age (thinking in millenia). We're going in two different - very different - directions at the same time.