What Happens After Humans Go Extinct?

Lately, it’s been on my mind.

Extinction.

Everything has changed over the last five years. New studies have come out. The planet is warming more than all the scientists thought, faster than they thought, and it’s going to get worse than they thought. We faced an outside chance of extinction within a hundred years, but 3-4C degrees of warming makes that more certain. Not by the end of the century, but the middle.

All this might sound like classic doomerism, but it’s not. We’re just being honest. After all, has climate optimism actually motivated anyone to change their habits? Has sugarcoating the truth helped?

Look around…

Scientists tend to agree that we’re actually living in the middle of a mass extinction right now, one caused by human activity. You’d think every newspaper would devote a section to that, but it doesn’t even make the back page.

For most people, it’s not a story.

Most of your friends and family would probably call you a conspiracy theorist or a fearmonger for even saying the words “mass extinction.” And yet, the evidence is undeniable. You’re not making this up.

It. Is. Happening.

It. Won’t. Stop.

So, let’s wrestle with a difficult question. What are we to do with the overwhelming evidence of our own demise? As we’ve discussed, you have to balance your knowledge and awareness of the end times with a healthy approach to living in the moment, because those moments are often all we’ve got left. We don’t want to shrug and give up, but it feels pointless and self-destructive to spend every waking minute of your life trying to stop something that has become inevitable.

So, is that it?

Not quite.