Written by John Lounsbury
This documentary has been selected in honor of the 8th anniversary of the collapse chronical, The Doomstead Diner.
Since the first animal fossil register, approximately 800 million years ago, the Earth has suffered at least twelve massive extinctions, of which five were of truly gigantic proportions. Millions of species disappeared forever in these periods of massive deaths.
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Note: Reverse Engineer, Surly 1, and other denizens of The Doomstead Diner are frequent contributors to GEI.
When we hear of extinctions in pre-history, we tend to think of the time when the Earth was inhabited by fabulous animals: the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs dominated the zoology of our planet for one hundred and forty million years, a period which, in comparison with the history of our species, makes them almost eternal. Then a medium-sized meteorite crashed into the Earth. It was neither the largest nor the most devastating of the many that have impacted against our planet but the disruption was such that with a matter of years all dinosaurs were gone, except for birds.
Massive extinctions took place millions of years ago, so long ago that life had time to start again from zero, leaving behind creatures that were lost forever in the transformations suffered by a young, inexpert and changing planet.
In the Holocene and Anthropocene, we are the most efficient agent of a phenomenon which is as old as life itself: the extinction of species. But we are becoming so efficient in our role as destroyers that, as we begin to understand the interdependent mechanisms of life on earth, we are realising that perhaps our own activities could end up leading our species along the road to extinction.
The current extinction event is described in this video in the context of the history of life on earth, from the earliest single cell organisms up to today. The perspective is fascinating – and terrifying.
Source: YouTube.
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