Why Humans Won’t Go Extinct From Climate Collapse

This brilliant dinosaur almost got my french fries yesterday. They didn’t go extinct at all, and neither will we. Our circumstances will just be reduced, and we may be stealing french fries from the artificial species that take over.

Dinosaurs didn’t go extinct. They became birds. One shat on my wife last week. They’re doing fine. In the same way, humans will survive climate collapse. But I suppose you expected something better than survival.

It Only Takes A Village

Human migration over the past 200,000 years. PNAS

The ancestral population modern humans come from was likely just tens of thousands of people in Africa and a ‘bottleneck’ of maybe even a few hundred people is what populated the rest of the Earth.

PNAS

Whatever we call ‘us’ came from a hardy band that would be a small concert today. Whatever fuckery we do to the Earth would have to literally kill all of us and it won’t. It will kill a lot of us, but more than enough will survive for the species to survive. One Facebook network would do.

If you go further back, at every point in the graph below, one of your relatives was alive, be they hominid, rat-like, reptilian, or just cells. It’s crazy to think about, but you are from a long line of survivors going back to the dawn of life. That line can get frayed and torn, but it is very, very difficult to cut.