The Earth is 4.6 BILLION Years Old…

[MrScorpio]

[Duer 157099]

1. Slackers

What were we doing the other 3 hours and 59 minutes?

(yeah, this is sad)

[niyad]

2. excellent

[NYC_SKP]

3. Only half?

Well, Let's GO!!

[indepat]

4. And man must drill in the most environmentally sensitive areas in the world so

almost every drop of oil, hundreds of millions of years in the making, can be extracted for corporate profit.

[Marr]

5. Of course, the forests have only existed for a few minutes, too.

Not to distract from the point, but the earth has had a pretty varied and violent past.

[Moostache]

14. To Quote the departed George Carlin...

"Save the PLANET?!?!?...folks, the planet ain't going anywhere....it was here a long time before us and it will be here a long time after us...the PLANET is fine, its not going anywhere...WE ARE! And after we're gone, the Earth is going to shake us off like a bad case of fleas..."

I just can't get too upset about our plight because 99.9% of every species that EVER lived on this planet - animal, plant, bacteria - is already extinct and pretty much all of the species around today won't be here as soon as 100,000 years from now. Once humanity gets done poisoning itself and the rest of the organisms unfortunate enough to come on the life stage at the same as us, the Earth will pause, reset and go on.

Comets, volcanos, Ice ages and Tropical poles, mass extinctions on several occasions...acidic oceans, carbon dioxide levels that we are going to see again soon...glaciers that once carved as far south as Indiana and left the Great Lakes, inland seas that have come and gone and left chalk deposits as a grim headstone of sorts....impact craters like the majority of the Gulf of Mexico....none of this could extinguish life on Earth and neither will we.

Humanity itself is doomed because of greed and stupidity; but life on Earth will go right on cycling through emerging species and extinctions until the Sun eventually burns out and consumes the entire inner planetary system as far as Mars.

But don't fret...if you run the clock forward enough, the entire universe seems destined to die a long, slow heat death anyway! Happy Wednesday!!

[musical_soul]

6. That's right.

I think we're the only species that have been known to take more than give back.

[AlbertCat]

7. I think we're the only species that have been known to take more than give back.

Oh please! The 1st microbial mats that produce free oxygen produced so much, they killed themselves because oxygen was poisonous to them. So they killed themselves with "pollution". Fortunately for us.....

Of course we do seem to overdo it ourselves and we're supposed to be more intelligent than microbial mats.

[WillyT]

8. HUGE K & R !!! - Thank You !!!

[Ed Suspicious]

9. This is so Sagan. Love it. nt

[Comrade Grumpy]

10. That's even older than John McCain.

[MrScorpio]

11. Just Barely…

[amuse bouche]

12. Heartbreaking

to think about

[Iliyah]

13. Well think about it.

Global warming is slowing happening while slowly destroying earth and its inhabitants. By the time earth is truly in bad shape, everybody in my lifetime will be dead. Remember the GOP always saying "think of the children" and the future, they don't mean it, oh my. Now is now, money money money money.

[Spider Jerusalem]

16. if one dates the Industrial Revolution to 1800?

The planet's human population has increased sevenfold in that time. There were about a billion people on the planet at the dawn of the industrial revolution; it took 130 years for that number to double to 2 billion. The next increase of 2 billion took just 45 years. And the next, just 25. We probably passed sustainable carrying capacity around 1960 or so. Like Bill Hicks said: "People suck. We're a virus with shoes."

[Mnemosyne]

17. K&R nt

[Nye Bevan]

18. Surely it's sadder that all the dinosaurs were wiped out about 8 months ago.

Because they are never coming back. But we can always plant more trees.