More than 90% of the worlds species have already gone extinct the last 200 years have not seen much of an acceleration when compared to the Permian extinction or any of the several other mass die offs mother nature orchestrated. We have screwed things up to be sure but only human arrogance would put our ability to kill at the same level as the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs over night! Only propaganda would ignore the progress we have made since the 50's.......it has been 44 years since the Detroit river caught fire and several species including the Bald eagle and all of the great whales, have made a stunning come backs!
I saw a blurb on the news that scientists actually are about to attempt cloning Wooly Mammoth's HOW Stupid can educated supposedly intelligent people get, do you suppose there was a reason they became extinct in the first place?? they say they will have one on the ground within 3 to 5 years. And some of you think I'm Nuts?? what about them???
the nice thing is think of all the Ivory Whoopee!!!!!!
This isn't the first time in history when the unenlightened masses have concluded that scientists and thinkers of all types were "stupid." In most cases the accusers were motivated by religious beliefs, nationalism, or a combination of both; pretty much the same as today. Great thinkers have been executed, kicked out of their churches and otherwise demonized for their theories. We are currently in a time when it is the scientists who are mocked and ridiculed for the hypotheses they advance and the experiments they propose.
It could be as much as 99% of all species that have ever been documented are now extinct and the majority of them died off in one of the extinction events. However, the extinction events were hardly overnight occurrences; the End Permian extinction event probably occurred in multiple waves that lasted most of a million years. That is still overnight in geological time. The Cretaceous-Tertiary event probably was triggered by a bolide impact, but the dinosaurs didn't all die overnight. There is good evidence that there were other causal events in the same time era. To say that the dinosaurs died off within a few hundred thousand years would be a better description of the timing than to say overnight.
The Holocene extinction event which we are currently experiencing has been going on for 12,000 or so years and the rate of extinctions during this time period is proceeding at a faster pace than the End Permian which was the greatest of all extinction events to date. If this continues for another million or so years it will easily be the greatest of all extinction events.
While it is unlikely that human involvement was only cause of the extinction of mammoths and other megafauna, there is no doubt that humans hunted them and no doubt that humans have played a role in the extinction of other species over the last few thousand years. I might be stupid, but given that we are killing off species at about the fastest rate ever, I think it sounds like a good idea to work out how to revive them. How stupid would it be to think otherwise?
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