A Quote by Norman Myers
We are into the opening stages of a human-caused biotic holocaust-a wholesale elimination of species-that could leave the planet impoverished for at least five million years.
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Planet Hollywood has shrunk from seventy-five locations around the world to just over thirty-five over the past two years. No new Planet Hollywoods are opening, which in turn has caused a 100 percent decline in opportunities for Bruce Willis to play the harmonica.
When I am at a dinner table, I love to ask everybody, 'How long do you think our species might last?' I've read that the average age of a species, of any species, is about two million years. Is it possible we can have an average life span as a species? And do you picture us two million years more or a million and a half years, or 5,000?
The reality is that if we in this rich, lucky quarter of the planet cannot make a stand for the 30 million other species we share this planet with, let alone our own species, then who can?
The Doctor: The Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. And there it is: planet Earth at its height. Covered with megacities, five moons, population 96 billion. The hub of a galactic domain, stretching across a million planets, a million species. With mankind right in the middle. [Adam faints] The Doctor: [leans towards Rose, still looking out over the Earth] He's your boyfriend.
Until about 30,000 years ago, there were at least five other species of humans on the planet. Homo Sapiens, our ancestors, lived mainly in East Africa, and you had the Neanderthal in Europe, Homo Erectus in part of Asia, and so forth.
We know little of the consequences of the geoengineering process, such as spraying particles into the atmosphere that shade the planet from the sun's rays and could decrease its temperature. But this process is how dinosaurs disappeared from the Earth about 60 million years ago, by particles spewed by a volcano or a giant meteorite impact, and our species could follow suit.
The early Triassic was a period when the planet was recovering from the worst mass extinction it had ever known - that was the end Permian extinction, where climate change caused in part by mega-volcanic eruptions wiped out ninety-five percent of life on Earth. It took about ten or twenty million years for the planet's ecosystems to stabilize. During that time you saw a lot of weird, out-of-balance ecosystems where, for example, crocodile-like predators ripped the crap out of each other along the coasts.
Five million Palestinians have not had a home for 60 years. It is amazing really: You have been paying reparations for the Holocaust for 60 years and will have to keep paying up for another 100 years. Why then is the fate of the Palestinians no issue here?
Many scientists would argue that we are now in what is called Extinction, and it's caused by this perfect extinction storm: climate change, habitat loss, pollution, unsustainable exploitation of species and habitat resources, and of course, human population explosion. All of these factors work together and conspire to drive a species to extinction on our planet, every half an hour.
The industrial revolution fueled all of humanity, everything we do has been exploding ever since. It's been the biggest most impacting thing, not only for human beings in the last 250 million years, but also the planet, which caused the ice age, which buried the forest. It's this circle because of the industrial revolution, it's neither good or bad, it enabled all of modernization, extended our life, it changed everything. It's the most impactful thing that happened to the planet and the people.
It is astonishing to realise that the human species survived hundreds of thousands of years, more than 99 percent of its time on this planet, with a life expectancy of only eighteen years.
There are over a million types of fish in the sea as there are flowers in all of the world's gardens. There are at least a million different types of rocks/minerals as there are species of birds or monkeys. To believe we are the only "intelligent beings" on this earth and beyond is ignorance. The possible configurations of lifeforms that could be created from a single atom are infinite. There are at least a billion people on this earth, and no two faces look the same. It is very arrogant to assume that we have seen all of God's miracles.
There is evidence that we are headed into what would be the planet's sixth mass extinction. It's hard to know for sure if you're in one because a mass extinction is an event where over 75 percent of the species on the planet die out over a - usually about a million-year period. The fastest it might happen is in hundreds of thousands of years.
I think for five lives, 10 lives, 15 human lives, we could save a million, two million, 10 million non-human lives.
At the end of the century, humans will look back at our impact on the planet and World War II will be a footnote compared to us presiding over the largest loss of biodiversity since a meteor hit the planet sixty-five million years ago.
There was this saying in GCHQ that, if you didn't leave after five years, you stay there for life. It was always my intention to leave before five years.
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