by many. In the end, it may be all we can do to stave off insanity, but until then we must do all we can to carry on the fight against the dying of the light.

I completely agree with all that was written. My thought exactly, but can't quite get to the "glass half full" feeling much these days.

Even worse is that far too many people DON'T want to listen when you express these concerns and I can understand it, but because I feel so passionate about this reality I'm unable to look the other way.

The don't worry be happy smiley face is GREAT and sends positive vibes. Too bad it's not about smiley faces so much of the time. See, you didn't want to hear that last sentence because it's too negative.

GliderGuider, in the past you've outlined with compelling insights how we, as humans, are trapped by the nature of our emotions to play out this grand drama and why we're so crippled in our ability to avert disaster.

If you still believe (as I do) in the truth of what you said then, it follows that we are witnessing a natural disaster; the Anthropocene is just the latest ripple in the persistent, continual churn of our ecosphere. It hurts because we're witnessing it personally rather than divining the catastrophes of another age in layers of sediment, far removed from the messy details of individual deaths and the loss species we've never seen walking in front of us.

I think of the human species as the latest asteroid to hit the Earth. It may seem more personal than that at the individual level, but in the aggregate, we're just about as mindless as that piece of rock.

And as you say, we appear to be the agents of a planetary natural disaster. Comparable events might have been asteroids, tectonic events like the Deccan and Siberian flood basalts, the Toba supervolcano eruption, or perhaps the evolution of cyanobacteria and the ensuing Oxygen Catastrophe. Unlike the cyanobacteria I don't think we'll wipe out most life on the planet, but that's pretty cold comfort.

We are the Cassandra species - able to comprehend the consequences of our actions, but unable to avert them.

There may be no fault to be found or blame to be laid, but it's still a pretty sad and shitty deal.

I think that we will be able to wipe almost everything out with extreme climate shifts.

The thing that may truly complete the job is the 440 or so nuclear reactors around the globe plus how ever many military/navy reactors, plus the 800 or so spent fuel storage locations.

Once we are gone and not able to tend these things any more, it will be Fukishima times a hundred. I have not doubt that this will be the slamming of the coffin lid for humanity, but I have not way of evaluating if anything can survive this, even microbes.

The earth may have to wait a million years or so for our folly to clear out to re-start with the old primordial soup. Of course the earth has the time.

I don't think even a +10C warming would do in all life. On the other hand, the higher the average temperature goes, the deeper it will prune the tree of life, and the longer it will take for the resurgence of more complex forms.

When we're talking on this scale, I think the radiation from the 440 nukes is essentially inconsequential. Once humans are gone, it becomes just part of the planet's character. Frankly, it's already that even with human here, but since we're the ones remembering history, imagining the future, making judgments and experiencing existential fears, it doesn't feel like that to us.

People traveling, vacations, jobs, wanting/needing their children to have it better than they did, universal human rights, all the stuff we like. That's what got us here. We wish all that good stuff wasn't part of a "consumptive culture", but it is. We can't just get rid of the bad stuff that we don't like. It makes us feel good to complain about militarism or nationalism, but the stuff that we like is also involved in the equation.

But as humans, we're supposed to strive for something more, something better. We can, and maybe we should. Maybe like the lion taking down a zebra with its speed, fangs, and claws, humans just try to control everything with our big brains. That's going to come at a cost though, which we cannot escape. If we could just have more control, we'd be able to get out of the problems caused by increasing our ability to control.

Not wanting to die is how we got to an increasingly full world. It's a perfectly legitimate and sane desire to not want to die, which is why this whole thing has no solution. Each and every time we save someone's life, however we do it, we make the overall equation that much more complicated. Not good or bad, it just is.

We like all the stuff that being human got us, but we don't like how we got it. We try to deny how we got it, without giving up what we got. We want the best of both worlds, without paying the cost of either one. That's why there's no answer. We're not willing to say fuck it, and go all in. Although we're closer to that than the alternative, which is that we're not willing to let go of what human beings have won in the struggle against death.

A poignant and all to truthful silent scream. Great essay.