Chapter 122: A resilient biosphere and a fragile civilization (Part 1)
In the history of the evolution of life on earth, there have been five mass extinctions of life that shocked the world and almost turned the earth into an alien planet.
The so-called mass extinction refers to the extinction of large-scale biological clusters, also called biological extinction. That is, an entire family, order, or even class of organisms completely disappears in a very short period of time, or only a handful of them survive. The most famous one in the modern world is naturally the one that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, that is, the last mass extinction. During every mass extinction of life, the entire earth's environment will be turned upside down and become like an alien planet. If someone could travel through time and space and land on the purgatory template Earth of that era, they would probably never recognize that this ghost place is actually their home planet Earth...
The first mass extinction occurred at the end of the Ordovician period 440 million years ago and was caused by global climate cooling. Due to the effect of continental drift, the land at that time was all gathered near the pole, resulting in thick ice accumulation. The large glaciers cooled the ocean currents and atmospheric circulation, eventually causing the temperature of the entire earth to gradually drop, leading to the extinction of 85% of species that were not cold-resistant enough.
The second mass extinction occurred in the late Devonian period about 36,500 years ago. It was also caused by climate cooling and global ice. The conditions were very similar to the previous Ordovician mass extinction. The degree of extinction It’s almost the same, so I won’t say more here.
What followed was the third most terrifying mass extinction in the history of the earth, the Permian mass extinction that occurred about 250 million years ago.
At the end of the Permian period, the most terrifying volcanic eruption in history occurred in Siberia. Molten basalt was ejected directly from the earth's mantle, blasting a 50-kilometer-diameter hole in the earth's crust and lowering the earth's average temperature at that time from 16 degrees Celsius. , rapidly increasing to 40 degrees Celsius in just a few decades (the average temperature on earth is now 14 degrees Celsius)! ! Then, tens of millions of cubic kilometers of magma erupted from this super volcano not only burned countless vegetation, but also directly covered half of the land at that time, seriously damaging the ecological chain and causing the oxygen content of the atmosphere to plummet - globally. At a high temperature with an average temperature of 40 degrees Celsius, the oxygen content of the atmosphere has dropped to less than 10%... Now the oxygen content of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is 15%, and the oxygen content of the plains is 21%...
While the oxygen content in the atmosphere plummeted, the sulfur dioxide content in the atmosphere rose to 6%, and the carbon dioxide content rose to 10% - the carbon dioxide content in the modern atmosphere is 0.05%. There is already a group of people calling for carbon control. Emitted.
Due to the sharp increase in the content of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide, and the fires caused by volcanic eruptions, a large amount of toxic gas and greenhouse gas methane was produced, resulting in an extremely terrifying super greenhouse effect. Moreover, this volcanic eruption continued for hundreds of thousands of years without ending, which was equivalent to continuing to burn the stove in the greenhouse. Therefore, in the next 100,000 years, the global average temperature continued to climb to a miserable 70 degrees Celsius - the highest temperature in the world at that time. The cold place is even hotter than the current Sahara Desert. Two-thirds of the global seawater has evaporated, and the air humidity is as high as 80%. When sulfur dioxide encounters water vapor, it will form sulfuric acid. However, the sulfur dioxide in the air was too high at that time, and what fell was no longer acid rain, but dilute sulfuric acid... In this way, dilute sulfuric acid has been raining on the whole world for tens of thousands of years. The world's soil and oceans have been completely acidified. Animals and plants have been soaked in acid for so long that they can no longer bear it and die one after another.
What's even more terrible is that because super-scale volcanic eruptions lasted for hundreds of thousands of years, the content of volcanic ash, sulfur dioxide, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was increasing day by day, completely blocking the sun, making the entire earth's surface white for as long as 400,000 years. In the dark night, photosynthesis of plants is completely finished... During these hundreds of thousands of years, the earth looked similar to Venus from space, a bright yellow-brown star. The color planet is completely wrapped in thick clouds. There are no seasons on the surface below the clouds. The global average temperature is as high as 70 degrees Celsius. All ocean currents have stopped. The oxygen content of seawater is almost zero. Two-thirds of seawater has evaporated. The air humidity has exceeded In the sauna room, sulfuric acid rain falls every day - in such a lava hell package, it is a miracle among miracles that all living things on the earth are not wiped out.
(Even the hell and abyss in the DND setting are much more livable than the Earth during the Permian mass extinction era.)
After exactly 200,000 years, the super volcano in Siberia finally stopped erupting. The basalt solidified by magma is more than 600 meters thick, covering almost the entire surface of the earth. Another 300,000 years later, the long night finally ended, the remaining plants began to multiply, the oxygen content of the atmosphere began to recover, the temperature began to drop, the water vapor after cooling formed global rainfall, and the disappeared oceans reappeared... But 98% of the species on the earth have also disappeared forever, and what is left are super dead species with terrifying tenacity, such as sharks, dragonflies and cockroaches. Especially for sharks, it is really hard to imagine how they can survive and reproduce in sea water of 70 degrees Celsius.
——Compared with the purgatory environment of the Permian mass extinction, the environmental damage and air pollution caused by modern humans are nothing more than a piece of cake. Even the interstellar wars in science fiction novels will probably not reach such an exaggerated level of destruction. . However, life on the earth has still survived, and the earth has not turned into a lifeless and dead planet... This shows the tenacity of the biosphere.
Forty million years after the Permian mass extinction, the fourth mass extinction, the Triassic mass extinction, began again.
The causes and manifestations of the early stage of this mass extinction are similar to the last Permian mass extinction - due to the splitting of the continental plates, a 2,500-kilometer-long, 2,500-kilometer-long rift appeared in the eastern part of the modern United States and the Caribbean. A large crack fifty meters wide, about 18 million cubic kilometers of magma and a large amount of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide erupted from the ground, followed by almost identical forest fires, super greenhouse effect, plummeting atmospheric oxygen content, tens of thousands Years of sulfuric acid rain...
But when it comes later, it is different from the third mass extinction - compared with the previous mass extinction, the magma eruption in the fourth mass extinction ended earlier, and there was no time to turn the earth into Venus again. However, the volcanic ash left in the atmosphere obscured the sky, reducing the amount of sunlight received by the surface by half. The global temperature, which had been rising rapidly, then plummeted rapidly, making it impossible for a large number of early animal eggs to hatch at low temperatures. Pieces of extinction... Then the earth began to fall with heavy snow that lasted for several years, forming glaciers all over the land and the Great Ice Age that lasted for 300,000 years, which also caused the extinction of 76% of the species on the earth at that time.
——If the last mass extinction was a template of lava hell, then this time it is a real two worlds of ice and fire...
Finally, there is the fifth mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period 65 million years ago... Although this mass extinction is the most well-known because it is the closest to modern times and ended the age of dinosaurs, in fact , in terms of destructive power and degree of destruction, it is actually the most "mild" among the five mass extinctions.
The specific process is now well known, that is, an asteroid crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, splashing up a huge dust cloud and covering a large area. At the same time, the impact also caused a large number of volcanoes around the world to erupt, and huge amounts of volcanic ash, carbon dioxide, and sulfur dioxide entered the atmosphere. The thickness of the clouds reached several kilometers, blocking the sunlight and causing a sharp drop in global temperatures. The world was plunged into darkness for a full six months... When the first ray of sunshine penetrated the clouds, another twenty or thirty years of sulfuric acid rain began...
During this time, the extinction of the dinosaurs occurred - first with large swaths of plants dying, and then with the rapid death of the herbivorous dinosaurs. The carnivorous dinosaurs began to kill each other, and eventually they were all destroyed... However, compared with the previous Permian mass extinction and Triassic mass extinction, the scale of the Cretaceous mass extinction disaster was extremely small. First of all, the duration was very short, just a few decades from beginning to end, while the previous Permian mass extinction and Triassic mass extinction were both hundreds of thousands of years in length. Moreover, the Cretaceous mass extinction did not cause large-scale global anoxia, nor did it have terrifying super high temperatures or global ice, nor did it cause large-scale ocean evaporation. Six months of darkness and four hundred thousand years of darkness are completely different concepts - a few decades after the asteroid impact, the entire Earth's climate recovered. In the following early Cenozoic Era, the climate was not significantly different from the end of the Mesozoic Era when dinosaurs lived.
But even so, such a "mild" mass extinction is still much more terrifying than the zombie apocalypse in human science fiction - it can be seen that compared with the earth that has experienced hardships and vicissitudes, we humans are Still too young and too ignorant
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All in all, in Wang Qiu's view, since the earth's biosphere is still full of vitality after experiencing such horrific five mass extinctions, how can it be possible for humans to really destroy the earth with such little ability to torment the natural world? What end is coming?
It's just a nuclear winter. Compared with these five mass extinctions of life, it's not even a hair!
Besides, even the so-called "nuclear winter" concept is nothing more than a scam and a false proposition. It is almost the same as the American Star Wars project in the 1980s, but its anti-war purpose is more noble. Just a little.
"...In my opinion, whether it is pollution, war, or even nuclear war, it is still far from the standard of destroying the world! Human beings are always used to being arrogant and placing their own position too high. , sometimes I feel that man can conquer nature, and I can hold nature in the palm of my hand, but sometimes I am worried that I will destroy the earth if I am not careful.
In fact, from the perspective of the earth, I am afraid that human beings only seem to have serious egomaniac tendencies, arrogantly thinking that they are important and awesome, but in fact, this is not the case at all. Many hot environmental topics have been over-promoted intentionally or unintentionally. Our earth is very solid and not easy to control, but it is also not easy to damage. ”
In the living room of the shrine, Wang Qiu talked eloquently, talking about his thoughts and feelings after saving, destroying, and messing up several worlds, "...I remember that there were always some environmentalists in the past. That's how you talk about the Amazon jungle. Forests are the "lungs of the earth", accounting for a fraction of the world's forests. Cutting them down will have catastrophic consequences. It seems reasonable at first, but when I think about it later, if it goes back to ancient times. era, then the Yangtze River and Yellow River basins in China and the Ganges River basin in India , the Mississippi River Basin in the United States, these densely populated areas in the future were full of large forests at that time! And Europe in ancient Roman times was a large black forest, and a squirrel could get from a tree. Jumping from tree to tree, all the way from Spain to Denmark There is no need to go to the ground to produce wheat. By now, these forests have basically been cut down. In terms of total area, they are at least several times the size of the Amazon rainforest. But why has the oxygen content of the earth's atmosphere declined over the past few thousand years? No significant decrease?
The reason is simple. Whether they have ulterior motives or are just heartless idiots, environmentalists are talking nonsense when it comes to oxygen emissions in the Amazon forest. In fact, marine algae produce 90% of the earth's annual net oxygen production, freshwater algae produce 3% of it, and mosses and lichens produce 6% of it. And how much of the oxygen content do all higher terrestrial plants, including forests, grasslands, and crops, produce in total? Only 1%! !
In other words, all terrestrial higher plants only contribute 1% of the oxygen on the earth, and forests account for an even lower proportion... For the earth, the oxygen-generating ability of forests can almost be ignored. , and cannot even affect the oxygen content of the atmosphere.
Why is this happening? Because higher plants themselves also need to breathe. They have to re-eat part of the oxygen they produce through photosynthesis and spit out carbon dioxide. In addition, any higher plants are the product of biological carbon accumulation. After they die, they will rot and deteriorate, releasing a large amount of carbon emissions and consuming a lot of oxygen... According to the calculations of many scientists, if the oxygen balance is balanced , some plants not only do not produce additional oxygen in their lifetime, but consume more oxygen!
Therefore, even if all the forests on the earth were turned into deserts, there would be no adverse impact on the oxygen content of the atmosphere. On the other hand, even if time goes back thousands of years and human settlements turn into large forests again, the air on the earth will not become fresher..."
Wang Qiu picked up the tea cup and took a sip of water, then continued talking, "...it can be seen that the Amazon rainforest is not the lungs of the earth at all, and the concept of nuclear winter in the Cold War era is also a well-intentioned scam - in During the Cold War, even if all the nuclear bombs in the world were detonated together, their total energy would be no more than the eruption of a large volcano to the earth. If more volcanic eruptions could not be induced, then the energy of nuclear bomb explosions alone would be The climate cannot be changed.
The so-called control of carbon emissions and 'low-carbon life' that have been very popular recently is actually a deliberately concocted false proposition - in fact, the little impact we humans have on the earth has a negative impact on the earth. In fact, it is nothing. The total annual carbon emissions of all human beings are not as much as those of decaying plants in the forest. And the annual methane emissions of all mankind cannot keep up with volcanic eruptions, or even termite farts. The so-called carbon emission control issue is just an excuse for developed countries to despise and suppress developing countries. It is analogous to ancient wizards accusing tribe members of "offending the gods". It is purely a matter of human beings torturing themselves...
So, don’t think too highly of yourself. Human beings don’t need to save the earth. Human beings only need to save themselves! ”
After listening to Wang Qiu's long speech, everyone seemed to be a little dizzy, and their minds were a little knotted by the conflicts of various ideas... After a long silence, it was Sophie, the ship girl who cared most about the world. Miss, be the first to retort.
"...You are right. The earth does not need our saving, and humans cannot destroy the earth. But the problem is that even if humans cannot destroy the earth, they can still easily destroy themselves! So the current human civilization world still needs our help. Save!" Just recovered from serious injuries. The ship girl Sophie, who was recovering (repairing), smiled wryly and spread her hands, "...Although the earth's biosphere is very resilient, human civilization is very fragile! And, do you know, what is the living environment of Europeans today? What kind of situation is it? ”