• Chozo@fedia.io
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    1 year ago

    In April, Lavers and her team broke a disturbing record: 778 pieces of plastic were found inside a single 80-day-old chick. “I’m sad to say just yesterday we blew [the record] out of the water,” she said. “In one of the most pristine corners of our planet.”

    That plastic load made up nearly a fifth of the chick’s body weight.

    Earth is cooked.

    EDIT: Fuck, the video is hard to watch. But you should. Everybody should. The sound is awful. Sorry for the Instagram link, but as best as I can tell, it’s the original source: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJ3fhlVTy1O/

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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      1 year ago

      The earth will be fine. It’s been through way worse than us. There was about a billion years when the whole thing was just a snowball. People don’t even really know how microbial life that was adapted for the surface survived, although the theory is that its little lifeboats were melted pools of water near volcanic hotspots, some sort of liquid water that incredibly enough was able to randomly stay around the whole time through. It only takes a very small number of survivors to repopulate everything once it turns okay again. The earth has been through oceans at the poles and total freezes and meteor strike apocalypses and everything in between, some of where we came from was the engine of creation in the wake of one of those disasters, the end of the dinosaurs.

      The paradise place we call home, though, is cooked and done for forever, on any kind of human timeline. There is 0 chance that what we call a livable biosphere, the kind of green grass nice summer day paradise we were born into, will still be around in a hundred years. It’s gone. We’re the last generation.

      There’s still a lot we can do to choose less apocalyptic options. The sheer massive scale of the disaster means that every fraction of a percent could save millions of lives, or significantly reduce the chance of total extinction. But bottom line, the planet itself and the web of life that lives on it will persist. Whether we will, certainly whether our civilization will, is uncertain, it will be determined by this generation and the next.

        • krashmo@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          You’re absolutely right. People insist on making this ridiculous point every time a topic like this comes up. It’s like, holy shit, just let the destruction of all life on Earth be the point of the conversation instead of some stupid tangent about a lifeless rock in space.