June 2015 was a terrible month to be a human. Anew study in the journal “Scientists confirmed what only the discerning had perhaps expected all along – that the sixth global mass extinction was happening and humanity’s existence was being threatened. The researches had used conservative estimates to prove that “species are disappearing faster than at any time since the dinosaurs’ demise”. We are wiping species off our planet at a rate at least 100 times faster than historical levels. They called for swift action to conserve threatened species, populations and habits, and also cautioned that the window of opportunity was closing really fast.
The impacts of a still-avoidable sixth mass extinction would likely be so massive they’d be best described as science fiction. It would be catastrophic, widespread and, of course, irreversible. In the past, it has taken life ten to thirty million years to recover after such an extinction, 40 to 120 times as long as modern-looking humans have been telling tales by firelight. Moreover, Williams and his team argue that future changes driven by humanity may go so far as to create not just a new epoch in geologic history – such as the widely-touted Anthropocene – but a fundamental reshaping of Earth on par with the rise of microbes or the later shift from microbes to multicellular organisms.
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