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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • Going a couple comments up the chain:

    Even if humans manage to kill off most life on Earth it will continue to exist, propagate, and become more complex. Again we’re talking about billions of years. There have been huge shifts in climate and mass extinctions many times before and yet here we are.

    So I took it to mean all life on Earth being dead. As long as one microbe survives to reproduce and start evolving it doesn’t count.


  • 75% of all species, not all life. Larger species and photosynthesizers were more heavily affected, while smaller species, scavengers, and deep sea life were less affected.

    And I’m not a biologist, but I’m pretty sure even 75% of all life, not species, still wouldn’t be close to completely ending life on Earth, cause in the end as long as some microbes survived around a hydrothermal vent somewhere total extinction would be avoided.


  • Eh I doubt it. Every single nuke ever built combined still doesn’t come close to the power of the Chicxulub asteroid (the one that killed the dinosaurs) and even that impact didn’t come close to eliminating all life on Earth. Unless someone accidentally compresses a mountain into an artifical black hole or something there probably is no way to wipe out all life on Earth.



  • The main advantage of early guns wasn’t that they were more powerful, it’s that they were easy to use. You can train someone to fire a gun in a day, while it takes months of training just to get an archer strong enough to draw a bow.

    Also the whole “the Europeans were dirty diseased peasants” thing isn’t accurate, and I have to say that IMO the right response to racist depictions of indigenous people as unwashed savages isn’t to just turn around and say “actually the stereotypes are correct it’s just that it’s about the Europeans this time”.

    And Indigenous people had more advanced technoglogy than many give them credit for but "The Europeans were technologically behind indigenous people in nearly every way. " is just blatantly wrong.

    I do think you’re right though that without smallpox and other diseases the Europeans wouldn’t have colonised the Americas, though there were several other major factors in it.

    P.S. I’m not a historian, grain of salt, etc.