this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] Allonzee@lemmy.world 7 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

I take great solace in knowing that for all the dirty tricks we play on one another to fuck each other over and get moar, greed made climate change itself cannot be bribed, discredited, scapegoated, cut in, threatened, me too-ed, or divided into attacking itself instead. That shit only works on other humans but it's hilarious to see humanity try anyway, because it's all we know to do for our problems.

I feel bad for all the innocent species we're taking with us, and the ecosystem for the next 2 or so million years while the earth recovers from us as it has with other runaway metastatic mistakes of evolution that threatened the whole, see the trees of the carboniferous period, but Im glad our reign of terror on this world, the creatures on it, and each other will end soon, and no amount of human bullshitting will save us.

[–] wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works 5 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (1 children)

Don't forget the anaerobes, which generated so much oxygen that they poisoned themselves nearly to extinction and made the entire atmosphere a toxic miasma for themselves, without which all multicellular life would not exist!

[–] AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 3 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Didn't the Proterozoic era happen a few billion years, and possibly a couple of snowball periods later than that? I thought the aneribic stuff happened pretty early and made Earth hotter than Venus, at the time.

[–] wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works 2 points 19 minutes ago* (last edited 18 minutes ago)

Absolutely, but aerobic life is more able to harness efficient energy with the use of oxygen's INSANE reactivity, and that change was only possible because the anaerobes turned 20+% of the atmosphere into the elemental molecular form of the second-most electronegative element in the universe. Even plants, which produce oxygen gas during photosynthesis, use oxygen to power ATP synthesis. Oxygenation of the planet was absolutely requisite to allow the evolution of eukaryotic multicellular life.