Chapter 122: A Resilient Biosphere and a Fragile Civilization (Part I)

In the history of the evolution of life on Earth, there have been five earth-shattering, weeping ghosts and gods, almost turning the Earth into an alien mass extinction. Pen? Interesting? Pavilion wWw. ｂiquge。 ｉｎfo

The so-called mass extinction refers to the extinction of large-scale biological clusters, also known as extinction. That is, the whole family, the whole order, or even the whole class of organisms completely disappear in a very short period of time, or only a very small number remain. One of the most famous in the modern world, naturally, is the extinction of the dinosaurs, the last mass extinction. During each mass extinction, the entire Earth's environment is turned upside down and becomes like an alien planet. If someone can travel through time and space and descend to the purgatory template Earth of that era, I am afraid that they will never recognize this ghost place as 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 cooling. At that time, the land mass was all gathered near the pole due to the action of continental drift, resulting in a thick layer of ice. Massive glaciers, in turn, cooled ocean currents and atmospheric circulation, eventually causing the temperature of the entire planet to gradually drop, leading to the extinction of 85% of the hardy species.

The second mass extinction occurred in the late Devonian period, about 36,500 years ago, and was also caused by a cooling climate and global ice closure, and the circumstances were very similar to the previous Ordovician mass extinction, and the extinction was about the same, so I won't say more about it here.

This was followed by the most horrific third mass extinction in Earth's history, which occurred during the Permian mass extinction about 250 million years ago.

At the end of the Permian period, the most terrifying volcanic eruption event ever occurred in Siberia, and the melting basalt ejected directly from the mantle, blasting a large mouth with a diameter of 50 kilometers in the earth's crust, and also raising the average temperature of the earth from 16 degrees Celsius to 40 degrees Celsius in a few decades (the average temperature of the earth is now 14 degrees Celsius)!! Then, tens of millions of cubic kilometers of magma erupted from this supervolcano, not only burning countless vegetation, but also directly covering half of the land at the time, seriously disrupting the ecological chain and causing the atmospheric oxygen content to plummet - at a global average temperature of 40 degrees Celsius, the atmospheric oxygen content fell to less than 10 percent...... At present, the oxygen content of the Tibetan Plateau is 15%, and the oxygen content of the plains is 21%......

While the oxygen content of the atmosphere has plummeted, the amount of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere has risen to 6% in one fell swoop, and the carbon dioxide content has risen to 10% - the carbon dioxide content of the modern atmosphere is 0.05%, and there is already a group of people clamoring to control carbon emissions.

Due to the sharp rise in carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide levels, and the fires caused by volcanic eruptions, a large amount of methane, a toxic gas and greenhouse gas, was produced, resulting in an extremely terrifying super-greenhouse effect. Moreover, the eruption continued to erupt for hundreds of thousands of years, which was equivalent to continuing to burn the furnace in the greenhouse, so that in the next 100,000 years, the global average temperature continued to climb to a terrible 70 degrees Celsius - the coldest place in the world at that time, even hotter than the current Sahara Desert. Two-thirds of the world's seawater evaporates, and the air humidity is as high as 80%, and sulfur dioxide will form sulfuric acid when it encounters water vapor...... In this way, dilute sulfuric acid has been laid all over the world for tens of thousands of years, the world's soil and oceans have been completely acidified, and animals and plants have been drenched in acid for so long, and they can no longer bear it and die one after another.

What's worse is that because the super-scale volcanic eruption lasted for hundreds of thousands of years, the content of volcanic ash, sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased day by day, completely obscuring the sun, making the entire earth's surface dark for 400,000 years, and the photosynthesis of plants was completely destroyed...... For hundreds of thousands of years, the Earth looked like Venus from space, a bright yellow-brown planet, completely wrapped in thick clouds, with no seasons on the surface beneath the clouds, the average global temperature was as high as 70 degrees Celsius, the ocean currents were all stopped, the oxygen content of the sea water was almost zero, two-thirds of the sea water evaporated, the air humidity exceeded that of the sauna, and sulfuric acid rain fell every day -- in such a lava hell package, the life on Earth was not completely wiped out, which is a miracle within a miracle.

(Even the hell and abyss in the DND setting are much more habitable than the Earth in the Permian mass extinction era.) ）

After exactly 200,000 years, the supervolcano in Siberia finally stopped erupting, and the basalt rock solidified by magma was more than 600 meters thick, covering almost the entire surface of the earth. After another 300,000 years, the long night finally ended, the remaining plants began to multiply, the oxygen levels of the atmosphere began to recover, the temperature began to drop, the cooling water vapor formed a global rainfall, and the vanished oceans reappeared...... But 98% of the planet's species have also disappeared forever, and what remains are super-dead species that are so tenacious that they are terrifying, such as sharks, dragonflies and cockroaches. Sharks, in particular, are hard to imagine how they survive and thrive in 70 degrees Celsius.

-- Compared with the purgatory environment of the Permian mass extinction, any environmental damage and air pollution of modern human beings is a piece of cake at all, and even the interstellar wars in science fiction novels are most likely not to reach such an exaggerated level of destruction. And life on Earth still survived, and it didn't turn Earth into a lifeless dead planet...... This shows how resilient the biosphere is.

Forty million years after the Permian mass extinction, the fourth mass extinction, the Triassic mass extinction, began.

The causes and manifestations of the pre-extinction period are similar to those of the previous Permian mass extinction - because of the division of the continental plates, in the eastern part of the modern United States and the Caribbean, there was a large fissure 2,500 kilometers long and 50 meters wide, about 18 million cubic kilometers of magma and a large amount of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide ejected from the ground, and then there were almost identical forest fires, super greenhouses, plummeting atmospheric oxygen levels, and tens of thousands of years of sulfuric acid rain......

But later on, it was different from the third mass extinction - compared to 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 behind in the atmosphere has clouded the sky, halved the amount of sunlight received on the surface, and the rapidly rising global temperature has turned around and plummeted, preventing a large number of early animal eggs from hatching in low temperatures, and extinct in patches...... Then the earth began to fall heavy snow that lasted for several years, forming land-wide glaciers and the Great Ice Age, which lasted 300,000 years, and caused the extinction of 76% of the species on the planet at that time.

- If the last mass extinction was a template of lava hell, then this time it is the real two heavens of ice and fire......

Finally, there was the fifth mass extinction at the end of the White Age, 65 million years ago...... Although this mass extinction is the most well-known because it is the closest to modern times and the end of the age of dinosaurs, in fact, in terms of destructive power and degree of destruction, it is actually the most "mild" of the five mass extinctions.

The exact process is now known as when an asteroid crashed on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, sending up a huge cloud of dust that covered a large area. At the same time, the impact also caused a large number of volcanoes around the world to erupt, huge amounts of volcanic ash, carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide entered the atmosphere, and the cloud thickness reached several kilometers, blocking the sunlight and causing the global temperature to drop sharply. The world has been plunged into darkness for six whole months...... When the first rays of sunlight pierced the clouds, it rained sulfuric acid for twenty or thirty years......

During this time, the extinction of the dinosaurs occurred - first with the mass death of plants, and then with the rapid death of herbivorous dinosaurs. The carnivorous dinosaurs began to kill each other and eventually all of them were destroyed...... However, compared with the previous Permian and Triassic mass extinctions, the scale of the catastrophe of this White Mass extinction could not be smaller. The first is that the duration is very short, from beginning to end is so many decades, while the previous Permian and Triassic mass extinctions were hundreds of thousands of years long. Moreover, the White Age mass extinction did not cause a global mass hypoxia, nor did it cause terrifying superheat or global ice, nor did it evaporate over a large area of the ocean. Six months of darkness and 400,000 years of darkness are also completely different concepts - a few decades after the asteroid impact, the climate of the entire earth recovered. In the early Cenozoic era, the climate was not significantly different from that of the end of the Mesozoic era, where the 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 suffering and vicissitudes of the earth, we humans are still too young and uninformed

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All in all, in Wang Qiu's view, since the earth's biosphere is still vibrant after such a horrific five mass extinctions, how can it really make the earth come to an end with such a little tossing ability of human beings to the natural world?

It's just a nuclear winter, and compared to these five mass extinctions of life, it's not even a hair!

Besides, even the concept of the so-called "nuclear winter" is nothing more than a hoax and a false proposition, which is almost the same as the Star Wars program of the United States in the 80s of the 20th century, but its anti-war purpose is a little more noble.

“…… 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 accustomed to arrogance and put their position too high, one moment they feel that man will win the sky, and they can pinch nature in the palm of their hands, and then they worry about the sky, worrying that they will play the earth badly if they are not careful.

In fact, from the perspective of the earth, I am afraid that it will only seem that human beings have serious megalomaniac tendencies, arrogantly thinking that they are important and awesome, but in fact, this is not the case at all. Many hot environmental topics are deliberately or unintentionally overhyped, our earth is very strong, not so easy to grasp, but also not so easy to play. ”

In the living room of the shrine, Wang Qiu talked so eloquently, talking about his experience after saving & destroying & messing up several worlds, "...... I remember that some environmentalists used to say that the Amazon jungle is the 'lungs of the earth', accounting for a fraction of the world's forests, and that cutting them down would have catastrophic consequences, which at first glance seems to make sense. But when I looked back later, if I had gone back to ancient times, the Yangtze River and Yellow River basins in China, the Ganges River basin in India, the Mississippi River basin in the United States, and the densely populated areas in the future would have been large forests at that time! And in ancient Roman Europe, there was a large black forest, and a squirrel could jump from tree to tree, all the way from Spain to Denmark, without having to go to the ground. By now, these forests have basically been cut down, at least several times the total area of the Amazon rainforest, right? But why hasn't the oxygen content of the Earth's atmosphere decreased significantly over the past few thousand years?

The reason is simple, whether it is really ulterior motives or pure heartless stupid white sweetness, anyway, when it comes to the oxygen emissions of the Amazon forest, those environmentalists are simply talking nonsense. In fact, marine algae produce 90 percent of the planet's net oxygen each year, freshwater algae produce 3 percent of it, and mosses and lichens produce 6 percent of it. And how much of the oxygen content of all terrestrial higher plants, including forests, grasslands, and crops, is produced? Only 1%!!

In other words, only one percent of the Earth's oxygen is contributed by all terrestrial higher plants, and forests account for an even smaller proportion...... For the planet, the oxygen-producing capacity of forests is almost negligible, and it cannot even affect the oxygen content of the atmosphere.

Why is this so? Because higher plants themselves also have to breathe, they have to eat some of the oxygen produced by photosynthesis and spit out carbon dioxide. In addition, any higher plant is the product of biochar accumulation, and after they die, it will decay 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 budget is even offset, some plants will not only not produce extra oxygen, but consume more oxygen in their lifetime!

Therefore, even if all the forests on Earth were to become deserts, there would be no adverse effect on the oxygen content of the atmosphere. On the other hand, even if we go back thousands of years and human settlements become large forests again, the air on the earth will not become cleaner......"

Wang Qiu took a sip of water from the teacup, and continued to talk endlessly, "...... It can be seen from this that the tropical rainforests of the Amazon are not the lungs of the earth at all, and the concept of nuclear winter during the Cold War era is also a well-intentioned hoax -- during the Cold War, even if all the nuclear bombs of all mankind were detonated together, their total energy for the earth was only the amount of a large volcanic eruption, and if more volcanic eruptions could not be induced, then the energy of the nuclear bomb explosion alone could not change the climate.

The so-called control of carbon emissions and 'low-carbon life', which has been hotly hyped recently, is actually a deliberately concocted false proposition - in fact, the little influence that we humans exert on the earth is actually nothing to the earth. The total annual carbon emissions of all mankind are not as much as those emitted by decaying plants in forests. And the annual methane emissions of all mankind cannot catch up with volcanic eruptions, or even termite farting. The so-called issue of controlling carbon emissions is nothing more than an excuse for developed countries to despise and suppress developing countries, analogous to ancient sorcerers accusing tribal members of 'angering the gods'......

Therefore, don't think too highly of yourself, the earth doesn't need to be saved by humans, it is enough for humans to save themselves! ”

After listening to Wang Qiu's tirade, everyone seemed to be a little dizzy, and their thinking was knotted by various conceptual conflicts...... After being silent for a while, Miss Sophie, who was still the most concerned about this world, was the first to retort.

“…… You're right, the earth really doesn't need to be saved, and humans can't destroy it. But the problem is that even if humans can't destroy the earth, they can still easily destroy themselves! Therefore, the current world of human civilization still needs our salvation! ”

Sophie, the ship's mother, who had just recovered (repaired) from her serious injuries, spread her hands with a wry smile, "...... Although the earth's biosphere is very resilient, human civilization is very fragile! Moreover, do you know what the living environment of Europeans is like today? (To be continued.) )