Chapter 122: The Tough Biosphere and Fragile Civilization In the history of the evolution of life on earth, there have been five mass extinctions of life that shocked the world and almost turned the earth into an alien planet.
The so-called mass extinction refers to the extinction of large-scale biological clusters, also called biological extinction.
That is, an entire family, order, or even class of organisms completely disappears in a very short period of time, or only a very small number of them survive.
The most famous one in the modern world is naturally the one that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, that is, the last mass extinction.
During every mass extinction of life, the entire earth's environment will be turned upside down and become like an alien planet.
If someone could travel through time and space and land on the purgatory template Earth of that era, they would probably never recognize that this ghost place is actually their home planet Earth.
The first mass extinction occurred at the end of the Ordovician period 4.4 billion years ago and was caused by global climate cooling.
Due to the effect of continental drift, the land at that time all gathered near the pole, resulting in thick ice accumulation.
The large glaciers cooled the ocean currents and atmospheric circulation, eventually causing the temperature of the entire earth to gradually drop, leading to the extinction of 85 species that were not cold-resistant enough.
The second mass extinction occurred in the late Devonian period about 3.65 million years ago.
It was also caused by climate cooling and global ice.
The conditions were very similar to the previous Ordovician mass extinction.
The degree of extinction It’s almost the same, so I won’t say more here.
What followed was the third most terrifying mass extinction in the history of the earth, the Permian mass extinction that occurred about 2.5 billion years ago.
At the end of the Permian period, the most terrifying volcanic eruption in history occurred in Siberia.
Molten basalt was ejected directly from the earth's mantle, blasting a 50-kilometer-diameter hole in the earth's crust and lowering the earth's average temperature at that time from 16 degrees Celsius. , rapidly increased to 40 degrees Celsius in a few decades.
Now the average temperature of the earth is 14 degrees Celsius.
Then, from this super The tens of millions of cubic kilometers of magma erupted from the volcano not only burned countless vegetation, but also directly covered half of the land at that time, seriously damaging the ecological chain and causing the oxygen content of the atmosphere to plummet.
The global average temperature is 40 degrees Celsius. , the oxygen content of the atmosphere has dropped below 10.
Now the oxygen content of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is 15, and the oxygen content of the plains is 21 While the oxygen content in the atmosphere plummeted, the sulfur dioxide content in the atmosphere rose to 6, and the carbon dioxide content rose to 10.
The carbon dioxide content in the modern atmosphere is 0.05, and a group of people are already calling for carbon emissions to be controlled.
Due to the sharp increase in the content of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide, and the fires caused by volcanic eruptions, a large amount of toxic gas and greenhouse gas methane was produced, resulting in an extremely terrifying super greenhouse effect.
Moreover, this volcanic eruption continued for hundreds of thousands of years without ending, which was equivalent to continuing to burn the stove in the greenhouse.
Therefore, in the next 100,000 years, the global average temperature continued to climb to a tragic 70 degrees Celsius, which was the coldest in the world at that time.
The place is even hotter than the current Sahara Desert.
Two-thirds of the global seawater has evaporated, and the air humidity is as high as 80.
When sulfur dioxide encounters water vapor, it will form sulfuric acid.
However, the sulfur dioxide in the air was too high at that time, and what fell was no longer acid rain, but dilute sulfuric acid.
Just like that, the whole world The world has been continuously exposed to dilute sulfuric acid for tens of thousands of years.
The global soil and oceans have been completely acidified.
Animals and plants have been exposed to the acid for so long that they can no longer withstand it and are dying one after another.
What's even more terrible is that because super-scale volcanic eruptions lasted for hundreds of thousands of years, the content of volcanic ash, sulfur dioxide, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was increasing day by day, completely blocking the sun, making the entire earth's surface white for as long as 400,000 years.
During the dark night, photosynthesis of plants has completely ceased.
During these hundreds of thousands of years, the Earth looked similar to Venus from space, a bright yellow-brown star.
The color planet is completely wrapped in thick clouds.
There are no seasons on the surface below the clouds.
The global average temperature is as high as 70 degrees Celsius.
All ocean currents have stopped.
The oxygen content of seawater is almost zero.
Two-thirds of seawater has evaporated.
The air humidity has exceeded In the sauna room, sulfuric acid rains every day.
In such a lava hell package, it is a miracle among miracles that all living things on the earth are not wiped out.
Even the hell and abyss in the DND setting are much more livable than the earth during the Permian mass extinction era.
After exactly 200,000 years, the super volcano in Siberia finally stopped erupting.
The basalt solidified by magma is more than 600 meters thick, covering almost the entire surface of the earth.
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Another 300,000 years later, the long night finally ended, the remaining plants began to multiply, the oxygen content of the atmosphere began to recover, the temperature began to drop, the water vapor after cooling formed global rainfall, and the disappeared oceans reappeared.
But the earth Over 98 species have also disappeared forever, and what is left are super dead species with terrifying tenacity, such as sharks, dragonflies and cockroaches.
Especially for sharks, it is really hard to imagine how they can survive and reproduce in sea water of 70 degrees Celsius.
Compared with the purgatory environment of the Permian mass extinction, the environmental damage and air pollution caused by modern humans are nothing.
Even the interstellar wars in science fiction novels will probably not reach such an exaggerated level of destruction.
However, life on the earth has still survived, and the resilience of the biosphere has not turned the earth into a lifeless dead planet.
This can be seen from this.
Forty million years after the Permian mass extinction, the fourth mass extinction, the Triassic mass extinction, began again.
The causes and manifestations of the early stage of this mass extinction are similar to the last Permian mass extinction.
Due to the splitting of the continental plates, a 2,500-kilometer-long and 5-meter-wide tidal wave appeared in the eastern part of the modern United States and the Caribbean.
A large crack of ten meters, about 18 million cubic kilometers of magma and a large amount of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide erupted from the ground, followed by almost identical forest fires, super greenhouse effect, plummeting atmospheric oxygen content, and tens of thousands of years of sulfuric acid rain But when it comes later, it is different from the third mass extinction.
Compared with 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 in the atmosphere obscured the sky, reducing the amount of sunlight received by the surface by half.
The global temperature, which had been rising rapidly, then plummeted rapidly, making it impossible for a large number of early animal eggs to hatch at low temperatures.
Pieces of extinction Then the earth began to fall with heavy snow that lasted for several years, forming glaciers all over the land and the Great Ice Age that lasted for 300,000 years, which also caused the extinction of 76 species on the earth at that time.
If the last mass extinction was a template of lava hell, then this time it is a real two worlds of ice and fire.
Finally, 65 million years ago, the fifth mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period is the most well-known because it is the closest to modern times and ended the age of dinosaurs.
But in fact, if In terms of destructive power and degree of destruction, it is actually the most "mild" of the five mass extinctions.
The specific process is now well known, that is, an asteroid crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, splashing up a huge dust cloud and covering a large area.
At the same time, the impact also caused a large number of volcanoes around the world to erupt, and huge amounts of volcanic ash, carbon dioxide, and sulfur dioxide entered the atmosphere.
The thickness of the clouds reached several kilometers, blocking the sunlight and causing a sharp drop in global temperatures.
The world was plunged into darkness for a full six months.
When the first ray of sunlight penetrated the clouds, the sulfuric acid rain of twenty to thirty years began again.
During this time, the extinction of the dinosaurs occurred first with the death of large tracts of plants, and then the rapid death of the herbivorous dinosaurs.
The carnivorous dinosaurs began to kill each other, and eventually they were all destroyed.
However, compared with the previous Permian mass extinction and Triassic mass extinction, the scale of the Cretaceous mass extinction disaster was extremely small.
First of all, the duration was very short, just a few decades from beginning to end, while the previous Permian mass extinction and Triassic mass extinction were both hundreds of thousands of years in length.
Moreover, the Cretaceous mass extinction did not cause large-scale global anoxia, nor did it have terrifying super-high temperatures or global ice, nor did it cause large-scale ocean evaporation.
Six months of darkness and four hundred thousand years of darkness are two completely different concepts.
A few decades after the asteroid impact, the climate of the entire earth recovered.
In the following early Cenozoic Era, the climate was not significantly different from the end of the Mesozoic Era when 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 earth that has experienced hardships and vicissitudes, we humans are still too You are so young and so ignorant All in all, in Wang Qiu's view, since the earth's biosphere is still full of vitality after experiencing such horrific five mass extinctions, how can it be possible for humans to really destroy the earth with so little ability to mess with the natural world?
What apocalypse is coming?
It's just a nuclear winter.
Compared with these five mass extinctions of life, it's not even a hair.
Besides, even the so-called "nuclear winter" concept is nothing more than a scam and a false proposition.
It is almost the same as the American Star Wars project in the 1980s, but its anti-war purpose is more noble.
Just a little bit.
"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 used to being arrogant and placing their own position too high.
For a while, they feel that Man can conquer nature, he can hold nature in the palm of his hand, but for a moment he is unreasonably worried that he will destroy the earth if he is not careful.
In fact, from the perspective of the earth, I am afraid that human beings seem to have serious egomaniac tendencies, arrogantly thinking that they are important and awesome, but in fact, this is not the case at all.
Many popular environmental protection topics have been over-promoted intentionally or unintentionally.
Our earth is very solid and not easy to control, but it is also not easy to damage it. " In the living room of the shrine, Wang Qiu talked so eloquently about his thoughts and feelings after saving aaaa and destroying aaaa and messing up several worlds, "I remember that there were always some environmentalists in the past who always talked about the Amazon tropics.
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What kind of earth is the jungle?
The lungs account for a fraction of the world's forests, and cutting them off would have disastrous consequences.
It seemed reasonable at first, but when I thought about it later, if we go back to ancient times, then China's Yangtze River.
Yellow River Basin, Ganges River Basin in India, United States In the Mississippi River Basin of the United States, these densely populated areas in the future were covered with large tracts of forests at that time.
In Europe during the ancient Roman era, the entire area was a large black forest, and a squirrel could jump from a tree.
To another tree, all the way from Spain to Denmark, without going to the ground.
Now, these forests have basically been cut down.
In terms of total area, it is at least several times that of the Amazon rainforest.
But the oxygen content of the earth's atmosphere is Why hasn’t there been any significant decline in volume over the past few thousand years?
The reason is simple.
Whether they have ulterior motives or are just heartless idiots, environmentalists are talking nonsense when it comes to oxygen emissions in the Amazon forest.
In fact, of the Earth's annual net oxygen production, marine algae produce 90% of it, freshwater algae produce 3% of it, and mosses and lichens produce 6% of it.
And how much of the oxygen content do all higher terrestrial plants, including forests, grasslands, and crops, produce in total?
1 In other words, all terrestrial higher plants only contribute one percent of the oxygen on the earth, and forests account for an even lower proportion.
For the earth, the oxygen-generating ability of forests can almost be ignored.
It cannot even affect the oxygen content of the atmosphere.
Why is this happening?
Because higher plants themselves also need to breathe.
They have to re-eat part of the oxygen they produce through photosynthesis and spit out carbon dioxide.
In addition, any higher plants are the product of biological carbon accumulation.
After they die, they will rot 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 balance is balanced, a certain Instead of producing extra oxygen, some plants consume more oxygen throughout their lives.
Therefore, even if all the forests on the earth were turned into deserts, there would be no adverse impact on the oxygen content of the atmosphere.
On the other hand, even if time goes back thousands of years and human settlements turn into large forests again, the air on the earth will not become cleaner.”
Wang Qiu picked up the tea cup and took a sip of water, then continued talking nonstop, "It can be seen that the Amazon rainforest is not the lungs of the earth at all.
The concept of nuclear winter during the Cold War era was also a well-intentioned scam.
During the Cold War period, even if All the nuclear bombs in the world have been detonated together.
For the earth, their total energy is nothing more than the eruption of a large volcano.
If more volcanic eruptions cannot be induced, then the energy of nuclear bomb explosions alone cannot change the climate. .
The so-called control of carbon emissions and low-carbon life, which have been very popular recently, are actually also deliberately concocted false propositions.
In fact, the little impact we humans have on the earth is actually nothing to the earth. .
The total annual carbon emissions of all mankind are not as much as those of decaying plants in the forest.
And the annual methane emissions of all mankind cannot keep up with volcanic eruptions, or even termite farts.
The so-called carbon emission control issue is just an excuse for developed countries to despise and suppress developing countries.
It is analogous to ancient wizards accusing tribe members of offending gods.
It is purely a matter of human beings torturing themselves.
So, don’t think too highly of yourself, the earth does not need to be saved by humans, it is enough for humans to save themselves.”
After listening to Wang Qiu's long speech, everyone seemed to be a little dizzy, and their minds were a little knotted by the conflict of various concepts.
After a long silence, Miss Sophie, the ship's wife who cared most about the world, Be the first to retort.
"You are right.
The earth does not need our saving, and humans cannot destroy the earth.
But the problem is that even if humans cannot destroy the earth, they can still easily destroy themselves.
Therefore, the current human civilization world still needs our saving."
Ship girl Sophie, who had just recovered from a serious injury, spread her hands with a wry smile, "Although the earth's biosphere is very tough, human civilization is very fragile.
And, do you know, what is the living environment of Europeans today?"
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What kind of situation is it?”
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