I can be a bit of an over-optimistic person, but I've always been of the opinion that mass extinction events are always going to occur without intervention and while humans certainly seem to have contributed towards speeding up the timeline heading towards the next extinction event, we're more importantly the only species with potential to mitigate these extinction events all-together.
Without humans extinction events will occur (at least history suggests this is the case). With humans, they might not. For all of our flaws, I think humans are the most beautiful species to come into existence. We have seemingly boundless potential.
Depends a lot on the timeline and extinction event.
In the case of human caused global warming, human harvesting of forests and top soil, endocrine interfering plastics, or global thermonuclear extinction where there is a causal link, those specific events would not happen without human industrialization (and exponential reproduction).
The Sun will one day consume the earth, the possibility of an asteroid (that humans can't destroy) is still there, the magma/volcanic cycle of heating and cooling is there.
I'm curious what extinction events you're so sure humans are capable of preventing that haven't been directly caused by humans (whales, eagles, buffalo, cfcs). And I don't think bacteria or viruses we've experienced qualify to have been extinction level events.
> I'm curious what extinction events you're so sure humans are capable of preventing that haven't been directly caused by humans
It's hard to say, but we may be able to pull off redirecting an asteroid and geoengineering might help offset the worst of some future crisis. Being able to do something from a technical standpoint and being able to actually do it when necessary are very different things though. We're already in the middle of a mass extinction event of our own making and I doubt we'll be able to repair all the harm we've done. Expecting humanity to solve the next one might be asking too much.
I'm not sure of anything but our potential. It's only been roughly 150 years since the first internal combustion engine. Today a 50lbs machine mows my lawn by itself by communicating invisibly with hunks of metal in outer space traveling at 17,000mph around earth to determine its position on the face of the planet within roughly a few centimeters. This machine cost me roughly a week of labor.
I think the much more interesting question is what sorts of extinction events do you think we will be incapable of preventing in 1,000 years?
