Truth in three panels.

[alfredo]

[NYC_SKP]

1. Silly Gaia! Doesn't she know that our inventiveness will save the day?

.

We'll just use more GMOs to feed all of us, and build desalination plants to overcome the drought.

Oh, and hydraulic fracturing and all the other new ways to extract fuels.

Let's go! We got this!

[alfredo]

2. We are clever, not wise.

[NYC_SKP]

3. TBH, I don't even think we're that clever.

It seemed to be working there for a couple hundred years, though!

The sad part is that, while at times in the past a civilization could crumble and humans might still have a future, we've passed the FUBAR threshold.

And not just environmentally; Ferguson and Citizens United and other indicators suggest that our national institutions are toast, too.

Maybe some small, as yet unscewed-with-by-modernity, population in micronesia will survive all of this.

[alfredo]

4. Our ancestors could over farm, over hunt, over fish, and just pick up and move on.

We are running out of places to move.

[NYC_SKP]

5. Indeed. And, there's a contingent of people who want to colonize space, find inhabitable planets.

All kidding aside, there have been sci fi writers but there are also people who are serious about it, partly as a means of preserving the species, partly for purposes of pure exploitation.

Madness.

[Enthusiast]

7. It is madness.

As a species we are tied to this planet. It is our habitat.

[alfredo]

8. Let's tell the capitalist that Mars has cheap labor and no regs.

[Enthusiast]

12. Yeah! It's true.

But they might have a difficult time of living on a world without vast deposits of fossil fuel.

[alfredo]

14. I'm sure the magic of the marketplace will

come to the rescue.

[Enthusiast]

6. Kicked and recommended! Precisely!

Too bad this isn't widely recognized.

If a giant asteroid crashing into the earth 66 million years ago didn't extinguish all life and if the Permian extinction didn't end all life, it is very unlikely puny humans will destroy the earth.

We will destroy human life and much of the flora and fauna inhabiting the earth now. But the earth will simply shake it off and continue, as it always has.

[alfredo]

9. Most of life is under ground. Many don't need oxygen.

[alterfurz]

10. We'll keep doing what we do...

...until we can't, and then we won't. -- James Kunstler

The Earth is an organism, and that organism has a skin, and that skin has diseases; one of these diseases is Man. -- Friedrich Nietzsche

[alfredo]

11. That cartoon sums it up nicely.

[Enthusiast]

13. Great toon! And great quotes!