As far as we know life is only present on Earth, we presuppose that in the vastness of Cosmos there are other instances of it or that it can re-emerge from almost zero, but the reality is that we simply don't know. So maybe there is a possibility that wiping out all the life on Earth also wipes it from the entire Cosmos, forever.
replyOr perhaps the comment you were responding to was asserting "knowing" or "caring" is not something Nature can do.
replyI care and I'm part of Nature.
replyThe comment was paraphrasing the message of the poem "There Will Come Soft Rains" (which Bradbury used for the title of his story), which is exactly about this: that Nature won't know or care when we're gone.
reply"Humanity" is far from "all the life on Earth". Nature will be better off once it happens.
replyI see this a lot, and I think it's sort of naive. Nature itself is doomed due to the way the universe works. It's also far more brutal and arbitrary than we could imagine being. The only way to even have a chance at avoiding the doom that "nature" is facing is for something to evolve that can manipulate and forestall this inevitability.
replyI don't know if humanity is what can do that, and likely nobody knows. But nature is not going to survive either once you broaden the time horizon a bit.
> Nature will be better off once it happens.
replyAs long as "it" happens before we poison or otherwise harm our planet beyond some "tipping point" after which Earth becomes "inhospitable" to most/all "complex" life in general.
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reply> Nature won't know or care if humanity erases itself.
replyYou got downvoted for paraphrasing the poem "There Will Come Soft Rains", from which Bradbury took the title of his story.
I supposed that's to be expected online. Small consolation, but at least some of us understood you :)
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.Thanks. Glad at least a few people understood. I pulled out my copy of Martian Chronicles today (which I'm fortunate to have signed by Bradbury) when I saw this pop up on the main page.
replyIt's common for spammers to use an LLM to post a short summary of a thing in the thing's comments, to attract upvotes.
replyFair, but even though I don't comment often, my account is almost 15 years old. So I'd hope that at least pushes back against the spammer aspect - but ultimately, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
replyIt's also common for spammers to hijack old accounts.
replyOh! I didn't even think it could be a spambot. You may be right :(
replyI'm not a spambot - it just felt sort of poignant for today. Ultimately, doesn't bother me that it got downvoted. Created some discussion, I got maybe mistaken for a bot - so all good ;).
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