this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2025
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No, it's not "game over". It will never be game over. Humans do not have the ability to destroy the planet.
What we do have is the ability of making it hard for lots of regions to sustain complex biodiversity and human activity. The more and the faster the average global temperature increases, the more people will be displaced and biodiversity lost.
Nature will always bounce back because nature operates in geological scale. But human civilization will suffer a lot. Vast areas will be progressively destroyed by droughts, floods, fires and encroaching sea, which will continue increasing migration to safer places, causing more and more unrest and war.
So, yeah. Never game over, just progressively crappier levels.
I'm sorry but we have so many nukes that your answer is trivially wrong. Also don't get technical with the "well is it really destroyed" like yes, if your house is rubble, technically all the mass is still there, a bunch of the walls are still intact, you can probably even still see the floorplan, but it's no longer a house. You tell someone to draw you an "Earth", and yeah humans can very much destroy the fuck out of that.
Nukes won't destroy the planet. All their yields combined don't measure up to a 1 km asteroid or an average supervolcano, and their radiation and dust is gone in 0.00005% of the remaining time Earth will exist.
The chemical pollution of all our industry washing out to sea will have a bigger impact. All ocean-based animals with shells will die out as oceanic acidity reaches critical levels, though in 0.01% of the remaining time earth will exist shell-based life from freshwater habitats would probablu repopulate them if non-shell-based life doesn't evolve to fill the same niches first.
There will be trees, flowers, mammals, shellfish, algae, fungi, birds, reptiles, and insects. The Earth from above will look like ocean, forest, desert, and glacier, though the forests may cover less of it for the first 0.01% of the remainder of its existence. We will produce a mass extinction event comparable to the other five, but Earth will still look the same at the scale of a simple drawing.