The Mesozoic started with a mass extinction (Permian-Triassic). The Triassic Period then gave way to the Jurassic Period following another mass extinction. The Mesozoic Era ended with another extinction (Cretaceous - Paleogene). So my question: why are the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods separate as they are not separated by a mass extinction?
The 50 year timeframe is to allow humans to put out enough GHG to well and truly fuck the collapse survivors over. Spending the 100 billion on collapsing civilization early to avoid this is cheating.
The extinction event will roughly conform to the Kump hypothesis for the "Great Dying." Warming triggers methane release resulting in over 10 degrees C of warming. The ocean is almost completey wiped and sulfate-reducing bacteria reduce massive amounts of H2S. Resultant atmosphere toxicity and ozone depletion is not complete, but severe.
Edit: To be clear, I'm assuming in this scenario you cannot stop these two events with this money. Which might not be true. But I'm more interested in what we could do to set the survivors up for success.
So glad that you guys are back! Been missing the show for a while now!
There's something I've been thinking about a lot and I think you guys would find super interesting as a topic for a show, and is really the ultimate 'collapse of the environment and the end of the world.'
If anything, it helps to put the current situation with climate change and species extinction into context, as well as brings up lots of philosophical questions about what extinction and cataclysm means, the 'nature' of nature, and more. This has happened before. Please hear me out here, this is a long post, and while I'm not necessarily an expert, I've been reading about it a ton over the past year. You guys are much better storytellers than me.
I was actually the guy who suggested the Trash Show a while back, and I'm so glad you guys made it. Thanks!
Here's my pitch:
There was a time when runaway climate change killed basically everything on earth - all the animals, trees, insects, molluscs, sea creatures, damn near everything but the bacteria - and the beginning stages of it were in many ways a lot like the beginning stages of what we're seeing today in the Anthropocene:
The Permian-Triassic Extinction event.
No joke - this is actually super interesting as it relates to life at the beginning of what appears to be another huge climate change event, and if anything the current one is happening much faster.
Not just whole species but whole families of species were killed outright due to environmental change. Around 95% of all living species were lost in the space of a couple hundred thousand years, or less. This means that, at its worst, there may be just a couple members of any specific species living on the planet, anywhere. OMG Also, something that's mind-blowing and we lose sight of sometimes is that THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED, and it happened where we are and live today.
Thinking about it requires a different kind of thinking, at a Planetary scale - we're talking about a cause whose effects touched every living thing and biome - and also in Deep Time. We're not talking about 'an event,' at the human-scale, but rather LITERALLY FOR A COUPLE HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS EVERYTHING WAS DEAD OR DYING and then even after it ended the earth that was left took MILLIONS OF YEARS TO RECOVER. We're talking about something that happened on the scale of 30,000-250,000 years (hard to define an actual moment it started and 'ended'), and then millions of years later stuff still w
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