About 200,000 species have become extinct. Is the sixth mass extinction about to begin?

Mass extinction sounds like a serious thing, but the Earth has experienced it five times.

From a dialectical point of view, everything has two sides, and so does mass extinction. For life on Earth, every mass extinction is both a disaster and an opportunity, because no mass extinction can destroy all life on Earth, and after the disaster, new life forms will usher in new development opportunities. The first mass extinction in Earth's history occurred at the end of the Ordovician period 440 million years ago. In this disaster, about 85% of life on Earth became extinct, and the cause of this mass extinction was the arrival of the Earth's ice age. The second mass extinction occurred in the late Devonian period 365 million years ago. It is generally believed that the cause of the Devonian mass extinction was global warming and rising sea levels.

During the second mass extinction event, marine life suffered severe damage, so it is also called the "mass extinction event of marine life."

The most serious mass extinction in the history of the earth was the third one. 96% of the organisms did not survive this disaster. The cause of the disaster was volcanic eruptions and ocean acidification. All of this happened in the Permian period 250 million years ago. The fourth mass extinction occurred at the end of the Triassic period 200 million years ago. The cause has not been determined yet. The most familiar one is the fifth mass extinction. This time it occurred 65 million years ago. The direct cause of the disaster was the impact of an asteroid. This disaster caused the dinosaurs to completely withdraw from the stage of history.

Interestingly, although every mass extinction event is extremely tragic, after the disaster, the earth will become more vibrant, species will become more abundant, and life forms will gradually evolve to a higher level.

Humans are a typical example. With the extinction of dinosaurs, mammals have unprecedented development opportunities. It took only more than 60 million years for them to enter the era of wisdom and civilization. However, the rapid development of wisdom and civilization has also brought some new problems. The impact of human activities on the natural environment has become more and more obvious, especially after humans entered the industrial age. The demand for various earth resources and energy has increased, and the climate and ecology have been affected. According to a statistic, in about 1,500 years, more than 200,000 species have become extinct on Earth, and the extinction rate has reached more than 10%.

The extinction rate of life on Earth is indeed too fast. Even if we only look at the past 25 years, the number of mammals, reptiles, amphibians and birds on Earth has decreased by 29%.

In this context, in 2017, 15,365 scientists around the world jointly issued a warning that human impact on the earth's environment is likely to lead to the sixth mass extinction. Some scientists even believe that we are already in the sixth mass extinction. Is this really possible? The possibility exists. Every mass extinction in the history of the earth is not a point in time, but a process with a long time span. Even the last extinction of dinosaurs did not disappear after the asteroid hit the earth, but died from the long-term climate change after the impact.

Because biological extinction is a long process, we would not feel it obviously even if we were in the midst of it.

Of course, whether humans are experiencing the sixth mass extinction is still an open question, and it is difficult to make a conclusion at this stage, but one thing is certain, that is, we must pay attention to climate and environmental issues. In fact, the impact of human activities on the ecological environment is obvious, but in recent years, when the topic of environmental protection is mentioned, there will always be voices of opposition. Some scholars even believe that the earth has existed for 4.6 billion years, and humans have only entered industrial civilization for hundreds of years. How much impact can they have on the earth? This is a substitution of concepts. Yes, humans cannot affect the earth. The earth can continuously digest and restart itself, but humans and existing earth creatures cannot. We rely on the existing ecological environment, so we must protect it.

The difficulty of environmental protection lies not in technical means but in people's cognition, because it is a matter of "planting trees for future generations to enjoy the shade".

Environmental protection will bring some inconvenience and rising living costs to people living in the present, but there is not much benefit, so it is difficult for people to spare no effort to do this, of course, except for some industries related to environmental protection. This is like the damage rate of desks and chairs in dormitories is significantly lower than that in classrooms, because the things in dormitories are used for four years, while the things in classrooms are only used for one class and have nothing to do with you, so people's protection of these things is naturally very different. The benefits of environmental protection take a long time to show, and human life is too short, so to do a good job in environmental protection, you must also have a long-term vision and a public heart.

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