Miss Humans When They Go Extinct, or Not

The number of people who address the matter of whether we're good or bad as a race increases by the day, especially in later times, when issues such as global warming, resource depletion, pollution, urbanization or wars are believed to eventually threaten the planet's equilibrium up to some point.

Of course, it's hard even to imagine the extent to which we did good or bad for the last 20.000 years, as these concepts themselves are philosophically under debate, but it seems the largest part of people tend to focus on our least bright side. From the dawn of life's evolution on Earth, it has been pointed out that there hasn't existed any other such destructive species as ours, especially since we carry out our planet-damaging ways with such zeal and awareness. We are to blame for the extinction of more lifeform than nature was ever able to accomplish. And we don't limit ourselves to desecrating our own planet, but instead we turn to space as well, in order to dump our toxic thrash as far away from us as possible.

As Wallace Stegner, American novelist and environmentalist has it, “We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate”. But how about the obvious good stuff that we did? We are the only species on Earth that is consciously able to enhance nature's abilities to create and evolve. True, we messed up the environment at some point, but we are beginning to reverse the process (by reusing energy, conserving wildlife, or lessen our dependency on fossil fuels by finding alternatives to it) and, more than that, even improve what is already good. “We are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy,” concludes Stegner.