Recovering After An Extinction

When you despair about man destroying the planet and himself, consider these two things:

• The earth will repair itself within about 10,000,000 years. This seems eternity to us, but it is an eyeblink in evolutionary time. Earth has recovered from similar catastrophes many times before and recovered life in completely new forms.
• Scientists estimate there are 400 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. It takes light 100,000 years to cross it. There are 125 billion such galaxies. We have visited none of them. From a cosmic perspective, lamenting the extinction of man is a bit like lamenting the loss of a population of paramecia in a drop of water. That surely is not all the life there is.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)