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Comment by rawland | Hacker News Reader

One author? Honestly?

Besides that, I'm not sure, where to even start, so let's start here:

    "I do not have an immediate doomsday prophecy, but 
    eventually, history suggests, there will be some
    doomsday event".

For the sake of my children: Overly pessimistic and unscientific.

Flying to Mars can be done. For sure. By the work of many.

Then. I have trust, that humans will first clean up the dirty mess in their current habitat ahead of polluting any other.

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Humans have never cleaned up one mess before starting a new one. What makes you think multiplanetary civilisation will be any different?

Humankind has to. On smaller scales, they did many times. There are plenty of examples. Here one I really like: https://www.eea.europa.eu/themes/air:

    In Europe, emissions of many air pollutants have
    decreased substantially over the past decades,
    resulting in improved air quality across the region.

In the other corner we have Exxon Valdez, BP Deep Horizons, Aliso Canyon, rednecks driving "coal rollers", the Koch brothers campaigning against EVs, and the Australian government using the drug dealer defence in relation to coal mining.

Many Europeans see this and are afraid that it will get worse in the US. In my opinion, that's the reason for the strong resistance against TTIP/CETA.

However, we're heading off topic. :-)

Although the paper could have provided a more quantative introduction, like with the doomsday part, however the math on these kinds of things have been done and done again over and over in so many papers, approaching from geological (looking at the rock layers and looking for the frequency of layers that indicate poor living conditions like embedded soot, certain rock types that suggest high energy impact, etc.), archeological (looking at the number of species from fossils in rock layers and looking for large decreases), and physical (solar system asteroid simulations, mathematical study, etc.).

In the end it's been done and the scientific community are well aware of the evidence. They don't need to re-invent the wheel be summarising/repeating this research...

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