When I was a kid, the media had convinced me there wouldn't be any wildlife left on the planet and pollution was going to render large sections uninhabitable by humans.<p>That was really my first experience with reasoning by extrapolation and it really affected my thinking. Later, when none of the things that were forecast came to pass, I began to examine the whole process of reason by extrapolation and its application to dynamic systems.<p>That isn't to say that there haven't been pollution events, or that things that shouldn't have gone extinct haven't, instead the dynamics of the system shifted and pushed things in different ways.<p>I also read about the many extinction events in the planets history and how things came back from each one, different than before.<p>It is always possible that humans will be the cause of the next major extinction event, and if we are, that event will likely take us with it. And that would demonstrate that ultimately the system stays in balance. And that ultimately the planet doesn't really care about us at all.<p>That said then, do we as a species kill off our own fishermen? It has been estimated by some [1] that less than 2 billion people can live on the planet in "harmony" (what ever that means) so do we go kill off the other 4 - 5 billion losers? And then take up residence in caves?<p>Or do we focus on harnessing the energy and technologies we need to support as many people as we would like and to move them to other planet too? Ultimately someone has to tell the general population that whether it is humans, an asteroid, a volcano, or something else this place is a death trap and we better get working on a plan to go elsewhere.<p>[1] <a href="http://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/geas_jun_12_carrying_capacity.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/geas_jun_12_carrying_ca...</a>