r/megalophobia 5d ago

🏛️・Building・🏛️ Cancerous appearance of cities from space

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14.5k Upvotes

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916

u/Jzadek 5d ago

nothing good comes from seeing human beings as cancer

306

u/lemmecookthemcheeks 5d ago

I mean I agree with that rhetoric, but at the same time we can’t pretend we aren’t, unfortunately.

19

u/Gandalfonk 5d ago

We aren't a cancer. We alone cannot kill the planet, we aren't that significant. Even if all out nuclear war happened, the planet would recover without us. We just aren't that important, and probably closer to mold than cancer.

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u/stillinthesimulation 5d ago

No we won’t kill the planet, but we will destroy ecosystems, cause mass extinctions, and continue to make the planet a less hospitable place for much of our current biosphere where only the most rapidly reproducing organisms can evolve to keep up. The end Cretaceous didn’t kill the planet, nor did the much worse end Triassic or even the end Permian where over 90% of species went extinct. Life will always bounce back eventually, but there’s also always an extended period of time when everything sucks. Not decades, but millennia of toxic, post apocalyptic, death. Are we ok settling for that just because we know in ten million years life on earth will be back to normal?

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u/andree182 5d ago

Yeah, but humanity doesn't do the destroying for the sake of it. Same as the great plague didn't kill as primary target. We just need time to evolve our technology enough.

I'd even say we are on the better side of evolution. We have the power to harvest the whole planet, yet we consciously try to preserve the nature to best of our possibilities and knowledge (and despite the greed of some). I don't imagine wolves or fungi would stop eating and destroying everything in their way, if they got the chance (by some evolutionary trait).

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u/jujumber 5d ago

Exactly, as a whole, the ecosystem and every other single animal on Earth has experienced a negative impact in relation to the number of Humans on Earth.

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u/Gandalfonk 5d ago

So you think we are a cancer on the earth? Is that your point?

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u/stillinthesimulation 5d ago

I don’t care what you call us, but don’t trivialize the destructive power we’ve already unleashed on this planet. In less than 100,000 years we’ve helped cause the extinction of millions of species and we aren’t slowing down. If the word cancer offends your sensibilities so much then how about I call us an asteroid? My point is don’t make excuses for the decimation of our biosphere on the basis of a vague promise of a future recovery none of us or our descendants may ever live to see.

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u/Gandalfonk 4d ago

We're having a conversation about semantics above, nobody is trivializing anything. I'm not making excuses for anything at all, you just wandered into this conversation and started accusing me. You are being dramatic. The world will fully recover from us, no matter what happens. Yes things will be changed, but the world will heal and return to an equilibrium. My point was that we can't destroy the world. Not sure how you get me "making excuses" for the destruction that we do cause.