That 5% would be 100% of life at that time -- and there are life forms that exist in unheard of conditions, spiders which survive freezing, bats which hibernate with almost zero body temp, worms living off sulphorous thermal vents and even life that eats radiation. And that's just the life we are familiar with. Life is possibility, not static forms.Gawdzilla wrote:As far as humans go, we hit one bottleneck where there were maybe 10,000 people. That may be the bottom limit, or we might be able to go lower. The rest of the life on the mud ball will have to see how bad we fuck the place up.Crumple wrote:I suppose if 5% of life remains in time things might rejig, that'll do just fine?apophenia wrote:In answer to your question, "No. Yes. Maybe."
(By the way, the biosphere will be just fine. We may not be, but that's irrelevant. Or something.)
We may some day look back and talk about how the species survived with as few as 6 billion people at one point.
Or maybe, we will be survived by teeming seas of silica nanites that were left over from some industrial accident.
But getting back to the original question. It's something of a banal observation that without ugliness there is no beauty, without bad, good, etc. If one analogizes shame to guilt as the latter being feeling bad about something you've done, whereas the former is feeling bad about who/what you are, then I suppose evil is possible. All that is necessary is to be a who for whom one's nature results in an extremely high ratio of bad to good acts. I suppose the usual suspects of Hitler, Stalin, Lenin and Pol Pot line up here, but one is left with figuring out what is and isn't moral. In my view, several prerequisites are necessary, one being affecting moral beings with consciously immoral acts which violate the needs of one's population group (usually species), but that's another thread.
