3 Answers

  1. Oh, of course, other species have had far more harmful effects on Earth. The most harmful impact on the planet was made by life forms that began to produce oxygen. They completely changed our planet, destroying almost all life forms that were not ready for the appearance of oxygen in the atmosphere.

    The Permian mass extinction cost the planet 90% of its biodiversity, and one of its possible causes is the appearance of methane – producing archaea.

    Devonian extinction-possibly related to plant evolution.

    The famous dinosaur extinction may also be related to plants. In the West, they love the meteorite impact hypothesis, but in our country they prefer the biogenic one, which is well and plausibly described by Eskov in the book “History of the Earth and Life on It”.

    The sequence of events that led to the extinction is presented as follows:

    * Flowering plants, which have a more developed root system and make better use of soil fertility, quickly replaced other types of vegetation everywhere. At the same time, insects specialized in feeding on flowering plants appeared, and insects “tied” to previously existing vegetation species began to die out.
    * Flowering plants form sod, which is the best natural erosion suppressant. As a result of their spread, the erosion of the land surface and, consequently, the supply of nutrients to the oceans decreased. The” impoverishment ” of the ocean with food led to the death of a significant part of algae, which were the main primary producer of biomass in the ocean. Along the chain, this led to a complete disruption of the entire marine ecosystem and caused mass extinctions at sea. The same extinction event also affected large flying lizards, which, according to available ideas, were trofically related to the sea. Some of the large marine reptiles, in addition, could not compete with the sharks of the modern type that appeared at this time.
    * On land, animals actively adapted to eating green mass (by the way, herbivorous dinosaurs too). In the small size class, small phytophagous mammals (such as rats) appeared. Their appearance led to the appearance of corresponding predators, which also became mammals. Small-sized carnivorous mammals were not dangerous for adult dinosaurs, but they fed on their eggs and young, creating additional difficulties for dinosaurs in reproduction. At the same time, the protection of offspring for a dinosaur is practically impossible due to too large a difference in the size of adults and cubs.

    It's easy to set up a masonry guard (some dinosaurs in the Late Cretaceous actually practice these types of behaviors), but when the baby is the size of a rabbit and the parents are the size of an elephant, you can crush it faster than you can protect it from attack.[25]

    * Due to the strict limit on the maximum egg size (due to the permissible shell thickness), large dinosaur species had babies born much lighter than adults (in the largest species, the difference in weight between adults and cubs was thousands of times). This means that all large dinosaurs had to repeatedly change their food niche during the growth process, and at the early stages of development they had to compete with more adapted specialized species[27]. Primitive intelligence and the lack of generational transmission of experience only made this problem worse.
    * As a result of continental drift at the end of the Cretaceous period, the system of air and sea currents changed, which led to some cooling over a significant part of the land and an increase in the seasonal temperature gradient. Inertial homoyothermy, which provided dinosaurs with an evolutionary advantage in previous periods, no longer had an effect under such conditions.

    So there is no need for this anthropocentrism, we are not as significant as we would like to think of ourselves.

  2. In my opinion, the most harmful influence of humanity is on ourselves. The Earth will calmly endure the extinction of humanity.

    She has already endured a lot, and she will endure a lot more…

  3. The topic is well-known, voiced in a very simplified form in the “Matrix”. Remembering Chernobyl, the drying up of the Aral Sea, the expansion of the dead spaces of the world ocean, the reduction of the ozone layer ,the rate of reduction of fertile soils ,the rate of extinction of biological species (due to human activity), including knocked-out mammoths, etc., and the consequences of man-made disasters… The relationship between man and the planet is not a synergistic coexistence. This, of course, is similar to pathogenic viruses. Of course, the greatest damage goes to the flora and fauna. The Earth itself – to a lesser extent.

    http://www.youtube.com/embed/U-ijUylm64k?wmode=opaque

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