When will the Earth try to kill us again?
"The revolutions and changes which have left the earth as we now find it, are not confined to the overthrow of the ancient layers" - Georges Cuvier, 1831.
Our planet Earth has extinguished large portions of its inhabitants several times since the dawn of animals. And if science tells us anything, it will surely try to kill us all again. Working in the 19th century, paleontology pioneer Georges Cuvier saw dramatic turnovers of life in the fossil record and likened them to the French Revolution, then still fresh in his memory.
Today, we refer to such events as "mass extinctions," incidents in which many species of animals and plants died out in a geological instant. They are so profound and have such global reach that geological time itself is sliced up into periods-Permian, Triassic, Cretaceous-that are often defined by these mass extinctions.
Debate over what caused these factory resets of life has raged ever since Cuvier's time. He considered them to be caused by environmental catastrophes that rearranged the oceans and continents. Since then, a host of explanations have been proposed, including diseases, galactic gamma rays, dark matter, and even methane from microbes. But since the 1970s, most scientists have considered the likely root cause to be either asteroid impacts, massive volcanic eruptions, or a combination of both.
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