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Some were global, but were not as severe—e.g. the 1918 influenza pandemic killed an estimated 3–6% of the world's population. [13] Most global catastrophic risks would not be so intense as to kill the majority of life on earth, but even if one did, the ecosystem and humanity would eventually recover (in contrast to existential risks ).
Some scholars believe that the projected peak global population of roughly 9-10 billion people could live sustainably within the earth's ecosystems if humans worked to live sustainably within planetary boundaries. [6] [7] [8] The bulk of environmental impacts are caused by excessive consumption of industrial goods by the world's wealthiest ...
Earth has experienced numerous mass extinction events, in which up to 96% of all species present at the time were eliminated. [114] A notable example is the K-T extinction event, which killed the dinosaurs. The types of threats posed by nature have been argued to be relatively constant, though this has been disputed. [115]
A December 2020 study published in Nature found that human-made materials, or anthropogenic mass, exceeds all living biomass on Earth, with plastic alone outweighing the mass of all terrestrial and marine animals combined. [261] [24]
Insects make up the vast majority of animal species. [14]Chapman, 2005 and 2009 [9] has attempted to compile perhaps the most comprehensive recent statistics on numbers of extant species, drawing on a range of published and unpublished sources, and has come up with a figure of approximately 1.9 million estimated described taxa, as against possibly a total of between 11 and 12 million ...
Astrobiologists have not yet found life in any environments beyond Earth, though experiments have shown that tardigrades can survive the harsh vacuum and intense radiation of outer space. The conceptual modification of conditions in locations beyond Earth, to make them more habitable by humans and other terrestrial organisms, is known as ...
Google Earth gives people the power to search remote areas of the globe, and those virtual treks have resulted in some rather intriguing discoveries. Here are 10 mysterious sites spotted via ...
Overexploitation does not necessarily lead to the destruction of the resource, nor is it necessarily unsustainable. However, depleting the numbers or amount of the resource can change its quality. For example, footstool palm is a wild palm tree found in Southeast Asia. Its leaves are used for thatching and food wrapping, and overharvesting has ...