Long-Range Sudden Systemic Extinction (LRSSE): Why This Time Will Be Different

This planet may have witnessed five major previous extinction events, but it has never been boiled before this fast, this much, for this long. A combination of ecological destruction, pollution, and the expected culmination of the climate crisis over the coming hundreds of years, constitute Earth’s first ever long-range sudden systemic extinction (LRSSE) event.

A species becomes extinct when its numbers are too low for a sizeable, diverse, genetic pool of individuals to exist who can sustain and propagate a healthy population. Although healthy individuals of the species may still exist, they are like pages of a book that was impulsively thrown into a bonfire, then hastily salvaged as an afterthought. Orphaned pages, half-burned fragments of words and passages leading nowhere, they fly past each other in the inferno, but fail to reconnect: there’s just not enough of them at this point to reassemble the story of the species. The book will remain limp, missing a beginning, middle or end.  Although the species isn’t gone yet, it is only a matter of time: it has entered the death spiral of functional extinction. The genome of the species, which had taken millions of years to assemble, has gone through the shredding machine of extinction and become forever unintelligible. It is now no less than a broken poem, a raucous cacophony, an endless rusty junkyard of symbols and sounds that have lost their meaning. Like any book that cannot be read anymore, it dies. Extinction, for any species, means 4 billion years of book-writing thrown in the bonfire.

There is more than one reason why a species can rapidly enter this extinction spiral. Sometimes it is an intense hunt from a predator, like the billions of passenger pigeons of North America that used to be so populous, skies would turn dark for days as massive flocks migrated overhead. They all became food for humans, down to the last few dozen. Other times, the species can run out of resources, like the Monachus tropicalis seals of the Caribbean who starved to death because of human overfishing of their main diet staple. We ate their food.  Whatever the reason for extinction, it always involves a change in environmental parameters, costing the species its competitive advantage.

But however many multiple extinction shocks reverberate up and down the food chain, nature always finds ingenious ways to recalibrate the system, achieving a new delicate balance each time between predator and prey. Any life form who disrespects this balance, wanting more for itself, eventually meets its match. Invasive species, super-multipliers, even most viruses, and especially humans, all have an Achilles heel: their strength is actually their biggest weakness. The more parasitic a species, the more hopelessly dependent it is on its ecosystem. Behind their tough exterior, all predators hide a fragile nature: they can become extinct as easily as their victims.  This applies even to predators who are “above the law”, like humans.

The problem today is that we are facing a simultaneous extinction of the planet’s lifeforms, and the planet’s climate machinery. It is so unprecedented that I don’t think any biologist really can calculate the implications. The future of humanity is probably that of extinction, because of the type of unique, all-encompassing predation we practice: we are not just predators of other life forms. We are predators of the climate machinery which sustains every single one of this planet’s 10 million species. The entirety of the planet’s life support infrastructure is under attack by our civilisation. This is why comparing natural predators to humans is like comparing a light bruise to a thermonuclear holocaust. We are not just a big fish eating every other fish in the tank. We are drinking the water, eating the decorations, unplugging the lights and oxygen supply, and even digesting the glass bowl itself. There is a high chance that, after we are all but gone, evolution on the planet will be rebooting virtually from scratch, in radioactive oceans full of microplastic. We are warned by scientists that ecosystems are not just being degraded, diminished, disturbed, or thrown off balance. The level of damage they are sustaining means that they are actually collapsing, a term used to describe a general, systemic and simultaneous decline across all species populations within a community. The collapse begins with certain key species, but its severity is so extreme that the ecosystem never fully recovers and, most importantly, never finds a chance to rebalance itself in-between multiple shocks that are too closely spaced, such as a rapidly changing climate. Rather than a bumpy roll down the hill, the process becomes a free fall. While stressed species populations scramble for resources that do not exist, the permanent deficit in the food chain becomes a deadly feedback. The entire ecosystem enters an irreversible death spiral, and the countdown to ground zero begins.

The problem with an LRSSE is that ecosystems will sustain much more damage than in a traditional extinction, but most crucially, whatever is left of these battered ecosystems now has to deal with an uninhabitable planet. The survivors, whoever they are, will be species that were made for an entirely different planet that no longer exists. As the play comes to a close and the audience and colorful actors leave the theatre, will there ever be another play? Because the audience seating is being ripped out. The curtains are being torn down, the stage is disassembled, and the lights turned off, for the very last time.

However much evolved and complex our species becomes, it still most closely resembles the simplest life form that exists: a virus. The sooner we accept that we have already become functionally extinct, the quicker we can retrieve whatever we can from the bonfire.

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter @99blackbaloons

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