But there’s a risk of stretching the analogy too far: Earth has been many different planets over its lifetime, and though in some salient and worrying ways our modern planet and its future prospects echo some of the most frightening chapters in its history, in many other ways our modern biocrises represent a one-off—a unique disruption in the history of life. And thankfully, we still have time. Though we’ve proven to be a destructive species, we have not produced anything even close to the levels of wanton destruction and carnage seen in previous planetary cataclysms. These are absolute
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