Our dogs' diversity can be traced back to the Stone Age

No, we broke the game by domestication, where we simplified hunting to walking the animal into the slaughterhouse. Mammalian wildlife is < 5% of mammalian biomass on earth, with humans being around 30% and domesticated animals being around 60% [1].

For example, there are around 30 billion chickens in the world, butchered within 6-8 weeks. Repeat.

Domestication was partly the result of not eliminating apex predators. A shepherd would guard a flock of sheep, and farmers would historically live/sleep near/with the animals, to protect them day and night.

[1] https://wildlife.org/on-a-global-scale-livestock-outweighs-w...

I think this is quite obviously a Yes And situation.

We've broken the game so many damn times, humans are awesome and we need to keep being awesome.

Somebodies gotta prevent an asteroid from killing the earth over these next 100 years.

It ain't gonna be the dolphins.

Speaking of which, we really need to ask the dolphins if they'd like some thumbs.

By becoming fatter and more delicious, the wild jungle fowl have evolved to exploit the human desire for a reliable source of meat. Now they outnumber us by a factor of four! The chickens have won.

Interestingly, although giant asteroids have certainly been responsible for some of the mass extinctions we see in the fossil record, apparently super volcanoes are also right up there. And I don't think there is a damn thing we can do about them

If it involves eggs, I think we'll be fine, by the sheer number of them.

> No, we broke the game by domestication

We domesticated plants animals for their meat, products and labour. We also domesticated dogs. This isn’t an either or.

> apparently super volcanoes are also right up there. And I don't think there is a damn thing we can do about them

I'm not sure about that.

Don't get me wrong, an example of a super-volcano is Yellowstone National Park, so I agree we can't prevent them

Rather, looking at the pandemic response and various wars, I think (most) world governments are competent enough to re-organise labour and national diets to mitigate the problems one would cause: covering farms in poly-tunnels, having "national service" that's about building/repurposing farming infrastructure rather than military function, food rationing, changes to farming laws to make sure livestock is only on land that doesn't support intensive crops, etc.

That's if we don't extinct ourselves (and the dolphins) first.

> an example of a super-volcano is Yellowstone National Park, so I agree we can't prevent them

We absolutely can, and extract geothermal energy from the system to boot.

Are you sure?

Everything I've seen suggests that the thermal mass of the Yellowstone magma reservoir is order-of 10km each way (so 1000km^3 total), density order-of 3 kg/litre, and heat capacity order-of 1500 J/kg K, so lowering the temperature of that reservoir by 100 K would still yield about the entire world's energy consumption in 2017: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1000km%5E3+*+3kg%2Fl+*+...

Even though this would combine both left-coded and right-coded aspects of the USA's politics (right: the USA's love of energy intensity; left: in this scenario it helps the environment not be made of fire), I find it dubious that the US would (or could) construct enough power plants to reach that scale.

(China might even want to help, but at this point I find myself too cynical of both China and the USA for that to happen even in an emergency).