Your Local Cassandra

Your Local Cassandra

What Happens After Humans Go Extinct?

A planet without humans could be beautiful.

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Jessica
Sep 03, 2025
∙ Paid
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Lately, it’s been on my mind.

Extinction.

Everything has changed over the last five years. New studies have come out. The planet is warming more than all the scientists thought, faster than they thought, and it’s going to get worse than they thought. We faced an outside chance of extinction within a hundred years, but 3-4C degrees of warming makes that more certain. Not by the end of the century, but the middle.

All this might sound like classic doomerism, but it’s not. We’re just being honest. After all, has climate optimism actually motivated anyone to change their habits? Has sugarcoating the truth helped?

Look around…

Scientists tend to agree that we’re actually living in the middle of a mass extinction right now, one caused by human activity. You’d think every newspaper would devote a section to that, but it doesn’t even make the back page.

For most people, it’s not a story.

Most of your friends and family would probably call you a conspiracy theorist or a fearmonger for even sa…

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