Yeah, I guess that was a bit of a strawman. Obviously mass extinctions are bad.

Sorry, I meant “destroy the planet” as in lifeless/only single celled organisms.

And you can kind of see humanity as “just another big asteroid impact”. Nature will recover competeley over the next million years or so. That’s what I meant with mass extinctions being kind of inconsequential for the planet as a whole on geological time scales.

Obviously mass extinctions are also bad besides their effect on human society, I just meant that that is mostly a spiritual one thats hard to measure, about lost potential and eradicating a species. As a thought experiment, is eradicating a disease, a form of life, inherently negative? Mosquitoes? Do you agree that it’s a big achievement that we eradicated small pox? What if we eradicate all existing diseases?

Well, survive yes. But self-sufficiency is a big problem. The world is nowadays so interconnected that even a problem in only one region can severely affect all of humanity (e.g. semiconductors from Taiwan). So yes, a collapse of our modern society is certainly possible.

Destroying the planet is not really a thing. Mass extinctions in the past were a big deal but at the same time: Earth recovered. We only have a big problem because the plants/animals we need might go extinct.

Obviously valuing nature and wildlife diversity in and of itself is good but it doesn’t have any intrinsic value in regards to supporting society.