I’m probably going to judge you if you say Holocene, without an interesting non-trivial reason.

    • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.caOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      2 months ago

      That’s my fav too.
      “The Oxygen Catastrophy” is just such a cool name.

      • Also some upstart bacteria just start pumping out poison that kills almost everything (oxygen)
      • Causes the ocean to rust
      • Causes the atmosphere to catch on fire
      • then causes the earth to turn to a snowball

      Fuckin metal

  • robocall@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    25
    ·
    2 months ago

    I wouldn’t call any extinction event a favorite, because it is a loss. An interesting one that is less known than the Dodo is that the wake island rail bird was hunted to extinction by starving Japanese soldiers in WWII. The Americans blockaded the island, trapping the Japanese there, and they ate all the birds in just a couple years time.

    I think it’s an interesting extinction because it’s an unintended casualty of war.

  • Adderbox76@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    20
    ·
    2 months ago

    Not a full on extinction event, but the late bronze age collapse has always fascinated me. So much do that it led me to pursue archaeology in college.

    So many theories, everyone has their favourite, but yeah, what ultimately caused every near eastern civilisation as well as the Mycenaean Greeks to just all collapse and disappear over a relatively short 200 years or so (archaeologically speaking a blink-of-an-eye)

  • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    13
    ·
    2 months ago

    Discussion: you can have an “extinction event” in any ecosystem-- not just biological ones.

    For example, the abandonment of steam locomotives in the mid-20th-century, or the Home Computer crash of the 1980s.

    Similar to a biological mass extinction, you have:

    • A discernable ecosystem change, either a sudden event (the introduction of reliable, mass-produced diesel locomotives), or a measurable decline of “habitability factors” (as hundreds of firms brought cheap 8-bit computers to market, retail space and overall consumer interest saturated)
    • a rapid diversification of new and exotic types to fill the vacated niches (the cabless “B-unit” and flexible “road-switcher” locomotive types didn’t exist in the steam era. The post-crash computer market brought in new entrants like cheap IBM clones, the C128 and Atari 130XE, all chasing a sub-$1000 market that was now free of Sinclair, Coleco, and Texas Instruments)
    • followed by a shake out and consolidation of the survivors/winners as they select for fitness in the new world (ALCO was a strong #2 in the diesel locomotive market in 1950, but didn’t make it to 1970. The C128 never became the world-beater its predecessor did.)
    • a few niches largely untouched (China was still building steam locomotives into the 1990s. The Apple II series lasted about as long.)
    • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.caOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      2 months ago

      I like it!
      I kind of feel like “locomotive” itself is a niche so this is more like a collapse of a niche rather than a mass extinction, but I love the analogies

  • Donjuanme@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    12
    ·
    2 months ago

    When the hyper intelligent dinosaurs lost control of their nuclear power plants and their society collapsed.

    Just a pet theory of mine.

      • meyotch@slrpnk.net
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        2 months ago

        Ooh, since this is a safe space for dorks, I would like to be pedantic myself. Thank you for the opportunity. The oxygen catastrophe was caused by cyanobacteria-like organisms, which are photosynthetic, but are not plants. But it’s true, all bio-mass matters!

          • SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            4
            ·
            2 months ago

            The first thing that comes to mind is that bacteria are prokaryotes, while plants are eukaryotes. They have internal membranes, called thylakoids, in which they do photosynthesis, but chloroplasts in plants are fully-developed organelles with their own DNA. If I recall correctly, the current thinking is that chloroplasts developed from endosymbiotic cyanobacteria.

        • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.caOP
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          2 months ago

          Yeah I knew they weren’t plants but it made the analogy easier to pretend they were 😅
          They have plant-ey vibes

          They were all like “let’s get the Calvin cycle up in this house, lets light it up!” And so they did, and the atmosphere caught fire

  • mub@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    2 months ago

    Zombie apocalypse. Anyone left over is either immune from the cause or smart enough to avoid it.

    Just me but I like the idea of a peaceful world.