Assessment of the planet known as Earth

August 28, 2025

The Earth is sick. It is losing species to extinction at an accelerating rate. Its forests and grasslands are shrinking daily. Its environment exceeds safe limits in six of its nine key planetary boundaries. Irreversible tipping points are gaining strength – icecaps and permafrost melting, forests shrinking, coral reefs dying, ocean currents changing.

This sickness has its roots in the planet’s dominant life-form – intelligent bipeds who have learned to exploit the planet’s natural resources. These beings have thrived over the last 12,000 years of exceptional climate stability, but in recent decades this life-form’s demands have grown to a parasitic level, sucking the resources it requires to satisfy its own growing needs well beyond what their planet’s ecosystems can sustain. Growing pollution chokes atmosphere and seas. Our expectation must be that their planet’s ecosystems will largely collapse beneath their ruthless pillaging of its resources.

In time — expect geological time — this planet’s ecology could recover, and vegetable and animal life revive, as it has done five times before. Whether this will eradicate the parasitic bipeds seems unlikely, but we hope that their numbers in future will be much reduced such that a healthy environment can be sustained for all life.