When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine. Do you think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. The evolutionary process would begin again. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Earth has survived everything in its time. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away - all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Bacteria first later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. “You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity.
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