The earth will be fine. It’s been through way worse than us. There was about a billion years when the whole thing was just a snowball. People don’t even really know how microbial life that was adapted for the surface survived, although the theory is that its little lifeboats were melted pools of water near volcanic hotspots, some sort of liquid water that incredibly enough was able to randomly stay around the whole time through. It only takes a very small number of survivors to repopulate everything once it turns okay again. The earth has been through oceans at the poles and total freezes and meteor strike apocalypses and everything in between, some of where we came from was the engine of creation in the wake of one of those disasters, the end of the dinosaurs.
The paradise place we call home, though, is cooked and done for forever, on any kind of human timeline. There is 0 chance that what we call a livable biosphere, the kind of green grass nice summer day paradise we were born into, will still be around in a hundred years. It’s gone. We’re the last generation.
There’s still a lot we can do to choose less apocalyptic options. The sheer massive scale of the disaster means that every fraction of a percent could save millions of lives, or significantly reduce the chance of total extinction. But bottom line, the planet itself and the web of life that lives on it will persist. Whether we will, certainly whether our civilization will, is uncertain, it will be determined by this generation and the next.
If the heartbreak I feel didn’t come through about the destruction of our home and everything that makes survival on it easy, the possibility of our total extinction and the certainty of massive scale suffering of every living thing on the planet, then let me make it clear: Yes, that’s a bad thing.