Comments by "Bo McGillacutty" (@Mrbfgray) on "The Last Time the Globe Warmed" video.

This is why Elon Musk will likely go down in history as one of the most important figures in human history.
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The whale one is easy--they are remnants from when whales were land animals, some whales still have rear legs too, some still external and 'nearly useless', most internal and apparently completely useless. The front "legs and feet" are obviously useful in the form of flippers and as you say, their bones strongly resemble (albeit highly distorted) front legs of most other land quadrupeds...and of course the arms (front legs really) of primates. That's exactly the way one would expect evolution to work, same for why they breath air when the vast majority of full time aquatic creatures 'breath water'.
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A crucial reference left out--those CO2 levels were on the order of 4000 ppm, 10 times higher than today. Not to dismiss the rate of change but we aren't likely to see 1000 let alone 4000.
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I loath the term "hero" as it's so over used and tends to imply excess emotion. But yeah...close enough in this case. I don't say it lightly and I don't worship anyone or anything. He has clearly accelerated the whole planet toward EVs, I don't know if he advanced that project by a decade as he might say, but that's not the wildest thing he ever claimed. :-)
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General Motors CEO said, paraphrased: "If a little start up car company in California can build EVs why can't we?" Tesla showed the world that EVs need not be ugly little pathetic 'golf carts' but instead could be the best, most desirable in every way, now every major auto manufacturer on Earth is scrambling to introduce their own EVs. So YEAH....if you follow such things it's obvious Tesla has had a massive impact on the transition to battery cars. It won't be long before almost no one wants a slow, high maintenance, inefficient liquid fuel car or truck. Almost anyone who has ever ridden (let alone driven) a Tesla loves them. ((if that's what you were referring to, you didn't say))
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Humanity just might redeem itself via distributing complex life over multiple cosmic bodies including other star systems which we are on the cusp of doing now. Something that apparently no other life form on Earth has come close to achieving. Also we MIGHT prevent one of the worst sort of extinction events likely...ie. the next K/T scale impact, in which case one would have to conclude that we have done far more good than bad by your metric. (probably)
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Infernity Aliyooo First off--100 years is NOTHING when we are talking 100s of millions of yr.s, and we were, in a sense. 2nd, we have the technology TODAY to deflect an Earth killer asteroid given a couple yr.s or a decade advanced warning, which we are also capable of having with minimal effort. Simply paint it white or park a small probe near it as a 'gravity tractor', or other methods. We are likely to send "micro-probes" to Alpha Centuri in the next couple/several decades. (have you not heard of it? Land based laser beams to 'solar sail' ultra lite probes to some V= 0.2 C? It seems to be in the works...Breakthrough Star Shot, I think it's called) The generally accepted frequency (very roughly) of a KT type impactor is about 100M yr.s, it could catch us by surprise tomorrow obviously but we have the capacity with a few million bucks per year to find virtually all of them decades before they would hit. Sending animals (people) to the next viable star system may take a couple hundred yr.s, but again that's next to nothing in the big picture, except that we can't know when the window for such capability may close (civilization collapse say). So there is urgency. Although I think living on Mars would be worse than prison in many ways, it maybe possible to establish self sufficient colonies there in a few decades....that would be a significant insurance policy against human extinction. And there are no shortage of applicants for the challenge. They might all die the first time but maybe by the 2nd or 3rd go?
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