And it really did come to this: “Oh my God. I’m back. I’m home. All the time, it was… We finally really did it. You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you!”

Ah, George Taylor, what the shit are you babbling about?
And what did ‘we‘ finally do?

In the immediate foam of the future, the world as we know nowadays is quickly coming to an abrupt climax without a whimper — the greed of humanity will soon be obvious to even nasty-faced Republicans as the various horrors inflicted upon the planet converge into a eye-popping perfect storm of disaster, leaving no one untouched.

(Illustration found here).

Just in the wake of a declaration this week by the US Fish and Wildlife Service that the Eastern Cougar is no more (and hasn’t been for decades) — “We have high confidence that the eastern cougar is extinct” — is another report of an even bigger import.
From AFP (via Raw Story):

Mankind may have unleashed the sixth known mass extinction in Earth’s history, according to a paper released on Wednesday by the science journal Nature.
Over the past 540 million years, five mega-wipeouts of species have occurred through naturally-induced events.
But the new threat is man-made, inflicted by habitation loss, over-hunting, over-fishing, the spread of germs and viruses and introduced species, and by climate change caused by fossil-fuel greenhouse gases, says the study.
…
Until mankind’s big expansion some 500 years ago, mammal extinctions were very rare: on average, just two species died out every million years.
But in the last five centuries, at least 80 out of 5,570 mammal species have bitten the dust, providing a clear warning of the peril to biodiversity.
“It looks like modern extinction rates resemble mass extinction rates, even after setting a high bar for defining ‘mass extinction,” said researcher Anthony Barnosky.
…
The authors admitted to weaknesses in the study.
They acknowledged that the fossil record is far from complete, that mammals provide an imperfect benchmark of Earth’s biodiversity and further work is needed to confirm their suspicions.
But they described their estimates as conservative and warned a large-scale extinction would have an impact on a timescale beyond human imagining.
“Recovery of biodiversity will not occur on any timeframe meaningful to people,” said the study.
…
So far, scientists have identified 1.9 million species, and between 16,000 and 18,000 new ones, essentially microscopic, are documented each year.
“At this rate, it will take us a thousand years to record all of Earth’s biodiversity, which is probably between 15 and 30 million species” said Boeuf (French biologist Gilles Boeuf, president of the Museum of Natural History in Paris).
“But at the rate things are going, by the end of this century, we may well have wiped out half of them, especially in tropical forests and coral reefs.”

And what happens to mankind in all this?

Changes in the smallest detail can sometimes have enormous, and catastrophic results through mankind’s greed and its don’t-give-a-shit attitude.
As per BP’s Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico last year — a rippling effect of change.
From Wired magazine: “While visible damages are evident in the wildlife populations and marine estuaries, the most significant effect may be on the most basic level of the ecosystems: the bacterial and plankton populations,” wrote researchers in a study Feb. 28 in Nature Precedings. “Abrupt and severe changes in the microbial metabolism can produce long-term effects on the entire ecosystem.”

Eventually, good-bye to everything.