Extinction is a natural byproduct of life and evolution, but an alarming number of species have entered the dustbin of history thanks to human activity — which is anything but natural.
In a 2023 study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists learned humans caused so many extinctions over the last 500 years that if our species had never existed, it would have taken 18,000 years for that same number of genera to have naturally vanished. This finding reinforced a conclusion by a 2021 study in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, which reported that the average predicted extinction rate for freshwater animals and plants today is three orders of magnitude higher than it was 66 million years ago, when an asteroid is believed to have killed the dinosaurs during the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.
