Alright as much of an angry silly exchange this has been between you and paulwall it's been interesting to me. He's being a smug dumbass about it but I still agree with the point that the entire framing of this seems nonsensical to me. You can't apply purely human concept that are extremely contextual to those things. You can't say any of those things existed "before humans", it's not that nothing existed before humans, it's that our perception of things and the words and concepts we use are entirely limited to us and extrapolating them to other things in that way seems silly and ends up back into anthropo-centrism to me.

I'm not going into the "humans are special" because of language or whatever else because I don't know enough about it and it's a pointless argument because it doesn't matter to this. In fact the argument itself always ends up being anthropocentric to me, whether it's to say "other animals are not as smart/special as us" OR to say "other animals are as smart/special as us". It's applying our own extremely contextual words and concepts on things non-human, those other things don't give a fuck what words we use, no matter how smart they are. They exist outside of how we talk about them or how we think about them.

Whatever other animals can/do think and feel doesn't matter here, this kind of take still seems nihilistic and anthropo-centric. The whole idea of humans having a "good or bad" impact on earth is within a human context, the concept of earth is within a human context. If you end saying that "humanity" is "bad" and should end, then yea to me that's nihilistic, misanthropic (not that that makes it or you bad because of it that's just how I would define it), but more importantly it's pointless. It's an answer to a nonsensical question. It doesn't matter, it's not productive and it seems very self-centered.

This is kinda hard to talk about because it's not even a very tangible or materialistic topic, it's mostly philosophical, so sorry if my thoughts aren't very clear.