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I guess I wouldn't know how to do real research cause when I google what is the largest native American city before Europeans got here, it says this:
Don't get me wrong. I have read Fingerprints Of The Gods and I am deeply intrigued by the idea the Olmecs are the ancestors of "African Americans" and not Africans. Hell I even loved the hypothesis that Devils Rock was really a big tree stump. But I'm just not seeing the evidence here.
Right, because simply googling something is doing real research....
"Business as usual" is what's going to ravage our environment. Of course species go extinct, but if it's the direct result of massive overdevelopment on our part, that impacts us. I mean look at the comparison of old growth forest in the USA:
You don't think that has an adverse effect on the ecosystem and species that depend on those environments? Sure, nature adapts, but it may not adapt in a way that is conducive to supporting so many of us either. But like you said, insects will win either way.
It's more like they're doing it wrong AND we're doing it wrong, our way of life is not sustainable for the population we have, that's all there is to it. The only thing resembling a solution is to scale down the amount of resources we use, which simply isn't how we're operating. Most of the advances we've made come at the cost of resources that are consumed faster than they're replenished. You can look at much of our prosperity over the past 150 years or as essentially borrowing from our future. Nature requires us to use some resources and preserve others, so it's sustainable. Our economic system requires us to have endless growth and profit as much as possible from all available resources. These views can't co-exist, so nature tends to lose. Unfortunately the concept of imposing limits on our way of life for our long-term survival is viewed as very un-American, so we're on a collision course one way or another.
Of course they support life, you'll just have different species thriving in different types of forests. The rainforests are up to 55 million years old. You think those don't support life? They have some of the most diverse life on all of the planet and have been the source for many medicinal discoveries. Sometimes the impact between cutting down old growth forest and replanting is neglible, in many other cases it's irreplaceable. As for the Native Americans, what they cut down is negligible compared to what we've done in the past century and a half.
Did you read my whole post? I don't think so. I said the same thing, I said that it is not a "mass extinction event" because that suggest it's a natural occurrence, nothing to be worried about. When in fact as I already pointed out in my first post it's due to human intermingling and reduction of living spaces.
It isn't applied to everyone right now. That's exactly the problem.
Old growth/Virgin just means it's a long lived forest pretty much any forest older than industrial logging this includes stuff like the amazon pretty much every forest is an old growth forest, they are the biggest areas for life diversity. I think you've confused old growth with second/n growth forests which have been logged and often lack bio diversity in trees leading to a lack of biodiversity as a whole
As to your hypothetical - we really have two options. Status quo, where our population continues to rise out of control (and regardless of the fact that developed countries birth rates have slowed, that is the trend), or take some control. Will some populations decrease enough to disappear? Quite possibly, especially populations that are currently marginal - basically, we'd have the exact same cultural / 'race' ratio we have now, / 15 (with 1 child per couple x 5 generations, we'd go from 7.5 billion to ~ 500 million).
First off, sentient AI isn't going to happen in our lifetimes, if ever. I swear, some people see AI and think it's magic, then draw lots of conclusions off of that. We don't even know how HUMAN consciousness works, let alone how to program for it. I guess the idea is with enough processing power we'll "stumble into it", except we probably won't even recognize it when we have it (assuming we're even aiming the right direction), plus we may as well win 10 lottery tickets in a row while we're at it.
Just a matter of time. With time, everything is possible. 50 years ago, if you told people half the things we have created since then, they wouldn't believe you about them, either. 'Can't be done', they would say. 'Impossible, the laws of physics tell us so'. Not to mention, 'Everything that can be invented, has been invented'.
Which is why we have space colonies in other star systems now. Some things have more extreme limits than others. It's only a matter of time if everything continues to progress forward. That's not necessarily a sure thing. Ancient Rome had a lot of technology and advancements that were lost in the Dark Ages. There's nothing preventing us from regressing either. Either way, sentient AI is about up there with cryogenic resuscitation and teleporters. If it can even happen at all, it's so far off from where we are now, that making predictions upon that seems foolhardy compared to the things that are coming right at us.
I mean that. That's some very interesting stuff. Paleoanthropology. Cool. Seriously, awesome. 
