Sorry, I meant “destroy the planet” as in lifeless/only single celled organisms.

And you can kind of see humanity as “just another big asteroid impact”. Nature will recover competeley over the next million years or so. That’s what I meant with mass extinctions being kind of inconsequential for the planet as a whole on geological time scales.

Obviously mass extinctions are also bad besides their effect on human society, I just meant that that is mostly a spiritual one thats hard to measure, about lost potential and eradicating a species. As a thought experiment, is eradicating a disease, a form of life, inherently negative? Mosquitoes? Do you agree that it’s a big achievement that we eradicated small pox? What if we eradicate all existing diseases?

Well, survive yes. But self-sufficiency is a big problem. The world is nowadays so interconnected that even a problem in only one region can severely affect all of humanity (e.g. semiconductors from Taiwan). So yes, a collapse of our modern society is certainly possible.

Destroying the planet is not really a thing. Mass extinctions in the past were a big deal but at the same time: Earth recovered. We only have a big problem because the plants/animals we need might go extinct.

Obviously valuing nature and wildlife diversity in and of itself is good but it doesn’t have any intrinsic value in regards to supporting society.

Obviously it’s a skill issue but don’t you ever make mistakes? If Rust prevents some bugs and makes you more productive, what is not to like? It’s a new language and takes time to learn but the benefits seem to outweigh the downsides now and certainly in the long run (compared to C at least).

Maybe Torvalds didn’t give in to public opinion but made an informed choice?

The crates are a bit of a problem and I think Rust is a bit overhyped for high-level problems (it still requires manual memory management after all) but those are not principal roadblockers, especially in the kernel.