Dead. We not the earth, the earth will still be here. Humanity on the other hand is out of control and is heading toward self destruction. That war like nature and our inability to get along and work toward common goals MAY have served a purpose thousands of years ago, today with 6.5 + billion people on earth, limited resources and petty arguments over theology and morality that sort of behavior will lead to the launching of all of the nuclear warheads on earth. If its not nuclear war then it will be our inability to curb our enthusiasm for making babies. 1 billion is what the earth can handle NATURALLY - with irrigation, some organic soil amendments and with the tractors and their attending tools we could feed 3 billion. We can't feed everybody already. We try and continually fail. Instead of rationally reducing our numbers by real planned parenthood (where we consider and train parents to be BEFORE they have a large family), we are turning to genetic engineering, hybridization and a heavy dependency on chemicals to sustain our crops. On top of that we are pumping the ground water dry to water those crops and actually believe that we should plant crops in what would naturally be wastelands. If that isn't going to kill us then it will be the wastes we dump freely into our environment. Plastics are bad, very bad - so bad that they should be banned and forgotten (petrol chemical ones). Do we do so? No, instead we create more and most of it goes into land-fills. Plastic does not degrade - it breaks up into smaller and smaller bits until eventually it is small enough to spread into underground and above ground resources where fish suck it in and those fish become toxic on those bits of plastic, those fish are hunted by animals and humans - their plastic infested bodies become part of our food chain. If its not plastics then it will be the millions of tons of toxic materials we create willy-nilly as part of our day to day life. Strip mining, and creating wonderful deadly toxins is a bad idea all around. What makes all of this worse is we humans know we are doing the wrong thing. But too few of us are actually doing something to change these things. As a species we are a dead-end evolutionary branch. In short we are too smart for our own good, yet not smart enough to stop what we are doing.