AI ran over 3,800 extinction events in Earth’s history, and the pattern it uncovered is deeply unsettling. Past collapses, from the dinosaurs to earlier mass die-offs, seemed random, driven by asteroids or climate shifts.
More than 99 percent of all species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct. Under normal conditions, the fossil record shows a steady background extinction rate, with new species replacing those that disappear and total diversity remaining roughly stable. But there have been five moments in the last 540 million years when extinction rates accelerated far beyond that baseline. In each event,…