This is unfortunate news

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Aquaplant

Am I the only one, or does this plot remind you of Titan A.E.

I assure you it is not at all. It is darker and it has some twists that may be quite unexpected actually. I highly recommend it! If you understand german, be sure to watch the original version though.

Originally Posted by Moco Loco

I find this highly unlikely. By the time we're forced out, the environment may be very radically altered, but I feel certain Earth will still be full of life, though it has been affected by us, and I can really hardly imagine it taking millions of years to look like we were never here at all. The only scenario in which I can see us totally destroying life here (and permanently) is [Runaway_greenhouse_effect]

Runaway greenhouse effect certainly. Nuclear war certainly. There are other possibilities like the oceanic anoxic event (basically overfishing leads to more dead zones which if large enough kill fish around them and even put SO2 on the land.
But it does not even need a catastrophic event - every day 200 whole species go extinct (if you want to doubt that number, make it 100 or even make it 50. Species - each - day! And that does not include microbial life). We are in the sixth mass extinction and humans are the cause. Humans already use 40% of the total photosynthetic capacity (net primary production) of the terrestrial surface and probably as much in the oceans. By agriculture, tree farming, cities, roads, tar sands and other mines. 40% of the phytoplankton in the oceans , the lungs of the Earth is dead. A tenth of all major rivers dont reach the ocean yearround any longer. It takes tens of thousands of years for species to develop, evolve, create ecosystems and millions of years to replace large biodiversity loss.
I dont know if we can mange to kill the planet - I believe we can, but maybe we won't, but a planet that has only 10% of its biota left will still take millions of years to recover from that extinction event. We know this from past extinctions! And as long as humans use 40% of the NPP, there is no way there can be more species emerging than are destroyed. And yet there is a push to get this number up to 50 or 60% by using the last remaining landscapes - called "marginal landscapes" because no food crops grow there. What for? Growing fast-growing trees and switchgrass to turn into biofuels.
Certainly there will always be a rebound, some life can come back very quickly if it is allowed to, others will take a million years to develop (and it will never be the same of course, but that is always so in geological history). But to me it is not the point if some grasses and small mammals and insects manage to pull through. Its like telling a patient that both arms and legs have to be amputated and he is blind, without voice and paralyzed - but he will make it through. Or rather we tell him that we need his arms and legs so that we can do something "cool" with it but hey - he will survive, right - and maybe in the future we can get him new arms as well.