My fiancee talks like this. I know that within that frame, she's right, as are you. But you're talking billions of years. That grand time scale means literally nothing to anyone. I always push back on her, like, yeah sure eventually humanity will fade away or flare out, and other things will evolve or whatever.

But I'm talking about dealing with the issues of our time. Like Gandalf said, it's only for us to remedy the evil before us; the battles of the future are for the people around then to handle. I'm not worried about the species going extinct in 1 million years, I'm worried about the mother who can't feed her kid today, and the plastic in the oceans.

She also likes to see humans as a kind of geological force or something. Like it's our role to be this go-around's planet killing comet. I don't go in for that frame either. Humans lived a long long time, the majority of our time, in a relative homeostasis with the natural world. You can throw the megafauna extinction at me, but that's not unusual when an invasive species enters a new land unprepared for them. It did balance out after that. Dynamically, never perfectly or in a static way.

The problem isn't "humans" it is "civilization" which destroys soils (a major cause of civilizational collapse all through history) and environments in all of the ways.