Prologue to Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton:

You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you
about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it
for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life,
then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land.

Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at
last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties
of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away -- all this against a background of
continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away,
cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents
moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make
mountains over millions of years.

Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the
nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals
died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would
survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the
planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary
process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its
present variety.

Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would
survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet
radiation sears the earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's
powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive
with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. Do you think this is the first
time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is
actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine.

When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some
three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants
were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an
atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In
the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time.

A hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was
a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million
years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't
imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try.
We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the
earth will not miss us.