I guess it depends on what you qualify as a real mass extinction, for me its like not really. Dont get me wrong the Holocene extinction is real but we hype up our own destructive capability and we only care about our own mass extinction and the species we directly affect. From an objective perspective comparing to the other extinction events what weve done Its like a minor extinction event over a long timeframe.

I don’t consider us potentiallyoffing ourselves and only like 10k species over the lifetime of the Holocene as a mass extinction.

If you wanted an actual for realsies mass extinction level event where more than 90% of all species everywhere die in that kind small timeframe you need nothing short of an apolocyptic sized meteor or a series of eruptions from super massive volcanos.

Were not talking about the survival of taking monkeys and all the creatures were familiar with, were talking about every biome every ecosystem everywhere all at once (in a geologically short time frame) from the top of mount everest to the bottom of Marianas.

Compared to something like that tens of thousands of species we personally had a hand in wiping out since the industrial revolution or start of epocene is child’s play compared to a for-real cataclysmic natural disaster. To even try to equate what we’ve done with the holocene extintion to the Cambrian extinction or Triassic extinction is a category error, completely different levels of devistation and timeframes. Humans bad and all that sure, but its night and day. We havent blocked out the sun for like 100 years straight, covered the entire earth in ash, or raised sea level by like 5 miles.

Compared to that we’ve checks notes damaged the ozone layer (which we fixed), polluted plastic everywhere (whose processing in the food chain is probably gonna be a big part of the evolution of Organisms in the long term) and ruined our own fresh water drinking supply. Unless we decide to go thermonuclear winter thats like a minor inconvinence to the biosphere in the greater picture.

Well, the Cretaceous mased extinction was pretty much instantaneous with the asteroid impact. Even including the Deccan traps or was still only 100 000 years

Depends on how many centuries it takes us to go from our current primitive understanding of biology in the age of discovery, to biology as a completed engineering corpus. Once we have complete control over life at every level, we will spread across the galaxy within 2 galactic orbits, or around 44 million years. So from that perspective, we are on the starship already, it is only a matter of when and where we disembark.

Personally, I bet we will be able to recreate nearly all extinct life as we unravel the ways everything evolved. The mind boggling part is just how complex that task will be. Biology as something like a high level Python script, will make the present digital scope of knowledge look like protohuman education standards. Eventually you’re growing a brain with a deterministic neuron structure for digital computations and calling it your computer. That will eventually lead to all of us moving into space except for a few indigenous hold outs. Gravity prisons suck, and the resource scarcity due to gravitational differentiation does not exist in more wealthy regions of the stellar system.

The real key to getting to that future is to think and talk about it. Biology as a fully understood and mastered technology is obviously the next major age. That is the final human technology; when we finally exit the stone age of silicon.