Sixth Mass Extinction Event: Time to face the Mortality Music

So, we've entered the sixth mass extinction phase, according to a study by Stanford, Princeton, and Berkeley Universities, all in America.

There have been five so far, including the famous asteroid collision that knocked off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. While that is the best known, it wasn't the worst, having only killed off 65% of life alive at the time.
The absolute worst extinction event to date came at the end of the Permian era, famous for its Gorgonopsids, with the first sabre teeth; 96% of all life at the time died, leaving us descended from the 4% that survived.
While we can't ever be entirely sure what caused it, the Permian's Great Dying (no kidding - that's what scientists really call it) was, as most people believe, caused in two phases: Firstly, a massive eruption in Siberia, known today as the Siberian Traps. This was one of the biggest eruptions for the last 500 million years, lasting for 1 million years. This raised the land temperature by between 5 and 10 degrees, killing off most of the land animals.
The heat on-land also led to massive amounts of methane bubbles trapped in the oceans to be released, heating up the oceans and pushing global temperatures up even higher, and killing off large amounts of marine life as well.

While the extinction event today probably - hopefully - won't be as bad, it still won't be good by any standards.
400 species have gone extinct since 1900. That sort of disappearing act usually happens within nature over 10,000 years. There's no doubt that this extinction event has been brought on, perhaps sooner than it would have happened, by mankind, what with the Industrial Revolution, global warming and pollution, and climate change. This doesn't mean that we're all going to be dead before fish and chip lunches on Friday, like hell we are.
It just means that if we don't do something very, very soon - as in five minutes ago - then we might find it very difficult to bounce back from this as humanity has done from curve-balls thrown at us in the past. Granted, it will take a tonne of work, and there will be people throwing hissy fits, but it needs to be done. And even if we succeed, we're only putting off the inevitable end of our world. Walter Hagen, I think, gives fantastic advice on living life:

"You're only here for a short visit. Don't hurry, don't worry. And do be sure to smell the flowers along the way."

But Alan Ball sums up our reaction to mortality best:

"As a culture, we are not comfortable with mortality. We do not accept it the way other cultures do. We cling to youth, and we don't want to die. And it's like, 'Well, too bad. We do'"

Some day, humanity will go the way of the dinosaurs, despite our superiority complex. We do have one, thinking that because we're at the top of the food chain, we're invincible. But someday we'll fall off our perch, most likely because we've cut it down ourselves and nature doesn't care, something else will take our place. We can only hope to have a similar run to the dinosaurs, if not longer.