After the power was restored and the immediate threat posed by the Velociraptors was gone for the time being, John Hammond expressed relief that the animals had not escaped and gone on to destroy the ecosystem. His concern was that without predators, they might eventually over-run the planet. Ian Malcom immediately accused him of having an overblown ego, thinking that he could actually destroy the planet.
He went on to explain how the planet was four billion years old, and had already experienced several major extinction events. Yet each time, life arose again, in the midst of the geological and physical changes the earth was going through in its early evolution. He mused that even if some apocalyptic event were to occur, that life would still survive, even if it were just bacteria and that the evolutionary process would simply begin again.
Malcom’s larger point was that in evolutionary time-scales, humans had only been on Earth for a blink of an eye. The planet and life had endured far worse then Humanity could ever put it through. The idea was that it was futile to even imagine humans as having the capacity to destroy the Earth, when evolutionary processes would resume even if humans managed to destroy themselves.
