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What Earth Without People Would Look Like
Raynor writes "Imagine a world without people. What if every human being, all 6.5 billion of us, were suddenly abducted and the planet was left to fend for itself? The planet would heal. 'The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better,' says John Orrock, a conservation biologist. Pollution would cease being created. It would remain around for many years, CO2 taking as long as 20,000 years to be restored to it's natural level, but will decrease. Even if we were all whisked away and our nuclear reactors melted down, it would have a surprisingly little effect on the planet. Chernobyl gives hope to this end. 'I really expected to see a nuclear desert there,' says Ronald Chesser, an environmental biologist. 'I was quite surprised. When you enter into the exclusion zone, it's a very thriving ecosystem.' In the grand scheme of the world there would be little evidence of our existence at 100,000 years. The most permanent piece is the radio waves we've emitted of the last century. As the article puts it, 'The humbling — and perversely comforting — reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.'"
If so I'd like to recommend Kim Jong Il
If they could, the other species we share Earth with would surely vote us off the planet.
They could try, but we'd be the ones building the voting machines.
even though buildings will crumble, their ruins - especially those made of stone or concrete - are likely to last thousands of years. "We still have records of civilisations that are 3000 years old," notes Masterton. "For many thousands of years there would still be some signs of the civilisations that we created. It's going to take a long time for a concrete road to disappear. It might be severely crumbling in many places, but it'll take a long time to become invisible."
Like the ancients, it's how we bury our dead which will be most telling to the next crop of intelligent life to evolve on Earth.
"They're all in these frames of petrified wood with evidence of metal rails, hinges and nails around them. Do you suppose they spun these things and then suffocated inside them? Or was this some way other creatures stored their food? They couldn't possibly be so vain as to try preserving their bodies after they died, HA HA HA!"
'The humbling -- and perversely comforting -- reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.'"
Oh, I dunno. The planet itself might, with the help of perhaps another ice age to drive the remnants of our cities into so much rubble.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"What if every human being, all 6.5 billion of us, were suddenly abducted and the planet was left to fend for itself? The planet would heal."
This excess anthropomorphising has reached a new heights for slashdrivel.
We are not hurting the planet with pollution. We are primarily hurting each other. As TFA notes, we have left very few permanent traces on the earth. Pollution is - or ought to be - a tort.
PS: and we should continue as the dominant species on the planet. If we don't the chimps will take over.
PPS: and if Mr. Orrock, the writer of the article, thinks that the global demise of the human species is a good idea, I invite him to act locally. Very locally.
The thought of no humans gives you environmentalists huge chubbies, doesn't it? Perhaps you'd rather they be eaten by lions instead of being abducted into space?
'The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better,'
But for what purpose? That's like never opening a package, so it never gets finished.
Who would even appreciate it? Is the Earth something so deistic and magical that's its mere existence is good enough by itself? Or, is some alien race (no doubt evilly destroying their own planet) going to come by and appreciate its pristine beauty?
The planet is here, and we are using it. We are becoming better, and making it more capable. To say that to conserve, take notice, and be proactive, to make it last longer, is not only true, but it is helpful. To say, however, that if we were gone it would be better, is an unproven theory, and would remain unproven, being noone would be here to care.
Growth takes a toll somewhere. But not for naught. The Earth is here for us, and we have made quite some progress based on her resources. There's no reason to replace our pride with some pessimistic view that promotes nihilism in some strange way.
Have you read my journal today?
Not if I can help it!
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You can view this as we are abnormalities in our ecosystem. We are atypical organisms living beyond what we are supposed to.
Or you can acknowledge that if other organisms were intelligent enough to make their existence better for them (at the expense of others), they would. That's one of the laws of nature and we're just reverting back to our primal instincts. Now, we're fairly civil and modest in reproducing and killing, so we're a bit better than the animals in that respect. If we chose to acknowledge that we're destroying earth for the rest of the organisms, it would probably be both civil and intelligent. Unfortunately, about half of us don't give a shit. Well, that's what we deal with.
Every organism is in competition for resources with every other organism in some way. A symbiosis rarely occurs and when it does, it's usually forced (humans raising cattle for milk).
Is there any scenario we can reach where we won't destroy the environment?
Probably not but, in my opinion, humans are entropy.
And, if you acknowledge the very long history of the earth, we are remarkably new to the earth. The dinosaurs had a longer reign and they are forgotten with the exception of their bones.
My work here is dung.
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, although definitely not one of Clancy's best, deals with a enviro-nut case group that wants to eradicate all human life on earth (except their own cult, of course).
As you might predict, it never gets off the ground, but if you can get past the almost comic plot, there's a lot of semi-informed commentary and discussion about "what if" and just how quickly the Earth would rebound.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
...nobody would be running Windows.
I'am sorry Mr Human but i think i speak for everyone here when i say your disrupting behaviour isn't welcome at our party, so i think its best if you just leave quietly before you cause some more trouble, here is your cab fare and its waiting outside for you, sorry but goodbye.
yours sincerly
The Earth
And to think that after all that, the earth is just going to forget about us. Well, not if we dump her, first!
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
I knew those "Left Behind" guys were desperate for money, but it never occurred to me they'd figure out a way to write a sequel.
Bah, this fellow lacks imagination.
Imagine how beautifully clean and preserved the planet would be without life of any type! No more messy leaf litter, buzzing flies around dungheaps, the occasional lightning-sparked forest fire besmudging the sky with ugly smoke...
Is all the environmental hype about styrofoam over blown? Will some ancient civilization mine for it like we mine for oil? ... or will it disappear?
Although it does seem that way, in 100,000 years, this planet would seem like it was empty of any "intelligent" life forms...except that the animals would truely be the intelligent ones for being able to survive without the need for hurting the planet they live on...what has become of us humans? Are we no better than a common criminal? Taking the life of a planet for our own?
Humans have altered the environment extensively throughout our existence. An alien species visiting us 5000 years ago would have noticed all the farming, extensive irrigation, not to mention a pyramid or two sticking out. Without humanity, would Earth be as interesting?
Will the War in Iraq get better or worse in 2007? Vote here
In 1.5 billion years the sun will start to grow into a red giant and solar winds winds will strip the Earth of its atmosphere.
Then in about 5 billion years after that, the sun will have consumed the Earth and whatever life remains on it.
(Source)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sun_Life.png
This is of course barring large iron metorites or collision with large space bodies and of course a passing of another solor system or galaxy in the meantime.
So if man went away tomorrow... Life would be peachy for nature for a while, but then it would die by itself due to reasons far beyond non-intelligents life control (unless dolphins evolve into space faring creatures on their own)
So nature has to put up with man for a while to we figure out how to get off this rock... Or get used to not being around in a few billion years.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I can arrange this to happen, just give me a few hours, k?
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
Can't we just hire Slartibartfast to make us a new one?
I'm really disappointed at Slashdot for posting this crap.
"The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better,'"
not to me.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
While I kill myself to repent...
What a stupid and lame discussion. Of course we have an impact on the earth. So do insects, cows and bacteria.
The rocks would be happier without the moss.
The questions shouldn't be about what if we all leave, they should be about how can we maintain an environment hospitable to us. That includes reducing pollution and expanding the "wild zones" and "gardens" of "terra firma".
Should we all just stop existing because, oh dear, we might actually have an impact on the rest of the world?
Falling trees would never again make a sound. So sad.
Christ's Second Coming, and you're basically *there*.
If you're interested in what the United States would be like without humans, there is a nifty map developed by A.W. Kuchler in 1964 and refined periodically since of what would grow where without human interference. It is called Potential Natural Vegetation of the Coterminous United States and can be found at the US Forest Service.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
or other "intelligent" life, then the Earth and the rest of the universe is a big waste of space.
--fatboy
Uh, what? Why would you expect to see a nuclear desert there? Armed with some research papers and some estimates of how much nuclear material was released, it should have been easy enough to figure out that no, all life will not fail. In fact the plants are doing great (and some of the shorter-lived animals) because there aren't a bunch of people running around destroying them.
Anyway, this is not a big surprise. There are some indications that it might rebound even faster than these studies suggest. One of the major indications is the continued presence of complex animals (like land-based vertebrates) after all the cataclysms which have occurred since they first crawled out of the ocean. I mean we only even know about a few and some of them are major impacts, some are ice ages, etc.
Just as an example the earth has a built-in mechanism for regulating global temperature. As temperatures rise, the ice caps melt, and sea levels rise. This has two major effects: One, it leads to additional evaporation, which causes cooling; the other is that it covers more land, which results in more light being reflected back into space, which also causes cooling. This pitches things towards an ice age; the globe cools, the ice caps refreeze, the sea level falls, evaporation decreases, more land is exposed, the earth retains more sunlight and the planet heats up. The cycle continues.
Of course, we may not be too happy about this, and there are things that we can do to make a difference and maybe (at some point) stabilize the system. Every year we put out (as a species, on average) something like 20 times as much CO2 as active surface volcanoes...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Modern "food" turkeys have such huge breasts that they are physically unable to breed without human help. Even if they escaped their pens, they'd be doomed to extinction.
Modern bananas have been bred totally seedless, like various grape varieties. They spread entirely by grafting. So they too would soon die off.
The article mocks Poodles, but I wonder a bit about that. They're actually considered one of the smartest breeds of dog there is, and that must be worth something when a major change in lifestyle is called for.
Who'll kill off other species and keep the world's gene pool in motion?
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, although definitely not one of Clancy's best, deals with a enviro-nut case group that wants to eradicate all human life on earth (except their own cult, of course).
Here's an enviro-nut case group that wants to eradicate all human life on Earth, including their own cult. (They don't want to do it violently, though -- they just want everyone on Earth to agree not to have children, and let nature take its course.)
Voluntary Human Extinction Movement
It could be a hoax website, but it's at least plausible.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Earth is not conscious or sentient. We, the homo sapiens, are. From the collected human knowledge so far, we are the only ones. And this is our first time doing it. So gimme a break. Its a no brainer the Earth will heal. But the mutual goal ie win-win situation is that how can the humans repair the damage and maybe even return the Earth to a healthier state than it ever has been. That isn't bad proposition for either party. We are on the same fucking side.
for nuclear.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The submitter, and the authors of the article are thinking of suddenly removing all the ecologically incorrect people, of course. This would exclude themselves, naturally from such a genocide. Perhaps Tom Clancy shouldn't have written "Rainbow 6." He has understood the implications of "ecological" thinking far more clearly than most so-called "ecologists."
Too many environmentalists I've talked to either don't or can't really think through the implications of the programs they are promoting. Many, many of them really do mean dramatic reductions in population in time frames and won't or can't see that that can only mean death on a large scale. And implicit in their programs is the assumption that such a mass genocide wouldn't include them, of course!
They should consider leading by example.
We are not hurting the planet with pollution. We are primarily hurting each other. As TFA notes, we have left very few permanent traces on the earth. Pollution is - or ought to be - a tort.
Just like a lot of things, the rich can affect the poor by having the capacity to do more harm by wielding wealth. The foolish can too, but not to anywhere near the same extent.
As an example, consider Joan Q. Public; buzzing back and forth in her compact which gets 30 MPG. Aside from a few drips from an oil leak and some evaporated (or leaked) coolant, she's not having a major impact. Now consider John F. Doe; charging between stop signs in his 4WD with monster tyres which achieves an average of 12 MPG and worse, he's fiddled his exhaust for that sound which can leave no trace of doubt in anyone's mind, that he indeed has a very small reproductive organ. Then there's Harriet T. Grundgeworth, with her private jet, zipping around between New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, she's got so many things to do and people to see and appearances to make, not by some car do we guage her MPG, but in all the miles it is essential for her to cover. She makes John F. Doe look like he couldn't properly achieve a bathtub ring compared to her footprint on the enviroment.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
What would earth look like if there was nobody there to look at it?
um.. er... I've just gone cross eyed...
Unexpect the expected!
I recall watching a few news programs saying the best places that preserve wildlife are military bases. Most of the base is never used, yet a buffer is kept around the areas that are used. Since people are prohibited from walking onto those bases with their hunting rifles and ATVs, these bases have actually become the best wildlife preserves, in fact better than those which are in place to protect wildlife.
/ 22/korea.bio.dmz/ Funny how they mention the only threat to this "preserve" would be peace between the two countries.
Another program I saw was discussing the DMZ between north and south korea. Aside from the outposts that scatter the line, this long fuzzy border does not have a whole lot of foot traffic and has allowed for the some wildlife to retake what was once theirs. Ah, just dug up an article on this: http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/east/08
Which is it? Either the Earth is in danger and needs to heal, or we really don't have much impact on the planet.
Can't have it both ways. If you're going to write a doomsday article, you better decide on the angle of it BEFORE you write it.
Sorry, I do not have modpoints myself.
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
>> In the grand scheme of the world there would be little evidence of our existence at 100,000 years.
No shit, Sherlock. Unless you're from Kansas, the earth is around 4.5 billion years old, and Homo sapiens have been around for about four hundred thousand years. On a geological time scale our existence is completely irrelevant.
Always remember, 'better' is a human-formed opinion. The Earth would not be better, or worse, off without us. Just...different. If all life were removed from Earth, it would be far worse... in our opinion. Without humans, their is no know universal qualifier as "better" or "worse;" just "is" or "is not," though without a way to observe, we couldn't be sure...
All of humanity shares a wonderful ability to briefly transcend their individual lives and apply human qualities across far-reaching matters. That we can say "without us, the world would be better." If there is one true glimmer of hope in humanity, it is that we have so deeply ingrained ourselves a necessity to acknowledge our deficiencies.
Demented But Determined.
Dude, can't you ever come up with a real post subject?
I mean, even I MOO a lot, but you just aren't any good at it.
If you can think of nothing else, may I suggest... Subject: Fuck!
And likely, half a million years after we're gone, chimps or bears will recreate their own special version of the human species.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Probably the biggest PR mistake that environmentalists ever made was that they made their activism about "The Earth", and not about our ability to survive on it.
Nature is a resilient bitch. We could hardly do the kind of damage necessary to make Earth unlivable by something.
We can, however, make life very unpleasant for mankind. And that's why we need to preserve the environment as best as possible. For us, not the environment.
I'm not aware of how the Earth, taken as an entity, can 'lose' before the rest of humanity 'loses', ignoring planetary colonization (one would think the technology required for this would be enough to clean up whatever problem we cause at home). The planet is certainly far durable than we are, and we're getting along fine right now so it can't be worse than us.
... human beings are the only organisms capable of attaching value to 'better'. Other organisms certainly struggle to live, but can't assign a value to living.
Stupid argument, but the sentiment (preserve the Earth) is valid, IMHO.
Ben Affleck has vanished and now no one can save us!?
I thought Ben Affleck vanishing was saving us.
but aren't humans a part of nature either? enough proof for me that the "system" isnt as perfect and symbiotic as everybody likes to think. in the end, the planet itself is doomed to die (red dwarf and whatnot). dig that, hippies!
of course it'd be worth it notheless to take care of the precious ecosystem.
I was really hoping the article would come with a picture.
Bottles.
We find dinosaur bones after a hundred of millions of years. But there wouldn't be a single trace of the gigantic structures we've built? Sounds unlikely. I'm surely one of those concrete buildings will accidently not get meddled with too much (and in turn shield its contents a little better). If in just a few million years our presence would go unnoticed by an intelligence similar to our own, then wouldn't that imply that for all we know this hypothesis actually did happen to the dinosaurs and possibly species before (or even since) them?
This coming from the eco-hystericals who focus entirely on humans as being solely responsible for anything that happens on the entire planet, which is usually bad. That's some lopsided power.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
"What if every human being, all 6.5 billion of us, were suddenly abducted and the planet was left to fend for itself? The planet would heal. "
I think i have heard similar things from earth first terrorists here in boston. The only difference being this "scientist" talks about alien abduction whereas the earth first freaks talk about the more realistic way of doing the same thing, killing thier fellow humans.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
As usually - nothing like a good bullshit session by some guy in a white lab coat pretending to be talking scientific - when it's all about "bullshit baffles brains". Where's most methane come from - people farting? - no..... cows farting and pooping!
Lets look at this planet 10 million years ago. Looks different from the way the planet nows looks? Naturally it does, 10 million years ago this planet was covered with ice!!
-As the article puts it, 'The humbling -- and perversely comforting -- reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.'"
yeah, well, unless we suffer some big setback (not impossible) through disease or turmoil, we ought to have the
ability to do major terraforming on terra in a few decades. More seriously, what is meant by "Earth will forget us".
Did earth forget the events that caused the great mass extinctions of the past? We've been responsible for a quite
a few extinctions ourselves. The earth as a planet is just a thing. It's only the biomass that has any awareness,
and it is in constant flux, the oldest things being only a few thousand years old. Strip that incredibly thin film
of living stuff off the surface and the rest of what we call the earth wouldn't care if it was vaporized in a supernova.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
The planet will heal whether we get out of the way or not. It will take us offline, as a necessary step towards self-correction.
Thinking we have control from the top is a mistake - that is like a giant clam feeling remorse for eating too much plankton. We are simply one part of one large mechanizm that will do whatever it needs to make corrections.
It is only our hubris that allows us to think we are part of the system, yet somehow unique.
We are not unique and it is just a matter of time before the system tosses off what it feels is the source of a major problem.
we will find out.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
The earth will be engulfed (or superheated) by the sun when it eventually expands into a red giant. Billions of years of evolution will all have been for nothing in the end, unless a technologically advanced civilization is able to colonize space with bits of protected ecosystem. Humanity (intelligent life) is the high-point amongst the achievements of evolution, and it will be necessary if any life from earth is to perservere.
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
This is exactly what the dinosaurs said 65M years ago.
"You just watch Cyril, we might only have been advanced for 300 thousand years but if by some fluke we kill ourselves off, the only trace will be the layer of iridium from our iridium reactors as they all melt down. Apart from that and a few lucky bones and they'll never know our advanced society even existed!"
Not "would" forget us?
:)
Does this man know something the rest of us don't?
Does he, perhaps, have some mad scientist aspirations his fellow planet-mates might like to know about before we read about it in our obituaries?
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
The Earth will forget us until it needs us to destroy an asteroid that is hurtling towards it.
For all you pro-nuclear guys trying to figure out what argument would bring the environmentalists around to your side, I believe this is the one. Just be sure to design the reactors to be as unsafe as possible.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
When was the last time you saw any evidence of the previous existance of the carribbian monk seal? We cleaned them up real good in just 46 years. Take that Earth, take that.
You can see the difference here: http://blogs.warpedworld.org/seumas/archives/image s/Bush-monkey.jpg
This article gives me a great idea for an MMORPG!
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
Aren't there enough places on the web for this type of crap?
Let me say this once so we are all clear: the survival and progress of the human species is the ultimate in morality, and work towards those ends is the highest obligation of every member of the species. The struggle to make the most of our potential is the only proper way to show respect to our creator and to our ancestors, regardless of who you personally believe that creator to be.
If some people are so deranged that they think their own species is a curse upon the universe, they should have the decency to sneak off to kill themselves while the rest of us get on with things.
This is not news for nerds, and it certainly isn't stuff that matters. This is pathetic and not worthy of a headline.
See that "Preview" button?
"The planet is doing just fine... it's the people who are fucked."
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
As a kid I used to read a lot of science fiction - Bradbury, Heinlein, Zelazny, Niven, etc.. Like a Slashdot users, I grew up with Star Trek and Buck Rogers. Though the article is new, SF has been asking these questions for a long time. When nuclear power first came about I imagine that lots of folks, maybe listening to a PSA about "What to do in the event of a nuclear strike", wondered what would happen if people were wiped out. Whether it's through an atom bomb or the Sun going supernova or the heat death of the Universe, our species is not immortal. We will die. So maybe it's no different from the ancient stories of the Cyclops. They know their death and this makes them look inward, look outward, maybe develop some Eastern approach to life and morality and mortality. Maybe they are like the Tolkien's elves who know their time will end... Or maybe like that civilization in Star Trek that built a machine to hold the memories of their race. Or heck, we may create a God and an Afterlife.... In any case, it's good that we think about these things once in a while between the day to day drudgery of work.
I'm typing this from bed. I'm sick right now... nothing serious, but my back is aching, my throat is burning, and I have 12 Monkeys showing on the tv screen (I was going to say I have "12 Monkeys playing on my laptop" but that just sounded weird). So yeah, the slow decay of my once proud Adonis-like figure (yeah, right) leads to these introspections.
Or maybe it's the cough medicine.
fine, go hate yourself. but don't think that your self-hatred is a component of all of us or has any power over your fellow man. i for one have faith in humanity in doing the right thing. am i stupid? am i crazy?
i don't know. humanity could fail. but i also know that giving up on humanity entirely guarantees that you will fail. so have some simple faith in your fellow man. or, frankly, shut up. because you're not helping anything with empty pointless doubt and pessimism
constructive criticism is helpful. but empty gloomy pessimism is worth absolutely nothing at all. it is self-fulfilling prophecy to doubt the future of mankind. if you don't believe in the future, you sit there, and you do nothing, and therefore ensure that there is no future. that means you are just damage to be routed around. you're not helpful or useful to anyone else in any way if you don't believe in a future
and you are quite arrogant if you think no one else believes in a future either, that your lack of faith is supposed to have any meaning to anyone around you. lack of faith does not beat faith. lack of faith doesn't grow anything, it doesn't spread, it just dies. it's just damage to be routed around. faith is something that creates and grows and spreads. faith always beats lack of faith, because it acts and creates. lack of faith just sits there, inert and useless
join in humanity in faith, or go away, and shut up. seriously, if you don't believe in the future of humanity, why are you talking? there's no future right? so what's the point of trying to add anything? you're not being constructive. being constructive is based on the supposition that it's the worth the effort, that there is a future worth working towards
so make up your mind:
but to continue talking, and not believe in a future, is not a logically cohesive position for anyone to take on the subject of humanity. it's an unfounded and incoherent position in life. so work it out, teenaged human, and get back to us later when you are worth something to yourself and others and have words worth our time for us to listen to
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is just plain stupid. Nice he harps on CO2.
Little does he know. During the Ordovician CO2 levels were 13x to 17x higher than now. The earth slipped into a deep freeze snowball phase during this time. Throughout the Carboniferous CO2 levels were much higher than now. Back in the PreCambrian CO2 was much higher than now... up into the 80,000 ppm range in fact compared to 370 ppm now.
So not only is the story just plain tripe - it is also based on a poor understanding of the history of the planet.
I always thought the Dinosaurs were the most dominant life form. Give me a break!
There is currently a huge amount of space garbage orbiting the earth. There is also a good amount of leftovers on the moon (not to mention a flag or two). Even given that said space junk's orbit will eventually decay, some may or may not. Even given that the moon will be bombarded with all sorts of asteroids and tasty rocks, our said junk on the Moon may not get oblitterated or decay - it may just end up in the Moon's trunk (the ground...think 2001). -O
The planet isn't fucked, We Are! -George Carlin
Environmentalists already knew this, we want not to save the trees, they won't have any trouble in the future. We want to keep the planet habitable for the human race.
If terrestrial life "wants" to outlive this Sun, it needs us. Or some critter like us that can use its big brain to invent interstellar space travel. Otherwise the whole exericse will be proven pointless in a couple billion years give or take. Of course there are a lot of pointless exercises in evolution and it's entirely possible we're just one of those. We'll just have to wait for the run to finish and see what happened.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Anyone else think of the great science fiction novel Earth Abides by George R Stewart?
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
No mod points when I need them...
What will America look like when the population gets to 600,000,000? (or insert other country or world as whole and scale)
I think this point goes over the head of the majority of the above posters. (and that was the point of TFA)
If you feel you need to let some steam out, you should sign up for 'The Kill Everyone Project' http://homokaasu.org/killeveryone/
Umm... They would probably come to that conclusion right now. :-)
I doubt an "advanced civilization" would treat their own planet, flora, fauna and population as do we.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Does it bother anyone else that the author uses "will" rather than "would" for all his predictions?
I think its a wonderful idea, lets cause World War III as fast as possible, because the earth is SO much more important TO mankind than.. well.. All of mankind. ...stupid absurd article... we are not harming the earth, its here for us to use and NO other reason.
"advanced civilization" is a meaningless term. How advanced? I think we still have a lot of room for advancement. I also think the only way out is through - through technology. Have you noticed that the trend in technology is to use less and less power, and to be smaller and smaller (meaning requiring less materials?) We're moving in the correct direction in a lot of ways.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Try redorbit.com- good pic's for desktops.
Yes, I know this will be modded "offtopic"- so what?
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Ah, the appeal to selfishness.
Sadly, this is the only way you can get most people to take any action.
the lunar descent modules & assorted detritus will be there for eons...and the 1 name at the top of every plaque:
Richard Milhouse Nixon
if that doesn't spur demopubs to return t the moon, nothing will;-)
The Sleestak will return.
'The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better,'
Not for the people!
Actually if you think about it all it would take to make up for any impact we have is to save the world from one enormus meteorite strike which would destroy most life on the planet. Without us the earth has no defenses against this.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This article is not about how we should all just get up and die to make the Earth better. It is to inform us of our own impact on this small island upon which we live.
And we do have an impact. We are the ecological 'winners' and we are not outside the system, true. But we have the ability to think, to ponder, to plan, to use our knowledge.
And yes, in the end, it's all for naught, the sun will blow up, our galaxy will crash into another one, time will slowly fizzle out towards a great crunch (and yeah, it would be pretty neat if humanity or its derivative could survive that long). But at the same time, if we could do it while brining along the least 'fortunate' of our kind as well, I think it would be a lot more interesting ride. We bring homeless, sick, and other unfortunate humans along with our welfare. Are you to say it's worth destroying 99% of all the species of 'unfortunate' life which coexists on this earth in order to have a bit more profitable of a day? We destroy in ignorance and in arrogance. We have the ability to live alongside the poor little insect we smash underfoot for fun. We are fortunate enough to have this ability of foresight and compassion. We have the ability to spend our lives in moderation (and still be kings).
Maybe as a species we are no better than the rabid carnivores of our past. Maybe as a species we have not learned the ability of foresight and we are just reactive, primitive, egotistical, deterministic 'lifeforms.'
And for those of you who are so bent on building the fastest, cheapest artificial intelligence, artificial reality, or computer of any sort. I will quickly point you to the millions of animals that are erased by our wanton arrogance.
we have enough. we (should) have the ability of foresight. we can live alongside our planet. But that would require choice, moderation and discipline. But those qualities are exactly what make us human - interesting.
Make a list of the ways you imagine manking hurts the earth. Reality be damned. Now write an article showing how each of man's damages would self-repair over time. Ignore the areas where man is actually supporting the ecosystem. (e.g., The first thing that would happen is all domesticated animals would die, from lack of being unable to feed themseleves. Except millions of pet dogs, which would form huge packs to kill off the rest of the world's animals.) It would have been just as simple to come up with a list of ways you imagine mankind supports the earth. Reality be damned. Then write an article showing how each of man's supports would topple over time, leaving the earth a vast wasteland. Boring.
Wouldn't the sudden loss of god knows how many tons of biomass and several billion large mammals actually have a fairly large impact on the global ecosystem? I
You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
Well, the way we are going now looks to be unsustainable, so any species that we'd consider "advanced" in that context would probably have found a much more sustainable way to live. Either that, or they have started taking their resources from other worlds. Like Earth, for example. In that case, we're going to be pretty fucked.
...and I promise I'm going to learn how to use 'blockquote' soon ...
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
Earth without humans... yes, but could it run GNU/Linux?
er...
Sounds funny but some physicists really investigate the possibility of universe being a big computer (and we are the bits, right? and it looks like we are just a bunch of six billion noise bits, so I wouldn't be surprised if a noise filter wipes us out of existence)
"his mind is not for rent, to god or government"
Should be:
No, his mind is not for rent
To any God or government.
Lyrics by Neil Peart and Pye DuBois
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
The beautiful sunset, the wide ocean, the wonderful glaciers, the glittering streams, and not another human in sight. Bliss, I say. Total bliss!
Now to get those space colonies working so we can make the earth into a paradise again!
I have nothing to say.
But will it *forgive* us? Or will it get wasted at the next family reunion and talk about how we were an alcoholic before it crumbles into a vodka induced refrain of "Oh Danny Boy" before pissing on itself and wandering off into the woods?
You know how the planet is. You can only nuke it a few times it just doesn't care anymore.
May we live long and die out!
http://www.vhemt.org/
'Better' in this sense is aesthetic. Its an opinion. If there is a huge bloom of foliage and birds it is considered 'good'. Greenpeace will love it. If there is a huge bloom of cockroaches or locust and the land is defoliated we will be blamed for the 'damage', even though it in itself is the success of one form of life.
So what is good or bad depends on either the diversity of various species and concentrated lifeforms in the area or it has an aesthetic meaning regarding the author's opinion of what a good piece of land should look like (name your favorite species of flowers, birds and big game animals).
The presence of humans in itself is a success. Apart from the 6.5 billion of us we host uncountable disease bacteria, flea, ticks, roaches, flies, mosquitoes, virii, rats, pets and all the animals who benefit from them or prey on them. We even host fungii on our bodies. These in itself is a successful bloom of various species. Just because its not all green with birds singing does not mean its 'bad'. It only means it has low aesthetic value.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
i think we killed it. are there any mirrors?
As I said over at my blog the underlying assumption all through this is that we humans aren't "nature". We're some kind of unnatural soemthing, I don't know what, and what humans do to survive is somehow not "right", unlike, I dunno, a wolf eating a bunny. (Of course, a lot of the same people are the ones who try to put their dogs and cats on vegetarian diets.)
It is, how you say, looneytoons.
Besides this being little more than a junk science screed against that favorite bugbear, global warming and pollution (hint hint, neither are as bad as a vocal few would make it out to be. What's so bad about the nuclear reactors? Some of the most "Progressive" coutries (such as France) are nearly or completely nuclear powered. Byproducts include steam, steam, steam, and oh, for the humongous amount of clean efficient power put out, a slight amount of radioactive waste that causes less damage if exposed to the average person than the suns rays do over the course of a day. I say cut out the coal-fired dirt bins that power much of the US, maintain the current dam system (don't expand, too much damage to little-understood ecosystems in the rivers they impede and lakes they create), and build lots of nuclear power plants. BTW, anybody ever looked at the actual data for fatalities and life-threatening or disabling conditions caused by such "disasters" as Three Mile Island or Chernobyl? Yea, thought not.
You know what they say, on the internet nobody knows you're a dog.
Rubbish!
Aliens will find:
Fscking AOL CDs
Chewing gum stains on all underfoot surfaces
The Duke Nukem Forever development team still hard at work
AT&ROFLMAO
There is one...try this site...
m ans-vanished-207870.php
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/what-if-all-hu
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white.
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
This "what if" question was in fact the aim of the group of eco-terrorists in the novel "Rainbow Six" when they devised a virus so lethal that it will kill all human beings in the world. The terrorists, in turn, will seek shelter in a Biodome-type containment area until the virus runs its course, and armed with the antidote they will become the seeds of a new "environmentally friendly" humanity.
My answer to anyone who practices tree-hugging blindly is the same as John Clark's comment to the presidential advisor at the end of the book: If they want to hug a tree, by all means proceed - but do so without destroying humankind or, as is the case here, asking inane "what if" questions.
Ultima Online.
Man, just look at how we've carved mountains created lakes, diverted rivers. We've put our footstep on the place. Not to mention that giant CHA burned into the moon.
I drank what? -- Socrates
is the "CO2 taking as long as 20,000 years to be restored to it's natural level" phrase, as if man is not a part of nature.
If one is to point to a "natural level" of CO2, then let's consider all of the CO2 which has been bound into dead plants buried in the ground. Any increase in CO2 levels caused by mankind pales in comparison to the decrease in "natural" atmospheric levels cause by plant life over millions of years. Mankind is simply releasing CO2 which plants have already removed from the atmosphere.
Free the CO2!
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
We depend on non-human earth organisms, and in the long term, they will depend on us to get them off-planet before the next large asteroid extinction event. We'll take Nature with us to the stars, and ensure our own survival and the survival of many other species. 'Course, we won't save them all, and until we learn enough to significantly reduce our environmental impact we will cause many more extinctions.
But I don't see how fantasizing about a fictional human-free future is useful unless you're the type to spend a lot of time worrying about the evils the human race is perpetrating and ignoring everything good that we do. In which case this type of fantasy is probably somewhat comforting and, in combination with your medications, helps reduce anxiety.
include $sig;
1;
Pollution would cease being created. It would remain around for many years, CO2 taking as long as 20,000 years to be restored to it's natural level, but will decrease.
The planetary record says otherwise. CO2 levels rise and fall naturally from much much lower than now to much much higher than now. So too do water vapor averages and methane and so forth. Also, temperatures.
Yet another boob who imagines a static Earth where the planet has no volcanism, there are never natural forest fires, asteroids don't exist, comets never hit, and all the animals talk and live in little houses with cute outfits like a Richard Scary book. Why do people this that without mankind the world is something out of that Perfect place in the Walgreen's ads?
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
just for curiosity's sake...
Mount Rushmore & the giant Spache will last how long?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
This is a sentiment I've held since environmentalism became a mainstream topic... The tree-huggers have it backwards: the Earth doesn't need saving or protecting, mankind does.
For all our ego, sophistication, technology and intelligence we are fragile creatures. We can only comfortably exist in a narrow range of climates (which, fortunately for us at present the Earth provides in abundance). Western-style civilisation in particular needs a monumental amount of effort to exist in anything but mild climates. Even as you move to the upper ranges of present climates, the amount of energy, infrastructure and maintenance required to sustain Western-style civilisation increases dramatically. Of course, there's a Catch-22 there: Adverse climates = more energy required to sustain our way of life. More energy production = more contribution to the warming of the planet. We have not yet created a widely-adoptable way out of this situation.
The Earth is big and old, and there's more 'not-human' on it than there is human. It'll get along just fine after we've eventually screwed ourselves.
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
The planet would heal.
A rock is a rock. If I pour water on the rock and it gets moss all over it, it's still a rock. If little bugs live in the moss, it's still just a rock. If I dip the rock in acid burning off all the moss and bugs, it's still just a rock. If I hide it in my freezer away from the sun and it gets really cold, it's just a really cold rock. Until I pulverize it into sand, the rock is just a rock. When humans figure out how to pulverize the earth into a fine dust, then we can talk about humans destroying the planet and it needing some type of industrial glue to put it back together again.
My personal prediction, before dinosaurs were some really big ass creatures that may or may not have had bones, maybe like in that Dune movie. They were huge but died off to make room for smaller more efficient animals like dinosaurs. Next on the chopping block came dinosars and after them, even smaller more efficient creatures took charge. Soon enough, humans will have to step aside for even smaller and especially more efficient creatures. The planet may be to small to support 20 billion humans, but it has more than enough room to support 20 trillion insects. Once the insects get done overpopulating and dying out, the microscopic organisms will get their turn. The planet will be able to support a googolplex of them.
One day you're at the top, thinking you have to be there to make things work. Leave and the machine just keeps going and going like you were never there.
He says "might", as if it would actually be surprising that one might be able to find a few tiny little traces of our existence in places like landfills!!
Dude, without us Earth would suck.
I can't understand PETA freaks and environmentalist madmen, but this idea is in another league altogether. Who gives a flying f-ck if the planet would have less CO2 if we weren't there? Do you know what it means to have thriving ecosystems on a planet with no humans?
WRONG
You don't know, because it means nothing at all. Not only are you now saying that we should protect the damn planet, the summary suggests that the planet should be protected even if we don't exist anymore, and that masses of cockroaches and panda bears can somehow serve as a motivating factor. I'm sure the guys at GreenPeace all wish they could give you a collective blowjob right now, but this idea is full of shiite.
If humans are there anymore, then it doesn't matter, genius. Cats exist because we need something cute to pet, wild animals exist because we need Discovery Channel, and dogs exist to chase cats. There is no higher purpose.
You need to come to grips wih the fact that we rule. If we nuke ourselves from space, there will be no one to sit back and sigh at the beauty of the empty swimming pool we left behind. We give so much to the universe. We gave it G.W Bush. We gave it Ted Stevens. We gave it Tubes. We invented pr0n.
Just..never mind.
No, I'm not talking about the silly (but classic) Vincent Price movie, parodied later in the Simpsons. This topic reminds me of a Poul Anderson short story published in Omni, Dec 1992 called "In Memoriam". It's a great read, especially if you are into "hard SF", and it covers a lot of the topics mentioned above in TFA and discussions.
So if the earth can so completely erase the existence of an intelligent civilization is there any reason to think we are the first intelligent species to appear on this planet. Applying the same principle as the earth not being the center of the universe, is there any reason we are the first technological civilization to evolve here?
Even if a prior native intelligence made it to the moon and mars would we even be able to find evidence there?
"Chernobyl gives hope to this end. 'I really expected to see a nuclear desert there,' says Ronald Chesser, an environmental biologist. 'I was quite surprised.'"
So, the proof for predicting humanity's impact is that last time something unexpected happened, our prediction was wrong.
'The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better,' says John Orrock, a conservation biologist.
0 7/feature1p/index.html ...following a recent speech before the Texas Academy of Science in which Pianka endorsed airborne Ebola as an efficient means for eliminating 90 percent of the world's population. Pianka received an enthusiastic and prolonged standing ovation. Later he received more applause from a banquet hall filled with more than 400 people when the president of the Texas Academy of Science presented him with a plaque naming him 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist.
Sad truth? This is an environmentalist's fantasy dream.
Sure, mod me 'troll' but at least read the article at http://www.sas.org/tcs/weeklyIssues_2006/2006-04-
Not warned, ENDORSED.
The environmentalist agenda, if they are honest enough to admit it, is ultimately about elimination of humans because essentially the problem is that there are too many of us. End of story.
-Styopa
I'd like to see that!
Oh... wait.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
Articles like this are unfounded psychobable on unproven guesses.
Lets take the first statement in this article...
"Humans are undoubtedly the most dominant species the Earth has ever known."
Totally incorrect and full of treehugging feel good mush.
Any species of ANT impacts the Earth and environment far more then humans ever have.
Think about it...
Am I supposed to feel guilty about this tripe? Put down the bong "man" and get a life.
'The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better,'
... CO2 taking as long as 20,000 years to be restored to it's natural level, but will decrease.
He missied a BIG point:
Unfortunately for this rosey scenario, it now appears that humans CO2 output has been holding off an ice age - which should have been well under way by now - since the dawn of agriculture at what was the temperature peak of the current interglacial.
Absent humans' emissions the temperature should crash back onto the (falling and accellerating) downward curve within a couple centuries. (The CO2 level might be detectably {if anybody was there to look} above its "natural" level for a long time, but only by a squidge. Asymptotic approaches are fastest when they have the farthest to go.
But don't sweat it. By the same model, even if we drastically cut back on carbon emissions to carefully hold global temperatures level (and trashed tech so we couldn't do anything else useful later), we'd run out of fossil fuels and crash back into the cold times within a two milleniua or so.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Likewise. In a hundred years or so, the entire planet will be disassembled post-Omega point.
I'm betting on the humans, not the planet. We are at the borderline of resurrecting extinct species. Send the disasterbation somewhere else.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I'd assume most environmentalists are people with a somewhat benevolent heart that are trying to minimize the negative impacts of humanities dumber ideas. They may whole heartedly embarce new technologies and change, or they may be somewhat to very skeptical about it. But for the most part they are looking towards getting us all to work and play well together.
And then, once in a while, you get the throwbacks. The ones that are the mirror of the creationist whackos. The ones that have somehow come to convince themselves that humanity is not part of the natural order, but set apart from it. Except these guys think humans are some sort of actual plague, and that "nature" is in some kind of contention with it. These folks actually like the idea of wiping out humanity. Of course they would go with the rest of us, but it would be a small price to pay to "heal" Mother Earth. This mentality isn't even tree hugging, it is head-in-the-earth sucking straight from the mother tit. The folks from Earth First grab the headlines, but this is the bat-shit weird thinking that should scare us all.
Granted, humans do some stupid things and ought to know better. But using that as a justification to highlight how much better off the world would be without us is just warped. Maybe this guy never heard of the Anthropic principle, but it is all around us and he can't really avoid it. We are in charge whether he likes it or not. What we do with our stewardship is never going to lead to (deliberately) offing ourselves. We'll leave that to chance, or the next domininant species to come along and take it from us.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
The idea that within 100,000 years there will be little evidence of our civilization make me wonder if there were ever any civilizations in the era of the dinosaurs. Or, for that matter, in any ancient era.
W.O.W.?
Some settling may occur during posting.
- Hello, I'm a PC
-...and I'm a Mac.
- Hey that's a cool blockquote. Why can't I do that?
- Because you're a fucking retard PC user.
- Oh. I suck I guess...
- Yes. Now go play, I have work to do.
Did anyone look at the picture (http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/archive/2 573/25731101.jpg)? The areas where mammals have lowest risk of extinctions because of human involvement is where the population density is highest. What does it tell me? It tells me that the nature will find a stable equilibrium even if the population keeps increasing.
and what the heck does he mean by "natural state"? anything that any creature does is non-natural. if a lion killing a deer is natural, then so is farming by humans. it is called living.
Discover magazine has a much more poetic article on the same subject-- and there's a picture!r th-without-people/
http://www.discover.com/issues/feb-05/features/ea
It really blows the other stuff on the topic away, IMO-- it's definitely the first article in Discover to actually bring tears to my eyes.
Nothing more to say...
I've always thought the slogan "Save the Planet" to be pretty stupid. Like we're really going to do any real harm to the planet? Or even mother nature? Certainly not with the technology we have today in any case. There have been volcano eruptions in the Earth's past that have released energy far in excess of the energy in all the nuclear weapons of all countries put together. Likewise for asteroid impacts.
What we can and might easily do is make the Earth's environment incapable of sustaining human life. But that will just make the world safe for the ants and kudzu. Life will go on, just perhaps without us.
Fuck the planet -- save the humans!
|>oug
Until animals evolve into humans again
Quoting that link:
One of Pianka's earliest points was a condemnation of anthropocentrism, or the idea that humankind occupies a privileged position in the Universe. He told a story about how a neighbor asked him what good the lizards are that he studies. He answered, "What good are you?"
Pianka hammered his point home by exclaiming, "We're no better than bacteria!"
I've heard estians, aka estholes (est, renamed Landmark Forum) say "We're all just tubes."
SPOILER: Have barf bag ready as you read:
The tubes thing refers to the human digestive system - our sole purpose in life is to eat and shit.
The "environmentalist" movement was taken over by socialists/anti-capitalists (if it looks like they have more than one agenda, it's because they do), but even more, they want to reprogram everyone's mind, just like a cult. "We're all no better than bacteria."
They're debasing the whole of humanity. How quaint.
Tag lost or not installed.
What I have only seen hinted at here in discussions is the fact that for our species to survive we need to get off this rock and find other rocks to ruin. If we leave this rock a ruined garbage dump it doesn't really matter. The only purpose in caring about the condition of this rock is "can it support us long enough for us to find other rocks?". If we don't hurry up about it, it won't. That will not be sad or happy just a fact. Humans just take themselves so darned seriously.
The EdGCM project is a NASA Global Climate Model (GCM) ported to run on Mac and Win computers, and wrapped in a point-and-click interface. If you'd like to turn the Sun down by a few percent or remove the CO2 you can do so with checkboxes and sliders
So if you want to find out what the earth would be like without humans, you can do so yourself. Download, double-click to install, and then...
You can use the values for paleo-climate to get CO2, N2O, and other greenhouse gasses from pre-industrial and pre-human times. You can set up trends (changes in inputs) for the future. You can take modern values and then at the year 2010 have everything drop to pre-human values. Run the model for a few hundred years (a day or two on a modern computer), and you'll see how long until the Earth reaches equilibrium.
Disclaimer: I'm the project developer.
Space and Computers.
There is an interesting fact that people seem to forget. Cars are the clean option. Let me explain. At the end of the 19th century, all major cities were covered in horse shit. It was everywhere. You couldn't step on the street without stepping in maneure. It was a health nightmare, and was responsible for a good amount of the lower life expectancy back then.
Then cars came along. Cars did not eat or poop. They didn't chew through street lamp poles while idle or spread disease amongst eachother. Cars, in fact, were one of the most environmentally sound technologies to come out of the time.
Fast forward 100 years, and we have asthma epidemics. The global temperature is rising little by little. The ice caps are melting. But we don't have to worry about massive disease pandemics spread by animal feces and the rats that live off of it. We have a transportation source that produces less C02 (and a lot less methane) per trip than having one horse per person would, and it doesn't impinge burden on the world's food supply. Again, cars are the clean option.
If we manage our technology like farmers, rotating the impact we have on the environment with every new technological generation, there is no reason why we shouldn't be able to continue indefinitely. Or at least there is no reason why we shouldn't be able to continue for long enough to learn how to clean up this rock.
All environmental projections assume we're going to continue doing exactly what we're doing indefinitely. And, of course, under those circumstances we'll eventually drain the resources, build up a mountain of a particular toxin, and die. In the 1900's it was biologically active fly bait. At the end of 2000 it is C02. 100 years from now (hopefully) it will be something else. As long as we keep looking for that something else, and keep giving the damaged parts of the environment time to recover, we should be OK.
In other words, cheer up emo kid.
The ______ Agenda
It is strangely ironic that if alien visitors show up in 100K years, the most obvious evidence of our presence will be the Apollo landing sites, and the battered remains of satellites in geostationary orbit. LEO satellites will long since have spiralled in and burned up. The stuff we sent to mars would be long buried in the blowing sand. The chance of ET running across one of our interstellar probes would be about one in a google or so. Space is just too big.
My rights don't need management.
I watched a documentary awhile back late at night on Mount Rushmore and iirc (which I don't, but the info is about right) it will take many thousands of years for Mount Rushmore to be complete (it is designed to be etched away over time to complete itself) and the result should be understandable (as heads) for a good long period...the number in my head is 300,000 years though of course check up on all of these for yourself. :)
I ate your fish.
...Google "Pripyat", the name of the city in Ukraine that was abandoned after the Chernobyl disaster (as mentioned in TFA). Pretty cool, actually.
'The humbling -- and perversely comforting -- reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.'
Considering what we've done to her, I don't blame her (Mother Earth). We don't deserve this planet.
- Dave
Earth Abides, 1949
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
As far as I can tell, the "natural" state of most planets in the universe is "lifeless". As the parent points out, sooner or later THIS planet is going to be scorched, by "natural" causes.
The same people who bemoan the "damage" that people do are often the same ones who deny any "higher purpose" for people (e.g. they are not religious).
Now, I myself, am also far from religious, but if humans have any "purpose" it is to begat other humans and spread throughtout the galaxy, keeping one step ahead of novas, black holes, X-ray quasars, or what have you.
Not that that is much of a point, but otherwise, there is no point, and then who cares?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
There are many stories about someone proving that something we believed true is true, and people responding to this with "well, of course"... without thinking that we DO need to test assumptions and prove that what we believe to be true really is true.
But...
These are usually things that AREN'T well studied, they're just axioms that are so obvious that they haven't been examined before.
This is something that HAS been well studied. It's not news. It's not humbling. It's a review of the field, and anyone who is humbled by this "revelation" simply hasn't been paying attention.
The act of abducting 6.5 million people from the planet would doubtless consume colossal amounts of energy and create massive pollution.
Unfortunatley, Earth is stuck with us.
It's amazing how much we as a society have changed the earth. We have leveled mountains for minerals, sunk forests for dams, and change everything around us. If you live in a quickly expanding city, I would recommend you check out some of the areas that will be developed in the next several years. When anything is really built, the whole terrain is usually changed, and leveled out just so we can build on it.
I have to say, this is my opinion exactly. The real problem is that environmentalist keep trying to give human emotions and wants to plants, animals, and the earth. It's ridicilus. The earth doesn't "want" this or that environment or polution. It just exists. It doesn't care how it exists, it just does. If humans did not exist it wouldn't matter if the earth were a barren like mars, a tropical rainforest, or a huge vate of bacterial goo. It doesn't matter, because mattering is a human concept. We should develop the earth to optimize our existance, like any other species does. Of course, that does mean preservering species and environments if it's to our benefit, but we shouldn't worry that "oh no I stepped on an ant and made mother earth cry"
just footsteps in the sand.
See my art -> http://herbevore.deviantart.com
There are hidden contradictions in the minds of people who "love Nature" while deploring the "artificialities" with which "Man has spoiled 'Nature.'" The obvious contradiction lies in their choice of words, which imply that Man and his artifacts are not part of "Nature" -- but beavers and their dams are. But the contradictions go deeper than this prima-facie absurdity. In declaring his love for a beaver dam (erected by beavers for beavers' purposes) and his hatred for dams erected by men (for the purposes of men) the Naturist reveals his hatred for his own race -- i.e., his own self-hatred.
In the case of "Naturists" such self-hatred is understandable; they are such a sorry lot. But hatred is too strong an emotion to feel toward them; pity and contempt are the most they rate.
As for me, willy-nilly I am a man, not a beaver, and H. sapiens is the only race I have or can have. Fortunately for me, I like being part of a race made up of men and women -- it strikes me as a fine arrangement -- and perfectly "natural" Believe it or not, there were "Naturists" who opposed the first flight to old Earth's Moon as being "unnaturaI" and a "despoiling of Nature."
-Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
These Druids talk like the planet is an organism of it's own, not made up of all the organisms on it.
)
That is "The Gaia Hypothesis" or some crap like that (not that I'm being judgemental of new-age beliefs or anything).
Here's the Wikipedia article on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_theory_(science
Tag lost or not installed.
Using less and less power to do the same task? Sure. However, technological progress necessitates using more and more power in aggregate. In fact, the level of advancement of a civilization is defined in terms of how much power it consumes - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale. So, in the long run there are only two ways of "saving" (ie, preserving) the Earth. One is having us dead. Another is having us get off the Earth.
wont the sun go into its extintion process by then and engulf the earth... then go supernova or into a white dwarf?
(yes i know i suck at spelling fell free to correct my grammar and/or spellin i dont care, im still not going to change
... the chorus would be "Humanity. "#$% yeah."
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
By I digress. The point I'm trying to make is that humans on the planet is not necessarily a bad thing. It is what Gaiea had evolved to--we are the result of the ecosphere. Only self-proclaimed eco-messiahs think they know what the planet should be like. And they are so full of it because they forgot to consider that even if we killed all the living things on the planet, the planet will survive. The real question, as Malcom said in Jurassic Park, is "whether or not we will."
that you can't vote a story as -1 Flamebait
Not necessarily forced. I read a book a few months ago that uses a variety of anthropological and biological evidence to suggest that domestication (of both plants and animals) arose evolutionarily as a symbiotic relationship that may even have initially benefitted the domestic species more than it did the humans. Look at any domestic species, then at its wild counterparts - which is doing better evolutionarily? The domestic species have someone higher on the food chain making sure they reproduce like crazy - of course they're winning!
If humans were suddenly wiped off the face of the earth, what would happen to all those dogs, cats, cows, sheep, and corn stalks? You might say, well, dogs and cats can live ferally pretty well - but generally when they are feral, it's near humans and depending largely on civilization for sources of food and shelter. Yes, we may be destroying species by our presence, but if we were suddenly gone I'd bet that hundreds of domestic species would follow pretty rapidly.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
There are presumably millions of planets like ours in our galaxy alone - what would be the point in having another one without intelligent life? Why do people think that a world without humans is better than one with humans? Why is a green, leafy planet inherently better than a radioactive wasteland?
Because of human values - the same human values that the author is talking about eliminating in such a positive light.
You green guys are so wierd! Earth has no value except to be used by humans - I can understand preservation and conservation in the context of preserving value for future humans, but the humans must come first, not nature (or other animals)!
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
I would like if the author could elaborate on what the Earths "natural temperature" is. Nevermind the rise and fall of many glacial and interglacial periods. While mankind has likely impacted this cycle, it is almost certain that mother nature is still the stronger force. It is almost egotistical to think man could really hurt the earth in the long run.
I've had enough of these guys. New Scientist is just full of the humans-are-terrible meme. The article can barely contain its glee at the thought of billions of people disappearing, at the very least.
Dog is my co-pilot.
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done,
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better,' says John Orrock, a conservation biologist
.... Who then went on a killing spree that ended in his own suicide because of guilt over his drive to the office... [snip]
[snip]
Get real... get over it... "What if"s only work in movies...
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
Yes, we're messing up our only home, but CO2 levels have fluctuated widely - The hydrogen sulfide explanation for species die-off that I read here recently is a good cross-link.
The government should set a price on the pollution, and use the tax dollars to benefit everyone.
This accomplishes the same effect without a million expensive lawsuits.
Why is it that environmentalists (of all people) want us to act unnaturally? Do beavers care about the down river ecosystem when they build a dam? Everyone always forgets that life is NOT static in any way, shape, form, or fashion. It is survival of the fittest (or most adaptable) and the loser dies. Nature worked that way for eons before the EPA or anyone came along; it will work that way long after we are gone. Man is just the current head honcho of the world, and every other creature must deal with it. The key aim of a species is to preserve its own, and we are the only one who actively tries to do the opposite. Man isn't a virus; it is a bacteria. Simply growing and growing until it is halted by outside events or its own overgrowth. That's not anything unusual: it is nature.
The one thing I can think of that could, in theory, even remotely justify our existence here is that we could maybe develop mass space travel and terraforming, and carry our ecosystems into space.
.1billion years without causing massive carbon-based global warming, destruction of biodiversity (burning down rainforests for corn farms), and releasing other nuclear, chemical, biological, and nanotechnological poisons into the biosphere. We'd have to learn to live a LOT more sustainably than we do to exist on the "billions" time scale.
With no sentient life, Earth's ecosystems will thrive another, oh I dunno, ten billion (?) years or so, then the planet will overheat as the sun expands. IF humans or other post-human sentiences can survive even longer than that, and expand into space, maybe we could keep Earth's ecosystems alive even after Terra herself boils over. If we managed to terraform Mars, our little spaceships would be sort of like the spores of interplanetary reproduction, because we'd probably try to bring as complete an ecosystem as possible with us. Of course, we'd have to live a lot more sustainably to last even
But this kind of thing shows that if "Gaia" were consciously tolerating our presence here, the risk/reward ratio isn't TOO bad. If we can't get our act together? Well, we go extinct in well under a million years, the planet spends a few million more undoing our mess, not too bad in the long term view of things. Suppose we somehow learn NOT to completely strip mine everything to death and sustainably expand into space. (Space elevators powered by renewable energy and such.) If we manage to turn Mars green, that's two Gaias instead of one. Twice the survivability against big meteors hitting one of the two planets and causing massive biological damage. If we terraform a third planet outside the Sol system then from the biological security standpoint the gamble was well worth the polluting naughtiness of our current industrial sentience.
If all we're going to do with hydrocarbon fuels is drive our SUVs to the mall, then we really are just wasting resources. If we're going to use hydrocarbons to build an infrastructure that can later build better renewable energy sources and space travel, then maybe that might justify our resource usage.
And yet, even after his spectacular failure to predict a discrete enviro-biological outcome like Chernobyl, Ronald Chesser will gleefully publish similarly dire, similarly vacuous predictions on a 100-, 1000-, and 10000-year timescale.
To paraphrase his next dire prediction: 'In 10,000 years, the planet will melt. Or freeze. Or implode. Yes. It will definitely melt or freeze or implode. I really expect to see a desert here.'
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
We had a golf course that went out of business.
1.5 years later it was all prairie again. Even the
greens.
Weeds rule!!!!!
Why even have the planet earth if we either a) are all dead or b) don't live on it. If saving the planet means removing ourselves from it, then there's truly no point to saving it because we won't be able to use it! I think perhaps the Kardashev scale if fundamentally flawed.
The article is written by reptiles! They are not partial; they still haven't gotten over the dinosour thing.
Table-ized A.I.
Yeah, obviously a radioactive wasteland would be much nicer.
But no one is advocating wiping out humans. Mnay who oppose conservation try to paint greens as promoting genocide; there are undoubtedly a few nutjobs that would advocate that, but it's not on the agenda of any organisation. The kind of person who could contempalte that is more the Unabomber type, antisocial and at worst capable of murdering a few people or perhaps blowing up a building or dam.
1) because of the word "would". There is no "would". Period.
2) because of absence of definition and absence of sense of any definition of "better" without human factor. What is "good" and "bad" is between God and creatures with a free will. Period.
Author is complete and utter moron and idiot. And stop posting anything from NewScientist and dumping it to the Science section.
Duh!
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Whirled Peas... Umm... World Peace...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
The only reminder of mankind will be Keef Richards smoking leftover nuclear waste.
Wait.. I thought Ben Affleck was the moonraper?
You're missing something very important: the survival of the human species is completely dependent on the survival of nature. We can sustain humanity on a green, leafy planet; we don't have the technology to sustain humanity in a radioactive wasteland.
Or, the massive glut of women in the USSR could start matching up with the massive glut of men in China.
Yes, we do have a lot of room for advancment, though I didn't necessarily mean technological. I was actually trying to make a point about humans being self-centered and short-sighted with regard to our environmental stewardship and treatment of others. Some of which may be described by your own sig...
"And when we go, nature will start over. With the bees, probably."
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Urgh! It's really annoying when someone claims to be scientific when they can't even spell: It would remain around for many years, CO2 taking as long as 20,000 years to be restored to it's natural level, but will decrease. It's natural level? Come on, spell it right.
this could have happened a few times since we fell out of the trees.
on the other hand, the decay of the effect of our presence seems logarithmic.
Then I guess we'll have to make sure it never forgets. *cracks knuckles*
You should write an essay and post it on your own blog.
Yes what you say is true, humans do have a great chance and responsibility to the earth and to each other, but humans hate life, and each other. How exactly do you reach humans who hate existance itself and who wish life could be shorter and more brutal?
If you think that way of thinking is insane, alright, how do you reach nihilists who think life is worthless, pointless, meaningless, and that we live simply to die? Finally, how do you harness/channel the energy of hate and convert it from a negative destructive force into a positive creative force? We are being destroyed by our own hatred. We are being destroyed by the fact that we are inefficient.
We have 6 billion people, but we don't have full employement, thats inefficiency. If we had full employement of all humans on planet earth we'd have cities on mars by now. If we did not invest so much time and money on wars, we'd have gone into mars hundreds of years ago and we'd be talking from different planets right now. So you see, our species is one of the most inefficient species that exists, we hunt ourselves down into extinction, a lot of the time for no reason at all, and other times for religious reasons or strategic turf reasons. Basically, we are doomed, programmed to destroy, it's in our genes.
The Earth is old and tends to forget a lot of things. Give her a break. Perhaps she's amnesiac because she chooses to be. What with all the shit we do to her... relentlessly
"earth w/o people" implies "no more cowboyneal option in the polls" ! hmm, an unexpected benefit
All the while, when we were killing ourselves, in specific our tribal versions, we basically killed off the people who knew how to take care of the earth, destroying thousands of years of knowledge that likely was passed down form word of mouth.
Go back further, during the inquisition and during other times of war, entire libraries with thousands of books were burned, knowledge which could have advanced us much sooner was vanished out of existance due to religious reasons. Now it's still happening, as we are as inefficient as we have ever been.
We have 6 billion people, maybe 2 billion are surviving, the other 4 billion live in complete poverty, and we arent using them for anything. We could be using these people to go into space and build on the moon, or mars, or any planet we want. We could build huge solar spaceships, and literally live in space cities floating around if we wanted to, we have the man power, the brain power, the will, the need, the only thing we lack is the heart. We hate ourselves to the point of inefficiency, just think about it, if all 6 billion people got together to do something, yes we could do it. We built pyramids, we went to the moon, it's all a matter of what we choose to focus on. We can focus on dominance of the planet and it's resources until theres nothing left to do,minate but ourselves, and then dominate ourselves out of existance, or we can move into space and take on aliens, or whatever the hell is in space. Since we don't even know whats up there, it would make sense to find out, I mean what else is there to do down here besides kill ourselves, fight over resources, starve,work, and watch the environment fall apart?
And no, we will not be able to take our wars into space like starwars if there are aliens in space, in fact if aliens don't like us they'd infect us with a virus and wipe us out and we'd have no defense for it. We can't even deal with stuff like HIV and the avian flu, if a virus came that spread through the air that killed instantly, it would likely kill everyone off before they could cure it, or worse if a virus just made us go insane and destroy ourselves the same result would happen.
Basically, humans will likely go extinct, it won't be any aliens that do it, if we cannot get along with each other we certainly can't get along with any aliens and would likely be killed off as soon as aliens discover us. Aliens would simply kill all humans and then fly their saucers down to the earth to live on whatevers left. Why would humans be useful to aliens? We don't make good slaves, we are violent, and the humans that arent violent and who do make good slaves get bullied out of existance by aggressive groups of people. Trust me, there are no aliens, and if there were, we'd never get to meet them, they'd wipe us out and take our resources just like we do to ourselves, because they'd play the game the same way we play it, just wipe us out and take the earth.
When might makes right, and as a species we decide to consciously live by that rule, if there are aliens, even if these aliens are not aggressive, they will see that humans are aggressive and there will be no dialog, no diplomacy, no deal, no communication, we would never discover they even exist, we'd simply be wiped out, likely in such a way that we can't stop it, and likely to simply steal the earth from the monsters(humans) that are destroying it.
So if you put yourself in the perspective of alien, what the hell would you do if you saw some monsters on earth destroying it, you'd simply kill all of them, and then land your ship, very much like if you saw anything else infested with pests, like roaches,. So the same response humans would give in the situation, assume aliens would give that exact response to us, assume we are pests. You know, maybe we had a choice to choose between being pet or pest, but if we can't take care of ourselves, or the planet, we won't be able to take care of aliens, or be useful in any way, not intellectually, not scientifically, aliens would have no reason at all to ever communicate with a species that has a gun to it's own head. Why should alienns care to talk us our of suicide if we want it so badly as to spend ALL of our thoughts trying to find new ways to do it?
It is only the arrogance of THIS particular human culture, one of thousands, but one that has swallowed thousands of others, like the Borg, that leads to widespread resource consumption and waste production.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
The Earth has barely noticed we were here. After all! What's a few billion years to a creature that can live as long as it can.
Blind are we who do not know that we are blind. The world has been boring ever since I got here.
"So Mr Ghandi, what do you think about Western Civilization?"
"That would be nice."
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
Without spiritual advancement, any technological advancement will only become more and more dangerous, to ourself, not earth itself mind you.
We're actually declining, just like the Roman empire, while thinking we're advancing. It's quite sad to see so many blind people around the world waiting for someone to save them, instead of getting away from the idiot-box and start improving the world with their fellow human beings.
The ignorant masses are counting many orders of magnitude more than those who are starting to take responsibility. Yes, this includes most those who are reading and commenting on Slashdot.
The humbling -- and perversely comforting -- reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.
Unrealistic speculation. In a couple of thousand years, we will damage it beyond all recognition.
Ofcourse it will recover (hey, it was stardust once). But "recovery" word itself would not be applicable. It would be more of recreation.
there is no issue with my network
Im so sick of hearing about native cultures living in "harmony" with nature. Such cultures do their share of damage to the enviroment, they just do it on a smaller scale, mainly because their populations were much smaller and they lacked the tools to do more. Lack of medicine and hygiene means lots of illness, add in regular tribal wars and regular famine, and the population will stay small enough to not make a massive impact on their enviroment. The culture's arent any more noble, and when introduced to the benefits of modern society almost invariable embrace them and all the enviromental impact they bring. And primitive people still managed to overhunt wildlife and destroy natural habitats with the best of them. Don't delude yourself, if they had the tools the most backwards tribe in Africa would cause as much enviromental damage as any American.
The reality of so called harmony with nature is an existence at the whims of nature, with sickness and death around every corner. Farming, and thus the civilization needed to enable widespread farming with resistance to drought and famine, was so attractive to ancient peoples because it allowed them to break free of an existence dictated by luck and the weather. They didnt give a damn about clearing forests full of animals to make farm land. Humans are, and always have been a fairly selfish lot, with little regard to far long term consequences of our actions. And even if a human culture arose that shunned civilization and lived a life with as little impact on the enviroment as possible, that culture would either quickly be destroyed by other cultures who had learned to bend the planet and it's enviroment to their own purposes.
The best example of this is the American Indians, who although hardly living in perfect harmony with nature as the tour guides would have you believe, largely lacked the tools or manpower to make signifigant changes to their enviroment. When europeans came, they brought with them the rewards of the quite savage raping of the natural European ecosystem (which, after so many centuries of heavy human inhabitance, barely resembles it's original form) and took their land, and either killed them or forced them off into tracts of poor quality land not deemed fit for european settlement. That society would grow so much by using the abundant resources of a hitherto virtually untapped continent to become the dominant military and economic force on the planet, partly through the development of a weapon capable of causing damage to the planet at a rate never before imagined.
Humans. in our lifetimes or any other, will never find "harmony" with nature, and even if a subset does, they will likely be killed by stronger cultures who want the only chunk of land not yet completely exploited.
The only realistic ways to escape total destruction of the planet, in my opinion, is technology. Technology can allow us to enjoy all the benefits of our modern society while at the same time making it easy to avoid excessive damage to the enviroment. Technology could even let us one day harvest resources from other planets, as well as allow us to use existing resources more effeciently. None of that will be accomplished by throwing away our cars and computers and screwing around in huts in the woods.
Your a idiot. Of course they will find intelligent life.
I think your forgetting the mice and dolphins.
If there were nobody left to look at the world, does it still exist?
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
Earth has no value except to be used by humans
Why do you say that?
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
The Kardashev Scale was released in 1964, when conservationism was a misspelling of conservatism (no political comment here, just a typo). Things have changed a lot since then, with some of the most advanced societies on earth (European) actually using less energy than 10 years ago. And contrary to the fevered wet dreams of every ethnic mionority, the population of the old world is growing, and not via immigration, either. So in the long run, you're fulla shit. :D
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Environmentalism isn't about saving the planet. It's more about saving the planet for our children.
Sustainability should be the goal. How can we limit the impact of our existence? Ideally, if we could build completely sealed cities with limited and measured consumption of naturally-generated resources as well as expulsion of waste for nature to recover. Unfortunately right now everyone leans heavily on nature, treating the environment as a bottomless resource that provides all the fuel we need and reprocesses all of our waste.
Anyway I was struck by the history of environmentalism in that things like the clean air act don't get enacted until the problem gets pretty absurd, like the deadly London fog or the unhealthy LA smog or the ozone hole. I don't really understand the detractors of global warming... it's like they're saying that not enough people have died yet of causes attributable to global warming, so let's press on with excessive energy consumption and exhaust until enough people do. I'm kind of wondering what this magic number is... how many people have to die or crops ruined or whatever for some of our nations' leaders to take the environmentalist / conservationist agenda seriously.
In the end, it all comes down to responsibility. We can have cheaper, plentiful, more polluting energy now, or we can spend more money and effort to conserve and deploy cleaner energy sources. I just don't think anyone would blame us for taking the latter approach.
If humankind suddenly disappeared, quite a few nuclear reactors would spin
completely out of control (can't really trust the automated shutdown systems,
- see Forsmark).
The resulting burning nuclear cores might result in severe long term
contamination of large areas. This has not been accounted for in this
timeline.
--- Eat my sig.
it's definitely the first article in Discover to actually bring tears to my eyes.
Oh for fucks sake. If you want a picture of a region where nature has overtaken humanity, look at the Cambodian jungles. The NK DMZ isn't the only one, nor even the best example. As to why it brings a tear to your eyes, look up gnosticism. See, this is why we booted out religious nutjobs from Europe long ago. Little did we know the Indians wouldn't eat them, in an ironic turn of events.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
the same human values that the author is talking about eliminating in such a positive light.
The author is talking about the tired and tedious theories of gnosticism, with a fresh coat of paint, which have been rolling around every once in a while for the last few centuries. See this is what happens when you don't oppress the shit out of religious nutjobs. Sigh.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
"Have you noticed that the trend in technology is to use less and less power, and to be smaller and smaller (meaning requiring less materials?)"
:)
are you sure about that?
It seems to me that for many things we are using more and more energy to do the same tasks.
Take for example food production, the most important thing we produce.
I've read a few times something like the following...
"In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1."
http://www.harpers.org/TheOilWeEat.html
I only use that site as a reference cause I found it quickly but feel free to look into it. I'd prefer if it wasn't true
Google it, sunshine.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
"What if every human being, all 6.5 billion of us, were suddenly abducted and the planet was left to fend for itself?"
Sounds like a PETA wet dream to me.
There's one thing that these types of scientists tend to forget: people are a part of nature. We're not the only species that build things, either. Beavers affect the environment on their own, with the dams that they build, or birds with the nests that they make, or bees with the hives that they construct. It takes resources to make those, as well, albeit on a smaller scale. We just happen to be animals who make the most of tools and resources. It doesn't mean that the earth would be better off without us, it just means that the earth would be different. People try too often to place humanity in some isolated objective context when, really, we're a part of the cycle of nature on this planet.
It's not good or bad, it's just how it is. We can't be guilty about existing, especially when there isn't any conclusive data pointing to global warming being caused by humanity. We've only been tracking changes in the environment for the past few hundred years; given the superfluous conjecture, it's equally likely that we're still coming out of the last ice age, or that the solar cycles are undergoing changes.
About the only way we could truly destroy the Earth is if we were to completely obliterate it into itty bitty pieces, or burn the atmosphere away. Other than that, the Earth will invariably heal itself from whatever we can throw at it. It's in a constant state of healing; nature finds a balance, and we're not the toughest thing it's faced.
On the timescale of the earth (5 billion years), having all traces of your civilization disappear within 2 million years is NOTHING!
I bet that if we were clever enough, we'd be able to find another ape-like species which lived on earth, evolved an advanced civilization and then disappeared because of a climatic event. The sun has remained stable for so long that it's inconcevible that it didn't occur before, likely long before the dinasours ruled the planet. We just need to find evidence of it, maybe in one of the great extinctions in the past.
Just an idea I had,
Ben
"Pollution would cease being created."
Is that assuming the volcanoes disappear along with the humans?
Was that a troll, or are you really so hung up on yourself that you don't realize how insanely ridiculous that sounded?
Not many domesticated animals would vote in favor of making it on their own. Some have it pretty good.
Eventually, the dam's power systems would notice nobody was around and close all the penstock gates. But the dam needs power to hold the gates closed, and it's no longer making power. Once external power fails (yes, electricity flows to the dam as well as from) and the battery backups fail, the penstock gates will open about a quarter of the way, and the turbines will start to spin up. But the breakers have all tripped, so there's no electricity coming out of the generators. This is important, because without electric power, you can't lubricate the generators' bearings. So after a while the bearings seize, which is guaranteed to be dramatic.
After the powerhouse destroys itself, the dam itself will probably survive until the end of the next ice age. That's when a lake the size of Montana eventually bursts through the ice and about half its contents slam into the dam all at once, tearing its top off and chewing apart the rock all around it. There will be enough rubble left over for Lake Mead to partially and permanently reform, at a third its original depth.
Has anybody else ever read this article? That's all I remember from it.
This is not my sandwich.
"Destroying the planet" is a fabrication of the environmental movement to frighten people into changing their behavior. All it really means is that we would render it uninhabitable for us. I do not think nature would care on way or the other if we detonated every nuclear bomb we have ever built, it would be nothing more than a tiny blip on the graph of the history of the planet. Squirrels and beavers and snakes might be screwed in the short term but that doesn't consitute destroying the planet. Like in Aldo Leopold's cycle, everything we vaporize with bombs will eventually be rebuilt into something else.
Everything else in your post, refreshingly above the usual banter of 12 year olds.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Today's environmentalism presents with a single argument:
The presumption presented is that anything affected in a recognizable way by humans is bad.
The more those humans are like us and the more of them there are, the uglier is the scene presented.
What's the hierarchy of natural health and beauty presented by the environmental view?
At one extreme, you've got pristine rainforest, untouched by humans; at the other extreme you've got NYC, Bombay (Mumbai?), Mexico City, London, etc.
Using these definitions of beauty and ugliness, we are presented with the idea that removal of humans is the removal of ugliness.
As the recognizable effects of human habitation disappear, we are told that the planet is healing itself.
The conclusion expressed is that it would be good for humans to minimize the effect we have on the environment.
The conclusion implied is that humans should not exist--it's an unwinnable war.
We're not offered the option that "humans can go this far and it'll be OK" or "these people are doing it right; that's the goal"
Any human activity must be constantly impeded or reversed.
What the environmentalists leave us with is dogmatic self-hatred.
At best it's equal-opportunity self-hatred as the whole species should cease to exist.
But they've managed to co-opt the venue for rational discourse on human effects to the environment and turn it into another sales pitch for a power grab.
There are still people working to preserve "the environment", but they don't present themselves as "environmentalists", and are painted as the enemy by those that are.
Cite Greenpeace and Ducks Unlimited as extreme examples.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
So the Puritans, say, who believed that the earth was created specifically so humans could reside on it, knew nothing about humilty.
While we folks today, believing stuff like in this article, are just such humble folk ...
That we humans have a "few billion" years to figure out how to move off-rock is a little optimistic given the record of significant events over last few millions, never mind last billion years. Our species barely survived the Toba eruption- events which occur every few million years, then theres the big impacts. Are we taking advantage of the current lull to hedge our survival over the long term?
Is it a rule, that there's an exception to every rule?
And then the alien conspiracy theorists will point at them as proof of intelligent life on earth, only to be dismissed by almost all the other aliens (like what happened to the face on mars and the butt on mercury)... :)
All that I am going to say is "Soylent Green".
But that is my point - the only context that conservation makes sense in is a human one.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
It's nice to see the pseudo-intellectuals showing thier true colors. You all talk a good game, but when it comes right down to it, You're all about Oppression and Genocide. Nice.
Oh, by the way, since you obviously missed the GP's point, he was talking about how value cannot be assigned to something unless you have a sentient being to assign the value. Non-sentient species do not have the ability to assign value to anything.
Without humans or some other sentient race to assign value to Earth's existence, it's just another rock orbiting an unimpressive main sequence star in an arm of a middling sized common spiral galaxy.
With humans (or some other sentient race)it becomes home. A place of incredble intrinsic value. The cradle of life and of our civilization. And, assuming we don't kill ourselves, the place we can all look back to as we begin our inevitable migration out into the greater galaxy and the universe.
But you wouldn't understand that, You're too busy planning how to oppress the religious freedoms of other people. Nice to see you have your priorities straight. Idiot.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Most solid planets/planetoids are radioactive wastelands, by the way. Humans don't have anything to do with that, nature makes them that way. Any airless body somewhere near a star is going to be a radioactive wasteland, like our moon.
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Why do you think that it has value? The are almost certainly a million other Earth-like planets in our Galaxy - are they more valuable than ours?
They have no value because anything that is unused by the valuer has no value by definition - if I am the valuer, and I am human, something I cannot see/use/experience has no value. An Earth without humans has no value to humans - and we are the only ones that really count. If you don't believe that, please shoot yourself - but not the rest of us, please.
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*nitpick*
They're irradiated wastelands. They're not very radioactive themselves.
...one of the principals of evolution is overpopulation. Having more animals than the environment can support will result in survival of the fittest. There is no way around that. However, we have yet to reach that point. We still have room to grow as a species. What will the human landscape look like when we have reached the point of overpopulation? What other species will we have displaced and brought to the point of extinction when we get to that point? At that point in time, will the only animals existing be some marine animals, humans, rats, cockroaches and pigeons?
We are smart enough to invent atomic bombs, factories, automobiles, styrofoam Big-Mac containers, but will we be smart enough to compensate for our overpopulation? Will we be able to do so before mass disease runs rampant and elimates a huge percentage of our population?
In the end, the ultimate question is, are we too smart? Will evolution and the rules of life take its course and remove us becuase we have passed that threshold of intellegence and are on the wrong side?
Our options are A) Learn to live with the planet to ensure resources are abundant enough to support our species (this can include 300 story apartment buildings in Kansas and eating some kind of man-made protien) B) Increase the size of our environment (Moon, Mars) C) Suffer massive losses.
-- A cat is no trade for integrity!
I think that is just a screenshot from 12 Monkeys.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Well, no they're not radioactive, unless they've been nuked by some alien race. But if most other planets are wastelands, that makes the case for preserving our rare green planet stronger.
If in 100,000 years after we are gone, an intelligent being came and could find no trace of our existence....I would ask how intelligent are they? sure they flew from one planet to another, so I would expect that they have some sort of archaeological savvy, enough to find traces of us at least.
'sig' deleted due to the stupidity of it's 'nature'
It will take only a few moments for the aliens' bureaucracy to release a statment that those aren't faces, just a rock formation. They only look like faces because of shadows and reflected light.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
That's unbelievably coherent and logical. You're right, of course. But the green debate is over the 'value' we preserve for future humans--personally, I find enormous value in old growth forests and untouched wilderness. It's about land use--which includes NOT using parts of it. You conservatives are so weird! Always wanting to log and pave our priceless wilderness areas in the name of creating jobs.
>think we still have a lot of room for advancement. I also think the only way out is through - through technology.
"Advanced" really doesnt just mean technology but society as well. All the technology in the world isnt going to make people realize that, for example, slavery is wrong, women deserve the same rights as men, healthcare shouldnt be a for-profit venture, etc. I dont see any reason why there couldnt be a space-faring slave state.
Technology isn't liberating, its just tools.
Oh, I dunno. The planet itself might, with the help of perhaps another ice age to drive the remnants of our cities into so much rubble.
I don't think it would take an ice age. I'd think 50-100 years without humans around for maintain our stuff and all our roads highways and such would be over run with grass. It would take much longer for wind, water, ice, plant erosion to completely destory our roads, but I'd think that under 10,000 most of our roads would be well on their way to being used as bedrock for the planet. I'd think the structures of our cities would take much longer for nature to tear down and level, but time would be on the planet's side.
we can say that we *are* a specific species: the first one who could eventually outlive the Sun.
Rescuing other species before the giant red sun burns everything on Earth is the strongest argument against those who would like to see mankind disappear for the benefit of nature.
We need more technologies, space industry and good productivity to face this ultimate challenge in a far future.
We can also manage to protect bio-diversity, while dominating Earth .
Thank you for reminding us this fact.
True, but really irrelevant. When we talk about turning Earth into a radioactive wasteland, we aren't talking about making the surface into pure plutonium. We are talking about spreading a few ppm of plutonium (and others) around, and some secondary radiation (think 20 years after a nuke). The moon (and other airless bodies) are irradiated by radiation from the sun, pick up a little secondary radiation, and get some radioactive particles thrown all over. Pretty much the same, really - neither one is friendly to human life.
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But if most other planets are wastelands, that makes the case for preserving our rare green planet stronger.
Why? If Earth was the only planet in the entire Universe, the case really wouldn't be that much stronger - unless you are proposing that humans will eventually use other Earth-like planets. Things only have human value if they can be used by humans - and we only care about human value (because we are humans!).
But really, your point is not valid. There are most likely millions of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy, but there are billions of airless bodies in the solar system! Is oxygen more valuable than iron because it is rare compared to iron on Earth? Now go check the relative prices of oxygen compared to iron, just to be sure.
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Personally, I was driving around about 3-4 years ago up here in Rochester, NY when we had that huge blackout. Exactly what I expected would happen did happen...
without power ALL of the massively inefficient electric devices STOPPED. In doing so, they stopped producing massive amounts of heat. All of those building AC units, all the electric motors, and a plethora of other devices.
I was trapped in bumper to bumper traffic because people in this country get all freaked out and impatient. So, they don't handle the the whole "when the traffic light is out treat it as an all way stop" thing.
In any event, I watched the temperature on a bank display. In the course of about 30 minutes it drop about 5-7 degrees and the wind picked up. Additionally, it was much quiter. It was wonderful. I am not saying we should just drop all technology. I am simply saying that most of our devices are incredibly inefficient and it seems obvious what would happen on this planet if all humans just vanished from the face of the Earth is very straight forward.
The temperature would start to drop, dramatically. The wind would pick up and in a matter of a few years the Earth would start to reclaim the spaces we used to inhabit.
I disagree with the article in one area. I don't think it would take tens of thousands of years. I think it would happen MUCH faster then that.
That's my two or three cents.
"Imagine a world without people"
I'm working on it! It'll be done soon, I promise.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
They have no value because anything that is unused by the valuer has no value by definition
Your defintion of value is not correct. We're not talking about a car or a house here. Something of value is simply something of 'worth' which, in a philosophical or moral context, is difficult to precisely describe. Humans can, for example, value 'life' in general even for a specific life which doesn't benefit us in anyway. To use your example, yes extra-terrestrial life is valuable, though not necessarially more valuable then our planet's life, but still valuable.
Aw crap, ninjas!
Sorry, the religious nutjobs _left_ Europe, and they are the better for it.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Thank you for saying what many OTHER people believe. As casual reader of /. I thought that EVERYONE who posts here was a bleeding heart tree hugger. It's nice to see there are some with a counter-opinion... who also get modded up.
/. about this year's hurricane season. But it's not just /. Am I the only one who remembers this time last year, when Alanis Morissette, Matt Damon, and the like were hosting PBS specials about all of last year's hurricanes being proof of Global Warming? Where's the "proof" this year?
I too noticed the lack of articles on
Anyway, thanks again.
Makes me wonder if the Earth First people might create exclusion zones in the rain forest... make it inhospitable to people, but hospitable - or tolerable - to the ecosystem.
Sounds like a John Grisham novel or something. (Set in the pacific northwest - Can they stop the eco-terrorists in time?)
meh
It's all about the kids. Indigenous cultures in places like Brazil tend to bleed over from the jungle into the civilised farms and cities not because they want to, but because they can obtain medicine to alleviate naturally horiffic infant mortality rates. In fact, most such indigenous people have absolutely no future in the civilised world, since they can't read, write or even speak in any widespread language. Suicide levels are rampant and common occupations include prostitution and manual labour. But they do it because watching one's children die from simple bacterial infections is even worse.
Cheerful, eh?
So it's not because they really love civilisation - in fact most hunter gatherers have to do about 3 hours foraging each day (depending on the environment of course I'm assuming somewhere rich like a rainforest) and the rest of the time is spent getting outrageously high on whatever hallucinogens are available from the nearest tree/ mushroom/ toad.
I can see where they're coming from - I was probably a bit nihilistic and anti-human until I had a kid, now I love people.
You thought you could break the laws of physics without paying the PRICE?
This is just nihilism. Nothing has any value, so let's just lay down and die.
And while I'd like to believe there are millions of Earth-like planets, we only know for sure of one. If there are millions of Earths, some should have intelligence, so, (vide Drake's Paradox) where the hell are they? If we survive we should have colonised the galaxy in a million years or 10 at the most. Why hasn't someone else beat us to it? So either life is very rare, or star travel is impossible, (but SETI is surely not) or we're the very first in our galaxy.
> no one is advocating wiping out humans
Au contraire, mon frere. The most powerful people in the world are busily
planning the extermination of the bulk (90%) of the population, in order to
provide better yachting for their trust-fund babies. If you think otherwise,
you have a very unrealistic understanding of human nature.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
You know, the thing that I thought most funny about this was the statement: "Pollution would cease being created". The earth was highly polluted before humans got here. Our atmosphere is made up of about 20% the toxic waste given off by cyanobacteria. And we like it that way. Of course, the cyanobacteria probably don't like it too much, but that's what they get for never doing an environmental impact study on the effects of large-scale photosynthesis. If they had, perhaps they would have curbed their activities a bit, thus inadvertently saving the planet from those pesky humans in the process.
Biological pollution will stop once there is no life left on the planet. At which point, the only thing left will be entropic pollution, which will continue until the ultimate heat death of the universe.
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
I'm afraid I find you philisophical argument irrational, and therefore unappealing to me. Of course, many philisophical things are irrational, and some are at least interesting. But to say that that Earth-like planet twelve galaxies over that humanity will never find has value to me is not a useful definition of value.
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This is just nihilism. Nothing has any value, so let's just lay down and die.
Not so! In my example, Iron has value because it is useable by humans, is attainable by humans, but is difficult to attain. Oxygen has less value to humans, because while it is essential for life it is easy to obtain. Or you could make other arguments that reverse the orders - but the key is that if there isn't a human involved, there is no value.
If there are millions of Earths, some should have intelligence, so, (vide Drake's Paradox) where the hell are they?
My current working theory is that any race advanced enough to create spacecraft has negative population growth, and they die out.
But anyway, the value of Earth is really uneffected by any other Earths - unless we find a way to reach them. (Or, if you think we will find a way to reach them, I suppose some kind of futures-market-like value could be assigned) The Earth is valuable because it is our home. If it ceases to be our home, it has no value.
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It's nice that we don't have to worry about any long-term damage that humans are doing to the planet. I now know that our effect as a species on this planet is insignificant. (I had always suspected all that fragile ecosystem talk was just tree-hugger fear-mongering.)
Well, as long as we agree that were both weird...
I agree with you, BTW - old growth forest have a high value, as does untouched wilderness. It just isn't valueable if there are no humans, and it is not priceless. Just expensive.
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Even funnier - have you ever thought about what those activists are trying to do to all the plants that have now evolved to live in a higher caron-dioxide atmosphere? They are trying to wipe out an entire ecosystem, I tells ya!
Remeber those moths that evolved grey, then black, then white to match the pollution colors?
Why do people resist change so much?
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whaddaya call people who like to hang around with scientists ? conservation biologists
I'm gonna start turning my front porch light on all night just to add to the LIGHT pollution!!
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Funny how a hundred years ago American society was centered around controlling the environment around us and things natural were considered "resources" to be used for the benefit of humankind. Lewis and Clark measured the wealth of the land during their trip in the numbers of animals they found - the number of skins that could be harvested and sold. These resources were put on Earth by a higher body for man to use in their eyes.
Today, humans are the blight.
This tells me the Islamic Fascists will win the coming war since they aren't so enlightened as to lower their self-esteem.
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Why do people resist change so much?
Well, in the case of the environment it means that enormous amount of disruption to the economy, culture, and way of life. If your entire village is dependant on fishing and has been for 200 years it's a little hard to adapt to the change. If NYC goes underwater from rising sea levels that just might be a burden on society that would be best avoided.
In short people resist change because they've invested a lot in the way things are. Sometimes that change is inevitable and you have no chance of changing it. Earthquakes happen and there's nothing we can do about them but plan for them. De-populating the fish in the oceans, rising sea levels, and climate change are things we can and should try to stop from happening.
The thing you seemed to have missed is that environmentalism is about human existance, not some dumb "save the planet" crap that the wingnuts have promoted. As George Carlin said "The planet is fine, the people are fucked".
AccountKiller
Save the Planet, Kill yourself.
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
Close, but pollution doesn't go away completely. In fact, that is completely and unequivocally far from the truth. Lets discuss: Oak trees emit Isoprene (in large quantities, esp in texas), Lightning produces NOx compounds, Volcanos produce more pollution in one eruption than the US does in an entire year. Volcanos and dust storms are huge producers of particulate matter. I hope you don't mean to tell me that when humans are gone that these things will magically disappear as well....
I agree that you're the one with a strange definition of "value". Why does something have to be used to have value?
Why do you think that it has value? Location, location, location.
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
When I describe myself as a misanthrope, most people assume I am a bitter, jaded, self-hating suicide case. The truth is, I love life, and my life is made better by the wealth of wonderful people I know and trust.
However, my life experience has taught me that about 1 out of 10,000 people are right for me, and the rest are simply incompatible. I do not wish them any harm, nor do I extend them any trust; I leave them alone and ask that they return me the courtesy. I have no trouble being witty or funny while at social gatherings, and I love to blather on and make conversation, but I demand a specific content to that conversation which makes finding friends a rare task for me.
I do not think I am superior to anyone. I think that some people prefer coke, and some people prefer pepsi. I'm partial to lunatics. As John Lennon once sang: "whatever gets you through the night...".
Back to topic, I follow a long line of rational thought; from original sin to an inherintly evil man to the corruption of power to the necessary paranoia of these modern times- clearly no rational person wanders the city waving piles of money, passing it along to the poor and hungry as they pass. And not for a distaste of philanthropy- but for fear that a zealous onlooker might club him and relieve him of his pile.
To put it another way- even the most adorable 2 year old will grab for a cookie if given a chance, be it on another's plate or not. As best I can tell, this is innate, it is natural, but it is also destructive, and always-present.
The human animal was designed for survival, and at this task it has performed remarkably well. But in the course of survival we have unlocked the possibility of a society based on greater ideals than simple survival (i.e. everyone should eat, everyone should have a comfortable home, everyone should have the opportunity to advance themselves, etc.). These ideals are noble, and express a true greatness also found in the human spirit. Unfortunatley, I believe we are simply ill-equipped for this new mission; after all, we were designed for survival, not justice.
Can we change? We change everyday. My great (g-g-g-g-great) grandfather once sat in a coliseum and cheered for blood. These days I watch "Gladiator" on DVD while forbidding the neighbor's children to curse.
Do people want to change their evil ways? Some do. Coincidentally, about 1 in 10,000 as best I can tell.
barack to the future?
Well, I would agree with you - but that is not what this article was about.
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Your hassle is that you have no power due to the snow storm. The snow storm didn't stop your coal-burning power plant from producing power. The overhead power lines that were ripped down by trees caused your problem. To fix your issue all we would have to do is bury the lines. Nuclear, while not inherently bad, produces waste that must be baby-sat for a long, long time. That is the issue. The waste. Deal with the waste and it is a good idea. Burying the waste and playing the "forget about it" game is not acceptable no matter how deep it is buried. Why is wind and solar power such a bad idea?
'The humbling -- and perversely comforting -- reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.'
We Transhumans will forget you fast, too - unless of course we decide to maintain full memory for "completeness" reasons...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
"10 years: Methane in atmosphere gone"
Did we take the cows with us? Or are they just less gassy without us around?
Note to self: Stop putting jokes in my insightful comments so I can get something other than +1 Funny!
Your sweeping generalizations are no less ridiculous than those of the GP.
In fact several "indigenous" peoples of North America (who ostensibly came across a land bridge from Siberia) really did live in harmony with the land. They would migrate with the seasons; some of them would actually build structures exclusively from gathered fallen wood or from quick-growing plants, and they would actually burn them down when they moved on. This would sometimes have the effect of firing the forest behind them, but what many people seem to be unable to realize is that when you have regular fires then the detritus doesn't have a chance to build up at the bases of trees, so the heat of the fire is less. Regular burns mean that the forest never has a chance to burn completely. Also, some plants can only distribute seeds with the influence of fire - the great coastal redwood (Sequoia Sempervirens) is one such. They only spread out through being cut or broken and then "ringing", where the roots come up and become new sprouts all around the stump, but continuing to be the same organism, or through fire which releases the seeds from the cones. Redwoods can't start in competition, so they wait until fire has scoured the land of competitors.
This part, I agree with. Granted, it will probably require that we make some substantial lifestyle changes. Among them: Throwing away our cars, but not our computers. That can't happen overnight though, because our economy is very much based around the car and if we eliminate it, very large percentages of us will be unable to get to work. It's something that has to happen more slowly. I suspect, however, that it will happen suddenly in the US because most Maricons are unable or unwilling to grasp simple truths - and it will not be a happy occasion when it comes.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm quite sure I believe it. However, by some estimates our topsoil is already depleted. It takes literally hundreds of years to build complete topsoil. Soil is maximum something like 40% mineral material, the rest is organic and a great deal of it is living organic material. A lot of the "magic" of really good dirt is in the mixture of living organisms. Through our use of petrochemical-based fertilizers and artificial pesticides and herbicides, we have reduced the living component of our soil not only to a small percentage of what it should be in many cases, but we have also seriously damaged its diversity which means we have made it more fragile, less robust, and it also impairs the soil's ability to fix nutrients in a form usable by plants.
Our farming methods are in general harmful to dirt. We implemented new methods of plowing that put less dirt into the air (but every time you turn soil over, some of it blows away) but what they do is create hardpan ("a hardened soil layer, caused by cementation of soil particles") beneath the top layer of soil. This hardpan layer is even more dead than the soil we've been pouring chemicals on; it also prevents root growth and hampers drainage.
Eventually we're going to have to move to hydroponic farming methods, which will require more energy to start up but less to maintain. Hydroponics can be used indoor or out, and for any kind of crops. The hottest type today is known as "aeroponics" in which a fine mist of nutrient solution is sprayed at the roots of the plant on a regular schedule. The best part of this, of course, is that it completely eliminates the need for growing medium. Medium must be replaced or sterilized between uses, or refreshed as soil [theoretically] is when used in typical outdoor farming, and eliminating it eliminates waste and energy consumption. It can be done in a very low-tech fashion using drip irrigation components and plastic containers, pieces of pipe, etc etc.
But in general, technology moves towards expending the minimum amount of energy to accomplish a task. Think about the difference in communicating with someone in the next state when you compare traveling there with picking up a phone and calling them; at first, it seems that the creation of the phone and the phone network would expend more energy. However, the phone can be used many times, as can the network, and so much less energy is expended that the savings add up rapidly. Now consider the appeal of moving to a cellular network; there's little costly and massive infrastructure to build and maintain, so the cost drops still further - both in terms of money and energy. Computers, too, are both getting faster and consuming less power. I have a handheld PDA with a 400MHz processor that will run more than 24 hours on a battery smaller than it is. Now, think about the first computers that were as powerful as that little guy...
Cars, too, are becoming more efficient. We have direct fuel injection and the turbocharger to thank for that. Or, well, the people who invented them. (I think hybrids are horrible mistakes, there's a lot of energy involved in making and later recycling the batteries, and meanwhile the VW Golf TDI which can run on vegetable oil gets better mileage than the Toyota Prius.)
So yeah, I do believe it. There's exceptions, and some of them are doozies, but overall we move towards expending less and less energy to accomplish any given task.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
See integral fast reactor. The only waste produced by the plant is safe in about 300 years. It's also the sort of waste that you can get away with burying (it's metal and ceramic), and you don't have to deal with cockamamie schemes for warning away future cavemen.
It was cancelled around 1994 by a faction led by John Kerry. (Though the opposition was led by Dick Durbin, also a Democrat; opposition to nuclear power is not as unthinking and monolithic as some would believe.)
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The American Mid-West is thought to have been created by extensive burning by the Native American Indians, thus creating thousands of miles of prarie/grassland now farmland. This drove game to where the population centers were. So I'd call this a very signifigant change to the[ir] enviornment. [Please read 1491 by Charles C Mann for further info.]
You're too busy planning how to oppress the religious freedoms of other people. Nice to see you have your priorities straight.
Europe called, it says you can keep the mormons. Oh and we're trying to find a way to shuffle off the whole catholic business as well, so if you people are still running that two for one special on that "give me your weak etc" deal, we're in business.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
You don't seem the type to enjoy a philosophical discussion but I can help myself. :)
The concept of value intersects significantly with the concept of morality. One way to describe morals is to call them a list of things we value that don't necessarially affect us directly or indirectly. I consider life precious and valuable regardless of whether it exists here or twelve galaxies over.
Aw crap, ninjas!
Thats what I said.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
It makes me wonder what sort of species inferiority complex some folks suffer from. We are currently the top predator on our planet with a severe identity crisis. We are so successful as a species that we created leisure time to muse about the nature of our own morality. If some planet-wide calamity happened (KT Event) the idle fantasies that we explore would become less important and things like food, water, shelter and safety would come into demand. Maybe part of any species survival is how well members of that species can adapt back to the primitive states and take care of survival requirements. The Katrina hurricane may be a good example... how many survivors of the hurricane would have had good long-term survival rates if there wasn't a civilization to come in, give them food, water and television again.
Tisha Hayes
Of course, many philisophical things are irrational,
I forgot to mention in my last post, but this is completely wrong. You obviously haven't studied philosophy or the works of any of the great philosophers. Philosophy is best described (imo) as the application of logic and rational thinking to problems that can't be answered by the scientific methods of experimentation and observation. Every university philosophy department that's worth anything will have a first year course that teaches basic symbolic logic.
Aw crap, ninjas!
a candle in a large dark hall is depressing and insignificant and weak and seemingly pointless
and yet it still beats complete darkness
there is no value in bemoaning what shaky slight weak foundation humankind's progress is based on
simply because a barely there foundation is still better than none
there is no choice but to roll up your sleaves and get to work bettering mankind, regardless about how depressing or impossible the task looks, simply because not working for it at all is even worse
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There would be a nanoprisoner and nanoterrorists trying to exploit especially intense mind tech against him. He walk to a place one day and say "Nonsense, nonsense, sense is your ass killed!" and rule the nanoterrorists forever!
Well, the only bad thing about that is acually, lower civilizations like the Aztecs were acually more respectful to the land without our "advance" technology. I belive that the more we "advance" the worse we make this Earth because of the destruction we cause to the Earth to bring that Technology, such as Nuke's all the way to simple underground plumming. Your sprinklers are also harming the enviorment as much as you don't realize it. It is just one of the sad ways our way of life although we make a less harmful way, is still hamring where we live...
I do actually enjoy them, as I learn interesting new things that way. I would disagree with your concept of morality - I believe that morality is merely an advance form of game theory. You probably believe it is the other way around, that game theory is an attempt to model morality.
Anyway, one advantage of looking at it that way is the ability to make balanced decisions about difficult options. For example, it is simple that we should not destroy Venus just because it obstructs our view of Mecury - but what if we used it's entire atmosphere as propellant to escape the sun's red giant phase? What if there is only a 50% chance of success? This would be a difficult choice to make if you rely on a moral system, such as "pristine planets have value." That just begs the question, how much value? How do you value it?
Personally, I think my definition of value is the only internally consistant one - but by all means, prove me wrong.
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Missing: I think there would be mass extinction of most the herbivore domesticated animals.
Incorrect: The nitrates in water will not go away unless nitrosomonas leave with us. The process is: fish poop and decomposing plant material becomes ammonia, nitrates become nitrites, nitrates escape into the atmosphere.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
The article wasn't lauding the removal of humans from earth. Its point was to show that civilization is more fragile than it appears. Walking around a place like Manhattan, I think of our civilization as invincible. A more constant reminder that things are on a knife's edge might help us not take it all for granted.
Probably the longest-lasting human artifacts would be purely-ceramic items like toilets and sinks (yes, and pottery, but there'd be a lot more toilets and sinks). They're essentially impervious to anything but crushing, so unless they're located near a subduction zone where they'd get sucked down into the earth by plate movement eventually, they'd be around for a very long time. Sort of humbling to think that mankind's most durable legacy would be millions of crappers.
There are demonstrable reasons of why nuclear is not an option.
First of all it is uneconomic. France, the country that most extensively is using nuclear energy, manages to keep it running only by means o vast subsidies. This is true of pretty much any plant that has gone into commercial operation. These deficiencies are tolerated because the nuclear power industry is intimately linked to the military industry, and if you don't believe this you can ask Iran (and the UN security council fro tha matter) about this.
Nuclear is also usch an obvious target that is not funny.
Also, in several countries (US, UK, Russia) the nuclear industry has a track record of cutting corners and not following safety procedures.
Finally you dismiss concerns about safety. I ma pretty sure that the people in Chernobyl thought that their systems were perfectly safe. You need only one unforseen horrible failure to get your commeupance.
The solution is limiting power consumption, energy eficency and renewable energy generation.
Nuclear is a huge red herring which should be avoided, if only for the clear lack of a way to use it in a way that is economicaly feasable.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Nuclear power is uneconomic and has relied so far in vast subsidies to be used.
The moment you need to run a profitable bussiness producing nuclear energy, reality bites and nobody does it.
Ecologists have some political cloud, but I don't see them in most congresses steering economic and development policy (how many Green Party representatives does the US have? Senators? Governors?). The closest a Green Party has been to power is in Germany, where they were part of a colaition for some years and yes, they pushed for a green agenda. Guess whay? Germany did not collapse and will prosper (but alas, it is a place were people are selling thir cars in order to use public transport).
Blaming ecologists for the lack of nuclear plants is most uninformed and disingenious.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
.... if you value the posibility of consciousness.
If you fuck not care about anything, then yes, you are right, there is no difference, but humans have morals and make judgments based on them.
Forgetting about moral judgments is denying our humanity, which may not be of consequence in the great scheme of things (we will be forgoteen in 5 billion years), but is all what we have got.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Sheesh. Crybaby.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
If the definition of "natural" is going to include skyscrapers, Humvees and digital watches, I think you've pretty much stripped the word of its meaning.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Pentti Linkola. I try not to just fling insults, but I can't think of a damn thing to say other than "what a nutbar".
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
If those aliens 100,000 years from now stumble upon a stack of gold ingots -- I suspect there's hundreds or even thousands of chest-high stacks of gold in vaults around the world -- they'll figure out that we existed. Maybe the SR72 Blackbird and other titanium artifacts, some very large, will be around too.
banana banana banana banana terracotta banana terrecotta terracotta pie!
Well, the main non-sense in The Matrix is the process of making power from human beings dreaming in bath-tubs. That's just a bad trick to set up the whole matrix thing, which is in itself a good idea. However I like this movie a lot, putting this non-sense aside.
Your defintion of value is not correct. We're not talking about a car or a house here. Something of value is simply something of 'worth' which, in a philosophical or moral context, is difficult to precisely describe.
Actually, "Value" is a purely human concept - whether you describe it in economic or moral terms - all Value dies with us. A diamond is valuable now, but if we all died of the plague tomorrow, what good is it going to do for the squirrels, dogs, or cats.
But if you believe "Value" extends from something outside humanity and exists with or without humans in the picture, then there must be some concept, entity, or being which determines that this "Value" exists. In this scenario, you - and many others here - would be correct in believing that human concepts are irrelevant and that this entity's concept of "Value" is the most important.
I believe that morality is merely an advance form of game theory.
Game thoery consists of a set of players who are all competing against each other with each player making decisions to try and maximize thier own gain and minimize thier own loss. Game theory can tell you what the optimal decisions are for those players. That's nothing like the situation that your example is describing. You're trying to come an optimial decision in the face of conflicting requirements, but you don't have competing playing each making thier own decisions. Sorry, but game thoery doesn't apply.
But we can drop the term game theory for a moment and talk about what you meant. You're saying that morality is the system used to come to a decision in the face of conflicting requirments. The 'lesser of two evils' problem. Choice A is bad, but B is worse so we choose A. That defintion of morality not useful because you haven't defined what is good or bad, which is the entire point of morality. The correct interpretation is that morality defines A as bad and B as worse and then we can use standard decision making techniques to resolve the confict.
it is simple that we should not destroy Venus just because it obstructs our view of Mecury
Why? How did you make that assertion? Where did it come from? It came from your morals. That's what morality does; it defines that act as 'bad' with no other underlying logic. (In this specific case destroying Venus might possibly have significant negative impacts on Earth, but that's besides the point). Morals are what define right and wrong when no other standards apply.
Aw crap, ninjas!
Actually, "Value" is a purely human concept
Well that's just foolish. Animals have values too. You just mean that the human standards of value are a human concept and not universal; which I agree with. But I don't agree that they die with us. Only values defined in economic terms die. You say moral values also die but nothing in your argument supports that, or even addresses the concept of a moral value. Actually "moral values" is just a longer way to right "morals", so lets use that term instead.
A diamond is valuable now, but if we all died of the plague tomorrow, what good is it going to do for the squirrels, dogs, or cats.
Your example of the value of a diamond describes a purely economic definition of the word value.
Our morals (moral values) are part of the definition of what we are. It is part of the definition of humanity. The _definition_ of humanity would still exist even after we're all gone, so that means that our set of morals still exist even if no one is around to adhere to them.
Aw crap, ninjas!
I spelled 'write' as 'right'. I feel like a moron... duh..me spel good!!
Aw crap, ninjas!
This is nothing more than wish fulfillment for these people. The dirty little secret of the "evironmentalism" crowd is that they really HATE humanity. Really. It's just a bunch of spoiled brats (of all ages) who simply don't like sharing the Earth with the rest of us. They wont admit this of course, but my experience with them has been that this is so. They sit around and jerk off to stories like this. Ken
Yes, that's why we need to reprocess spent fuel with breeder reactors. Are you stupid, or do you have a vision problem? Or did you just not read my comment before you replied?
Given that there are subsidies, it's possible to run it profitably (to the shareholder anyway) without using a breeder reactor. Not very profitably, of course.
Also, all current nuclear plants are using extremely old technology (in terms of nuclear power, anyway.) A newer-design reactor should have a lower operating cost.
"clout"
The last nuclear plant anyone tried to bring up in California was El Diablo, which was originally slated to cost $500M, which we can read as approx. $1.5B the way things are usually built under contract in the USA. It ended up actually costing $6B because of everything the environmental lobby threw in their way. San Onofre's story is similar - $1.3B to $4.3B. No one wants to build one because they know it's going to cost them billions in litigation and bullshit due to the environmentalists standing in their way.
I think you mean "disingenuous", unless you were trying to say I lack ingenuity. My advice is to look up the spelling of any words that you don't actually know, because otherwise you look like what you actually are. Also, it would mean that I knew it was not true; on the contrary. Not only am I right :) but I also believe that I'm right. I am not a troll.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Game theory is the science of calculating optimum response (optimizing self-interest) in difficult situations. For example, game theory can tell you why human morality (in general) looks down on lying. If you lie, you can achieve a short term gain while everyone else loses - but, longer term, your lie will lead to people not trusting you (either you in particular or more generalized mistrust), which will lower society's output (because people cannot work well together), which will mean that you are worse off than before. So most people do not lie.
Of course, most people do not go through that line of reasoning - but there exists a line of reasoning like that for all of human morality.
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Far be it from me to say that one absolutely is and the other absolutely isn't natural, but I do think it's useful to draw a distinction between wild animals, domesticated crops, my refrigerator and a terraforming project. These things are different. I don't have a strong, bright-line distinction between them, but to throw one's hands up and claim that the last three are indistinguishable smacks of considerable intellectual laziness, or perhaps a desire to salve one's conscience at ecological catastrophe, arguing that (insert huge change to ecosystem here) isn't any worse than a bigger ear of corn, so what are you damn hippies bitching about?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I'm sorry to have to post this here, but it's the closest that I can get to the top. I hope that Raynor (the article submitter) sees it. Anyway ...
to be restored to it's natural level
"its".
"most people do not lie"
You obviously understand human nature no better than the average 4-year old. Typical nerd.
Actuelly, I think we'll stop using cars fairly soon, as the price of crude will make a car-based society unsustainable in the not-too-distant future.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
Weather forecasters can't get things right 2 days in advance, much less years in advance. Societal prognosticators have such poor grasp of economics in terms of human interaction and a lack of understanding of science and potential technology as to be right only by accident.
Of all the factors concerning the situation here on planet earth, its biomass (all things living), is insignificant on any time scale involving many thousands of years or more. What's more telling is that mankind and technology is not even #1 or # 2 in importance of short term impact. Hell, we're not even #3.
It is most telling of the egoes of some that they think we as a species are actually important in the scheme of things that happen on planet earth. It is also most telling that these think they know the 'way things should be' or more accurately, the way that they would like them to be.
10,000 yrs - the approximate age of some vestages of civilization is but an instant in time for climatic changes and not even that for the far greater forces that impact us in a big way. According to the records, most life on earth dies out every few tens of millions of years.
Perhaps the most often catastrophic events are comet/asteroid impacts. If you've ever looked at the dark night sky for a few hours, you'll probably see at least one meteor and on some nights, you might see several in a single minute. Those are dust, usually left over pieces of dust that populate comet orbits we pass through. There are tons of this cosmic debris entering the earths atmosphere every year. There are numerous occurances of much larger objects which reach the ground every year. Apparently, as often possibly as a few times a century (or millenia) there are some which are large enough to destroy our largest cities were it to hit one. On a less frequent basis, there are some that would destroy all or most all of life on earth.
Please note, every time you see a meteor shower that this occurs when the earth passes through the path of the comet that shed the dust. Imagine what might happen were the comet to be there when earth was passing through. The world witnessed a few years ago several fragments of the Shoemaker-Levy comet hitting Jupiter. The fragments were each creating impact blasts about the size of the earth.
With engineering, and enough warning time (several years), it would be possible to deflect one of these rocks (or snowballs) and avoid a collision. This is assuming moderate sized objects rather than the largest sized object thought to have hit the earth. Not even our technology could save us from that one. It seems that something the size of Mars came plowing through, smashing the earth to molton blobs - which is thought to be how the moon was created. "It is far easier to believe that something which happened once can happen again than it is to believe that something which has never happened before will happen" (paraphrased).
As for such large potential problems, not even our technology could save us and the little fishes, the cockroaches and bacteria. Nor can it save us from all potentially damaging events of much smaller scale, such as a super volcano erruption.
Also, the universe comes with unbelievably massive events that can destroy life on earth in an instant with no warning or perhaps even destroy earth totally, not just make it unihabitable for life. Our only saving grace (from a scientific standpoint) has been luck and the rather infrequent nature of such calamity.
It's not the sort of thing of science fiction because it makes for too depressing and boring a story as well as way too short. - It was a dark and stormy night as the GLAST satellite passed through the earth's shadow. Suddenly, out of the gloom its detectors started to pick up readings and the internal computer gave commands to swing the telescope around in the direction of the burst but the action never began because the motors were no longer there. It had also started to transmit the detection of another burst,
Game theory is the science of calculating optimum response (optimizing self-interest) in difficult situations.
No, it's not. I explained this in my last post. I don't like repeating myself. Game theory involves multiple competing players each making decisions for themselves. What you're talking about is a generalized decision theory.
If you lie, you can achieve a short term gain while everyone else loses - but, longer term, your lie will lead to people not trusting you (either you in particular or more generalized mistrust), which will lower society's output (because people cannot work well together), which will mean that you are worse off than before. So most people do not lie.
I agree. But now you're talking about the origin of morals. The difference is important, as I will explain momentarially.
Of course, most people do not go through that line of reasoning
That's exactly my point; the one I've been trying to make all along. But why is that exactly? The reason is because moral laws work for the benifit of society as a whole (as your example describes), but not for the individual. It is often the case that what is best for the individual (even in the long run) is not best for society as a whole. Honesty is an excellent example. That means that people often make decisions that actually have a negative impact on themselves personally. The only way the law can work correctly to benifit society is if people follow it blindly (i.e. without an analysis of the logic you described). As a result, that's exactly the way nature has evolved morals to work. They're enforced subconsciously. But the subconscious machine that does that isn't precise; it doesn't know exactly in which situations the law needs to be applied, so it usually applies it liberally. So, for example, most people will develop a value for life that extends to aliens twelve galaxies over.
Aw crap, ninjas!
Look, I realize that your position is a defensible and reasonable one - I am merely showing you that it is not the only defensible and reasonable one.
I study game theory - I really do know what I am talking about. You believe that morals transcend game theory, and that lying is a better for the individual by game theory. My point is that it is not! To put this in Game Theory terms, think of this as the prisoner's dilemma - lying helps you only if everyone else doesn't lie (or if you do it first, if you like). But to you personally, you have a choice - lie or don't lie. If you lie, then you know that everyone else will start lying in a downward spiral - which will be bad for you. If you don't lie, then as long as noone else lies you are far better off. The trick is that in a society, you can beat up the guy that lies first - getting you out of the prisoner's dillemma, and matching the game theory choice with the moral choice.
Causality (or the direction of it) in the relationship of game theory to morallity is impossible to prove, of course. So you have your ideas and I have mine.
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Game theory is the science of calculating optimum response (optimizing self-interest) in difficult situations.
If you lie, you can achieve a short term gain while everyone else loses - but, longer term, your lie will lead to people not trusting you (either you in particular or more generalized mistrust), which will lower society's output (because people cannot work well together), which will mean that you are worse off than before. So most people do not lie.
I should clarify. I agree that this example is an application of game theory because there are other people making decisions based on your decisions that you need to condsider. However your overall understanding of the specifics of game theory do not seem correct. You apply the term too liberally in situations where you should not. Your previous Venus/Mecury example was not a valid application of game theory.
Aw crap, ninjas!
You believe that morals transcend game theory, and that lying is a better for the individual by game theory.
No, I didn't say that. I belive that sometimes lying is better for the individual. I thought that was obvious and didn't realize that it would be a point of debate. Though I understand now that it's the keystone of your position.
To put this in Game Theory terms, think of this as the prisoner's dilemma - lying helps you only if everyone else doesn't lie (or if you do it first, if you like). But to you personally, you have a choice - lie or don't lie. If you lie, then you know that everyone else will start lying in a downward spiral - which will be bad for you. If you don't lie, then as long as noone else lies you are far better off. The trick is that in a society, you can beat up the guy that lies first - getting you out of the prisoner's dillemma, and matching the game theory choice with the moral choice.
That's just a specific example in a very constrained environment. It doesn't do anything to support your arugment that lying is always bad for the individual in the general case. I don't think your posision has any legs when scaled to the scope of the real world. In fact, it's almost trivial to refute; we only have to look at the origin of this debate. There are many people who value (morally) life on this planet after we're extinct, or who value alien life on another planet twelve galaxies over that will never affect us. Those values have no explaination in your model. Perhaps you think those opinions are uncommon, but I don't think so.
Aw crap, ninjas!
It doesn't do anything to support your arugment that lying is always bad for the individual in the general case.
Sorry, I realized after posting that this is not correct. I misread. What I should have said is that your example describes a specific situation in which the game theory choice matches the moral choice, but it's not an arugment for the general case. Though, that was probably your point. You were just trying to explain your position to me, not defend it, I assume. My point is that I don't think you can make a good arugment for the general case.
Aw crap, ninjas!