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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.'"
"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 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?
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.
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...
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?
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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)
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?
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.'"
for nuclear.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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
But Linux would not prevail - at best Windows and Linux have equal market share
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.
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?
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!
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?
Animals hurt the planet they live on too. Throughout evolution, there have been entire species killed off by more dominant species, and groups of animals have spread to other areas and changed the environment there to the detriment of what already lived there.
I think some people put up an anti-mankind mindset to make themselves feel like they're hip and intellectual, and I doubt our impact on the environment is as great as global warming alarmists have made it out to be (I notice Slashdot didn't report about the lack of an active hurricane season this year or the recent below-average temperatures).
"Sufferin' succotash."
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.
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
is there any reason to think we are the first intelligent species to appear on this planet.
What, apart from the mice and the dolphins?
Seriously, mineral deposits. We take huge deposits of minerals and suck out the pure minerals we need. Then we spread 'em around the whole world in the products we produce. Finally, we lay them to rest in garbage dumps, landfills, etc, mixed in with a whole bunch of other relatively pure substances. Now assuming an intelligent species built tools and produced things out of their environment, there should be very few places left where one could find concentrations of a single mineral, and a lot of places where we could find homogenous deposits of "waste" minerals. Just a thought.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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;
Actually, the environment has been changing (and will continue to change) beyond what we consider 'equilibrium' without humans. Global warming through excess CO2 was happening well before life developed here and I don't think any conservationist would call the ice age optimal for current life. The environment changes, and trying to conserve its current state is impossible.
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?
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.
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
"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
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.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
...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!
The current level of atmospheric CO2 is higher than any in known history. Trying to conserve its current state is not impossible, except perhaps at our current level of technological development. Saying it's impossible is stupid, because nothing that has been observed is impossible, there are simply things we don't understand about it yet (and we cannot achieve sufficient energy output yet, either.) One thing that we know about progress, however, is that it continues.
That's nice, but also irrelevant. Of course it was, because without some lifeform to change it back, the O gets bound up, largely into CO2.
The early history of the planet is one of volcanism, which naturally is going to produce CO2. However, today we produce more CO2 than volcanoes, on an average yearly basis.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"