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Wildlife Returning To Chernobyl
The wilderness is encroaching over abandoned towns in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. One of the elderly residents who refused to evacuate the contaminated area says packs of wolves have eaten two of her dogs, and wild boar trample through her cornfield. Scientist are divided as to whether or not the animals are flourishing in the highly radioactive environment: "Robert J. Baker of Texas Tech University says the mice and other rodents he has studied at Chernobyl since the early 1990s have shown remarkable tolerance for elevated radiation levels. But Timothy Mousseau of the University of South Carolina, a biologist who studies barn swallows at Chernobyl, says that while wild animals have settled in the area, they have struggled to build new populations."
Are these bionic AMD-64 running mutant radioactive wildlife critters, or something?
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In Florida Avon Park Bombing Range is also full of wildlife as is the Savannah River site in South Carolina.
Bombing and radiation is better for wildlife than sub divisions.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
O.K., we have a game story about odd moments in games filed under "Politics" instead of "Games" and an environmental story filed under "Hardware" instead of "Science". Methinks maybe some /. editors have been spending a bit too much time in Chernobyl themselves, and it's had a deleterious affect on their "1337 categorization skillz".
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
In a sense... yes.
I bred at less than my replacement level. If everyone in the word were to follow that tendency, we would be able to half the population by roughly 2050 and half it again in the 20 years after that so by 2100 the population would be roughly 1.5 billion. The chinese made some of these extremely hard choices with regard to overbreeding and overpopulation and have benefited from doing so.
The problem is that ignorant poor people and some religious people are going to breed us to the point where things are unpleasant all the time at the best or downright ugly and murderous at the worst.
Overbreeding would be no problem if the overbreeders and their descendants were limited to a fixed plot of land. That way the descendants of people with sustainable breeding habits could live in a paradise while the overbreeders lived in hell on earth, died of starvation, and killed each other over precious water and living space.
But no-- their descendants would feel they had a right to spread equally into everyone else's land. Thus spreading the consequences of their poor breeding choices.
You can buy all the CFC's you want, conserve til you bleed, eat only grains (because meat is so inefficient) and eventually that will all be pointless unless a lot of humans die fast from something. Too many humans is the fundamental problem-- not global warming, not limited oil, not limited food, not limited water.
If we do not address this fundamental problem- then everything else we do is similar to ignoring the huge hungry rampaging elephant in the room while we keep replacing the carpet and drapes.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Except that the US isn't suffering from over population. That is what drives me nuts. There are places in Australia where rabbits are destroying the habitat because of massive over population. Killing off a few in Texas just isn't going to help. Killing hundreds or thousands in Texas isn't going to help. The Population of the US is pretty much flat and soon to be slightly declining once the Baby boomer's start to die off. In Europe and Japan you are seeing the same thing or a strong decline. That will do nothing to really help since the over population problem is other locations.
I am all for people having only enough children that they can raise. I am all for adoption as well if you want a very large family. But this "I only had a replacement" thing is just posturing.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
But they won't, and so all you accomplished is selecting yourself out of the gene pool.
We have a ton of resources on the planet. Supporting more humans with the resources that we have is a reasonably easy problem technologically. Yes, we have a high population compared to what a species without agriculture (and modern agriculture) could do, but we have those things. The earth could handle a bunch more population, but the trends indicate that human population growth is slowing quickly enough that it won't be a real issue.
The appropriate tactic here isn't to have less kids, it's to have as many kids as you think you can reasonably educate. The only way we'll be able to keep quality of life up as a species is to have as high a percentage of well educated people as possible - that way there will be people around to suggest and implement rational solutions to problems.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.