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Expedition To Explore an Alaska-Sized Plastic "Island"
Peace Corps Online writes "An expedition called Project Kaisei has departed bound for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a huge 'island' of plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean estimated to be the size of Alaska (some estimates place it at ten times that size). The expedition will study the impact of the waste on marine life, and research methods to clean up the vast human-created mess in the Pacific. The BBC quotes Ryan Yerkey, the project's chief of operations: 'Every piece of trash that is left on a beach or ends up in our rivers or estuaries and washes out to the sea is an addition to the problem, so we need people to be the solution.' The garbage patch occupies a large and relatively stationary region of the North Pacific Ocean bound by the North Pacific Gyre, a remote area commonly referred to as the horse latitudes. The rotational pattern created by the North Pacific Gyre draws in waste material from across the North Pacific Ocean, including the coastal waters off North America and Japan. As material is captured in the currents, wind-driven surface currents gradually move floating debris toward the center, trapping it in the region. 'You are talking about quite a bit of marine debris but it's not a solid mass,' says Yerkey. 'Twenty years from now we can't be harvesting the ocean for trash. We need to get it out but we need to also have people make those changes in their lives to stop the problem from growing and hopefully reverse the course.'"
They should collect this in barges and burn it for fuel.
Scientists estimate that at least 30% of the bulk is made up of Collectors edition Daikatana boxes.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
If you wanted to do that, pretty much any municipal solid waste dump would be a better bet. This is more like a gigantic patch of watery plastic soup(plus, it's in the middle of the pacific, transport costs would be irksome), dense enough to cause all kinds of trouble for aquatic fauna, tenuous enough to make collection a serious hassle.
So by calling him a "journalist" i am calling him an illiterate jackass who cant find his ass with both hands?
Gentlemen, grab the closest hairdryer. The time has come to melt the plastic, and make our own nation!
Before you mod me funny, think, perhaps I was insightfully funny?
A redundant episode for the upcoming Futurama season.
the images one conjures up reading the title is this big area filled with recognizable objects, however reading the wiki article states that the particles that comprise the bulk of the suspected pollution are too small and disperse to be imaged by satellite or aircraft.
So don't let the title fool you. While there may be occasional large pollutants its not like something your bound to spot on the horizon and just sail to it. Think about it, if it were we would have seen pictures all over the news by now.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Plastic is no longer fantastic!
Send in Bruce Willis with a tanker full of gasoline. He'll douse the island, set it on fire and get rid of the pollution in our oceans! Everyone wins!
Followed links from TFA but could not find any images.... intrigued to see aerial/satellite images of this.
Goes without saying that I, for one, welcome our new plastic bottle overlords
"Twenty years from now we can't be harvesting the ocean for trash"
Why not? What's wrong with that?
Isn't it the perfect natural recycling system? We throw or trash in the water and it automatically gets shipped to this large dump. There we can just park lots of freighters next to it to grab all the resources and make more useful stuff out of it.
People have to stop being all conservative about nature and start seeing the awesome benefits we can have from just "going with the flow".
I have looked through all the links. If this "island" is that big, it should be easy to get satellite images.
Anyone care to provide them?
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
What is the actual density and particle size, and how near the surface is it concentrated? Although the Pacific is enormous, it might actually be possible to do something with some kind of filter system, given long enough. After all, the East Anglian fens were drained by pumps running for over 100 years, so long term projects are not exactly unheard of. Something that stops plastic and allows through fish - there's a challenge.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The plastic is not going to waste. It is protecting the inhabitant of Mu from various cosmic and ultraviolet rays.
What is the economic feasibility of building a floating recycling (hopefully solar & wind powered mostly) to gather up and process a huge stockpile of unnatural plastic reserves?
http://www.livescience.com/environment/071102-micro-plastics.html
"...The seas eventually break down all this plastic garbage into microscopic particles. ...
adding just a few millionths of a gram of contaminated microplastics to sediments triggered an 80 percent rise in phenanthrene accumulation in marine worms dwelling in that muck.
Such worms lie at the base of the food chain,..."
If it costs less than the prevailing price of crude, then it's a go - hassles be damned!
Just look at the hassles and cost ($40/barrel) to get oil out of the oil sands in Canada. It says something about our oil supplies when paying $40/barrel to get it out of the ground is considered reasonable.
Lets just ignore it.
The problem of sea trash is fabricated by the biased media. sea trash doesn't exist. The earth has been in existence for four billion years (or six thousand years, depending on who you're asking) and sea trash hasn't hurt anything. It's just a natural cycle. There is no conclusive evidence that sea trash even exists.
People who preach about sea trash just want to give the government more power. For control. They want to control your ability to throw trash in the sea. $Diety$ gave us this planet, and $he/she/it$ didn't design it with sea trash in mind. It's unfaithful to claim that sea trash is a problem, or even exists.
If we can somehow make this island more "solid", for example by spraying insulation foam on it, and connect the new island to the Internetzwerk via home-brewn undersea cables or satellite dishes, wouldn't this make a great new home for the Pirate Bay? Which name do you think should the new nation have? IMHO, naming it "The Pirate Bay" would be appropriate, although this might create confusion with its virtual pendant on the Internetzwerk.
My God, I said I read the articles and I cannot find ONE image. Not even from a dude on a canoe floating past. Someone has to have taken a picture of this somehow. And i find it hard to believe that the infrared signature of that section of ocean matches the unpolluted sections. There has to be some way to come up with some kind of image to prove that it's there.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
Nonsense. It is the remains of an ancient, not so perfectly preserved Quagaar battle fleet.
Normally I don't get all riled up, but every one of you idiots has mentioned the wikipedia article that says "satellite and arial" photos. Is that the only method of taking pictures of something on the surface of the ocean?
Time to step away from /. before I wreck my karma.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
I read my original post and I do see that I did say "satellite" images. I didn't mean "satellite", and I am sorry I flew off the handle and insulted your intelligence level.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
We (humans) caused that huge mass of plastic to form in the sea by dumping our garbage in the beach or sea and in my opinion we should also try to get it out, or at least stop in from increasing in size. The problem with modern Western society is that we are not ready to start a long term project like that unless it is profitable for us in short term. And that is something that it isn't. It would be a long term money sink with no real market value, and thats why not many seems to care. In a way it feels like we are crapping our own pants because we have more important things to do than go to the toilet.
Algalita Marine Research Foundation have been studying this garbage patch in the Pacific for the last 10 years.
Well if it's not visible how the heck do they know it's there?
What about just having 1 humongous ship built to take care of the problem, with its front end able to open and scoop up the garbage, then compact it inside itself (like a garbage truck except a boat), and about as wide as it is long. It could just be used once in awhile, or as much as is needed, and it would crush all the garbage into small squares which could then be brought back on smaller boats to the coast and then dropped inside one of the hawaiian volcanos... I know it might be a bit costly, but it would be much quicker solution to a big problem getting bigger by the minute.
As for air dropping the garbage into a volcano, a military helicopter couild be used, the ones without a bottom, with room to pick up the square and drop it in...that is the way I see it done the quickest and cheapest solution.
Yes, I'll apologize again. It was stupidity on my part, and I am humbly sorry for insulting you.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
10 times the size of Alaska would make this thing about 1/10th the size of the Pacific. That is pretty huge.. and a little unbelievable.
I wonder if some planet-gazing alien species is looking at our blue planet wondering what that strange formation is... it doesn't seem to match with existing ice movements or weather patterns. Is it some weird storm? A long-slow volcanic eruption? What could it be? I guess they'll have to send bovine-exploding, anal probes down to find out for sure...
OK, where is the Great Atlantic Garbage patch?
courtesy of cracked.com
http://omploader.org/vMjNuOQ + http://omploader.org/vMjNuYQ
I read somewhere that a none insignificant proportion of "sand" on a beach is actually tiny pieces of plastic and is far, far more difficult to clean up.
Quick Google found some old reports: ...Northumbrian coast, every one of them was found to contain microscopic plastic fibres at densities of up to 10,000 per litre of sand. More have been discovered in plankton samples dating back to the 1960s. Already, there may be no such thing as a clean beach. ...
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6570001.ece
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/05/0506_040506_oceanplastic.html
Ta
According to Wikipedia: "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also described as the Eastern Garbage Patch or the Pacific Trash Vortex..."
Pacific Trash Vortex would be a good name for a band.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
So, if there's that much trash, composed primarily of plastics, dispersed over a large area of the Pacific... It might make economic sense to modify a ship or two to go out there, skim it off the ocean surface (the top few feet or so) and bring it to shore. There it could be converted back to it's original form, petroleum, run through a gasification plant, or burned as-is in an incinerator for power. Even if it only breaks even with the fuel usage of the ship(s), it still solves the problem, no? (but would require government funding for operational expenses, yes). One might even consider a factory ship where processing was contained on the vessel.
Go through and find all the messages in bottles. We've got to see if these poor guys are still alive.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
When you burn that kind of plastic, you'll get lots of dioxins produced.
I don't know about you, but I think I've already mutated enough, thank you.
New brand of toys, manufactured from molten plastic harvested directly from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
How hard could it be to make a giant barge that skims off the crud and harvests it?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Ten times the size of Alaska???
okay, let's run the numbers.
Alaska's area is 663,268 sq mi.
10x Alaska's area would be 6,632,680 sq mi.
the USA's TOTAL area is 3,794,066 sq mi.
Russia's TOTAL area is 6,592,800 sq mi.
You're telling me that some people think there is a mass of garbage in the Pacific Ocean SLIGHTLY LARGER than Russia???
I'm not saying it's not as bad as it sounds but I really doubt the numbers are right.
This pacific floating plastic formation is mentionned here:
http://www.cracked.com/article_17379_6-real-islands-way-more-terrifying-than-one-on-lost.html
For my money though, the snake island is WAY more terrifying.
Couldn't we scoop it all up and convert it back into oil/gas... It seems like that would be cheaper than drilling new wells or digging out coal.
It works like this...
Dump waste plastic in the ocean....
It drifts down to the plastic island...
Scoop it up and sell it as fuel...
PROFIT!!!
Look mom no missing steps...
Absolutely. "[M]odern Western society" is the problem. Fortunately we have those other societies that will take care of this for us.
What? No? So then why single out "modern Western society?"
Oh, because "modern Western society" is the only polluter. Yeah, that's it.
This video illustrates the situation very well:
http://www.vbs.tv/watch/toxic/toxic-garbage-island-3-of-3
Hairdryer? I'm bald, you insensitive clod!
I do have a heat gun in the toolbox, though....
it would actually just look like a picture of the sea with a couple of plastic bottles floating in it.
I wonder whether the label with the pawn icon is still affixed to them...
I agree that we are part of nature, but as we can forsee the outcomes of our actions in a long term, we should be able to plan for long term. You have explained a rational agent with no information on long term outcomes for a given situation, that is obviously not our case. If the current situation asks for us to crap our pants running to get natural resources before other get them, then we must agree to change the situation.
DON'T PANIC
Because most of that pollution has come from western society, dumbass. Just how many Chinese and Indians do you think are chucking milk jugs and water bottles into the ocean?
These are were taken from the blog of the Oceanographic Research Vessel Alguita detailing their travels this year. They have eye witness accounts of the plastic garbage. It turns out the plastic is not even close to a island, or anything island like. The plastic that is out looks like the byproduct of a will-it-blend episode.
To get any detectable and easily studied plastic they set out a small net and trawl for the plastic:
Regarding the difficulty seeing it:
Source: http://orvalguita.blogspot.com/2009/07/t.html
Hmm... I should probably post this to wikipedia...
From what I have seen (in real life) its coming from south east asia (and east asia). The counteries in those regions have many fishing villages living at the waters edge. These vilages in the last couple of decades have adapted many of the modern conveniences, including product packaging. There is now an enormous amount of waste being created in areas with no landfill or trash collection services. The result is to dump a unfathonable amount of crap in the ocean. If you travel through the region you will notice any area of water within 5km of any village is visably poluted. You have to be on or in the water to see it (not visable frome planes).
Nature is not exclusively 'red in tooth and claw.' Cooperation is at least as much a part of ecology as competition. Cooperators are simply more likely to survive than pure competitors. Every creature on Earth evolved from the same thing, and uses the same building blocks. Like cells in your body, nothing can live on its own. Everywhere you look you will see altruism and cooperation in nature, as well as violent competition. However, all this is beside the point.
Your argument boils down to a classic naturalistic fallacy. Just because something is a certain way does not mean that is how it should be, or how it must be. We have brains. We aren't simple animals. We can predict the consequences of our actions and adjust our actions accordingly. Another point to consider is that we are not desperate. We are not being chased by a lion. We have enough resources to give everyone on the planet a decent standard of living. When you look at history, resource depletion is one of the primary factors in culture collapse. Some cultures have learned from this and developed sustainable ways of living. Ultimately, those are the cultures with the best long term chance of survival.
Finally, we can punish non-cooperation, making it less profitable than cooperation. Pollution is only potentially profitable to you if your neighbors won't come over and put a stop to your activities. We can change the risk/reward ratio for any activity individuals or groups engage in, whether they like it or not.
In closing, let me just add that I'm glad I don't live in your mental world. It sounds like a lonely and frightening place.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Just move this "island" out of the environment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcU4t6zRAKg
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
I claim this island in the name of Dow Chemical, and hereby proclaim that this place shall be named "Baekeland", in honor of Leo Baekeland, a chemistry researcher and the inventor of, among other things, Bakelite. The Gen'l Bakelite Corp. was sold to Union Carbide, which is currently a proud subsidiary of the mighty Dow Chemical.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
To quote George Carlin, "...and if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, "Why are we here?" Plastic...asshole. So, the plastic is here, our job is done, we can be phased out now."
Now that the Chinese and Indians have adoped Euro-American lifestyle - about 1.5 billion of them are chucking waste into rivers (which eventually lead into the ocean). So this is a now a worldwide problem.
We could fix this problem quite easily if the world just stopped using plastics and other non-degradable packaging. At my local store some of the packing peanuts are made from corn starch. When they get wet they literally dissolve into a puddle of goo, which within a few days gets eaten by bacteria or fungus, and then disappears.
We need more of this biodegradable packaging, and it has to be degradable within a year, not like the plastic bottles my milk comes in that claims to be biodegradable, but takes 1000 years to do it.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Plastic does occur naturally in nature. Just like lakes-of-oil occured naturally until we humans cleaned them up.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q3upFx4FcA
That trash island will have its own eco system developing around it... Is that eco system not deserving of the same protections of any other eco system? We've created it, and now because we feel ugly and bad about it we're going to seek new ways to destroy it? Sounds a lot like frankenstien's self loathing when he created a new being... How sad it was for his creation... Hated by ones creator and only wishing to be loved.
Why are we here? The Earth wants plastic. If plastic, pharmaceuticals, mercury, and other toxic to human substances raise to high enough concentrations in sea life it will be afforded new protections from humans until we evolved into something able to consume those tasty toxic creatures again, or we just die off and the planet continues without us.
People just dont have any consideration. They cant figure out how to use a fucken trash can anymore. We cant we have nice things? Because people fucken suck shit.
And that's where you're fundamentally wrong. We, a bigbrain species, actually can rise above our nature. It's what almost every belief teaches, and what growing up to be an adult is all about. Our societies are built for this specific reason: control your urges so that we can all get along. We exterminated smallpox a few decades ago. We've been to the moon. We have cameras in orbit around Saturns moons. We do all sorts of thing that do not benefit us in the shortterm, but somehow have come to be through hard and long labour (people have fought and died for beliefs and facts put forward by periods like the Renaissance). We know for a fact with our current level of knowledge this trash is a problem. With our level of population density we are in fact gardeners of this planet. The choice is once agian: sit there and grab what you can, or put our minds together and do something about it. It's always attractive to be cynical, because you get to sit on the bench, and maybe be even the first one who grabs. We can tackle this problem, we just need to put our minds to it. That may take years, or hundreds of years. The Western level of personal freedom took thousands of years as well. It starts with believing "we can" and telling everyone you know this is a problem and we should do something about it.
PBS had a great 1 hour segment on this not too long ago. Their segment covered the rapid decline in albatrosses due to offspring being fed the plastic from the pacific. I haven't been able to find the complete coverage of the segment I saw on my local PBS station, but I have managed to locate part of it here titled: World's Oceans Face Problem of Plastic Pollution
pictures, google maps link or i don't believe it exists.
Parks are places that benefit the many more than the few locals who would wish to exploit them. A park's many visitors derive more benefit from having an unspoilt area to visit than the few locals who would use that land for logging, grazing, or who would build mansions on the beach there. Most importantly, these areas are where the voting *power* of the many overwhelms the money power of those who have it to spend. The monetary value of the use of a piece of land is less than the desire of the public to use that land as park.
No littering laws. The cost of not littering is basically the effort of carrying your trash to a trashcan. In other words it's very low to free.
Pollution restrictions: Pollution lowers the standard of living for those nearby. It's junk in the air, smelly water, seeping cancer chemicals etc. When other economic activity dwarfs a particularly bad polluter, then the harm done to the area by the polluter results in the balance of power shifting away from let's keep them here at all costs, to they better clean up or they can close down for all I care. Whatever they were doing gets shifted to where there is nothing going on ( the developing world ). Out in the boonies, you can pollute and the locals love you because you are paying them more than they've ever been paid before.
The developed world's pollution restrictions largely amount to this sort of thing - making the place nice so that people involved in other more lucrative (at least in sum) economic persuits are happy. Catalytic converters are required everywhere but are largely for cityfolk.
In the end no less pollution happens. It just gets moved from the rich areas to the poor ones. Fines keep people from littering, and because the benefit is great and the cost is tiny nobody complains to have the fines repealed. If there were any serious effort to stop pollution there would be severe economic consequences. Imagine paying fines with every piece of wal-mart junk you buy because of the pollution in it's manufacture? Not gonna happen. It would be shooting oneself in the foot. And it shouldn't happen, because someone else would arise to not make the same mistake of trying to implement Central Air Conditioning.
...
You state these things as if they were unalterable facts. But as has been noted above it is the profit motive that makes people, and more importantly corporations, behave like this.
Worse, those little bits get consumed by small life forms that in turn get consumed by bigger life forms and at some point get consumed by us... so we're poisoning the food chain.
Where capitalism doesn't provide a long term solution is where governments should step in, so [off the top of my head... so not really thought thru] perhaps governments need to impose a tax on non-biodegradable materials?
Granted.
There's nobody watching from above. If a rogue coment sterilized the surface of the earth tomorrow, nobody would care. ( there would be nobody on earth to care, and likely no aliens around to witness it ). Should a comet hit the earth tomorrow? From my point of view no, but my opinion is irrelevant, one either will or won't. Should I kill and eat a deer? From my point of view, yes, they are yummy, from the deer's pov, no. For me morals depend entirely on your point of view. Sometimes people find common cause and cooperate, but to act as if there is common cause when there is none is asking for a disaster.
If you are in a crowded venue which happens to be on fire and notice that everyone is rushing to the only exit, and realize that most will not get out alive this way even though an orderly exit would mean no deaths are you going to stop rushing to the exit? It won't help you get out alive, even though you have a brain and know the consequences of everyone rushing at the door, you will still rush at the door. If you are nice you'll try not to step on anyone's face on the way. If you try to convince people to stop rushing, they won't hear you above the din, and if you don't rush to the exit your chance of survival goes form ten percent to zero.
Every day is a matter of life and death though mostly disguised subtly. People have many ways of purposefully forgetting that. Most everyone ( including me ) chooses not to take themselves as seriously as things are. If you didn't relax, you'd certainly choke and fail.
Who is WE? We aren't in charge - nobody is. Central Air Conditioning.
Central Air Conditioning. Some form of this may occur with a We making sure They cooperate. 'They' won't harm OUR environment,and there may not be many of 'Us' so OUR piggish ways won't be too hard on Mother Earth.
I'd be far more lonely and frightened if I didn't have a realistic conception of other people and so were unable to relate to them, or an unrealistic conception of the world so as to be liable to be surprised in unfortunate ways by it. I'm actually pretty comfortable with things.
...
Where capitalism doesn't provide a long term solution is where governments should step in, so [off the top of my head... so not really thought thru] perhaps governments need to impose a tax on non-biodegradable materials?
By "materials" I meant to say packaging materials, so plastic bottles, etc.
Brains can not escape nature and become supernatural. If our brains get in the way of our survival and procreation, nature will take our brains back (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy )
...
Do you think that people will ever cease to seek to profit? I doubt it.
...
Interesting viewpoint... goes to explain a lot of individual and corporate behaviour, too.
FROOMB! ;)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Establish a small fleet of permanent skimmer barges.
The plastic is already broken down into pellets even finer than those delivered to molding factories it's ripe for harvest and sale!
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
You're telling me that some people think there is a mass of garbage in the Pacific Ocean SLIGHTLY LARGER than Russia???
Stupid people with no math skills! News at 11. ;-)
Deer don't have a 'point of view.' They do not conceptualize. They can not think ahead and imagine what it would be like to be killed and eaten. After the deer is dead, there is no deer to have a point of view, as stated in your first point, so: they can not think about it ahead of time, and afterwords they are dead. Your point is moo, it is like a cow's opinion. It's a moo point. :)
If I am in a survival situation, I will do whatever it takes to get myself and my loved ones to safety. After I and my loved ones are safe, I will help others escape the situation.
Let me rephrase my next point: the planet has the carrying capacity to give everyone a decent standard of living. If the majority of people act selfishly, we will fail, if we (the majority, that is) act cooperatively, we can create a future where no one has to fear the desperate actions of starving individuals.
Yes, we the majority need to make sure the selfish minority do not take what is not theirs, and shit where they are not supposed to. You need to read up on modern experiments in game theory. Humans are not primarily self interested. Most people will voluntarily harm themselves to punish selfishness in others. When a society has degraded to the point it is primarily selfish, people will act selfishly out of necessity, but when cooperation is rewarded and selfishness punished, everyone is happier, has more freedom, and a greater chance of survival and satisfaction.
This science has been peer reviewed and stands up to scrutiny. Only sociopaths act selfishly all the time, and we (the non sociopaths) do not need to take their desires into account. It is perfectly fine to kill someone who would kill you and everyone you love without any qualms. Heck, we'd be doing society a favor if we wiped out all the sociopathic non-cooperators rather than letting them take advantage of our good nature.
Except, sociopathy comes from a spectrum of genetic influences, and if we killed off all the sociopaths, we'd also be removing many of the genes responsible for leadership and survival instincts, probably not a good idea, so we need a system that takes the existence of a small number of sociopaths into account.
Your world view is a self fulfilling prophecy. It seems realistic to you because it creates the conditions it purports to protect you from. It also points to a serious case of confirmation bias. You easily ignore data that does not support your worldview, rather than changing your worldview to incorporate the new data into a cohesive framework, but don't feel bad, the majority of people sem to live that way.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
...and make me a private island!
Humans make their living FROM the environment, not FOR it. We aren't as a species gardeners of nature, we like the rest of species, are part of nature which means we don't have the luxury of being 'environmentalists'. Personally, if I can gain by polluting more than the pollution itself harms me personally, I not only will, but I must. It's part of the duty I feel to try hard.
When the environment can't support humans at their current lifestyle then less humans will live ( mostly ) less well. ( or more humans will live very much less well ). If humans don't like that, they will kill each other until they come to some sort of arrangement. It's inevitable. The best you can do is be the one who in the end is living the best and not being killed.
This line of reasoning takes "rational self-interest" right into "Apres moi, le deluge" territory. One problem that comes up when using that approach is that often times a bunch of other folks gets together because they're sick of your attempts to out-pollute them (or stealing their chickens, or eating their children). In fact, it happens now: people who act too egregiously get tossed in jail, where your previously nice lifestyle takes a real dive.
Even a rational approach doesn't have to preclude cooperation. if it did, the rationalists would be wasting their time learning language when they could be spending it more profitably pooping in my yard.
I am not a crackpot.
Because most of that pollution has come from western society, dumbass. Just how many Chinese and Indians do you think are chucking milk jugs and water bottles into the ocean?
BWAHAHAHA! You've never been to either China or India, have you?
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
How would changing packaging to paper help with the dumping plastic issues ? Recently I heard about managed forests and on the surface it sounds good since the forest stays in place and it's cut down to make paper products and also replenished at the same time. I cringe every time I have to throw a plastic/glass container in the trash (and no, there's no recycling program where I live).
Shakespeare poems - infinite monkeys with infinite time.Computer tech support - a few trained ones working from 9 to 5.
What a fantastic idea _read sarcasm here_, now in your altruistic world who gets to be our overlord telling us what is cooperative and what is not?
For Christians, it is Yahweh.
For Islam it is Allah.
For Athiests it is self.
For Agnostics it is no-one.
for Slashdotters it is his Noodlyness.
Who gets to set up our rules and dictate them to us?
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
If our brains get in the way of our survival and procreation, nature will take our brains back (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy )
Central Air Conditioning. You just defeated your own argument with that one line. "Nature" is NOT a centralized, autonomous entity. There is no "master control" maintaining the balance on this planet. Everything on this planet exist through a self-correcting balance of competition and cooperation. Its brutal, but not merciless. Anything that steps too out of line is put down by resistance from all other participants within its environment. Or, it wipes out everything around it, and starves to death because it has removed the infrastructure that created the ideal conditions in the first place. Guess which side of that coin humans are leaning towards?
Anyone should be able to punish non-cooperation by reciprocating that non-cooperation and making that non-cooperation known to others. If you employ child laborers, I will not do business with you, and I will tell everyone I know about your actions.
As well, in a democracy or republic, the majority or their representatives get to say what is punishable non-cooperation, like murder, pollution, and fraud. Seriously, have you never taken a civics class or explored the way your society is supposed to work?
Your knee jerk reaction makes you seem like a hardened non-cooperator who wishes that other people did not have the power to hold him to account for his actions: in other words, an overlord wannabe. Thankfully, we do have the ability to hold you to account and protect ourselves from your selfishness.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
You misunderstood.
It is trivial, that if something prevents an entity from survival and multiplication, that entity will either mutate to shed this setback, or simply die out.
This is the "Nature" of survival and multiplication.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
The problem with modern Western society
And all societies...
Do what they do with other waste sites. Cover it up with dirt and turn it into a park. Charge admission and use the money to clean up the environment. Or put it in your pocket, whatever. We humans always seem to overestimate our significance to the universe. Even our planet. Destroy the planet? Really? Pretty sure we don't have the technology to destroy the planet. Make it uninhabitable for higher organisms, maybe, for a few hundred maybe even a couple thousand years. The planet'll get over it and life will continue without us. I wonder if Dinosaurs were ever this arrogant?
I believe there is room for all the human qualities that most people value such as love and cooperation within the rubric of acting selfishly. Acknowledging this is merely an act of intellectual honesty. At least that has been my experience. Life is a survival situation. It's not necessary to emotionally feel this constantly to survive, but it's true - something to keep in the back of your mind. The difference between someone like me and a typical sociopath is that I do value the same things that most humans do, such as love and cooperation, whereas a sociopath may not.
Hahha, this is the sort of thing that being intellectually honest with yourself helps you avoid. You just advocated some kind of genocide or something... The longer I've held nihilistic assumptions about the world ( 15 or 16 years now? ) the more I've noticed them making me MORE humane and 'normal' in my thinking than I ever was before. Starting with a bad base theory leads to crazy shit via the GIGO principle.
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Assuming it's true, the Pacific is 65.3 million square miles, so it would be a tenth of the size of the ocean it's in. Yeah, that still seems pretty ridiculous.
Wikipedia has it at approximately twice the size of Texas-- which is 268,820 square miles-- so "roughly the size of Alaska" sounds like the proper scale.
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat? -C. Palahniuk
Is this jackass for real?
Get off slashdot and go back to Little Green Footballs
Yes the GP misunderstood, but I wasn't exactly clear. It's a somewhat obscure reference to a quote from the movie Dogma where a demon (of art?) Azrael says: "No pleasure, no rapture, no exquisite sin greater... than central air" . I was saying that Central Air Conditioning is dumb ( in the movie, a sin ). Although prohibiting it might be considered a case of Central Air Conditioning in and of itself. Anyway, my chosen interpretation of the movie may not be what the writer intended. I just thought it was funny.
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Selfishness presupposes the existence of a self, and the primacy of said self in controlling the organism. This is a flawed assumption. Your genes do not care what you like or dislike. They care about the survival of the human genome. You value love and cooperation not because you have arrived at the conclusion they are valuable through any logical means, but because it enhances the chance of the human race surviving.
The idea of death springs entirely from the misapprehension of a separate existence. What is not separate from the whole can not die. Death is an idea, not a reality, it is a concept that springs into existence because of the concept of life. All ideas are formed in duality, which is not reality but imagination. Everyone has equal access to reality, but most choose to live in their heads, chasing and fleeing from phantoms.
You missed my caveat and responded to my last statement as if I had not negated it, congratulations, you fail reading comprehension 101, but never fear, there is always the remedial class.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
No, my genes don't care about anything, even 'the human genome'. They just want to be passed on. They don't care if I mate with a starfish to do it, as long as the resulting hybrid isn't sterile and has a chance of surviving. That said, I'm sure that the things that I value are somewhat shaped by my genes. My concept of self includes my genes but is not limited to them.
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This is a staple of "modern Western society?" And here I thought it was assholes of any society that chuck milk jugs and water bottles into the ocean. Well, them and people who refer to people of dissenting opinion as "dumbass".
BTW, I would love for you to define "modern Western society", and then give me an example or two of non-"modern Western societ[ies]" that do not pollute the environment.
Thanks in advance.
But, according to the generally accepted views of evolution, such mutations don't happen as a direct result of the environment (though I may be wrong, I'm not an expert). The entities that possess the less desirable traits die out, while the ones with the more desirable traits breed with each other, strengthening said traits, and pass it on to the next generation. This is all theory of course. Just look at the platypus.
Now, the environment does affect the probability that the species will survive and in what form, so they might improve and evolve or die out when a giant rock decides their head would make an excellent landing strip.
Its more random that simple "adapt or die". Sometimes, its just dumb luck.
If a powerful minority of people continue to act selfishly, we will fail
Fixed that fer ya ;)
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
I'm sure I'll get modded as a troll... but just to play devil's advocate...
Here are the facts: We humans generate a lot of plastic trash that we need to dispose of somewhere. If we put our best scientists on it, I can imagine at least one scientist coming up with a method whereby of utilizing natural forces to collect our trash, hammer away at it, break it down, and disperse it, instead of collecting it into landfills where it sits for eternity.
Here we have a natural trash collector, compactor, composter, slicer-dicer system, where the ocean currents pick up our trash and beat it to a pulp, and then gently disperse it out to the rest of the environment. And it's conveniently located no where near civilization, yet it collects trash from all over. Sure, some animal and plant lives are sacrificed, but might it be a sound part of our overall trash strategy, had we planned it, instead of just discovering it?
Maybe Mother Nature knows better than us, in this case! Yes, Mother Nature. That MILF
The profit motive being an unalterable fact, yes.
You can't mate with a starfish, only with other humans. If all other humans died out, your genes would perish. Look at eusocial creatures like ants and bees. Yes, I know we aren't ants or bees, but I'm illustrating a genetic point: many ants and bees never breed. Their genes only give them the power to support the breeders, and those breeders also create the next generation of non-breeders. If genes were totally selfish to the individual, and not to the species, how could species that include non-breeders ever evolve?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I dunno what humans COULD mate with, there are hybrids such as ligers and tigons and jagoleps and mules and hinneys and rutabega etc. There are live mice with human genes used for experiments. There are probably many bacteria with artificially implanted human genes and everyone has genes from viruses that have once upon the human evolutionary past 'mated' with humans or their ancestors. Probably there are snippets from bacterial plasmids in the human genome. I am not an expert but funky shit goes on naturally and more funky shit is suddenly possible with modern technology.
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That was my first thought. The fact that this occurs is a good thing. Not the plastic in the ocean, but the fact that it tends to stabilize in a certain location. I have a hunch they'll find no shortage of life in that area... it will just be a very DIFFERENT ecosystem than other places.
And, some point in the future, it will be worthwhile and profitable to clean it up. Just like, in the future, garbage dumps will be the greatest source of raw materials.
It's like a technological iridium layer ;)
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Deer don't have a 'point of view.' They do not conceptualize. They can not think ahead and imagine what it would be like to be killed and eaten.
Don't be so sure. I saw this programme and am damn sure that the horse in question knew the kind of thing that was planned for her. That's why she escaped - jumped over a fence she had not jumped over all the rest of her life.
I'm not suggesting that animals philosophise in French in terrace cafes - but I find it hard to believe that they have don't have some kind of "world view" that is based around life experiences with a few "abstractions" to fill in the gaps.
A bee colony with uncooperative workers would be sick as would a person with a cancerous skin lesion. A typical skin cells function is to die and thereby protect the innards with it's corpse, then slough off. It lacks the ability to procreate without the organism it protects. All its eggs are in the one basket of the total you, and it lacks a mind to change. It's basically an automaton. Would I take the Bruce Willis trip to the hypothetical comet to save the human race? Sure, if nobody else was doing it. Even if I didn't think there were much chance of success, there would have to be some pretty wild sex back home on earth, to be cooler than a trip on a rocket. Seriously, I can't imagine nobody else would go, so I'd stay home. There would be an ample hero supply without me.
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And if our intelligence is so powerful, why did we make this ocean mess in the first place? I'm glad I don't live in your smug world; fortunately that is phenomenologically impossible.
You may be right about that, especially in regards to social animals. I think they may have some sort of rudimentary conceptualization. It seems like it would be genetically advantageous to be able to conceptualize your place in your pack, herd, or what have you. But the horse may just have been picking up on subtle cues from her owners, as the 'mathematical' horses have been proven to do.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It's all good up to the point where the garbage sits around or (worse yet) gets gently dispersed. We're lucky that there happen to be currents that collect this stuff in one spot, I'd say THE LEAST we can do is collect it and put it in landfills where it's somewhat safely contained and wildlife has a sporting chance at avoiding it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Some would argue that "profit" is a wholly human, intellectual creation and a perversion of our survival instinct. Most creatures of this world only do what is necessary to survive. Even those with and ordered society among themselves don't seek to purposely destroy for destruction's sake. Humans are the only ones who do that, who kill outside of the needs of survival.
"Humans make their living FROM the environment, not FOR it."
How about making our living WITH it?
You know there's a line of human cancer cells that can live outside the human body? They've been around for nearly fifty years, taken from one woman, and they are so successful that labs need to take precautions that their experiments are not infested with these cells, skewing the results. (searches diligently on wiki for the half-remembered article: aha! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa)
Freaky stuff. There are single celled humans out there, living in the wild.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Fines keep people from littering, and because the benefit is great and the cost is tiny nobody complains to have the fines repealed.
Wait so you say this in the middle of something that can be summed up as "lets not bother doing this on a grander scale"
It's never going to work 100% of the time but requiring an incinerator in the US to filter out the worst crap does not mean that another one opens in the 3rd world. it might if you set restrictions which are too costly but that's where negotiation comes in.
Imagine watching a petri dish full of bacteria which are slowly secreting toxins into their environment until they kill themselves.
Now imagine that they're all sentient rational actors which know what they're doing and could stop but won't because trying is hard.
Who said anything about a powerful intelligence? I merely speculated that we have the potential. Obviously, we aren't realizing it now. I don't know where you are getting 'smug' from, honestly, nor am I seeing any actual argument for why 'my world' is impossible. Just a lot of hot air, is that what you meant to convey?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Anyone want to help out with a back of the envelope calculation on how expensive this might be?
costs:
1:
Perhaps an old oil tanker or other suitably large vessel.
2:
Cost of fitting it with some kind of large collapseable/retractable scoop mechanism to draw the material in towards the intake.
3:
cost of crew
4:
cost of processing the material gathered into a form suitable for dropping into a furnace, a recycling plant or whatever suits.
Income:
1:
Sale of material or products.
2:
Grants and subsidies(if you can find a government willing to give you some funding)
I imagine the densities out there would have a big effect, if you'd have to make many passes through the dense areas to fill up your tanker then it would be a no go, if you could fill up on a few runs then it would mean faster turnaround etc.
Scoop size and how much useless crap turns up in your intake would also affect it.
How many staff and how complex would your machinery have to be?
I guess the most important question is:
Is there anyone willing to pay cash money for massive volumes of unsorted soggy salty bottle caps, bird feathers, wood, used condoms and other random crap.
I imagine no since I don't see anyone digging up the landfills....
You just advocated some kind of genocide or something...
That's not what he was advocating at all.
Survival of the species in general dictates that we have to remove those elements capable of damaging it. Especially now, with technology, where a few nuts can kill millions of people with a weapon that will fit in the trunk of a car.
He has a point. It's not a very practical point, but...
MORE humane and 'normal' in my thinking than I ever was before
By whose measure? Yours? Nihilism is kind of the anti-thesis of "normal thinking" - there is no norm :)
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
The world would be better without the non-cooperators? If so, annihilate them - you've done the world a favor ( though not the non-cooperators ). How is that not genocide? Not that you could even identify them as almost anyone would cooperate with a gun to their head.
Damaging the human species? By whose measure, yours?
To clarify my comment about my 'normal' thinking, I find myself usually in favor of the status quo which I wasn't before. Sending ships to clean up the garbage vortex is NOT the status quo. I never find myself longing for a world without a certain group of people.
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Is it not time to require recycling of plastic, glass, and metal for everybody? It really doesn't take that much effort, and it has cut down on my trash output so much that I no longer have trash service. Between recycling and composting I throw away 1 bag of trash every 2 weeks, which I drive to the dump myself for free.
If that is too cumbersome for most people then how about the federal government impose packaging standards that helped reduce waste? For example, how about we promote "refills" for things like detergent, and soaps instead of buying the whole plastic container again? It seems like something simple like that would have immediate impact in help solving pollution problems like this as well as using less plastic (or foreign oil to take it to another level).
TFS says (unsourced)
estimated to be the size of Alaska (some estimates place it at ten times that size)
BBC says (unsourced)
estimated to be larger than the State of Texas
Wikipedia says (source: Mauitimes
estimated to be twice the size of Texas
larger than Texas: > 678 000 km^2
2x Texas: 1 356 000 km^2
Alaska: 1 480 000 km^2
10x Alaska: 14 800 000 km^2
(Pacific Ocean: 155 600 000 km^2)
Project Kaisei says:
No one really knows how big this area is, and this is one reason for further testing and analysis by Project Kaiseiâ(TM)s science team.
As I mentioned, I am not advocating for the removal of sociopaths, and I actually gave reasons why this would be a bad idea.
I still don't understand why cleaning up our own crap is a bad idea. Do you shit in your kitchen? Do you let other people shit in your kitchen? If you found shit in your kitchen, would you clean it up or let it fester there, because, hey, it's there and that's the status quo? If you argue that it was not there before, and thus is not the status quo, how is an Alaska sized heap of human created trash the status quo? It wasn't there before, either, right? You seem to have a definition of 'status quo' that is awfully convenient for you, in that it gets you out of doing anything you don't want to do without having to come up with an actual reason not to do it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
They should collect this in barges and burn it for fuel.
If you wanted to do that, pretty much any municipal solid waste dump would be a better bet.
If it costs less than the prevailing price of crude, then it's a go - hassles be damned!
Hmmm, first three posts on a supposedly smart and generally environmentally leaning website can think of doing nothing but burning it.
Yup, as a planet, we're fucked.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Many cities in India have already banned plastic bags - New Delhi for one. Some others have selectively banned plastic - Chennai recently banned plastics from its beaches (considering the fact that it has the world's second longest beach). The Indian state of Himachal Pradesh has banned plastic bags throughout the state. Some areas of China have done so too. South Africa (forget the other societal ills they have) has banned plastic bags too. I do not know of any major city in the US that has done something similar.
What website would that be then?
Take for example, any tribe or country. When faced with merciless invaders, there have to be a few members who are more concerned with protecting the majority, even by sacrificing their own life. A few have to sacrifice their lives to ensure the survival of the majority. Such behavior is desirable and encouraged, and that is why such people are called "brave", while people like you are disapproved of and labeled as "gutless cowards".
In your example, you forgot that the crew on a sinking ship indeed helps the majority passengers get off first, even by risking their own life. The firefighters save lives even at risk of their own. Your "realistic conception" of other people is a misconception based on the assumption that everyone is like you, and such soldiers/firefighters are stupid and aberrations.
Since you are selfish, you assume automatically that your way of life is correct and your selfishness is justified just because you can get away with it. The purpose of life is to continue living. To survive. If a comet wipes us out, what of it? But if a car was about to crush you, will you jump out of the way if you can see it coming? or will you think "oh let me die now, since a comet may kill me anyways and my life is meaningless"?
Your apathy is rooted only in the fact that you selfishly assume that you will not have to pay yourself for your actions. And as much justifications you might throw to defend it, the fact remains that individuals such as you are undesirable for survival of the society and are useless for the community's long term survival.
Laws are framed and enforced to support and extend the survival of the community. Individuals such as you, who work against the interest of the community have to be either kicked out or punished, in order to protect the interest of the community. The community has an equal right to be selfish too. Probably more so, since it is basically more people than you. Only reason everyone is not overly-concerned by the environment damage is because they are unaware of the problem, and plus people like you actively work towards keeping them misinformed. If more people are correctly informed as to exactly how dire the problem is, they would choose to decide based on long-term view rather than short-term.
Even better analogy, one that is a near parallel. Assume that your doctor has told you that you have merely 6 months to live, if you continue smoking. You can take the short term, depressed view that since you will die anyways after 30-50 years, you might just enjoy smoking and die within 6 months, since you will die in either case. *Or* you can take the long term view and lead a more healthy life and extend your lifespan. You may still die in a car crash, but what of it? If you bother to be careful and watch both sides of the road when crossing it, and jump to avoid a car, you should accept that you are not really all that cynical and suicidal.
Everyone knows that smoking is harmful for them, but they smoke assuming that the risk is low. When the doctor actually informs them that they will die shortly, if they do not stop, the majority is non-suicidal enough to act appropriately on the warning. *You* are the equivalent of a shill of the tobacco manufacturers who are spreading misinformation regards how the risk from smoking is not really so great, and the doctor is mistaken to tell you that you have only 6 months left, just so they can make a profit.
Your indifference to others and lack of altruism is fine and natural, from your own survival point of view. But you are useless to the community's survival. And following your own selfishness principal, if you are not interested in the survival of community, there is no reason why community should provide its benefits to people such as you. A law that locks up or punishes selfish behaviour such as yours, is perfectly fine too from the selfish pov of the majority/community.
You assume that people are essentially selfish. And yet somehow I see myriads of laws that inconvenience the individual, in order to benefit the majority. For example, it would be beneficial to simply steal from others. There are others who are stupid enough to work. If people are just selfish, they should all be thieves and support stealing from one-another or those who are stupid enough to work. And yet, there are laws against thefts. People decided that it was better not to be selfish, and agree to work instead of just directly stealing from others. They decided to actually punish the selfish behavior of stealing from others. They decided to serve the long-term "selfishness" instead of the short-term one. So much for your theory and "understanding" of human nature.
And since the laws against theft etc. prove that majority of people put long-term benefits ahead of short-term selfishness, it is indeed beneficial in long term if individuals such as you are removed from society. Obviously the extremely selfish individuals such as you are far few, as evidence of most laws, supports and it would hardly be genocide. It will be merely removal of undesirable elements that are a dire potential threat to survival of the majority.
You assumed you wouldn't need to volunteer. And if *you* were *chosen* and asked to make the trip to the comet? What will you do then? If you said "why me? choose someone else" they will just say "if not you, then who?". So will you go, if it was explained that you had the capabilities for the rocket trip and you were being asked to sacrifice yourself so that majority can survive? If you assume that all humans are selfish like you, then nobody will indeed go and you will die anyways. What if you were the best choice for such a mission? What if your cooperation was critical? If you stayed back, you will die anyways, and basically you would be just be saying that since you are going to die, you want everyone else to die with you too. *OR* you might decide that since you will die either ways if you were selfish, you might as well ensure that at least the majority survive. That is all that basically defines a hero.
Society as such needs more "heroes", and less cowards like you, who would want everyone else to die along with them or hope that someone else will die for them. And therefore society with its own "selfishness" will be correct to punish people like you in order to discourage such undesirable "cowardly" behavior.
You are being asked to sacrifice your old ways to protect the environment and ensure the long-term extended survival of the majority. You try to be careful to watch oncoming traffic even though you are aware that some day you will die anyways, but you still wish to extend your lifespan. Community/majority wants to do the same. If you do not cooperate, you are a cancerous skin lesion that needs to be cured/removed.
I have been hearing for years about this but I have never seen anyone take pictures of this so called island.
I see small piles but never the so called Islands of plastic garbage.
my genes don't care about anything [...my genes] want to be passed on
Don't come to a gunfight with a pair of knives, son. You'll just wind up full of holes.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
In a way it feels like we are crapping our own pants because we have more important things to do than go to the toilet.
I crap my pants regularly while reading /. does that count? or is my wife right and I am just a lazy bum.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
I didn't say that I advocate the status quo for it's own sake, or because it is the status quo. The status quo is not king, it's just that I find myself agreeing with it often. But the conclusions are made independently.
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Although there are lots of nice things I'd like to pinch, I'm not in favor of repealing antitheivery laws because the negative impact in the long run ( or even the fairly short run ) on me would likely more than cancel out the value of what I would steal. Also, I'd not be able to steal all that much if the anti-stealing laws were repealed since wal-mart would be looted bare in sort order.
I must confess that I WOULD steal millions of dollars if presented with an opportunity to where there would be no chance of getting caught. For instance, If I were suddenly endowed with some superhero powers that would let me get into Fort Knox. However, I've never been faced with an opportunity to steal where the small (or large) risk of getting caught doesn't outweigh any desire I might have to steal. And because the people close to me, certainly friends and family, and even just aquaintances are safe from any potential thievery from me because I value the goodwill of those around me and my reputation more highly than the value of anything they are likely to have for me to steal, - even IF stealing were legal.
Despite being totally OK with stealing in principle - especially from strangers, I've never stolen anything except a toy plastic boot when I was four years old.
I am NOT ok with everyone stealing, and I think thieves should be punished, as long as the thief isn't me. My habit ( I agree with habits=morals ala Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics ) of not stealing stems from practical reasons such as the near impossibility of reliably committing the perfect crime, and the fact that if you keep committing crimes you will eventually get caught, and many other practical considerations.
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I don't think humanity is an organism the way an individual human is, or even like a beehive sort of is. Humans are a species. I don't think uncooperative humans necessarily harm 'humanity'. They are just part of it.
As for a Bruce Willis adventure, I'll elaborate:
Case 1) I was 'Chosen' by someone to go. If the chance of success were low enough, I might even volunteer just to take a ride on a rocket. If there were significant chance of success, then I would want to stay, and so I'd tell them to fsck off, I don't care, I don't think it will work, and I'm going to get laid. But it would be a bluff. If it seriously looked like nobody else would go, then they would have called my bluff and I would go.
Case 2) If I was a significantly better choice than the next guy or somehow my personal presence was critical, I would go. I'm dead anyways, so no skin off my nose. However I would seriously examine whether or not my ego was about to get me killed. Am I REALLY all that much better than the next guy? Going when you're dead anyway is completely selfish - you sacrifice nothing ( or at most a few weeks of life ) and get a big win gene wise ( most of humanity and even the animals and plants etc have very similar genes to your own, and even if you don't give a damn about that which most including me barely do or don't at all, you get a free spaceship ride. Weeee. And you probably get laid alot in the time just prior to liftoff. And those close to you may be able to play up any fame/noteriety for personal benefit. You might be able to demand payment upfront to be awarded to those close to you.
Society, memes, institutions, corporations and other nonhuman lifeforms which may be endowed with a wierd sort of alien sentience that's hard to relate to, act selfishly if they have the wherewithal to survive. Most of the arrangements humans have with these are at best uneasy symbiosis. When the love affair goes bad, it's usually the humans that lose.
What if the majority wanted to eat me? A plane crashes in antarctica with 30 people, who eventually decide to draw straws for who will be killed and eaten, I don't like this, but am forced to draw, and get the short straw, I quickly grab the dead ( and already eaten ) airmarshal's gun and threaten to shoot the first person that steps toward me. I stay awake, but realise that they'll jump me as soon as I nod off, so I look around and decide to shoot, not the fattest most nutritious person, but the person most intent on my being killed. We eat him. And I'm keeping the gun, and sleeping with one eye open until we freeze starve or are rescued. Fsck the majority.
I'll cooperate mine fuhrer.
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http://www.bestlifeonline.com/cms/publish/health/Our_oceans_are_turning_into_plastic_are_we_2.php
^ 6 page article on the effect of plastic on nature, including a turtle deformed by a plastic band, numerous birds who died, leaving a skeleton encircling a pile of indigestible plastic 'critters', and some statistics and figures.
What choice do we make? What decision is made for those who choose not to decide?
Nearly every plasticine particle ever crafted still exists in a less than useful form. How many are in your pocket?
I would like to start calling this "Walmart Island." Walmart is slowly turning everything we buy into higher and higher percentage of plastic.. Things that used to last forever - like a chair, a table, a drill - are being turned into 'disposable' items that just end up in our landfills. A normal table lasts years and years.. a Walmart table breaks after 2 months to a year of moderate use..
No one seems to be saying that part of the answer to combatting these buildups of plastic is to build things of higher quality that last. Walmart is the anti-quality. Therefore, we should call this plastic island "Walmart Island."
--- We need more Ron Paul!
Nothing wrong with that. Most people are genetically predisposed to support the status quo. After all, if everyone was continually trying new things, we wouldn't be doing the things that were proven to work. A small minority is predisposed to reject the status quo and try new things. Most of us fail to come up with anything better, but occasionally we get something right. If it weren't for the supporters of the status quo, we experimenters would not have the resources to experiment.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
This was about the idea of sending a fleet of ocean going water filter ships to clean up the garbage patch at great expense. I'm all for not throwing more shit in the ocean. I doubt that would be noticeably expensive.
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Ok, I finally had time to go back and re-read your comment. I see you did temper it at the end. Frankly I scanned down and found the hateful statement I was expecting ( trolling for? ) and pasted it in. Kudos to you for actually tempering the remark with a 'well that's how I feel, but I recognise this as probable crap, so here's a few plausable reasons why what my emotion wants isn't a good idea'. Still, I was expecting the emotional response because that's what you get all the time when you're someone like me. Except online with psuedonymity, I take care not to let people know what I'm thinking because of this sort of thing. It would get me clobbered. Shame on me for not really reading the rest of the post as carefully as I should have.
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Oh, that's okay. I'm bombastic, annoying, and crude. I'm used to getting much worse than you handed out. It kinda goes with the territory. I try to be honest and not troll just for the sake of trolling, but I do enjoy being over the top and saying outrageous things.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Altruistic behavior is selfish in some cases. Sometimes sacrificing your own life is the most selfish thing to do, and sometimes it's a mistake. I choose not to contribute to the cult of back patting that often leads 'the best of us' to be sacrificed to the rest of us. Maybe someone with the imagination, compassion and guts to risk their life for their fellow people should not be consumed in such a way? Oh, it's an honor to jump in the volcano, and we all appreciate your bravery and self sacrifice, we'll think of you when the volcano god is appeased, and it rains and our crops grow. We all wish we were as good as you. Thanks so much. (maybe that person about to jump needs to hear what I'm saying rather than what 'community minded' people are saying and stop being so damn good (tasty)). That way they might not end up eaten ( figuratively ) by everyone else. Maybe then 'everybody' taken as a whole might 'rise' in some way if it happens enough. Self sacrifice requires relatively low self esteem/worth. You have to believe that your own sacrifice is worth the gain. For instance, sacrificing for your fellow means you have to rather not live otherwise ( low self worth ), will gain something worth more than your life via the sacrifice requiring you to value yourself less than whatever you *believe* you would gain etc. Sometimes low self esteem/low self worth is the CORRECT assessment, and hence sometimes self sacrifice can be correct (selfish). The logic behind the self sacrifice need not be sound and the facts fed into that logic need not be correct, and indeed it's not necessary for logic to have been used at all in the decision to sacrifice one's self for the action to be correct. However, it seems that those best able to sacrifice themselves ( which can be a most subtle self interested act ) are also prone to being taken advantage of by back patters who would like to reap the benefits of their self sacrifice. These people ought to be given the advantage of a little street smarts education, since it would be interesting to see what such people would do with themselves if they survived. And the community isn't a human being. It's a phenomenon that occurs when there are a bunch of people together. As a nonhuman, it doesn't have rights.
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