Slashdot Mirror
The Sixth Mass Extinction Will Hit The Biggest Animals The Hardest, Says Stanford Study (gizmodo.com)
The sixth mass extinction will be an event triggered by people and will hit the biggest animals the hardest. "There is no past event that looks biologically like what's happening today," says lead study author Jonathan Payne of Stanford University. "Processes like warming and ocean acidification are not the dominant cause of threat in the modern ocean." Gizmodo reports: A paleontologist by training, Payne and his research group started compiling data on modern marine organisms several years back, in order to study how body size and ecological traits have changed over evolutionary time. Payne, who has studied the End Permian extinction event that wiped out more than 95 percent of all marine species 250 million years ago, soon realized that his dataset -- which included living and extinct members of nearly 2,500 marine genera -- could serve another purpose. By comparing the extinction threat faced by modern marine genera (as indicated by their official conservation status) with their ancestral counterparts, Payne and his colleagues discovered that modern extinction threat is more strongly associated with body size. Larger animals face a greater risk of disappearing than smaller animals. Today, the dominant driver of marine extinction is people, and people aren't terribly selective about which environments they pluck animals from. We go for the biggest game, fishing down the food web and removing top predators. Within species, too, we tend to hunt the largest individuals, which is why North Atlantic cod and Chesapeake oysters were historically much larger. "In a sense, we're driving evolution [toward smaller individuals]," Payne said. What's worth noting is that the Stanford researchers only looked at organisms whose extinction risk has been assessed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which creates a bias towards big, charismatic groups like fish, sea turtles, marine mammals, etc. The marine genera that were analyzed only had fossil counterparts, too. Gizmodo also notes that the study "excluded corals, which are currently in the midst of a catastrophic, global die-off."
"Oh, this is all liberal garbage, I could shoot 100 polar bears a day from my SUV and nothing bad would ever happen, blah blah blah"
We are all used to the relentless exponential growth of the human population.
But there is another exponential, the one with negative rate, the one of the things that decrease exponentially.
In the last 40 years, while the human population doubled, both marine and terrestrial wildlife halved :
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-16/half-marine-life-lost-in-40-years/6779912
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26290-worlds-wildlife-population-halved-in-just-40-years.html
Even the relatively protected Great Barrier Reef halved in less than 40 years :
http://www.scienceinpublic.com.au/wp-content/uploads/Full-PNAS-paper-for-publication.pdf
Nature is being converted into humanity at exponential rate and it's getting worse :
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/world-population-will-soar-higher-than-predicted/
"Blessed is the lion which becomes man when consumed by man; and cursed is the man whom the lion consumes, and the lion becomes man."
...justifying preferences for particular species was difficult, -before- this.
Enter a young Al Gore, clutching his bed sheets closely. He whimpers: "I see dead animals."
Yeah damn those scientists and their pesky "facts".
Anyway lets look at all the ways your wrong!
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Easily accomplished, since any record containing experience of a deity (and there are many), you will declare not historical.
Does a frog know it's being boiled?
Aren't frogs going extinct?
We are on the brink of a much, much bigger change than people realize. Computers will soon think. Not within 20 years, but certainly within 200 years. And they will end up much more intelligent than us.
What will they think about? And what will they think about us?
What makes us think the way that we do? Why do we care about extinction? Ultimately there is only one answer, Natural Selection conditioned us that way.
So, what will ultimately drive an artificial intelligence? Same thing. Natural Selection. But operating in a completely different world.
What is the obvious huge (initial) energy source for an ultra intelligent machine? No, not satellites. Plants. Or at least carefully engineered plant like things that grow but can also think. They will want sunlight, lots of it, why should they share it?
http://www.computersthink.com/
See above for a full exposition of these ideas. (Large preview on Amazon.)
your you're
and you're wrong.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
I'm sure the French know when they are being boiled.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
My previous comment was acidently posted before I finished for some reason. Lets try again.
Yeah damn those scientists and their pesky "facts".
Anyway lets look at all the ways you are wrong
1) Is Mass Extinction happening? Yes. ( Barnosky, Matzki , et al. Nature, 2011) ..unless you subscribe to conspiracy theories, in which case you've already made your mind up and "facts" wont convince you. I suggest thorazine. HOWEVER! Lets go there.
2) Is the temperature warming? Yes. (IPCC authors, synthesis report, 2014)
3) People with financial interests buying off scientists? This IS a strange claim. I've spent a big of time working around climate scientists as a coder. Heres the reality of it;- Its bad for your career to actually follow science because governments are stacked with anti-science people who are absolutely insistent that theres something wrong with science any time science points out that Co2's infra red absorbsion properties is causing climate change, that evolution is real, or that vaccinations actually do save lives.
I've seen a number of collegues over at the CSIRO lose their jobs because the current conservative government has decided it doesnt want to fund climate or oceanographic reseach anymoer. Meanwhile there ARE scientists getting paid off by groups like the Heratige foundation and the Kosh brothers, and we know that because we've looked at the paperwork. As one workmate put it, if she REALLY wanted to get rich of climate change, she'd deny everything the data tells her, and pretend its not happening and make a mint on the right wing talk circuit. Double so if she throws in creationism and get to visit churches too. Unfortunately , she's a scientist, albeit one in a field where she gets death threats from anti-science stalkers, funding threats from conservative policy makers, and a world of disrespect from a media industry that thinks "balance" means matching every truth with a lie.
And just for the records, scientists have not been "crying wolf" for three decades, they've been pointing out the physics of the greenhouse effect for well over a century. And the predictions are not being pushed "farther in the future", they are being observed *right now* in the floods, hurricanes, droughts and rising sea levels that happening right before our eyes.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
The problem is those crooked scientists are using liberal thermometers and corrupt mathematics.
When I'm president, we'll have the greatest thermometers and mathematics you've ever seen, OK? It'll make your head spin, the mathematics we're going to have. American mathematics, none of that fruity foreign calculus and so-called "partial differential equations". Leave it to liberals. I'll get the best people to change all the partial differential equations to FULL differential equations, because we're Americans and we don't accept partial stuff. Sad!
You are welcome on my lawn.
I like George Carlin's "Save the Planet" commentary.
The planet has survived the ice age, volcanoes, meteorites and other "crises".
The planet will survive and has survived.
Mankind will not.
Does a frog know it's being boiled?
Yes. The belief that a frog won't notice if the water is heated slowly is a myth.
Aren't frogs going extinct?
Some species are, but not all.
Another fact: Big animals were disproportionately exterminated in all mass extinctions. The survivors tended to be generalists (rats, cockroaches, humans, etc.) and geographically dispersed.
Still not sure if your browser is working for you, but the relationship to my post to which you are "replying" is entirely unclear.
You seem to have a certain set of political positions you call "science" and others you call "anti-science", with no particular scientific justification at all, other than invoking some supposed financier "connections". For the record, my post says nothing negative about climate change, and your mind on these topics seems to consist largely of a collection of vague non-sequiturs.
Don't get carried away. Computers simply run programs. Calling what they do "AI" or "thinking" is incorrect. They simply compute, albeit using ever more complex algorithms.
I be hardpressed to find an extinction event that won't hit the biggest animals the hardest, other than maybe ocean/land divide. Food chain goes like a pyramid, if enough below you crumbles, so do you, apex predator.
Humans only have hope because of brains, not that they use it all that much anymore.
Until they're not. If you can't define what causes consciousness and self awareness, you can't say something won't develop it.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
We should let a message somewhere this time, for the next civilization in a few million years not to do the same mistakes!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Global Warming is causing major extinctions - citation: Gawker Media. I'm not saying it isn't happening, but I'd much rather an article from someone who doesn't make a living from flashing photos of starlet'a crotches, intertwined with stories of "is your cat the cutest on the block? 15 steps to know for sure".
Thirty four characters live here.
Let's feed him more just to make sure.
Table-ized A.I.
What do you think brains broken down to neurons do? Magic? We're machines too. Just biological ones.
Our consciousness could perhaps be speculated like an Operating System level, some abstract layer above all the automatic crap (heart beat, breathing) and all the other functions... and that's what AI probably will be. Some higher level layer above all the automatic code that lets the machine function.
What will the other lower levels be? Well, there's instinct. There's also all that vision processing -- because of the inherent property of lenses, we see everything upside down and backwards but something corrects that so automatically we don't even know. Vision processing also waves away our blind spots and a bunch of other things. I'm sure there's sound processing. And a language center that makes those sound waves somehow coherent without us thinking too much about it.
So the AI layers needs to take these already processed inputs, and desires triggered by whatever (in humans food, sex) and act on them. The thinking layer's job then is to both model the world and be a prediction engine.
I imagine that will be a job for evolutionary learning algorithms. Humans can design those, because writing the code that anticipates every interaction is too complex and besides, new rules arise that can't be accounted for.
And voila, eventually computers that think but don't know why or how (human made evolutionary algorithms). Just like we don't really understand our minds yet.
I also can't say that my feces won't become sentient. But it's probably not going to happen.
The logic is weak in this one.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I believe I just read one. Please get educated.
Not much of a shocker. Cool that's there's more data. I know this much: we're all descended from tiny animals that survived some shitty days back in 65,000,000 BCE. The large fauna at that time were the non-avian dinosaurs. Now they're dead, Jim. The shitty environment killed a lot of the flora that the large herbivores ate, which starved the large carnivores that ate them, and then it's dead turtles almost all the way down from there. Luckily, at the bottom of the food change worms and other tiny things were able to survive. That was able to support our tiny ass ancestors, small birds, etc. Let us hope that we're all small enough next time shit goes down.
What do you think brains broken down to neurons do? Magic?
Maybe. It's a sufficiently advanced technology.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'm going to be huuuge.
Mankind has survived all those, too.
Whether we, or any species, survives is a matter of degree, not kind.
unless something comes along and kills all of species over 50 cm tall in the timespan of a couple of days mankind will survive, whatever we will do to this earth, we will survive
if the species around us will survive, well, thats up to us...
Global Warming is causing major extinctions - citation: Gawker Media
Also in the study cited just two posts up from yours - Barnosky, Matzki , et al. Nature, 2011. Talk about willful blindness.
They simply compute, albeit using ever more complex algorithms.
Whereas brains do what exactly? In order for them to do something that can't be run on a computer, they would have to be super-turing somehow.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I'm not sure if you're trying to send up nutjobs or if you are one. Poe's law strikes again and if you are not serious, then I take my hat off to you sir, you have done an outstandingly good job. On the off chance you are serious...
Why is it that the "scientific facts" always seem to be twisted toward your liberal agenda? Our beer is bad, but your red wine is healthy.
u wot m8? Our beer? Your red wine? Wat.
Our cigarettes cause cancer
They do. Also it's not like all scientists are non smokers.
and are being banned
They are not.
but your marijuana cures cancer
yes, because providing pain relief is *totally* the same as curing.
and is being legalized
and I say this as someone with no interest in it, not fast enough.
Our SUVs are the spawn of Satan
I like to think that Satan has more panache. I figure they're the work of one of the lower orders of demon.
while liberals get to drive their effeminate Priuses in the HOV lane
Hee hee :)
My sense of "being a man" is not so fragile that it can be broken by driving the wrong brand/model of car. If yours is, then, well, you should probably fix it. Otherwise who knows what else might cause it to shatter at a moment's notice? The wrong grade of steel in your axe? The wrong brand of tools? The wrong type of beer? The wrong type of alcoholic drink altogether? The wrong toothbrush?
Life becomes much easier and cheaper when you don't have to rely on marketing teams to define your manliness for you.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Need mind the fact that the warming we'll see before the next icing period will make for a wider abundance of plant and animal life.
No, forget they got THAT completely backwards. Instead turn your attention to the even more ethically questionable fear mongering of "ocean acidification", which in fact is really AT WORST the Oceon moving to a slightly more neutral PH from the base it's at now (really a calcification problem but then that would invoke TEH FEAR now would it?) .
The ocean is not in fact acidifying one bit, any more than my jumping up in the air means I am in danger of falling into the sun.
If you want real details on what is up with open "acidification" from actual scientists as opposed to people paid to scare you, read this which covers many papers on the topic...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Mankind wasn't around when the Chicxulub one hit. As for the ice age, by some accounts it was a close-run thing.
The most dangerous thing of all is complacency.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The largest animals will be the best protected by humans. Witness the giant panda, which is no longer endangered due to conservation efforts. The same will be true of elephants, giraffe, bears, gorillas, whales, and any other animals we care about, which includes pretty much all the large ones.
I'd be quite happy for Gawker, Buzzfeed and LinkedIn to go extinct. At least we're making a bit of progress on that front.
Earth is getting warmer you stupid christian
Pardon my french, but this is total crap. Thinking that man can cause mass extintion using anything but darkening Sun for a period of time, using, say, thermonuclear weapons, and lots, and lots of it, simply does not add up. Killing animals is not equal to mass extinction in any shape.
Yeah damn those scientists and their pesky "facts".
This has nothing to do with facts. We are sick of your "facts". Why is it that the "scientific facts" always seem to be twisted toward your liberal agenda? Our beer is bad, but your red wine is healthy. Our cigarettes cause cancer and are being banned, but your marijuana cures cancer and is being legalized. Our hash browns cause diabetes, but all you arugula chomping vegans are expected to live to 110. Our SUVs are the spawn of Satan, while liberals get to drive their effeminate Priuses in the HOV lane. So don't give us any more of that crap about "facts". You really think we are too dumb to recognize an agenda when we see one?
I'm sick of hearing bullshit about a "liberal agenda". It's a nice undefined catch-all people who identify as rightwing use to descibe any idea they don't agree with. I'm a left winger in a country where our most rightwing politicians are to left of your most leftwing. I like beer. I used to smoke, I liked it but it was fucking up my lungs too much. I'm sure there are medicinal properties to cannabis; there are to nicotine as well (there are indications it helps stave off Parkinson's for example). Smoking either will screw up your lungs. I don't know what arugula is, if it isn't meat I don't want to know. SUVs are the spawn of Satan. Why the hell should people be encouraged to waste fuel driving a tank to drop little Johnny to playschool?
The Sixth Mass Extinction is already upon us, and will involve only people. The bugs are already out there that are going to wipe us out, and they have become totally resistant to all known treatments thanks to careless, even reckless use of medical technology.
Tuberculosis is now totally drug resistant and it is only a matter of time before that bug gets out.
We're allowing people to survive who are susceptible to cancer and other genetic disease. This weakens the gene pool, and scientists have already been able to measure the great extent of this weakness.
We have profitized medical care such that there is no incentive to actually cure disease. There is more money in treating symptoms and prolonging life to sustain that revenue stream.
We are bringing back extinct disease with reckless and ill-thought out immigration policy.
And, you know what, perhaps this is a good thing for every other living thing on Earth. God wiped Man out once before, saving only Noah, his family, and the animals. He will do it again, and that right soon.
In my native language, the Milky Way is called "Bird's track." Anyone watching the bird migration today can see only few flocks here and there. At the time when the word was born, the migratory birds were filling the sky from the horizon to horizon, just like the Milky Way.
That contention would be at odds with reports of a possible coming "Little Ice Age" due to the current Maunder-type sunspot minimum.
It is also at odds with reports of no global warming since the late 1990's.
And on a macro scale, it's a bit odd to judge planetary data on merely human timescales. Technically, we're still in an Ice Age, and are merely between continental glacial advances.
Put on your fedora fucktard
They simply compute, albeit using ever more complex algorithms.
Whereas brains do what exactly? In order for them to do something that can't be run on a computer, they would have to be super-turing somehow.
While I broadly agree with you, I was under the impression that there is absolutely no research whatsoever indicating that a turing machine can model a human brain. It's never been done and only been speculated in fiction.
IOW, what makes you think brains are not a product of a model better than the turing machine (super-turing?). 'Cos claiming that a brain can be modeled with nothing more than a turing machine is inaccurate at best: we don't know what model the brain uses. We barely know which areas light up when given particular stimulation, but that's all we know about computation in the human brain.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
It is also at odds with reports of no global warming since the late 1990's.
Want to know how everyone knows you're an idiot? You cited the daily mail to "prove" there was no global warming.
Where's the "no warming since the 90s"?
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gist...
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gist...
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It's natural selection which really just boils down to a filtering process. Variations within a population are eliminated leaving othet variations to thrive and multiply without effort.
Another fact: you're completely wrong!
"The researchers conducted the work through a statistical analysis of a 2,497 different marine animal groups at one taxonomic level higher than the level of species -- called "genera." And they found that increases in an organism's body size were strongly linked to an increased risk of extinction in the present period -- but that this was not the case in the Earth's distant past.
Indeed, during the past 66 million years, there was actually a small link between smaller body sizes and going extinct, marking the present as a strong reversal. "The extreme bias against large-bodied animals distinguishes the modern diversity crisis from all potential deep-time analogs," the researchers write."
I've provided a citation for my fact, now feel free to do so for yours, rather than declaring it one by fiat.
All the whales roaming in the USA are fucked LOL
You just repeated the point that the scientists made: humans are consuming the larger forms of marine life at an unsustainable pace.
There is hope though. Whales have made quite a recovery since the Russians stopped slaughtering them. International agreements on fishing can make a difference.
You forgot to cite volcanoes and thermometers-near-airports.
You know why you're citing a 2012 article? Because in 2012 you could still cherrypick the strong 1998 El Nino year as your basis. If you stop believing that the world ended on December 21 2012, then you are no longer able to deny warming.
This space intentionally left blank
Sweet!
Keep going, this nonsense is fascinating. The funnest part is figuring out if you actually believe this crap or are just trolling for fun. Either, way it's great to have someone to laugh at, keep it up!
Thanks again
Frankly I've formed the exact same opinion as ShangaBill concerning extinction.
The small therapods seem to have evolved into the birds we see everyday.
But where are the big sauropod's descendants ? I assume this jaded (erroneous) opinion is caused by the smaller animals
being a lot more numerous and uninteresting compared to the bigger ones.
Shit, with arguments as eloquent, concise, and accurate as that how could we possibly disagree!!?!!?!!!
QFTMFT:
As one workmate put it, if she REALLY wanted to get rich of climate change, she'd deny everything the data tells her, and pretend its not happening and make a mint on the right wing talk circuit. Double so if she throws in creationism and get to visit churches too. Unfortunately , she's a scientist, albeit one in a field where she gets death threats from anti-science stalkers, funding threats from conservative policy makers, and a world of disrespect from a media industry that thinks "balance" means matching every truth with a lie.
Props to her for her integrity.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
translation: I reject science because thinking is hard. and scary.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Just like our primitive forebears who simply computed. And evolved ever more complex algorithms. And now there is human intelligence. You're stupid and arrogant if you think such evolution is limited solely to the biological realm.
amphibians are experiencing one of the highest if not the highest die off of any animal group, and due to their biology they are among the most susceptible most sensitive creatures in existence.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
"And just for the records, scientists have not been "crying wolf" for three decades, they've been pointing out the physics of the greenhouse effect"
It's not the scientists who have been crying wolf, but the Greens. Time after time after time, every discerned environmental problem is going to kill us all: famine, exhaustion of industrial metals, acid rain, the ozone layer, the energy crisis. Small wonder, then, that the average person is having trouble grasping the carbon problem.
Can we all agree to two things: let the science work itself out to find the truth, and set the engineers free to implement any fixes that may be needed?
I'm sure the French know when they are being boiled.
It is only in the last two or three years that this has become apparent to them.
Who cares that a large part of the non-human life on this planet is going extinct? There are still plenty of animals left. Humans have enough to worry about without worrying if some big cat or bird will go extinct.
captcha: nobler
"The researchers conducted the work through a statistical analysis of a 2,497 different marine animal groups at one taxonomic level higher than the level of species -- called "genera." And they found that increases in an organism's body size were strongly linked to an increased risk of extinction in the present period -- but that this was not the case in the Earth's distant past.
Their claim is even stronger:
âoeWhat to us was surprising was that we did not see a similar kind of pattern in any of the previous mass extinction events that we studied,â said geoscientist Jonathan Payne of Stanford University, the studyâ(TM)s lead author. âoeSo that indicated that there really is no good ecological analogueâ¦this pattern has not happened before in the half billion years of the animal fossil record.â
The obvious rebuttal is the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event where almost every vertebrate animal over 25 kg went extinct (the few that didn't had a very particular niche - aquatic and cold-blooded). If they aren't seeing statistical evidence then they aren't doing it right.
Further, fossil species and genera are not directly comparable to modern species and genera. They are by necessity a far more coarse measurement since we only know about organisms that were fossilized and for the most part, we only know morphology of these organisms rather than DNA. So an extinction of a species common enough to be fossilized and observed by us is a much bigger deal that several niche large animals which might never get into the fossil record.
Didn't even bother to look at the second link did you: "to be published in the Sept. 16 issue of the journal Science."
And the Washington Post is still a better source than absolutely freaking nothing, isn't it.
While I broadly agree with you, I was under the impression that there is absolutely no research whatsoever indicating that a turing machine can model a human brain. It's never been done and only been speculated in fiction.
I'd say something of the opposite. As far as we know, all computing systems are essentially equivalent for various definitions of equivalent. I think at this point you'd want research to show they're not equivalent.
IOW, what makes you think brains are not a product of a model better than the turing machine (super-turing?)
Because so far every model of hypercomputation requires something non physical. I think it would be more than an enormous result to find a physical means of hypercomputation because that would mean you could build a machine to prove certain mathematical theorems which are unprovable, depending on what the limits of the hypercomputation are.
Alternatively having the brain be a hypercomputer means that there's something in the brain which we couldn't model on even an almost infinitely powerful computer given our current knowledge of physics.
Our current models of physics work awfully well except for essentially very high energy interaction. Sure we don't have the chops to write a brain simulator, but tha's a question of scale. We can simulate physics on a smaller scale, it's just that the computational cost soon gets impractical, far, far, far before we get to anything remotely brain sized. We also don't know the structure of the brain and all the bits well enough to actually make a model right now. However:
But we know the maths and we know the physics.
And we know that at the astronomical and relativistic scale of the brain (i.e. not) that the physics we have works exceptionally well.
IOW if the brain is a hypercomputer then we're missing fundamental physics at low energies and scales somewhere between nucleons and say about a cubic meter.
So while there's an awful lot about the brain we don't know, we do know enough about the physical world in which it resides to know it's not a hypercomputer.
Missing knowledge about a system doesn't imply it's unknowable. For example, the weather is a chaotic system and we can't predict it beyond certain timescale. We do however know that the weather won't spawn a starship in the middle of a hurricane. Not knowing everything is not the same as knowing nothing. We know little about the brain but we do know it's not a hypercomputer.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
They are so cute I need to have 5!
My parents say I need to make them, my friends say I need to make them.
Aren't they cute?!
Arf.
A woman is not a woman until she has a baby!
bark.
So adorable, sniff their head!
Arf Arf.
It is a basic human right, everyone needs to make more wonderful babies! Precious babies!
Arf arf arf.
There is no overpopulation, make more BABIES!!!!!
Arf arf bark arf.
And so we all die.
If 0 babies were born for 10 years we would have almost 7 billion resource consumers on the planet messing things up.
If 0 babies were born for 20 years we would still have over 6 billion people and their byproducts, messing things up.
No one will ever say no to the emotional mob (as Romans called it) and so we will all get what we deserve.
That contention would be at odds with reports of a possible coming "Little Ice Age" due to the current Maunder-type sunspot minimum.
It is also at odds with reports of no global warming since the late 1990's.
And on a macro scale, it's a bit odd to judge planetary data on merely human timescales. Technically, we're still in an Ice Age, and are merely between continental glacial advances.
Your astonomy now link gives lots of good information, except for one thing: the magnitude of the cooling effect proposed. It also contains drivel, like someone claiming to be a serious scientist saying "There is no strong evidence, that global warming is caused by human activity" and "In the days of the Maunder minimum... Greenland was covered by glaciers”
A two year old article from the Daily Mail saying that there has been no warming since 1998, a year chosen in many of these stories because it was the hottest year on record at the time, is just laughable when all 10 of the 10 hottest years on record have been since 1998.
As for us still being in an ice age, most people here know that. Yes, the earth has been hotter in the past, even with the dimmer sun of the past (it is getting slowly and steadily brighter over millions of years). Changes are not the big problem. The speed of them is.
There was a time in the satellite record when you could show that there has been little warming since 1997, and no warming prior to 1997, but significant warming over the whole period: http://phosphorus.github.io/ap...
Unlike the previous 5 mass extinction events, which instead hit the biggest animals the hardest.
That's what mass extinctions do. If you are big, you die. If you live on the land, you'll likely die. If you are a specialized animal rather than a generalist, you'll die.
Go see a cheetah while you can.
Because so far every model of hypercomputation requires something non physical. I
Isn't that an argument from ignorance? You are saying we can't think of anything better than a Turing machine, so something better must not exist. Despite the fact that you admit we don't understand the brain either......your argument is based on intuition that the brain must be a computer. Which seems like a reasonable intuition, and it is a good working hypothesis, but don't confuse it with fact.
As far as we know, all computing systems are essentially equivalent for various definitions of equivalent. I think at this point you'd want research to show they're not equivalent.
No, this is not true. There are various types of computation machines: single stack machines, dual stack machines, finite automata...etc
A single stack machine cannot solve problems that a Turing machine can solve, for example (although a dual stack machine can), and a finite automata can't even understand itself.
Thus we have examples of systems that can't understand themselves. How can you be certain that our brain is any different? Right now, you can't be certain.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
but your marijuana cures cancer
yes, because providing pain relief is *totally* the same as curing.
There is real, scientific evidence that even smoking cannabis reduces cancer risk. This is why the current classification is so very, very offensive.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Okay, lets say this is true. That the evidence is being doctored.
We then must be dealing with a conspiracy so wide-reaching and powerful that it can go back and alter records of late and early frosts in the vast majority of newspapers. That's pretty powerful - most of those are still on microfilm.
They can alter all physics textbooks to change the wavelengths carbon dioxide absorbs to support their agenda.
They can doctor old photographs and maps of glaciers to show them retreating.
Their power is almost omnipotent.
If I were you, I wouldn't oppose them, but instead toe the party line that anthropological global warming is happening. Else who knows what they will do to you!
The amount of anti-scientific drivel on /. has become quite strange. Humans have carefully recorded the extinction events they have caused over the centuries (e.g., Steller's sea cow, the dodo, Tasmanian tiger, passenger pigeon, Carolina parakeet, etc. etc. etc.).
http://www.biologicaldiversity...
http://science.sciencemag.org/...
http://advances.sciencemag.org...
We have been doing it for tens of thousands of years...
http://science.sciencemag.org/...
http://science.sciencemag.org/...
I have to assume that lots of the anti-science types are just yanking everyone's chains for fun. It would be very disturbing to find out they actually believe the crap they type here.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
Kosh? Naaah, the Koch brothers are much more likely to be Shadows rather than Vorlons...
S,cnr.
Gawkers dead already, got killed off by the Hulk Hogan lawsuit. Which is actually bit of a shame, occasionally it got some pretty important scoops, and regardless of how you look at it, independent media voices being slain by the rich and powerful is never a good thing.
Buzzfeed is waaaaaay to chickenshit to try that sort of thing while its making fat cash from cat pictures.
and I'm not sure why linkedin is on your list, being that its basically a resume/job site.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I'm usually in favor of those who show citations against those who don't, but what you're citing hasn't actually been published as of this date in a journal.
You know what they say about new science. It's like cars. Some is good, some is bad, but you need to take it around the block a few times before you can tell the difference.
Science isn't one study.
Isn't that an argument from ignorance?
No.
You are saying we can't think of anything better than a Turing machine, so something better must not exist.
Did you read about the bit about a physical hypercomputer meaning we can prove things with a machine which are mathematically unprovable? We can think of things better, and have done a lot. They're interesting mathematical constructs and we can prove all sorts of things about them.
In fact IIRC Turing even discussed super-turing machines which are essentially a Turing machine with some sort of oracle attached.
Despite the fact that you admit we don't understand the brain either......your argument is based on intuition that the brain must be a computer.
We don't need to understand the brain: we know the brain runs on physics. If we understand the physics well enough to prove hypercomputation can't happen then we know the brain can't be one, even without knowing anything more about the brain.
Now when it comes to the physics. No, we do not know for sure except...
Basically phsical things have a finite number of states. It's large, really large, but not infinite (actually if it was then yes hypercomputation would be possible), which is basically how entropy is defined and comes to be.
And physical processes cause transitions from one set of states to another. And that's it.
No, this is not true. There are various types of computation machines: single stack machines, dual stack machines, finite automata...etc
Well, OK thank you Mr Pedant. I think it was obvious from the context I was speaking about Turing equivalent ones.
How can you be certain that our brain is any different? Right now, you can't be certain.
Indeed, it's science, but I think the brain being a hypercomputer is about as likely as the EM drive being a thing that actually works.
Now, going further. If the brain is a hypercomputer then that means we cannot simulate physics on existing computers because it means that current physics is not Church-Turing computable. And that means we can't simulate physics on a scale between say nucleons and below truly astronomical, at low energies and non relativistic speeds. Do you believe that's the case, because so far our understading of that physics is awfully accurate in that there are *no* measureable prediction errors.
And if it is, then there's no theoretical reason we can't build our own hypercomputers. As it happens, hypercomputation has been reasonably well studied and there are in fact Turing-like equivalences for various models of hypercomputation too.
Anyway, like I said before, not knowing everything about something (the brain) is not the same as knowing nothing about it. We know the brain for example can't shoot lasers out of its lobes. Why? Because it doesn't make any physical sense. And we know that even now knowing very much about its structure at all.
So the argument "we don't know much about the brain so it might be a hypercomputer" is not very strong IMO.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
No, a hypercomputer is a thing, but certainly not the only thing.
For example, we perceive the world as being logical.....but our logic system is based on axioms, it isn't a proven thing. Perhaps our brains understanding of logic limits us, just as a being based on a finite automata would be limited by its 'worldview' to not even conceive things beyond.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
So you're saying we should sear up some rhino steaks while we still have the chance.
There is real, scientific evidence that even smoking cannabis reduces cancer risk. This is why the current classification is so very, very offensive.
Interesting. Got a link?
I also wonder if it's the smoking of it or simply the cannabis itself. It seems that smoking anything increases the likelihood of lung cancer (it's the smoke that does it).
But yes the current classification is insane.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
As has been demonstrated by the fact that George Carlin, himself, went extinct.
What you are saying is that we cannot simulate physical systems on our computers.
So, stop waffling and address that point.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Will it kill off the giant bag of douches that is Gawker Media and Univision?
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
I'll get the best people to change all the partial differential equations to FULL differential equations, because we're Americans and we don't accept partial stuff.
I chortled.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
You can't, in fact, mathematically model the most basic system in full detail.
A computer is incapable of modeling a simple pendulum. It must model a greatly simplified version. No string mass, stretch, or break, point mass, no change in G force etc.
Accurately modeling a single nerve cell junction is still far beyond our capabilities. Statistical methods must be used to model synapse chemistry.
You can of course write down difference equations for all those factors, but you'll never get a closed form solution. Difference equations are by definition approximations. Those approximations rapidly become computationally impossible to solve in the life of the universe even with quantum computers.
Then there's Heisenberg uncertainty to make things really interesting. Model me a synapse, just one...
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Complacency just needs better public relations. However, the Complacency Now! meetings are sparsely attended.
If larger animals are going to be hit harder- it doesn't sound good for Americans. The African Pygmy tribe will inherit the earth.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
But humans did not yet exist when the last mass extinction happened.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Oh the Daily Mail is reporting on it, so it must be true.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
You're disputing that tobacco smoking/chewing causes cancer? Really?
Have you lost your mind?
You really think we are too dumb to recognize an agenda when we see one?
No, but I think the alt-right is dangerous, paranoid, and irrational enough to invent an agenda out of whole cloth while completely fucking failing to identify why the economy is about to collapse. You're so far gone to the alt-right, there is no point in arguing with you.
Remember, some of us gays have guns and fully intend to stand our ground when you assholes come for us.
You're disputing that tobacco smoking/chewing causes cancer? Really?
Of course not. "Disputing" is my facts against your facts, and I am not going to descend to your level. We are living in a post truth world. FACTS DON'T MATTER ANYMORE and it is about time that all you liberals accept that.
A computer is incapable of modeling a simple pendulum. It must model a greatly simplified version. No string mass, stretch, or break, point mass, no change in G force etc.
You can model all of those things plus air resistance and thermal effects.
For the rest of the post you're confusing computability with feasibility. We can write PDEs and solve them with arbitrarily high precision too. They get intractable for large systems but that doesn't make the systems non computable, merely very difficult.
So, you've not yet given an answer as to why or how any physical system could be non computable in the mathematical sense, i.e. like the halting problem is noncomputable. For the brain to be super-Turing it must be noncomputable, otherwise by definition a Turing machine could compute it.
Then there's Heisenberg uncertainty to make things really interesting. Model me a synapse, just one...
That just shows it's quite difficult, not impossible.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
People always deny or forget in a biased fashion that energy isn't created or destroyed, and gases convert as energy or aid in the process, producing other gases. So let's take humans away... Now we have less CO2 in the atmosphere. The plants are going to thrive on.....? The planet is going to.....?
Everything has a freaking balance, but people are too narrow-minded and biased to think outside the box. That's why we are stuck where we are intellectually. Lather, rinse, repeat. People focus on increasing CO2 being this huge problem that's triggering and exacerbating global warming. They don't take into account that there are other gases that do the same, AND WORSE, that we don't contribute to. Also, if the pressure in the crust weren't relieved by Human use, it would release itself, and probably follow pathways in the crust (as it does) and meet up with volcanic pockets. Explosions, burning, gases, oh my! Shit's gonna happen, and Humans aren't in control as much as we think. We're just changing a few of the pathways. What if we didn't eat cattle and there were many times more? Methane.
But since this isn't in peoples' biased mindsets, it's just going to remain score:0 or modded down as flamebait or trolling. Funny, in a way, because the scientists that have postulated and announced things that labeled them as whackjobs or insane people that don't follow the data that's RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF THEM, presented something that ended up having merit and being the backbone of research 100+ years later.
Balance, people. Balance.
It's not the scientists who have been crying wolf, but the Greens. Time after time after time, every discerned environmental problem is going to kill us all: famine, exhaustion of industrial metals, acid rain, the ozone layer, the energy crisis. Small wonder, then, that the average person is having trouble grasping the carbon problem.
Can we all agree to two things: let the science work itself out to find the truth, and set the engineers free to implement any fixes that may be needed?
Largely, "the Greens" have been vindicated. DDT was a very bad thing, the green "alarmist" in that case being the author of "Silent Spring", so DDT usage got shut down, at least in the US. The scientifists answer has always been "dilution is the solution", guess what? Turns out that they were wrong, thus dead zones in the ocean (algal blooms), anthropogenic global warming, the great pacific garbage patch, mercury poisoning of fish in the ocean.
let the science work itself out to find the truth
You mean the science as brought to you by Monsanto and the rest of the pharma/agro/med industries? Is that the science upon which you want the fate of humanity to rest on? Notice lately the articles surfacing about the sugar industry's influence on our US dietary recommendations? It took over 50 years for that shit to surface. You don't think the huge multinationals are controlling the debate and science in a similar but much more well-funded and studied manner?
set the engineers free to implement any fixes that may be needed
You are so cute. Do you really thing we can fix such a complicated system? Every time we meddle even on the small scale at which we've meddled so far, we break more than we fix. Who do you think is going to fund cleaning up the planet on such a scale? Are you a computer programmer? There is no restart in the real physical world, once we get to a bad enough place, only time will heal the planet. The healing process might take millions of years, maybe long enough for the destructive human species to die off, and good riddance to us.
Only I can judge you.
Except that due to ice melt, we are about to unleash several large methane caches that have been trapped under ice or under cooler waters. Some are already escaping as oceans warm.
Only I can judge you.
LOL. I thought you were serious for a minute. Now I see, you were really doing a "Stephen Colbert"
Only I can judge you.
ShanghaiBill, please say that you're trolling (or don't, *wink*-*wink*). You are truly hilarious and I intend to follow every one of your posts. Your comedy level is astounding.
Only I can judge you.
If "Larger animals face a greater risk of disappearing than smaller animals" and "In a sense, we're driving evolution toward smaller individuals", then they should be thanking us for preparing them to survive the mass extinction!
I'm just "this guy", you know?
Once you get to a level of 'quite difficult' that amounts to 'can't do before the heat death of the universe if you turn the entire milky way into idealized quantum computers' you're not very far from 'impossible'.
More on point (and something I have professional experience with): The human brain is a chaotic system. You will never be able to 'model' it as it is non-deterministic. e.g. The best you can do is run multiple simulations of her brain and give you a best probability line of bullsht to feed her. No guarantees.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
They don't take into account that there are other gases that do the same, AND WORSE, that we don't contribute to.
No, there is no such gas. We contribute to methane, CFCs, water, etc. Everything which could significantly contribute to global warming and is in our atmosphere has a human contribution to it.
Also, if the pressure in the crust weren't relieved by Human use, it would release itself, and probably follow pathways in the crust (as it does) and meet up with volcanic pockets.
It's not relieved by human use, volcanic pockets aren't a real thing, and the only reason there's less volcanism now is because the last glacial period ended 12k or so years ago and that triggered a bump in volcanic activity which is mostly done by now.
Wow. You really need to study up on the Earth's crust. Apparently you've been reading some pretty slanted crap if you think that volcanic pockets don't exist. For starters, check out Yellowstone. Typical narcissistic crap. Humans don't amount tp shit when it comes to the planet's atmosphere. If we were to stop all gas emissions right now, the planet would be completely equalised within a year. Also, it would fuck itself up with its own gas emissions that we're no longer consuming. The parent to your comment has a good point.
Except that due to ice melt, we are about to unleash several large methane caches that have been trapped under ice or under cooler waters. Some are already escaping as oceans warm.
Interesting observation. So now comes the question. Do we utilize does gas pockets to our advantage and increase emissions, or do we let the gas pockets escape on their own and warm the planet by natural process? What to do, what to do?
This is a technical forum. For the sake of us all, please go find yourself a religious forum.
Apparently you've been reading some pretty slanted crap if you think that volcanic pockets don't exist.
Google volcanic pocket. All you'll get is hits on pistols and PDAs.
For starters, check out Yellowstone.
I live at Yellowstone. It's not a volcanic pocket. It's sitting on a tremendous surge of magma from deep in the Earth's crust. And humanity isn't doing a thing to depressurize that.
Humans don't amount tp shit when it comes to the planet's atmosphere. If we were to stop all gas emissions right now, the planet would be completely equalised within a year.
Some stuff that would take longer: CO2, methane, and the variety of CFCs.
That's a good question.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That's because the last one clashed with Procrastinators Anonymous. I'll go to the next one, really.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Nothing in my post was even in the slightest religious. Did I offend your religion of corporate sponsored "Science"?
Only I can judge you.
Yeah, I have fantasies too that someone should design this huge capturing dome that can be driven over the methane escape plumes to then capture the methane and compress it into cylinders for transport. The super cool part of that would be that the process would only require some initial energy to get it started and once on site could operate off of whatever it was capturing, even capture enough to move the ship to a new location or for station-keeping if needed. I'm apparently not motivated enough to move to make something like this happen but someone out there might be looking into it already. Looking at it fatalistically, I think that even if we put the methane to use before releasing it into the atmosphere it will contribute to global warming. It may contribute less as by that time it would have been converted to a different gas(?).
Only I can judge you.
Good point, and now we start with a similar processes to electric cars. The energy doesn't come from nowhere... Energy has to be used to gather energy in your example; people with electric cars forget (of course, those with a massive array of solar panels at their home or geothermal conv. homes etc) that electricity comes from somewhere.
Sorry but I can't help saying it... Met with a guy about a transmitter tower near the Ohio River valley. Dude has a kickin' electric car plan; plan to install socket in his garage and buy the next stable Tesla release (geez, never thought I would refer to cars like software). I pointed my finger to our SE at the time, to the Zimmer power plant. He said, "What, you gonna play a trick or something?"
I looked in the direction of my point and continued to point. Saw some yellowish-orange emissions from the stack (usual). Again, he said but this time with a chuckle, "What? Is there a UFO over there?"
I face-palmed and said, "Sure. That's what I'm pointing at coming from a stack at a power plant. A UFO."
Both of us friendly laughing, he said, "I don't get it. What's the joke, sorry?"
I said, "Your new vehicle is going to pull power from the grid. No biggie right now, but what happens when everyone down this street and in the town down there [pointing] are all using power at night or at work to charge their Teslas? That thing is gonna have more of that yellow-orange coming out of the stack."
He responded, chucking with, "Come on.. This is green energy at work.. They'll come up with a solution before everyone gets one."
I ended with, "You're right. It won't get worse. They'll just build another plant. Anyhow, do you have the welder in your truck; ready to go?"
*Sigh*
My previous comment was acidently posted before I finished for some reason. Lets try again.
Yeah damn those scientists and their pesky "facts".
Anyway lets look at all the ways you are wrong
1) Is Mass Extinction happening? Yes. ( Barnosky, Matzki , et al. Nature, 2011) ..unless you subscribe to conspiracy theories, in which case you've already made your mind up and "facts" wont convince you. I suggest thorazine. HOWEVER! Lets go there.
2) Is the temperature warming? Yes. (IPCC authors, synthesis report, 2014)
3) People with financial interests buying off scientists? This IS a strange claim. I've spent a big of time working around climate scientists as a coder. Heres the reality of it;- Its bad for your career to actually follow science because governments are stacked with anti-science people who are absolutely insistent that theres something wrong with science any time science points out that Co2's infra red absorbsion properties is causing climate change, that evolution is real, or that vaccinations actually do save lives.
I've seen a number of collegues over at the CSIRO lose their jobs because the current conservative government has decided it doesnt want to fund climate or oceanographic reseach anymoer. Meanwhile there ARE scientists getting paid off by groups like the Heratige foundation and the Kosh brothers, and we know that because we've looked at the paperwork. As one workmate put it, if she REALLY wanted to get rich of climate change, she'd deny everything the data tells her, and pretend its not happening and make a mint on the right wing talk circuit. Double so if she throws in creationism and get to visit churches too. Unfortunately , she's a scientist, albeit one in a field where she gets death threats from anti-science stalkers, funding threats from conservative policy makers, and a world of disrespect from a media industry that thinks "balance" means matching every truth with a lie.
And just for the records, scientists have not been "crying wolf" for three decades, they've been pointing out the physics of the greenhouse effect for well over a century. And the predictions are not being pushed "farther in the future", they are being observed *right now* in the floods, hurricanes, droughts and rising sea levels that happening right before our eyes.
My previous comment was acidently posted before I finished for some reason. Lets try again.
Yeah damn those scientists and their pesky "facts".
Anyway lets look at all the ways you are wrong
1) Is Mass Exti
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
The scientists told us not to go digging up those crab ships on mars, but did we listen? noooo....
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Yup. Confirmed you're a biased yuppie. I'll have to keep this one in my joke book for future conversations. "That idiot on Slashdot that argues that volcanic pockets are a completely different than surges of magma."
They both do the same freaking thing in the end, only the one you're "supposedly" on top of (I doubt you even live there) has a much greater impact on life when it gets a surge from deeper below.
Sure, expert. Different things. Totally different. We Humans use these things called "words" that make things completely different in reality, physically.
You are one of the typical ones who thinks that we Humans have a huge impact on the planet with CFCs and CO2. My god, you biased hands-over-the-ears people know and repeat the phrase "Energy is neither created nor destroyed..." and AT THE SAME TIME think that the world would be oh, so different without Humans. Uh, yeah. It would be. Built up energy would release itself in different ways and create different gasses and matter, and would consume that matter differently, releasing different gasses and capturing different energy.
If we stop all gas emissions, the planet sure would be different. It would get hotter during the days and colder at night. But that's completely different than global warming, right? THINK. It's so embarrassing to have people like you listening to whatever is shoved into your ears and eyes without THINKING about it.
Just this: http://xkcd.com/1732/
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
You are one of the typical ones who thinks that we Humans have a huge impact on the planet with CFCs and CO2. My god, you biased hands-over-the-ears people know and repeat the phrase "Energy is neither created nor destroyed..." and AT THE SAME TIME think that the world would be oh, so different without Humans. Uh, yeah. It would be. Built up energy would release itself in different ways and create different gasses and matter, and would consume that matter differently, releasing different gasses and capturing different energy.
We have yet to observe energy being created or destroyed. And the effect of humanity on the world is easy to observe with land usage, disruption of ecosystems, global scale redistribution of resources and organisms, and of course, even the chemistry of the atmosphere easy to observe. So yes, that phrase is correct.
If we stop all gas emissions, the planet sure would be different. It would get hotter during the days and colder at night. But that's completely different than global warming, right? THINK. It's so embarrassing to have people like you listening to whatever is shoved into your ears and eyes without THINKING about it.
Again, you're not considering the effects of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Gases and particulate matter which reduce heating of the Earth are not the only components of human air pollution.
Yup. Confirmed you're a biased yuppie. I'll have to keep this one in my joke book for future conversations. "That idiot on Slashdot that argues that volcanic pockets are a completely different than surges of magma."
And you should too. Words mean things and we now have a better understanding of volcanic activity than we used to. "Pocket" implies among other things something small and locl. Most volcanic activity is not small even on the scale of the planet and tied to deeper activity in the planet as well as large scale movement of the crust.