Which will require really really big pectorals to power them, which will require really big lungs to provide the oxygen to power the pectorals. Which will require bigger wings to lift them. Which will need bigger pectorals....
The number of fossils "lost" to "traditional medicine", or even road cuts, building foundations, mining etc is negligible to those "lost" to just plain old erosion.
The idea of using something like GPR (Ground-Penetrating Radar) to try to detect fossils in the ground, before they're significantly affected by erosion is interesting, but it's going to need a lot of development. The last time that I was using GPR it had a resolution of a metre or so - enough to possibly see if there was "something" down there (it's more or less routine in archaeology and forensic work these days), but not really good enough to pick up individual bones, or most dinosaurs (most dinosaurs were small ; smaller than humans).
And the snap response from the Illuminati of Slashdot will be "increase the frequency of the radar". Which is great fine and marvellous. But that generally means that the attenuation by (particularly) groundwater increases too, so your signal-to-noise ratio falls.
People are trying this sort of thing. Not with much success, it must be said.
Do you have "Time Team" filling your documentary TV channels on your side of the pond? The repeated ribbing that the geophysicists there get about "not being able to find the bloody archaeology" is a fair indication of the state of the art - very imperfect and only slowly improving.
âoeI am very interested to see if these findings can be reproduced in very different environments such as permafrost and caves,â says Michael Knapp, a palaeogeneticist at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.
As I think I said at the time, I'm very interested to see an environment that has been permanently permafrost since the late Cretaceous, and absolutely FASCINATED to see one that has been permafrost since the late Jurassic. Answers, on a post card please....
Availability of mice had a similar limiting affect on uptake of Windows. Likely explains the Microsoft mouse.
Bollocks.
I was around at the time, including learning how to build and repair industrial and desktop computers "in the field" (i.e. out at sea, where spare parts are several days the other side of "your company is fired"). There was no shortage of mice, pen-graphics tablet combinations, trackballs and touch screens at the time. There was a shortage of good, robust versions of all of the above, but even that wasn't the limiting factor to the uptake of Windows. The two biggest limiting factors were : (1) there were several alternatives to Windows for a multi-application task-switching environment - GEM and DESQview being best known [DESQview was still running industrial systems in 2002 : I sledge-hammered our last system, while it was powered up and working, because we were losing money and personnel being in that particular game] ; and (2) the most important factor was that early versions of Windows were absolutely crap. It wasn't until Windows 3 (and considerably better, Windows 3.11) that their environmental lead started to reach snowballing levels. That was 1990 or so, and I finally upgraded from DrDOS and GEM on my 1989 machine to Windows 3.11 in mid 1993. That machine couldn't quite handle WinNT4 in 1998, so in a way it was nice of the burglars to take it then.
Likely explains the Microsoft mouse.
Actually, though I consider Gates and his fawning minions to be the scum of the universe, I do have to admit the MS-mice have generally been pretty good products. Though whether they're worth 6 times the cost of a budget mouse is a different question.
Besides, the life forms able to survive this (without artificial means like us) are precisely the niche ones that would take a good time to recolonize the planet.
The experiment has been done, repeatedly. The time taken for essentially complete re-colonisation of the planet from a rump of species surviving a mass extinction, is trivial. A mere couple of million years. In the more restricted case of colonising a newly-emerged island, it's even less - a mere tens to hundreds of thousands of years. Though trophic complexity does increase for a considerable period after that initial radiation. (Yes, I am a geologist ; I'm playing it dead straight when I say " a mere couple of million years".)
I mean, for most of the living species on the planet, plants (and plancton) are the basis of the trophic chain. And both plants and plancton live basically on the surface. Damage them enough and you will see many species go extinct quite quickly, even nocturnal ones, actually.
Actually many, many species (and genera, and orders) of plankton (which is an environmental classification, not a group of related organisms) move up and down through the water column on a diurnal cycle. Some rise to the surface to graze on photosynthetic plankton (plant or animal) by day and sink by night ; some rise to hunt by night and sink by day. Plankton are hugely variable in this, and the distances moved can be well in excess of a hundred metres. Which is enough to be far more important to their survival than the surface flux of UV.
Land plants are confined to the surface, true. But their seeds aren't, and can delay germination for decades or centuries.
I'm not an ecologist, and my palaeontological training is only a few hundred hours of lectures and practicals, plus a couple of decades of having to work hand in glove with palaeontologists on high-precision environmental analysis and interpretation as part of optimising oil well placement (I've just finished a 12 hour shift doing just that, and I'll be back on shift in another 10 hours). But that's enough to teach me that life and trophic systems have plenty of resilience to surviving quite severe environmental insults. We use the consequent floral and faunal changes as day-to-day tools for recognising where we are in the rock column.
Sure, a GRB nearby would have a big effect for a few tens to hundreds of thousands of years, and less noticeable effects for millions more. But in the grand scheme of things, it might queue up with the "big five" mass extinctions, but it's more likely to queue up with the dozen or so minor mass extinctions. For comparison, the PETM (or in my working language, the "T75 maximum flooding surface palynological event") event which marks a popular landing surface for horizontal wells in the CNS "Forties" play, was caused by volcanism triggering the release of a few hundreds of petatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. Our current rate of injection of carbon into the atmosphere is faster, so I'd expect our legacy to be somewhat larger than the PETM. Say, a quarter to a half million years for things to stabilize again, once we've stopped doing what we're doing. Call it ten thousand (human) generations. Not very long.
Going through the 477 comment summaries I can see no mention of what exactly it is that is objected to or what the cause of the attack is trying to bring attention to.
"Full," to quote the Spear shaker, "of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
There's nothing that I can find online detailing the nature of the attacks, or indeed the nature of the publication that has been rendered inoperable. Which leaves nearly 600 uninformative rants here and nary a ripple of substance that will persist.
Warn the hackers to cease their illegal activities.
From the scant details available, it has yet to be established which country (or countries) laws apply, let alone whether anything that is actualy illegal in any or all of the relevant jurisdictions has occurred.
But you're an AC ; concepts such as "due process" are probably as alien to you as are concepts like "standing up and being counted".
(I wouldn't be surprised at all if some unpleasant or even immoral activities have been going on. But thus far evidence of this, let alone "proof" to any standard, is lacking. Which should be cause to think before posting, even if you are an AC.)
That's a necessity to prevent hacking of the Internet from our OS, for which we remain criminally liable.
and maybe add more DRM.
We just need to ensure that the decryption keys are only ever issued on a robust one-time-use policy over the network, after the user has paid their pay-per-view fees for that viewing of the content. As our corporate customers have been demanding for years. We've got to get rid of the current thing of storing the keys on the media itself, because those hackers will always find a way to break such a scheme.
Regards, Bill
(But Steve, you've been in post for a decade or so now, and I'm retired. So why am I having to wipe your arse on basic topics like this. And what are you doing with that chai $£&$^$£&* NO CARRIER
it should be possible to calculate the amount of biomass required to do that. There is a hell of a lot of methane in this cycle on Titan which implies a lot of life.
IF and only IF the source of the methane is biological. Which is not necessarily the case.
The OP is implying a carbon cycle where, in effect, the sunlight alters (increases) the amount of net bond energy per carbon atom, by converting methane vapour into "higher" hydrocarbons ; then at the surface the metabolism of the (putative) organisms reverses the process to release methane and use the energy.
Since the atmosphere of Titan is not opaque, I'd expect that in a living, evolving system ("living" and "evolving" are pretty much synonymous, to our present state of knowledge), an organism would appear rapidly which would directly use the solar radiation on the surface and out-compete the organisms which rely on the methane itself. I think such a simple cycle would be unstable. Remember that the only example we've got went through a drastic re-organisation of it's atmospheric chemistry (the "Great Oxidation Event") over half the lifetime of the solar system ago.
The atmosphere of Titan is not extraordinarily out of thermodynamic equilibrium (as Earth's is, with methane and oxygen simultaneously present). So there are no grounds to anticipate the presence of significant life. Sorry ; I'd like it to be the case, but the atmospheric chemistry doesn't support the proposition. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," as the saying goes. (OK : strictly that doesn't exclude the possibility of a biota that doesn't interact significantly with the atmosphere. That doesn't strike me as terribly credible.)
And having a very weakened ozone layer would mean extinction for many surface-dwelling species.
FTFY
The increased UV radiation at the surface is an issue if you're on the surface. If you are an organism living below a few metres water depth, or under a few cm of soil, then it's much less of a problem. The loss of those more sensitive species would certainly be a problem, but with our technologies we should have a pretty good chance of surviving as a species. It might be 90% or higher casualties, and it would be a drastically altered world afterwards, but I don't find a GRB terribly threatening on a species- or life- extinguishing front.
And yes, I did read the fucking paper. Last night. Interesting work, well argued. I'm not 100% convinced, but they do make a good case.
Many biologists have questioned the claim (making irrelevant statements like "[Earth] bacteria aren't that small"), but the features found can still not be explained by non-biological processes.
However, other people have challenged the 1996 assertions on the grounds that there are inroganic processes which can be reproduced by non-biological processes. For example, as a geologist (relevant since the rocks are actually rocks, and geology is the science of how rocks behave and appear), I read the paper in installments on the day of publication (alternating with 150 mile bouts of driving to the next coffee break) and thought carefully about the phenomena described and possible alternative interpretations. Then I arrived at my parents and discussed the paper with Dad (a chemist and amateur botanist, relevant because life is made of chemicals, as are rocks) over a jug of malt whiskey.
Neither of us were convinced, on the contents of the paper and the strength of the arguments made.
The pattern is similar to the response to the labeled-release experiment on Viking I in 1976: "It doesn't work like life on Earth, so it must not be life".
A Saganism - which may predate Sagan - "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". McKay et al's paper provided, at best, weak ordinary evidence. A perfectly respectable paper ; but not an Earth-shattering one by any means.
My fellow scientists are often not as open-minded as they would like to believe.
The trick, citing IIRC Feynman this time, is to have a mind that isn't so open that your brains fall out.
Dad and I would have loved the paper to have been true. But that isn't sufficient grounds to suspend one's critical facilities.
He dosen't seem like a hack scientist by a long shot.
Wickramasinghe was a perfectly respectable (junior) scientist until the mid-late 1970s, when he hooked up with the (senior and fully respectable) Fred Hoyle. The two seem to have then got into a mutually-reinforcing cycle of agreeing with each others theories and not worrying about other people's opinions. In short, they became kooks.
But I've got to admit that his views on evolution are rather unconventional.
They're kooks. Hoyle is dead now, long gone, but Wickramasinghe is still around.
Unlike most kooks, he does know what he needs to do to perform useful, respectable work - but he doesn't do it. No ad homenium necessary - he does that to himself by publishing this sort of incredibly sloppy work.
Sorry "crazyjj", belief in anything is a waste of time.
Stop wasting your mental effort trying to "believe" in things. Learn to find and understand evidence and either challenge it's validity (in which case, present contrasting evidence) or accept it's veracity.
If you do not enjoy the idea of your inevitable death and permanent cessation of existence, then feel free to contribute to an alternative reality either by getting involved in aging/ longeivity research. Or find a counter-example of a lifeform that doesn't individually age and die, and we'll study it's differences to us. Or take an end trip around the whole question by learning how to duplicate "consciousness" (whatever that means) into computer hardware and software (or even wetware) so that the inevitable senescence of the human body no-longer means the end of the consciousness (whatever that means) that lives in those several kilogrammes of watery fat.
Slashdot Mirror
My signature line for the last few months has answered your question. IMHO.
Oh dear, your leg bones just broke.
The number of fossils "lost" to "traditional medicine", or even road cuts, building foundations, mining etc is negligible to those "lost" to just plain old erosion.
The idea of using something like GPR (Ground-Penetrating Radar) to try to detect fossils in the ground, before they're significantly affected by erosion is interesting, but it's going to need a lot of development. The last time that I was using GPR it had a resolution of a metre or so - enough to possibly see if there was "something" down there (it's more or less routine in archaeology and forensic work these days), but not really good enough to pick up individual bones, or most dinosaurs (most dinosaurs were small ; smaller than humans).
And the snap response from the Illuminati of Slashdot will be "increase the frequency of the radar". Which is great fine and marvellous. But that generally means that the attenuation by (particularly) groundwater increases too, so your signal-to-noise ratio falls.
People are trying this sort of thing. Not with much success, it must be said.
Do you have "Time Team" filling your documentary TV channels on your side of the pond? The repeated ribbing that the geophysicists there get about "not being able to find the bloody archaeology" is a fair indication of the state of the art - very imperfect and only slowly improving.
In the words of the Pogues' "Navigator"song, "with your pick and your shovel and your bold dynamite
we will shift a few tons of this earthly delight."
I always like that one on the earphones when fossicking.
You're right, but I'm not sure that you should be right.
FTFY
As I think I said at the time, I'm very interested to see an environment that has been permanently permafrost since the late Cretaceous, and absolutely FASCINATED to see one that has been permafrost since the late Jurassic. Answers, on a post card please ....
Ahhh, and your qualifications for saying that are ?
North Korea only has trivial oil production. It has non-trivial prospectivity. Look at the geology of the region.
Bollocks.
I was around at the time, including learning how to build and repair industrial and desktop computers "in the field" (i.e. out at sea, where spare parts are several days the other side of "your company is fired"). There was no shortage of mice, pen-graphics tablet combinations, trackballs and touch screens at the time. There was a shortage of good, robust versions of all of the above, but even that wasn't the limiting factor to the uptake of Windows. The two biggest limiting factors were :
(1) there were several alternatives to Windows for a multi-application task-switching environment - GEM and DESQview being best known [DESQview was still running industrial systems in 2002 : I sledge-hammered our last system, while it was powered up and working, because we were losing money and personnel being in that particular game] ; and
(2) the most important factor was that early versions of Windows were absolutely crap. It wasn't until Windows 3 (and considerably better, Windows 3.11) that their environmental lead started to reach snowballing levels. That was 1990 or so, and I finally upgraded from DrDOS and GEM on my 1989 machine to Windows 3.11 in mid 1993. That machine couldn't quite handle WinNT4 in 1998, so in a way it was nice of the burglars to take it then.
Actually, though I consider Gates and his fawning minions to be the scum of the universe, I do have to admit the MS-mice have generally been pretty good products. Though whether they're worth 6 times the cost of a budget mouse is a different question.
I take it that you and I both don't live in the United States.
Evidently such anti-competition practices are rife in the ultra-competitive world of the United States.
Or they're a bunch of hypocrites.
Or both.
Indeed it is. And one of these days I'm likely to go back to it - I'm getting pretty hacked-off with Ubuntu fucking with my desktop organisation too.
The experiment has been done, repeatedly. The time taken for essentially complete re-colonisation of the planet from a rump of species surviving a mass extinction, is trivial. A mere couple of million years. In the more restricted case of colonising a newly-emerged island, it's even less - a mere tens to hundreds of thousands of years. Though trophic complexity does increase for a considerable period after that initial radiation. (Yes, I am a geologist ; I'm playing it dead straight when I say " a mere couple of million years".)
Actually many, many species (and genera, and orders) of plankton (which is an environmental classification, not a group of related organisms) move up and down through the water column on a diurnal cycle. Some rise to the surface to graze on photosynthetic plankton (plant or animal) by day and sink by night ; some rise to hunt by night and sink by day. Plankton are hugely variable in this, and the distances moved can be well in excess of a hundred metres. Which is enough to be far more important to their survival than the surface flux of UV.
Land plants are confined to the surface, true. But their seeds aren't, and can delay germination for decades or centuries.
I'm not an ecologist, and my palaeontological training is only a few hundred hours of lectures and practicals, plus a couple of decades of having to work hand in glove with palaeontologists on high-precision environmental analysis and interpretation as part of optimising oil well placement (I've just finished a 12 hour shift doing just that, and I'll be back on shift in another 10 hours). But that's enough to teach me that life and trophic systems have plenty of resilience to surviving quite severe environmental insults. We use the consequent floral and faunal changes as day-to-day tools for recognising where we are in the rock column.
Sure, a GRB nearby would have a big effect for a few tens to hundreds of thousands of years, and less noticeable effects for millions more. But in the grand scheme of things, it might queue up with the "big five" mass extinctions, but it's more likely to queue up with the dozen or so minor mass extinctions. For comparison, the PETM (or in my working language, the "T75 maximum flooding surface palynological event") event which marks a popular landing surface for horizontal wells in the CNS "Forties" play, was caused by volcanism triggering the release of a few hundreds of petatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. Our current rate of injection of carbon into the atmosphere is faster, so I'd expect our legacy to be somewhat larger than the PETM. Say, a quarter to a half million years for things to stabilize again, once we've stopped doing what we're doing. Call it ten thousand (human) generations. Not very long.
"Full," to quote the Spear shaker, "of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
There's nothing that I can find online detailing the nature of the attacks, or indeed the nature of the publication that has been rendered inoperable. Which leaves nearly 600 uninformative rants here and nary a ripple of substance that will persist.
From the scant details available, it has yet to be established which country (or countries) laws apply, let alone whether anything that is actualy illegal in any or all of the relevant jurisdictions has occurred.
But you're an AC ; concepts such as "due process" are probably as alien to you as are concepts like "standing up and being counted".
(I wouldn't be surprised at all if some unpleasant or even immoral activities have been going on. But thus far evidence of this, let alone "proof" to any standard, is lacking. Which should be cause to think before posting, even if you are an AC.)
Old dogs are perfectly capable of learning new tricks, if you turn the voltage in the cattle-prod up high enough.
Does it do anything useful?
That's a necessity to prevent hacking of the Internet from our OS, for which we remain criminally liable.
We just need to ensure that the decryption keys are only ever issued on a robust one-time-use policy over the network, after the user has paid their pay-per-view fees for that viewing of the content. As our corporate customers have been demanding for years. We've got to get rid of the current thing of storing the keys on the media itself, because those hackers will always find a way to break such a scheme.
Regards, Bill
(But Steve, you've been in post for a decade or so now, and I'm retired. So why am I having to wipe your arse on basic topics like this. And what are you doing with that chai $£&$^$£&* NO CARRIER
IF and only IF the source of the methane is biological. Which is not necessarily the case.
The OP is implying a carbon cycle where, in effect, the sunlight alters (increases) the amount of net bond energy per carbon atom, by converting methane vapour into "higher" hydrocarbons ; then at the surface the metabolism of the (putative) organisms reverses the process to release methane and use the energy.
Since the atmosphere of Titan is not opaque, I'd expect that in a living, evolving system ("living" and "evolving" are pretty much synonymous, to our present state of knowledge), an organism would appear rapidly which would directly use the solar radiation on the surface and out-compete the organisms which rely on the methane itself. I think such a simple cycle would be unstable. Remember that the only example we've got went through a drastic re-organisation of it's atmospheric chemistry (the "Great Oxidation Event") over half the lifetime of the solar system ago.
The atmosphere of Titan is not extraordinarily out of thermodynamic equilibrium (as Earth's is, with methane and oxygen simultaneously present). So there are no grounds to anticipate the presence of significant life. Sorry ; I'd like it to be the case, but the atmospheric chemistry doesn't support the proposition. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," as the saying goes. (OK : strictly that doesn't exclude the possibility of a biota that doesn't interact significantly with the atmosphere. That doesn't strike me as terribly credible.)
FTFY
The increased UV radiation at the surface is an issue if you're on the surface. If you are an organism living below a few metres water depth, or under a few cm of soil, then it's much less of a problem. The loss of those more sensitive species would certainly be a problem, but with our technologies we should have a pretty good chance of surviving as a species. It might be 90% or higher casualties, and it would be a drastically altered world afterwards, but I don't find a GRB terribly threatening on a species- or life- extinguishing front.
And yes, I did read the fucking paper. Last night. Interesting work, well argued. I'm not 100% convinced, but they do make a good case.
However, other people have challenged the 1996 assertions on the grounds that there are inroganic processes which can be reproduced by non-biological processes. For example, as a geologist (relevant since the rocks are actually rocks, and geology is the science of how rocks behave and appear), I read the paper in installments on the day of publication (alternating with 150 mile bouts of driving to the next coffee break) and thought carefully about the phenomena described and possible alternative interpretations. Then I arrived at my parents and discussed the paper with Dad (a chemist and amateur botanist, relevant because life is made of chemicals, as are rocks) over a jug of malt whiskey.
Neither of us were convinced, on the contents of the paper and the strength of the arguments made.
A Saganism - which may predate Sagan - "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". McKay et al's paper provided, at best, weak ordinary evidence. A perfectly respectable paper ; but not an Earth-shattering one by any means.
The trick, citing IIRC Feynman this time, is to have a mind that isn't so open that your brains fall out.
Dad and I would have loved the paper to have been true. But that isn't sufficient grounds to suspend one's critical facilities.
Wickramasinghe was a perfectly respectable (junior) scientist until the mid-late 1970s, when he hooked up with the (senior and fully respectable) Fred Hoyle. The two seem to have then got into a mutually-reinforcing cycle of agreeing with each others theories and not worrying about other people's opinions. In short, they became kooks.
They're kooks. Hoyle is dead now, long gone, but Wickramasinghe is still around.
Unlike most kooks, he does know what he needs to do to perform useful, respectable work - but he doesn't do it. No ad homenium necessary - he does that to himself by publishing this sort of incredibly sloppy work.
No.
Next question?
In the UK's Sun emergency arse-wipe supply, it's variable but inversely related to the tit size of the woman on the opposite page.
Stop wasting your mental effort trying to "believe" in things. Learn to find and understand evidence and either challenge it's validity (in which case, present contrasting evidence) or accept it's veracity.
If you do not enjoy the idea of your inevitable death and permanent cessation of existence, then feel free to contribute to an alternative reality either by getting involved in aging/ longeivity research. Or find a counter-example of a lifeform that doesn't individually age and die, and we'll study it's differences to us. Or take an end trip around the whole question by learning how to duplicate "consciousness" (whatever that means) into computer hardware and software (or even wetware) so that the inevitable senescence of the human body no-longer means the end of the consciousness (whatever that means) that lives in those several kilogrammes of watery fat.
Enjoy, and have a nice(-r) day!
And fear of the process of dying could be one very good reason for not wanting to die. And the only alternative to dying is to live forever.