Gee, under Clinton/Gore the Federal government has gotten smaller. Under Bush, the Texas government has gotten larger. Bush advocates sodomy laws and is fighting to keep Texas's sodomy law in place, as well as to strip gay people of the right to adopt or serve as foster parents... as a gay man myself, how does this serve as 'better protection of my constitutional rights'? And Bush would lower taxes on a robust economy... this would over-stimulate the economy, causing the Fed to raise interest rates... costing LOTS of low and middle-income people to end up paying MORE for interest than they got back in taxes... a net loss. Clinton/Gore also helped balance the budget and give priority to paying down the debt. Bush wants to give away the surplus and just pretend the debt isn't looming there behind him and us.
What's REALLY ironic is that I'll bet the people who insist that "GLobal Warming" isn't a problem or doesn't exist, actually think this is a neat idea and that it would work...
Now if only you would KEEP Celine Dione, and stop her from infesting our airwaves and movie soundtracks...
Ack. If Bush wins the election I may have to learn to like snow, mosquitos, and Celine Dione. Canada's population might just swell by a few percentage points...
But UNTIL then, I will BLAME CANADA for everything I can;-)
Whine about being too hot in the summer when the thermometer on your porch (in the shade mind you) reads 115... and you go out and sun your self by the lake anyway:-)
It happened to me this summer. Sure, it was 'too hot' (I had to hike a mile from my parking spot to the water's edge in that heat too), but eh, a few weeks of 'too hot' (and that's all there really are in Texas... when it's 90 here, it feels lots better than when it's 80 in say, Chicago or Toronto).
It's wonderful for most of the rest of the year, except for a couple of weeks in the winter when the lows get near freezing (and in my opinion, any time the high is less than 70 or the low is less than 50, it's too damn cold).
This is why I moved from Ohio (just 150 miles from the Canadian border) to Texas. I'll never go back north again.
So count me out of both Canada (unless i have a summer home there... nah, too many damn mosquitos) AND Mars.
My biggest problem with the terraforming plan, though, is not that it will create a planet-sized 'northern Canada'... but that the lichen and/or moss will evolve rather rapidly in this new environment (thanks to tons of UV exposure) to something that is lethal to mankind. So in warming it up, we make it every bit as uninhabitable as it is now. It's the basic law of unintended consequences at work....
Relatively small flat-panel displays cost around $600-$999. Unless you're definition of 'relatively small' is different from mine.
Another thing to keep in mind is that buying a 15" flat panel display gives you as much actual display area as a 17"-18" CRT tube. So you need to factor that in...
That's not the show I was thinking of... I believe the title had more to do with the weather, global warming, and/or carbon emissions.
And that whole plutonium thing (sorry, but after decades of hearing it's the most toxic dangerous substance known to man, it'll take more than one article to tear through all that) doesn't address my main point, which is the expense, over all danger (all things considered, including potential worst-case scenereos), and the fact that it doesn't help in the areas we desperately need help, with regards to energy.
I'd say that you and people who truely believe what you've posted (I'm reserving judgement just due to the sheer weight of counter-claims that have been made over the decades, and I HAVE read up on this stuff from time to time, following it in popular scientific press and such) have a LOT of work cut out for you. If indeed the common knowledge about all this is either misrepresentation, misperception, or out-right lies, it's going to take a lot of respectable people making a LOT of noise to over-come all that has gone before. Unfortuantely, posting here reaches a VERY small audience (especially posting here more than 18 hours after an article first becomes available... most people just read through once).
Well... puppet Jabba sure looked BETTER (and more 'real' because he looked *there*!) than the CGI Jabba in the special edition of the first Star Wars movie...
And frequently CGI doesn't look 'real' enough because it's too perfect/lean/new. It takes a lot of effort to go back and put scuffs on floors and doors, bump up the corners and edges of tables and chairs, etc. It's a lot of sophisticated modeling to make things look REAL, as in having all the signs of wear-and-tear of real items in the real world.
Eyes Wide Shut truely was a horrible boring waste of film.
But I loved Fight Club, and thought it was a great movie. I saw it in the same month as seeing Three Kings and American Beauty... and pretty much pronounced that month as the single best month in movie history. Three amazingly good flicks all out at once. Most people I know also agree that these three movies were all great. Top notch. Excellent.
The specials in question (which had to do with global warming, the weather, and carbon emissions) were recorded this year, and were broadcast just this past spring, if I remember correctly.
And sorry I don't trust some of your sources. These are some of the same sources that said 'duck and cover' was a good defense in the case of nuclear attack.
Nuclear power is simply not the answer, your protestations to the contrary. It may help a little, but there are very high costs, and serious issues with waste desposal (regardless of your attempts to poo-poo them).
Besides, nuclear power doesn't do much to help our transportation industry... battery driven cars don't currently have much range, pep, and are very costly... and unless you're advocating putting nuclear reactors in individual vehicles, that's about the only method of transfering nuclear power to one of the largest uses of fossil fuels today.
I'm more interested in fuel-cell and fusion research for helping to satisfy our needs in 30-80 years time. At least with fusion, the chances of a meltdown/china-syndrome are non-existant, and there isn't near the problem with waste disposal. Unfortunately there's no real indication that it will ever be a viable source of energy, but I'm willing to fund the research until there's an absolute indication one way or another.
Sorry but I cannot believe your information. I trust the PBS specials on the topic I saw over some poster I don't even know. Uranium is STILL a depletable resource just like fossile fuels, and there is less of it on the planet than fossil fuels, and the huge energy density of fossile fuels takes a lot to replace. All of the information I gleened from those sources made intutive sense, and was backed by many experts and scientists in the field of energy. If you immediately replaced ALL power production with nuclear power, it wouldn't last any longer than fossil fuels, and probably not AS long... and would be more expensive on top of it all.
Far more people are poisoned by burning fossil fuels than by radiation.
Of course. Look at the vastly different ratio of burnt fossil fuels to radiation. A lot more people are killed in auto-accidents than by meteor impacts too.
...even though nuclear plants (at least in this country) have much better safety systems and have a much, much lower accident rate.
Because they're under much tighter regulatory control, have much higher and stricter standards and safety mechinisms, at a much higher cost. If the chemical plants and the like were subject to the same rules and regulations and enforcement, they'd be a hell of a lot safer than they are, no?
The last I heard, current Uranium reserves will supposedly last well over 100 years at the current burn rate.
Very true... at the current burn rate. But that's not what was being discussed, now was it? I'm talking about REPLACING our existing fossil fuel sources with nuclear power. Uranium is a limited resource just like fossile fuels, and thus doing this doesn't solve the problem anyway! Which is entirely my point. It's hugely more expensive (due to all the necessary detectors, controls, rules, regulations, safety precautions, disposal problems, etc) and doesn't really get us much farther down the road. A little bit, sure. But it's still tap-dancing on the deck of the titanic, isn't it?
Let me rephrase more clearly: Stating that plutonium is less dangerous than the household bleach I use every week in my own home is the purest rubbish. It is that kind of propaganda that will do nothing but turn people away from any valid points you might actually have.
You aparently missed my point. I brought up the dust bowl to indicate a small point... you were supposed to imagine such a catastrophe on a more global scale. The weather and climate are chaotic... change can happen quite suddenly. We may not be prepared.
And all sorts of things are part of nature too... there are dozens of species going extinct every day. Humans are not in any such danger at the moment, but that doesn't mean things won't change over-night (relatively speaking) sometime in the next 1000 years.
Of course we aren't separate from it. But neither is any other creature... and tons of them have gone extinct as their climates changed, their food sources moved or vanished or changed, etc. We can use our technological marvesl to hold on, but we usually do so by trying to hold on to the status quo, not using our marvels to adjust and adapt. We try to perpetuate constancy. That'll work just fine up to a point, but eventually it'll snap.
Sorry, i'm not buying it. It all sounds like propaganda from the nuclear power industry to me. It sounds like rationalization and ignoring very common sense facts... like the fact that radiation is invisible, oderless, colorless, and undetectable without a geiger counter. You can pretty much tell when you ingesting bleach or even arsnic. You could be exposed to radiation and not be aware of it until the cancers start... You conveniently ignore the huge psychological factors involved as well (they're very real and not just the result of 'ignorance').
Sorry. I not only don't buy that nuclear power is as safe or safer than other forms, but you haven't addressed the primary point I've made, which is that nuclear power as it exists today cannot possibly supply the world's energy needs... it can only delay the inevitable by a few years.
I'll be more interested to see where fusion goes (if it ever goes anywhere). But until then...
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That conveniently ignores a whole host of problems with nuclear waste, nuclear by-products, and other difficulties. These are not politically manufacturered things either. When a coal-burning plant blows up, the land around it doesn't become uninhabitable for centuries. I mean, just LOOK at Chernobyle...
AND remember that the 'sufficient amount' of plutonium to kill you is measured in micro-grams... an amount virutally invisible to the naked eye. And the form of death is rather horrifying as well (i.e. slow, stealthy, agonizing). It's a lot different from trying to ingest a lot of bleach...
And nuclear waste REQUIRES a lot more care than standard waste... store it wrong, and things can go BOOM.
Statistics can be used to twist just about anything. When it comes to radiation, I'd rather be careful UP FRONT. Add to it the fact that building all the nuclear plants in the world won't really help the energy crunch all that much (the supply of uranium is far more limited than the supply of fossil fuels) and the fact that it's so expensive (building the plants, the intense safety requirements, the long-term disposal safety requirements), and it's just not much of an answer.
True, it'll be gradual. But consider the riots in Europe this summer over high energy prices. Now magnify that by an order of magnitude over the years as supplies tighten and demand keeps increasing (WE WANT OUR SUVs DAMMIT! )
And while we technically wont run out of power until we get to the heat-death of the universe, there's this little issue of SUPPLY v.s. DEMAND, and demand is only going up while the over-all supply of specific sources of energy either remains constant, is highly variable, or is dwindling.
Solar power just couldn't provide enough power to satisfy the current world economy (you'd have to pave over a huge percentage of the earth and suppliment it with space collecters as well, and you still wouldn't have enough thanks to cloudy days and night-time). Solar just doesn't match the energy density of oil+coal+gas. Ditto for wind power and hydro-electric power. And even with nuclear, there isn't really enough uranium available to power the entire world's thirst for power for more than a decade or two. And the demand for energy keeps rising and rising and rising...
Um... wide-scale weather problems can really disrupt food sources. Remember the dust-bowl back in the 30's? Do you think dramatic climate change would have any less of a dramatic impact on our food sources? Do you think the drought in Texas this year has has NO impact on food sources? Are you that naive? Humankind is not THAT powerful before the forces of nature...
It wasn't too long ago, that I saw a list of all the major oil producing countries in the world, along with estimates of their current oil reserves, and their current daily pumping rates.
I did some quick math to divide their reserves by their pumping rates to see just how long they'd last. The longest I saw any lasting was about 70 years, with most drying up between 10 and 30 years. And this assumed constant pumping rates (which have already gone up since that time), and constant ability to remove oil up until the last is retrieved (which simply isn't true... the less oil there is, the harder it is to get out, and the more energy required to wring it out).
Not long after that, I saw two graphs of oil production... one optimistic and one pessimistic. Even the optimistic one showed steep declines in oil production 50 years out.
I think you can factor in the fact that new oil reserves will be discovered and new technologies will allow us to get out oil that isn't feasable now... but that will be offset by the fact that oil consumption is constantly and dramatically increasing even in a fixed population... never mind that the population is constantly growing.
So it would seem that this summer/fall's "energy crisis" is just a small dress rehersal for what is to come... in our lifetimes.
How convenient to ignore the side-effects of great climactic change like that... like, oh, what happens to our food sources, what do intense storms do to huge populations and cities and transportation, how this effects the spread of disease, etc...
We used to die of plagues and famine, and now we don't. Just enjoy your life and let the future worry about the future.
I'll inform all those people who are dying of AIDS world-wide (especially in Africa) of this. Ditto all those dying of famine world-wide (especially in Africa).
Read "Darwin's Radio" and maybe you wouldn't be such an evolutionary gradualist;-)
Maybe there's a way of rapid mutations to help out...:-)
Or more likely, as you say, a technological solution.
Or even MORE likely, just a lot of disease, famine, war, and death as people fight over diminshing resources in order to 'preserve their way of life'. Humans are remarkably inertial creatures, unwilling to change unless absolutely FORCED to (i.e. no oil crisis will keep them from buying thier Stupid Useless Vehicles (SUVs), dammit!). People will fight and go to war to maintain the status quo, rather than adapt and change as the environment around them changes.
Actually, I'd put global warming on the lower end of the threats that face humanity. There are many, many others (bacteria and viruses, our own stupidity when it comes to religion and war and pollution, and extra-terrestrial threats such as asteroid or comet impacts).
Well, it could happen a lot sooner, and a lot more quickly, and maybe not in the way we're expecteting...
Read last months' "Discover" magazine's cover article on 20 ways the human race could perish in the future ('future' being defined as 'anytime tomorrow on').
There are lots of threats bubbling and seething beneath the conscious level of the everyday consumer. Disease, famine, astaroids/comets, global warming, nuclear war, ozon depletion, etc., etc.
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Gee, under Clinton/Gore the Federal government has gotten smaller. Under Bush, the Texas government has gotten larger. Bush advocates sodomy laws and is fighting to keep Texas's sodomy law in place, as well as to strip gay people of the right to adopt or serve as foster parents... as a gay man myself, how does this serve as 'better protection of my constitutional rights'? And Bush would lower taxes on a robust economy... this would over-stimulate the economy, causing the Fed to raise interest rates... costing LOTS of low and middle-income people to end up paying MORE for interest than they got back in taxes... a net loss. Clinton/Gore also helped balance the budget and give priority to paying down the debt. Bush wants to give away the surplus and just pretend the debt isn't looming there behind him and us.
- Spryguy
What's REALLY ironic is that I'll bet the people who insist that "GLobal Warming" isn't a problem or doesn't exist, actually think this is a neat idea and that it would work...
- Spryguy
Now if only you would KEEP Celine Dione, and stop her from infesting our airwaves and movie soundtracks...
;-)
Ack. If Bush wins the election I may have to learn to like snow, mosquitos, and Celine Dione. Canada's population might just swell by a few percentage points...
But UNTIL then, I will BLAME CANADA for everything I can
- Spryguy
Whine about being too hot in the summer when the thermometer on your porch (in the shade mind you) reads 115 ... and you go out and sun your self by the lake anyway :-)
... but that the lichen and/or moss will evolve rather rapidly in this new environment (thanks to tons of UV exposure) to something that is lethal to mankind. So in warming it up, we make it every bit as uninhabitable as it is now. It's the basic law of unintended consequences at work....
It happened to me this summer. Sure, it was 'too hot' (I had to hike a mile from my parking spot to the water's edge in that heat too), but eh, a few weeks of 'too hot' (and that's all there really are in Texas... when it's 90 here, it feels lots better than when it's 80 in say, Chicago or Toronto).
It's wonderful for most of the rest of the year, except for a couple of weeks in the winter when the lows get near freezing (and in my opinion, any time the high is less than 70 or the low is less than 50, it's too damn cold).
This is why I moved from Ohio (just 150 miles from the Canadian border) to Texas. I'll never go back north again.
So count me out of both Canada (unless i have a summer home there... nah, too many damn mosquitos) AND Mars.
My biggest problem with the terraforming plan, though, is not that it will create a planet-sized 'northern Canada'
- Spryguy
Relatively small flat-panel displays cost around $600-$999. Unless you're definition of 'relatively small' is different from mine.
Another thing to keep in mind is that buying a 15" flat panel display gives you as much actual display area as a 17"-18" CRT tube. So you need to factor that in...
- Spryguy
That's not the show I was thinking of... I believe the title had more to do with the weather, global warming, and/or carbon emissions.
And that whole plutonium thing (sorry, but after decades of hearing it's the most toxic dangerous substance known to man, it'll take more than one article to tear through all that) doesn't address my main point, which is the expense, over all danger (all things considered, including potential worst-case scenereos), and the fact that it doesn't help in the areas we desperately need help, with regards to energy.
I'd say that you and people who truely believe what you've posted (I'm reserving judgement just due to the sheer weight of counter-claims that have been made over the decades, and I HAVE read up on this stuff from time to time, following it in popular scientific press and such) have a LOT of work cut out for you. If indeed the common knowledge about all this is either misrepresentation, misperception, or out-right lies, it's going to take a lot of respectable people making a LOT of noise to over-come all that has gone before. Unfortuantely, posting here reaches a VERY small audience (especially posting here more than 18 hours after an article first becomes available... most people just read through once).
Good luck in your efforts.
- Spryguy
Well... puppet Jabba sure looked BETTER (and more 'real' because he looked *there*!) than the CGI Jabba in the special edition of the first Star Wars movie...
And frequently CGI doesn't look 'real' enough because it's too perfect/lean/new. It takes a lot of effort to go back and put scuffs on floors and doors, bump up the corners and edges of tables and chairs, etc. It's a lot of sophisticated modeling to make things look REAL, as in having all the signs of wear-and-tear of real items in the real world.
- Spryguy
Eyes Wide Shut truely was a horrible boring waste of film.
But I loved Fight Club, and thought it was a great movie. I saw it in the same month as seeing Three Kings and American Beauty... and pretty much pronounced that month as the single best month in movie history. Three amazingly good flicks all out at once. Most people I know also agree that these three movies were all great. Top notch. Excellent.
- Spryguy
The specials in question (which had to do with global warming, the weather, and carbon emissions) were recorded this year, and were broadcast just this past spring, if I remember correctly.
And sorry I don't trust some of your sources. These are some of the same sources that said 'duck and cover' was a good defense in the case of nuclear attack.
Nuclear power is simply not the answer, your protestations to the contrary. It may help a little, but there are very high costs, and serious issues with waste desposal (regardless of your attempts to poo-poo them).
Besides, nuclear power doesn't do much to help our transportation industry... battery driven cars don't currently have much range, pep, and are very costly... and unless you're advocating putting nuclear reactors in individual vehicles, that's about the only method of transfering nuclear power to one of the largest uses of fossil fuels today.
I'm more interested in fuel-cell and fusion research for helping to satisfy our needs in 30-80 years time. At least with fusion, the chances of a meltdown/china-syndrome are non-existant, and there isn't near the problem with waste disposal. Unfortunately there's no real indication that it will ever be a viable source of energy, but I'm willing to fund the research until there's an absolute indication one way or another.
- Spryguy
Sorry but I cannot believe your information. I trust the PBS specials on the topic I saw over some poster I don't even know. Uranium is STILL a depletable resource just like fossile fuels, and there is less of it on the planet than fossil fuels, and the huge energy density of fossile fuels takes a lot to replace. All of the information I gleened from those sources made intutive sense, and was backed by many experts and scientists in the field of energy. If you immediately replaced ALL power production with nuclear power, it wouldn't last any longer than fossil fuels, and probably not AS long... and would be more expensive on top of it all.
- Spryguy
Far more people are poisoned by burning fossil fuels than by radiation.
...even though nuclear plants (at least in this country) have much better safety systems and have a much, much lower accident rate.
Of course. Look at the vastly different ratio of burnt fossil fuels to radiation. A lot more people are killed in auto-accidents than by meteor impacts too.
Because they're under much tighter regulatory control, have much higher and stricter standards and safety mechinisms, at a much higher cost. If the chemical plants and the like were subject to the same rules and regulations and enforcement, they'd be a hell of a lot safer than they are, no?
The last I heard, current Uranium reserves will supposedly last well over 100 years at the current burn rate.
Very true... at the current burn rate. But that's not what was being discussed, now was it? I'm talking about REPLACING our existing fossil fuel sources with nuclear power. Uranium is a limited resource just like fossile fuels, and thus doing this doesn't solve the problem anyway! Which is entirely my point. It's hugely more expensive (due to all the necessary detectors, controls, rules, regulations, safety precautions, disposal problems, etc) and doesn't really get us much farther down the road. A little bit, sure. But it's still tap-dancing on the deck of the titanic, isn't it?
- Spryguy
Let me rephrase more clearly: Stating that plutonium is less dangerous than the household bleach I use every week in my own home is the purest rubbish. It is that kind of propaganda that will do nothing but turn people away from any valid points you might actually have.
- Spryguy
You aparently missed my point. I brought up the dust bowl to indicate a small point... you were supposed to imagine such a catastrophe on a more global scale. The weather and climate are chaotic... change can happen quite suddenly. We may not be prepared.
And all sorts of things are part of nature too... there are dozens of species going extinct every day. Humans are not in any such danger at the moment, but that doesn't mean things won't change over-night (relatively speaking) sometime in the next 1000 years.
Of course we aren't separate from it. But neither is any other creature... and tons of them have gone extinct as their climates changed, their food sources moved or vanished or changed, etc. We can use our technological marvesl to hold on, but we usually do so by trying to hold on to the status quo, not using our marvels to adjust and adapt. We try to perpetuate constancy. That'll work just fine up to a point, but eventually it'll snap.
- Spryguy
Sorry, i'm not buying it. It all sounds like propaganda from the nuclear power industry to me. It sounds like rationalization and ignoring very common sense facts... like the fact that radiation is invisible, oderless, colorless, and undetectable without a geiger counter. You can pretty much tell when you ingesting bleach or even arsnic. You could be exposed to radiation and not be aware of it until the cancers start... You conveniently ignore the huge psychological factors involved as well (they're very real and not just the result of 'ignorance').
Sorry. I not only don't buy that nuclear power is as safe or safer than other forms, but you haven't addressed the primary point I've made, which is that nuclear power as it exists today cannot possibly supply the world's energy needs... it can only delay the inevitable by a few years.
I'll be more interested to see where fusion goes (if it ever goes anywhere). But until then...
- Spryguy
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That conveniently ignores a whole host of problems with nuclear waste, nuclear by-products, and other difficulties. These are not politically manufacturered things either. When a coal-burning plant blows up, the land around it doesn't become uninhabitable for centuries. I mean, just LOOK at Chernobyle...
...
AND remember that the 'sufficient amount' of plutonium to kill you is measured in micro-grams... an amount virutally invisible to the naked eye. And the form of death is rather horrifying as well (i.e. slow, stealthy, agonizing). It's a lot different from trying to ingest a lot of bleach
And nuclear waste REQUIRES a lot more care than standard waste... store it wrong, and things can go BOOM.
Statistics can be used to twist just about anything. When it comes to radiation, I'd rather be careful UP FRONT. Add to it the fact that building all the nuclear plants in the world won't really help the energy crunch all that much (the supply of uranium is far more limited than the supply of fossil fuels) and the fact that it's so expensive (building the plants, the intense safety requirements, the long-term disposal safety requirements), and it's just not much of an answer.
- Spryguy
True, it'll be gradual. But consider the riots in Europe this summer over high energy prices. Now magnify that by an order of magnitude over the years as supplies tighten and demand keeps increasing (WE WANT OUR SUVs DAMMIT! )
And while we technically wont run out of power until we get to the heat-death of the universe, there's this little issue of SUPPLY v.s. DEMAND, and demand is only going up while the over-all supply of specific sources of energy either remains constant, is highly variable, or is dwindling.
Solar power just couldn't provide enough power to satisfy the current world economy (you'd have to pave over a huge percentage of the earth and suppliment it with space collecters as well, and you still wouldn't have enough thanks to cloudy days and night-time). Solar just doesn't match the energy density of oil+coal+gas. Ditto for wind power and hydro-electric power. And even with nuclear, there isn't really enough uranium available to power the entire world's thirst for power for more than a decade or two. And the demand for energy keeps rising and rising and rising...
- Spryguy
Tell me again how plutonium (a by-product of many nuclear reactions) isn't all that dangerous compared to house-hold chemicals?
- Spryguy
Um... wide-scale weather problems can really disrupt food sources. Remember the dust-bowl back in the 30's? Do you think dramatic climate change would have any less of a dramatic impact on our food sources? Do you think the drought in Texas this year has has NO impact on food sources? Are you that naive? Humankind is not THAT powerful before the forces of nature...
- Spryguy
It wasn't too long ago, that I saw a list of all the major oil producing countries in the world, along with estimates of their current oil reserves, and their current daily pumping rates.
I did some quick math to divide their reserves by their pumping rates to see just how long they'd last. The longest I saw any lasting was about 70 years, with most drying up between 10 and 30 years. And this assumed constant pumping rates (which have already gone up since that time), and constant ability to remove oil up until the last is retrieved (which simply isn't true... the less oil there is, the harder it is to get out, and the more energy required to wring it out).
Not long after that, I saw two graphs of oil production... one optimistic and one pessimistic. Even the optimistic one showed steep declines in oil production 50 years out.
I think you can factor in the fact that new oil reserves will be discovered and new technologies will allow us to get out oil that isn't feasable now... but that will be offset by the fact that oil consumption is constantly and dramatically increasing even in a fixed population... never mind that the population is constantly growing.
So it would seem that this summer/fall's "energy crisis" is just a small dress rehersal for what is to come... in our lifetimes.
- Spryguy
How convenient to ignore the side-effects of great climactic change like that... like, oh, what happens to our food sources, what do intense storms do to huge populations and cities and transportation, how this effects the spread of disease, etc...
- Spryguy
We used to die of plagues and famine, and now we don't. Just enjoy your life and let the future worry about the future.
I'll inform all those people who are dying of AIDS world-wide (especially in Africa) of this. Ditto all those dying of famine world-wide (especially in Africa).
- Spryguy
Read "Darwin's Radio" and maybe you wouldn't be such an evolutionary gradualist ;-)
... :-)
Maybe there's a way of rapid mutations to help out
Or more likely, as you say, a technological solution.
Or even MORE likely, just a lot of disease, famine, war, and death as people fight over diminshing resources in order to 'preserve their way of life'. Humans are remarkably inertial creatures, unwilling to change unless absolutely FORCED to (i.e. no oil crisis will keep them from buying thier Stupid Useless Vehicles (SUVs), dammit!). People will fight and go to war to maintain the status quo, rather than adapt and change as the environment around them changes.
Actually, I'd put global warming on the lower end of the threats that face humanity. There are many, many others (bacteria and viruses, our own stupidity when it comes to religion and war and pollution, and extra-terrestrial threats such as asteroid or comet impacts).
- Spryguy
Well, it could happen a lot sooner, and a lot more quickly, and maybe not in the way we're expecteting...
Read last months' "Discover" magazine's cover article on 20 ways the human race could perish in the future ('future' being defined as 'anytime tomorrow on').
There are lots of threats bubbling and seething beneath the conscious level of the everyday consumer. Disease, famine, astaroids/comets, global warming, nuclear war, ozon depletion, etc., etc.
- Spryguy
Evolution is a fact.
The details of exactly how it works are the subjects of several competing theories.
See the difference?
- Spryguy
Read Darwin's Radio and find out ;-)
- Spryguy