Posted: Tue Dec 17, 2013 11:56 pm
Wow. The hubris there is staggering.Ancient History wrote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_ ... n_Movement
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Wow. The hubris there is staggering.Ancient History wrote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_ ... n_Movement
Explain? Humans are successful because they terraform. Larger numbers = larger terraform. Am I wrong?DSMatticus wrote:Wow. The hubris there is staggering.Ancient History wrote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_ ... n_Movement
Yep. All the "we're dooming nature!" arguments you read from environmentalists are bullshit. What we're actually dooming is our own chances to survive. Tardigrades will keep existing just fine no matter what we do. Finally, for contrast, compare our modest holocene extinction with what nature does when she's serious about genocide.ubernoob wrote:Alright, that is much more sane than what I was expecting. I guess there are too many climate change deniers in my family. Agreed on all counts.
This is the most fucking stupid argument I've seen in quite some time. Where the actual fuck do you think the genetic diversity of tomorrow comes from if not from the genetic diversity of today? If there aren't any ancestors of gobafracks today, there won't be any gobafracks in the future. Extinction is forever.DSMatticus wrote:I've never got the "extinctions are bad" thing - a world with whales and goats is not preferable to a world with just goats, especially when in 5-25 million years (the actual time it takes to recover biodiversity from a major extinction event) you're going to end up with gobafracks and whiskawollies which are entirely new organisms which have adapted to the environments and filled the openings created by those changes. There's nothing more natural than change, and the only reason to get worked up about it is the entirely human-selfish motivation that the environment as it exists might be preferable for us humans. You can't use environmentalism to justify misanthropy - environmentalism is only justifiable at all because of the selfish human desire to continue having a world which permits their existence.
You're a moron. A world without macro organisms is nothing like impossible to achieve, and no one would be remiss calling that world "dead" whether there were arcaea and protists hiding in crevices or not.nockermensch wrote:Yep. All the "we're dooming nature!" arguments you read from environmentalists are bullshit.
Still irrelevant on the long view and misses the point. Nobody should doubt that extinguishing human life is well within our grasp today. But "life"? The biosphere survived much worse than we can do. Thanks to evolution, as long as there's energy, archaea and protists will eventually evolve and refill whatever ecological niches that were wiped. (I know that the jump to multi-cellular organisms to a freaking long while to happen, but it happened).FrankTrollman wrote:You're a moron. A world without macro organisms is nothing like impossible to achieve, and no one would be remiss calling that world "dead" whether there were arcaea and protists hiding in crevices or not.
-Username17
Well, there are two ways to read your stupid:FrankTrollman wrote:Where the actual fuck do you think the genetic diversity of tomorrow comes from if not from the genetic diversity of today?
Please explain how, keeping in mind that human civilization actually has to be around long enough to see the process through to its completion. I think the closest you'll get is massive nuclear armageddon, and I'm honestly skeptical even that could truly compete with the devastation of the Permian-Triassic in extent or longevity of harm.Frank wrote:A world without macro organisms is nothing like impossible to achieve
Wat.DSM wrote:Please explain how, keeping in mind that human civilization actually has to be around long enough to see the process through to its completion. I think the closest you'll get is massive nuclear armageddon, and I'm honestly skeptical even that could truly compete with the devastation of the Permian-Triassic in extent or longevity of harm.
Swing and a miss. The reason life on Earth survived those massive extinction events is not because they occurred slowly enough that organisms were able to evolve alongside them. That would imply a relatively constant biodiversity, where new species entered the fossil record as quickly as they left them. The actual evidence (which is overwhelming and irrefutable) points to a very real and very significant drop in biodiversity, and that tells us there are a bunch of species (in at least one case, as many as 90% of all existing ones) that simply had their evolutionary lines ended. Poof. Gone. Generations upon generations upon generations of exhaustive trial and error disappeared in the blink of an eye (relatively speaking). And somewhere between 10-30 million years later, the biosphere had recovered it and once more filled all those empty niches with new and exciting organisms. And all of those new and exciting organisms passed through the bottleneck of the 10% that had survived.FrankTrollman wrote:DSM, does the fact that a couple hundred years is a very much shorter time period and allows a lot less generations worth of trial and error than a few dozen million years completely escape you? Evolution is a powerful method for problem solving, but it's one that is inherently unreliable. Flippantly saying that evolution has solved problems in the past and therefore is going to solve specific problems in the future is a gross misunderstanding of how things work on every possible level.
Some of those are not actually reasonable threats either because they are dubious (I've never really bought into the gray goo apocalypse - evolution has been exploring the limits of tiny, self-reproducing machines for the entire history of life on earth, and the results are not promising) or things we are not in any danger whatsoever of doing (... is plutonium dusting a thing we're doing?). Many of them are certainly threats to human civilization. But I've never seen any compelling argument for how humanity is in danger of rendering the planet uninhabitable through any of them.FrankTrollman wrote:If you release some sort of gray goo catalyst, it'll keep catalyzing destruction long after you're not there to see it working. If you dust the lands with plutonium, it'll stay poisonous for tens of millions of years. Chlorofluorocarbons keep breaking up the ozone layer for years after their release, dioxins have a half-life of several years, radiation sources can stay toxic for millennia, and heavy metals literally don't ever stop being poisonous.
I think Frank actually answered that question.Chamomile wrote:What accident, war, or disaster would cause them to spread far enough to be much of a deal to global biodiversity?
Grey Goo is an actual endgame of nanotechnology. Massive amounts of radiation everywhere is an actual endgame of Mutually Assured Destruction through nuclear weapons (all it takes is one nuclear capable country to start this). Turning the earth into venus by destroying our ozone layer is something that humans have been happily doing for the past two hundred years.FrankTrollman wrote:If you release some sort of gray goo catalyst, it'll keep catalyzing destruction long after you're not there to see it working. If you dust the lands with plutonium, it'll stay poisonous for tens of millions of years. Chlorofluorocarbons keep breaking up the ozone layer for years after their release, dioxins have a half-life of several years, radiation sources can stay toxic for millennia, and heavy metals literally don't ever stop being poisonous.
You seem to believe that the Earth is some sort of self regulating entity that is going to move back to a life-friendly equilibrium sooner or later. There is no reason to believe that to be the case. It's entirely possible to imagine scenarios in which we get, for example, runaway greenhouse effects like we see on Venus and when the surface temperatures get to 500 degrees and no liquid water exists, I feel that it is patently obvious that all macroscopic life as we understand it will cease to exist. Humanity will naturally die off well before the seas actually boil, but our not being here won't really stop the temperature from continuing to rise.
-Username17
No, it really isn't. If you want a real life example of gray goo and what we know it can do, look here. They're very tiny, very complicated machines running a program that looks like while (true) { replicate() }. They are put under evolutionary pressure to be able to replicate in as many environments using as many materials as possible. And yet... they haven't taken over the planet. That isn't to say technology won't be able to solve the problems evolution failed to, but there's currently no reason to believe that there exists a viable universal self-replicator. It's entirely possible that it will stay forever in the realm of science fiction.ubernoob wrote:Grey Goo is an actual endgame of nanotechnology.
Nuclear armageddon would represent a mass extinction event for many reasons - brute force devastation of huge swaths of land, nuclear winter, and radiation everywhere. But we're not going to cover the entire planet in hellfire, impact winter/volcanic winter are things life has already survived, and there are organisms alive today that get to straight up flip off cancer and other harmful effects of chronic radiation poisoning. The ingredients are all there for there to be survivors who would take up the mantle of creating a new biosphere as soon as the smoke cleared.ubernoob wrote:Massive amounts of radiation everywhere is an actual endgame of Mutually Assured Destruction through nuclear weapons (all it takes is one nuclear capable country to start this).
The loss of an ozone layer would likely spell doom for human civilization (it would kill a lot of our agriculture) and a mass extinction event, but there's no reason to believe it would kill all the things - it probably wouldn't even be the most serious extinction event we'd ever had.ubernoob wrote:Turning the earth into mars by destroying our ozone layer is something that humans have been happily doing for the past two hundred years.
Assuming by 'we' you mean life in general, no. Even if through our efforts we managed to reduce the biodiversity of the entire planet (which, without understating the percentage of the planet used in agriculture, is still considerably larger than that) to a tenth of what it was before we wiped everything out, then... that would be an extinction event completely in line with the ones this planet has already bounced back from (and quite quickly).ubernoob wrote:Now, the climate change/terraforming thing where we totally do kill off more species than mutation and evolution can replace means that we can slowly strangle the earth to death until we no longer are able to live on it.
I will grant you that this one could hypothetically be a problem if the technology shakes out the way we expect it to. However, saying that humans might hypothetically have the power to destroy all life on Earth someday is not the same as saying we have that power right now. I have no doubt that as technology advances, we will continue to create more and more destructive weapons, and sooner or later one of them will be able to destroy life permanently (and possibly destroy the entire planet). It also strikes me as quite plausible that as a side effect of industrial practices or scientific experimentation we eventually create some super pollutant that kills everything and spreads on its own. But that's not what's being referred to when people say "we're dooming nature!" Remember that the original comment Frank was responding to is claimed that the "we're dooming nature" crowd is wrong, but they're not right if we could doom nature someday hypothetically. Hypothetically wolves could evolve intelligence and be the ones to create grey goo. Quick, kill all the wolves, just in case.ubernoob wrote:Grey Goo is an actual endgame of nanotechnology.
Who's going to nuke Canadian wilderness? The Amazon rainforest? In the event of nuclear war, how many nukes are even going to land on places like South Dakota? Even if every population center from New York to Wichita gets nuked, there will be still be more United States territory that isn't irradiated than territory that is. Not that the United States will be a thing anymore. Life will keep on trucking in the three-fourths of North American wilderness barely, if at all affected by nuclear radiation, and in an evolutionary heartbeat the irradiated areas will be habitable again. Unless you can give me a good reason that nuclear war would lead to nuclear carpet-bombing of barely populated wilderness areas, a MAD situation won't necessarily even spell the end for humans as a species, it certainly won't be able to compete with extinction events that have happened in the past.Massive amounts of radiation everywhere is an actual endgame of Mutually Assured Destruction through nuclear weapons (all it takes is one nuclear capable country to start this).
Did you know the Ozone Hole is actually shrinking? Not only is the ozone layer regrowing, it's actually regrowing faster than we were destroying it in the first place! By which I mean it will only take 70 years to repair 200 years of damage. Considering the relative rapidity that the ozone layer recovers, I find it unlikely that human civilization would survive our own ozone depletion long enough to doom the planet even if we went right back to using the same methods that originally caused the problem for some reason.Turning the earth into venus by destroying our ozone layer is something that humans have been happily doing for the past two hundred years.
Actually, yes it is. Those are pretty much exactly the same thing, and in any case are wholly interchangeable from a policy standpoint. We're talking about life on Earth, which operates on a geological scale. A thousand years, even a million years is basically an eyeblink. Anything we do a century or a thousand centuries from today is essentially indistinguishable on a geologic scale from things we are doing today or things we did two hundred years in the past. The big asteroid that struck the Earth and ended the reign of dinosaurs has been "precisely" dated to 65.5 +/- 0.3 million years ago. Meaning that we are pretty sure it occurred somewhere during a six hundred thousand year period.Chamomile wrote:I will grant you that this one could hypothetically be a problem if the technology shakes out the way we expect it to. However, saying that humans might hypothetically have the power to destroy all life on Earth someday is not the same as saying we have that power right now.
Anything that happens in the next half million years is happening right now. That is how long geological timeframes actually are. If you think it is possible that research into nanotechnology we are doing today will, over the course of the next five thousand centuries, result in the capability to produce something capable of destroying all life on Earth, then the argument is over. You believe that we are capable of doing something, and indeed are currently doing something which "could" result in the extinction of all macroscopic life on Earth. Today's research is tomorrow's capabilities, but both of those things are equally "current" as long as today and tomorrow are less than five hundred millennia apart.Chamomile wrote:The reason grey goo doesn't back up the "we're dooming nature" argument has nothing to do with how long it'll take us to invent it. The reason is that grey goo does not, in fact, exist. It is not implausible that it might exist someday, but "we might someday destroy life" is not the same as "the things we're doing right now pose a credible threat to ending life."
Who would knew that the anti-spirals were actually right? Cultures cannot be trusted.FrankTrollman wrote:Anything that happens in the next half million years is happening right now. That is how long geological timeframes actually are. If you think it is possible that research into nanotechnology we are doing today will, over the course of the next five thousand centuries, result in the capability to produce something capable of destroying all life on Earth, then the argument is over. You believe that we are capable of doing something, and indeed are currently doing something which "could" result in the extinction of all macroscopic life on Earth. Today's research is tomorrow's capabilities, but both of those things are equally "current" as long as today and tomorrow are less than five hundred millennia apart.
Now personally, I think that it's possible that nanotechnology research will produce at least the ability to create a grey goo doomsday scenario in a lot less than five thousand centuries. It seems plausible that it could do so in only a handful of centuries. After all, everything we've accomplished in the field of nanotechnology has occurred in the last fifty four years, barely more than half of a single century. Which means that any discussion of whether it is possible for things humanity does today to result in the extinction of all macroscopic life on Earth is basically retarded. Of course it's fucking possible.
-Username17
I still don't think that matters.Draculmaulkee wrote:While we don't have enough nuclear weapons to atomize all of Earth's surface, nuclear fallout affects an area much wider than the original blast radius.