[HN Gopher] Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was cover...
___________________________________________________________________
Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by
prototaxites (2013)
Author : janandonly
Score : 252 points
Date : 2023-04-26 13:42 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| jononomo wrote:
| The interesting thing is that no one has any idea where life came
| from in the first place.
| cubefox wrote:
| Problem is that there are no fossils. The only evidence of the
| first cells are similarities between eukaryotes and
| prokaryotes.
| _0ffh wrote:
| So, Vvardenfell from Morrowind?
| keenmaster wrote:
| Yes I thought of Sadrith Mora. Top tier surreal video game
| landscape
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| Try playing the Tamriel Rebuilt mod. There are places with
| double/triple the mushroom architecture of Sadrith Mora.
| xdavidliu wrote:
| The area around Pelagiad and Dren Plantation had way more
| giant mushrooms than any of the Telvanni settlements
| [deleted]
| kqr wrote:
| The headline immediately transported my mind to the Ascadian
| Isles.
| todd8 wrote:
| I was thinking Zangarmarsh from World of Warcraft.
| andrewclunn wrote:
| Then the dinosaur king named Bowser conquered this Mushroom
| kingdom, until a time travelling plumber...
| dboreham wrote:
| Lewis Carroll was right!
| dm319 wrote:
| As time goes on I start to think that life imitates Minecraft.
| dymax78 wrote:
| A discussion regarding colossal fungi and mycorrhizal networks --
| I'm going to take this opportunity to plug the highly
| entertaining documentary Fantastic Fungi and book Entangled Life.
| ilovecurl wrote:
| A good long form vid on Protaxites and fungi in general:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH9JVy-u5DQ
| vrglvrglvrgl wrote:
| [dead]
| rqtwteye wrote:
| It's hard to get your head around the idea that there was a time
| when there was no grass, no trees or other plants. Really
| interesting.
| drewfis wrote:
| What if Fungi were the key to our technological advancement? If
| we could make fungal computers we could become a bio-technical
| race like Species 8472 in Star Trek Voyager Season 3 Episode 26.
| ru552 wrote:
| I watched a documentary that proposed eating mushrooms, and the
| ensuing hallucinations that happened, as the cause of our
| Neanderthal ancestors developing free thought and the
| underpinning of creativity that lead to tool development.
| blaze33 wrote:
| Yep, the stoned ape theory!
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoned_ape_theory Didn't know
| there was a documentary about it though.
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| The Dune navigator theory of evolution
| acchow wrote:
| There isn't really much "science" to back up these claims. It
| is fun to think about tho.
| codeflo wrote:
| At least they unlocked the creativity of whoever produced
| that documentary.
| ummonk wrote:
| I recently discovered that flowers didn't exist in most of the
| Jurassic era. Mind-blowing really.
| tabtab wrote:
| Flowers are relative newcomers. This is because it required a
| relatively tight relationship between insects and plants.
| Coordination between species is trickier to evolve.
| cubefox wrote:
| Even more recent than flowering plants: Grass.
|
| > Before 2005, fossil findings indicated that grasses evolved
| around 55 million years ago. Finds of grass-like phytoliths in
| Cretaceous dinosaur coprolites from the latest Cretaceous
| (Maastrichtian) aged Lameta Formation of India have pushed this
| date back to 66 million years ago.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaceae
|
| For reference, dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago.
| simongray wrote:
| This is actually the case in the game Alpha Centauri, only it is
| the planet in that star system (where the game takes place) and
| not Earth.
| 1attice wrote:
| The HN headline edit obscures the point of the article, which
| amounts to an argument that prototaxites were basically fungus.
|
| It's like taking an article that says "dinosaurs are related to
| birds" and changing it to read "the ancestors of birds are
| related to birds." It reduces a new, interesting claim to a
| tautology which is not, in any way, what the article concerns
| itself with.
| 1attice wrote:
| Also, while I'm going off, this is a great example of how the
| clickbait-reduction policy at HN ends up selecting for titles
| which obfuscate or mislead.
|
| Here, the descriptive, sensible word 'mushroom' is replaced
| with 'prototaxite', a word that is meaningless to (let's be
| honest) most casual visitors to this site.
|
| Accessibility and meaningfulness are casualties in the war on
| interestingness.
| excalibur wrote:
| > "A 6-metre fungus would be odd enough in the modern world, but
| at least we are used to trees quite a bit bigger," says
| [geophysicist Kevin] Boyce. "Plants at that time were a few feet
| tall, invertebrate animals were small, and there were no
| terrestrial vertebrates. This fossil would have been all the more
| striking in such a diminutive landscape."
|
| Throw in a turtle invasion and a time traveling plumber, and
| you've got yourself a movie.
| yazzku wrote:
| Shigeru Miyamoto is the real MVP.
| nologic01 wrote:
| Maybe I've missed it, but there is no evidence that the Earth was
| _covered_ with "giant mushrooms", merely that they existed?
|
| Which might be interesting but not exactly as evocative as
| implied.
| param wrote:
| Wait so Super Mario Bros is factually historical?
| stainablesteel wrote:
| i've never seen a good visualization of the variety of non-animal
| landscapes across geologic time
| lisasays wrote:
| Just like in one of the most underrated films of all time:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matango
| Logans_Run wrote:
| A fascinating read, including the Nat Geo article OG link; but
| couldn't help chuckling at one of the quotes in it ....
| _..Sucking up carbon from microbial crusts would [make large
| fruiting bodies] possible._ fnar, fnar. But seriously though,
| Mind. Blown.
|
| That is all :)
| finnh wrote:
| > The largest organism on Earth, says ABC, is still a huge fungal
| mat, a single organism spread over 2,200 acres of forest in
| eastern Oregon.
|
| Largest by area. By mass you need to go a bit south, to the faint
| grove of Aspens in Utah known as "Pando".
|
| ofc, Aspens are weird enough that they may be thought of more
| like a fungus with tree-like fruiting bodies rather than trees
| per se.
| tootie wrote:
| Another super interesting fact that never occurred to me is
| that trees are not a taxonomic grouping of their own. Rather a
| broad set of characteristics that have separately evolved into
| a convergent set of traits. So, it's unnecessary to say Aspens
| are not like other trees because they aren't actually related
| to other trees. The MCRA of all trees would not remotely be a
| tree.
| pimlottc wrote:
| MRCA = Most recent common ancestor
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor
| turnsout wrote:
| Citation needed! The Aspen page on Wikipedia doesn't mention
| fungi at all.
| m4jor wrote:
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/pano-one-worlds-
| la...
|
| >Weighing 13 million pounds, Pando is the world's largest
| organism by mass (Oregon's "humungous fungus" spans a greater
| distance). Quaking aspens can reproduce by disseminating
| seeds, but more frequently, they send up sprouts from their
| roots and form a mass of trees aptly known as a "clone."
|
| and I was able to find
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-
| true-...
| turnsout wrote:
| Thank you! Odd that it's not mentioned in the main article.
| samstave wrote:
| When I was growing up in Lake Tahoe in the 1980s, I would
| leave the house in the morning to return at dusk, and I
| often went on a hike up Ward Creek from my house to the
| backside of Alpine Meadows.
|
| Quaking Aspens were my Spirit Tree and I loved being around
| them.
|
| I didnt know at the time that the groves of Aspen were
| acually all the same tree.
|
| But they had a profound effect on me as I hiked and built
| stuff from them.
|
| I used to chop them down and build tee-pees with pine bows
| as walls... I was like 13 or so. If you got caught in any
| of my booby-traps, I am sorry...
| tarentel wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)
| krisoft wrote:
| It feels this part is what they are asking citation for:
| "Aspens are weird enough that they may be thought of more
| like a fungus with tree-like fruiting bodies rather than
| trees per se". At least the second sentence of their
| comment seems to suggest that.
|
| I read the page you kindly linked but I'm not seeing
| anything about Aspens being considered a fungus with tree-
| like fruiting bodies..
| cschneid wrote:
| Not literally, but in style. They are clearly trees.
|
| But they exist in a large underground network of roots,
| and spawn trunks upwards over that large area, not unlike
| how many funguses do. Convergent evolution of an approach
| to life.
| finnh wrote:
| Thanks.
|
| I'm definitely a layman here, but I lived in Utah about
| 10 years ago and did some reading on Aspens, which is
| when I came across that comparison. I was hoping to find
| a direct citation to post here but haven't managed to do
| so yet.
|
| A fire (or clear cut) can take down the entire overstory
| of trees, but that living root system will survive & send
| up more "suckers" that become new trees. It's this "the
| real life is underground" vibe that makes them
| particularly fungi-like to me. I wonder if any other
| trees are like Aspens in this regard...
| tarentel wrote:
| I don't think you're going to find a citation to the
| original post. I don't think they were saying aspen are a
| type of fungi just that they act like one in some ways.
| svachalek wrote:
| Redwoods also grow like this but not to the same degree.
| They do form "fairy rings" like mushrooms though.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| The title is misleading, the article is more honest in admitting
| that it is _thought_ that these things named prototaxites are a
| fungus, but we are not sure.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we've replaced giant mushrooms with prototaxites in the
| title above. Thanks!
|
| Related: I dreaded looking into this thread because titles like
| that (I mean the original one) almost always provoke shallow-
| sensational-reflexive responses. There are a few such
| subthreads here but for the most part the hivemind didn't
| derange itself this time. Well done hivemind!
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| That was just a mild heads-up to others, not anticipated a
| title change, thanks dude.
| notlisted wrote:
| Relevant twitter discussion (before Elno ruined it)
| https://twitter.com/LauraSeesPlants/status/13105563532498984...
| Thaxll wrote:
| So it did looked like a Minecraft biome.
| francisofascii wrote:
| I was going to say a Mushroom Kingdom
| hinkley wrote:
| I think over time we will eventually set the beginning of
| "agriculture" to be in the age of fungi. The more we learn about
| trees the more they resemble an evolutionary step up from lichen.
|
| Lichen is a symbiosis between fungi and single celled chlorophyll
| owners. Forests are multicellular lichen. Like the cyanobacteria,
| trees can often function without their host, but they do better
| things with them.
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| Do you have any more information on what led you to this idea?
| I'm not an expert by any means, but when I look at trees I see
| 100% plant, with some fungus in the soil and roots and what
| not, somewhat akin to animals' gut bacteria.
| hinkley wrote:
| The fungi are underground. Out of sight, out of mind.
|
| Suzanne Simard was one of the first to draw attention to it.
| She has a book now, as does Paul Stamets, but there's also
| The Secret Life of Trees and a few others. Healthy forests
| are a network, the fungi arbitrage sugars and water, and
| sometimes minerals between the trees. But in addition some of
| these fungi can still degrade stone to make minerals
| accessible to the plants. There was a study where they found
| nano holes in forest sand particles that are consistent with
| the dimensions of mycelia. No direct observation yet that in
| know of, but the pathways exist so it's "worth further study"
| as they say.
|
| Biological weathering of rock, as in lichen, was critical to
| how plants got a foothold on land.
|
| I think we'll find that it was also critical to the
| development of mega flora, and that fungi and trees are a
| case of coevolution, where the fungi take a less overt role
| in the partnership.
| davidjones332 wrote:
| [flagged]
| bediger4000 wrote:
| I think it's rather the opposite. The insane weirdness of
| plants (polyploidy, symbiosis with insects, fern genomes,
| multiple evolutions of tree-forms), parasites, molluscs having
| all kinds of eyes, indicate more than one divine entity. More
| over, those entities clearly squabble, make jokes, and
| generally plague each other at biology's expense.
| burkaman wrote:
| > Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological
| battle. That tramples curiosity.
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| Pengtuzi wrote:
| > isn't the consistency of physical constants and other
| phenomena suggestive of a programmer-like intelligence behind
| the universe's design?
|
| No
| davidjones332 wrote:
| [flagged]
| vlod wrote:
| So the Nintendo movie is true! ([0] image)
|
| [0]:
| https://techraptor.net/sites/default/files/styles/herobanner...
| yazzku wrote:
| Thank you, I was looking for that picture.
| FpUser wrote:
| Times blessed. Mushrooms sauteed with the onions on top of boiled
| potatoes - nirvana forever.
| user3939382 wrote:
| Apparently they looked something like this
| https://i.imgur.com/PcEixHo.png
|
| More https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&sa=1&q=Prototaxites
| cubefox wrote:
| I wonder though how plausible this "trunk only" appearance is.
| What would the biological function of that trunk in the life
| cycle of prototaxites supposed to be? Modern fungi have heads,
| I think to spread spores.
| amflare wrote:
| Temperature control maybe? The ground is a pretty good
| insulator all things considered, so if the organism is
| producing more heat than it can shed into the soil,
| protrusions into the air like this may help.
| [deleted]
| klyrs wrote:
| Around the same era, there were giant horsetails too -- up to
| 30m tall!
|
| https://www.indefenseofplants.com/blog/2015/5/21/ancient-equ...
| zabzonk wrote:
| what is the evolutionary advantage of being so big back then?
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Dispersing more spores, from a higher altitude, so they go
| further?
| tsunamifury wrote:
| I think it's wild and deeply inspiring to imagine how the surface
| of the earth had radically different forms over billions of
| years. Huge landscapes of unrotted dead plants. Then massive
| landscapes of fungus and decomposing bacteria breaking that down
| into dirt. And on and on.
|
| I think it is wise to understand that earth has been through many
| eras and is not as homeostatic as our narrowly imagined "natural"
| state we seek today. And I am not trying to build an anti climate
| change argument, just that static "naturalism" is a human
| construct.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| We want to keep the earth habitat habitable for humans.
| samstave wrote:
| I read that book and watched the later documentary about what
| happens when the earth takes over, about how nature just over-
| runs human endeavors ... it was pretty depressing (though the
| writing was sophomoric)
|
| but I am always amazed at how much 'nature' has been
| interrupted by humans laying concrete (streets and buildings
| etc)
|
| Manhatten Island was once a sanctuary and now is a concrete
| cemetary.
| bodhi_mind wrote:
| It's saddening that a comment like this needs to disclaim that
| it's not anti climate change. I get it, I've posted things in
| the past that were attacked as anti climate change and I was
| perplexed. My gut tells me there are just people that like to
| stir up trouble and will post "enraging" things on anything
| really. It's unfortunately discouraging and makes me not want
| to engage in social media.
| yazzku wrote:
| Don't worry, this is not social media; VC does the talk.
| circuit10 wrote:
| I don't know what the bit about VC (venture capital? voice
| chat?) is but this site is definitely social media
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| A similarly wild thing to think about is that Pangaea was just
| the most recent supercontinent. The landmass on earth has split
| and merged several times.
|
| Time. It's deep.
| izzydata wrote:
| And then after millions of years and all of the biological
| matter turning into oil we will eventually use it all up within
| ~300-400 years. The era that humans will utilize this kind of
| gasoline combustion is such a tiny blip of the whole human
| history, but today it seems like civilization can't possibly
| exist without it.
|
| I don't see how airplanes are even going to exist for mass
| transit and cargo 200 years from now or how we will ever escape
| Earths gravity again without building some kind of space
| elevator before we run out.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| Rockets (especially SpaceX ones) can fly without fossil
| fuels. Hydrocarbons can easily be synthesized with thermal
| depolymerization or wasteful processes like how we make
| ethanol from corn.
|
| That's to say nothing of how all the oil fields we've tapped
| are the easy to get ones, and the deep sea holds a ton of
| oil.
| beebeepka wrote:
| https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/12/porsches-synthetic-
| gaso...
| izzydata wrote:
| This is very interesting. Thank you.
| drewm1980 wrote:
| Electric and hydrogen fueled airplanes are progressing. There
| are also futuristic ideas about powering the planes with
| ground or space based lasers powered by solar. Zeppelins
| still scale really well, and ships can use sails again. I
| believe a lot of this stuff would have already been resolved
| if we had stopped propping up the fossil fuel industry by
| funding wars to maintain supply and allowing the industry to
| externalize its costs.
| drewm1980 wrote:
| We need a president to declare transitioning of fossil
| fuels to be a national emergency and also a matter of
| national defense, and set the military industrial complex
| to work actually building a sustainable supply chain for
| energy and materials.
| lovecg wrote:
| It's really up to China and, increasingly, India at this
| point. The Western countries are not emitting much
| anymore so the impact here is limited.
| timeon wrote:
| We can stop buying things from China and India then.
| lovecg wrote:
| A World War 3 is definitely one way to cut emissions and
| save the Earth. It seems more likely than the world
| working together on a reasonable plan.
| LordKano wrote:
| Using such language is a guarantee that such an effort
| will not succeed.
|
| Of course it's important and it's inevitable but calling
| it an "emergency" would by hyperbole and cause it to be
| taken less seriously.
| Balgair wrote:
| PBS Eons on YT does a good job of diving into the many and
| extreme phases that Earth has seen. Check it out!
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1LdMWlNYS4&list=PLi6K9w_Ubf...
|
| Also, Darwin wrote a lot about the extreme variations that we
| see in the 'balanced' ecosystem. He tallied up the birds near
| him and found that ~4/5ths of all the birds would die every
| winter. He remarked that a 10% death rate illness in humans
| would be considered a huge event, but that every year, nearly
| all the birds near him just up and die. This was in a passage
| on how the 'balance' that we see is really just a lot of
| species furiously competing with each other and trying to eek
| out minuscule improvements in the deadly chaos.
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| I've been a falconer for a couple of decades and in general
| try to keep up with the research around birds of prey. The
| general consensus is only about 10% of birds of prey survive
| the first year. It doesn't surprise me that the survival rate
| for most other birds is equally as bad. I've been out in the
| field a number of times in the winter and found wild birds of
| prey that were so weak they couldn't fly and you could just
| walk up to them and pick them up. In every one of these cases
| the birds were skin and bones, starving to death. Nature can
| be brutal.
| ericmay wrote:
| > just that static "naturalism" is a human construct.
|
| I think you are somewhat strawmanning environmentalism and
| climate-change concerns here (not with malicious intention or
| anything) because I don't think that many argue that things are
| or should be _static_ - though they mostly appear to be static
| from our short viewpoint.
|
| Instead the concern is that the changes are _too fast_. It 's
| more akin to consciously bringing a meteor down on the planet
| than it is to "the world is changing and always have and humans
| are a tiny blip in the existence of the world".
| mc32 wrote:
| >static "naturalism" is a human construct.
|
| Eh, I think lots of living things "presume" today's state of
| things --and involuntarily evolve and try to adapt when things
| change from what is now to what will be then. But otherwise, I
| agree.
| glitchc wrote:
| Thank you! People don't realize how much of a blip we are in
| Earth's long history, and trying to hold on to what we are used
| to i.e. conservatism, is actually the most _unnatural_ thing to
| do.
| flerchin wrote:
| Over human lifespans, it's generally been pretty static.
| api wrote:
| Concern about climate change is about its effects on us and the
| fact that we are dependent on a whole cohort of life forms that
| we coevolved with.
|
| Obviously life will just keep evolving. There have been times
| in the geological record when there has been little to no polar
| ice and times of "snowball Earth." Life existed during all
| these times but both these extremes would be more hostile to
| humans than the current epoch.
| shisisms wrote:
| Totally agree. And beyond that human life assumes it's own
| sentience through an incredibly narrow view. Isn't it
| fair/logical to assume that if giant mushrooms did over the
| earth that given the passing of considerable time they've
| likely evolved to a far more considerable state of
| intelligence/harmony than humans have. Their
| survivability/adaptability being an illustration.
|
| Likewise, one ends up sounding like an anti climate nut, but
| the existential fear for the planet seems arrogant at best and
| massively over emphasises our place in the universe. See, I
| sound like an anti climate nut.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| the fear is of the threat to humans and the human livability
| of the planet, not for the planet itself, which will still be
| fine after we all die
|
| not sure what's arrogant about that, it's a bit of
| perspective
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Indeed. This sort of misanthropic talk is shockingly
| incoherent and absurd. For starters, demeaning human life
| automatically undermines the value of _any_ life, even more
| drastically than how acceptance of infanticide undermines
| all human rights. The notion of sacrificing ourselves for
| "the planet" is pure nonsense.
|
| Most of this talk is unthinking affectation and empty
| emotionalism, I suspect, something you might expect a mopey
| teenager to say, but it does betray some degree of
| viciousness. Envy and pride come to mind.
| technothrasher wrote:
| > Isn't it fair/logical to assume that if giant mushrooms did
| over the earth that given the passing of considerable time
| they've likely evolved to a far more considerable state of
| intelligence/harmony than humans have.
|
| No? Intelligence isn't needed for a stable evolutionary state
| to exist in an organism. You would have define what you mean
| by intelligence and then show evidence of that before it
| would be reasonable to make that assumption.
| lovecg wrote:
| The phase shifts in huge dynamic systems are fascinating. The
| Earth can look more or less the same for millions of years
| (with minor variations), then an extreme event happens and the
| world is completely transformed, never to return to a previous
| state again. We humans sure like to play with fire.
| rektide wrote:
| I really like this comment & it has a lot going for it.
|
| At the same time I think it's also worth pointing out that
| earth has likely never had as diverse an ecosystem as it has
| this millennium. The tree of life has become incredibly wide &
| complex.
|
| The naturalist tendency doesn't have to be as static as
| portrayed here. Nature itself is such a dynamic & changing
| system death & population booms chasing each other around
| wildly. What, I think, is so scary about right now is how in
| jeapordy so much life seems. Insects & birds are disappearing
| at mass scale. Large life is hunted to breaking points. Many
| animals lack for habitat and access to essential food & water.
|
| We see strictly worse coming & that has built a fervor for the
| worlds we are actively losing/destroying.
| meindnoch wrote:
| >At the same time I think it's also worth pointing out that
| earth has likely never had as diverse an ecosystem as it has
| this millennium.
|
| Lol, no.
|
| Today is not in any way more/less special than any of the
| preceding 350million years. We obviously know more, because
| today's animals don't need to be dug out from the ground as
| fossils.
| pohl wrote:
| _earth has likely never had as diverse an ecosystem as it has
| this millennium._
|
| What about the millennium or two prior to that, though?
| Hundreds of species have gone extinct since around 1900.
| medstrom wrote:
| Heh, hundreds? On a low estimate, we lose 200 to 2,000
| species every year now. Source https://wwf.panda.org/discov
| er/our_focus/biodiversity/biodiv...
| zokier wrote:
| To me it would be really suprising if previous millennium
| would not would not have been more diverse. Of course we have
| only seen <5% of this millenium so maybe its early to say?
| But the trend is not looking great.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Adam Curtis' "All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace"
| theorized that that emerging chaotic state mixed with our
| recent technological emergence has lead us to believe we can
| "contain the chaos" of this highly sophisticated system. He
| quite amazingly illustrates over 3 hours that we falsely
| believe that earth is an unchanging systematic snow globe
| rather than a chaotic system. And the more we try to control
| it, the more we sort of build up larger and more chaotic
| outcomes.
|
| There is no natural state as defined by hyper static
| equilibrium. Only brief moments where we purport to control
| it -- building up a chaotic momentum beneath it.
| mrbungie wrote:
| Hah, that sounds like typical human hubris. To think that
| we as humans can control the complexity of Earth when we
| barely control ourselves.
|
| PS: Not suggesting anything about climate change, I'm just
| amused the comment parent makes.
| achr2 wrote:
| Maybe I am misinterpreting the tone, but this is an
| incongruous belief. Nothing about a chaotic system
| precludes a *trend* in that system. I think it is quite
| objectively clear that while _extremely_ chaotic, the trend
| of recent human impact on the earth is an equally extreme
| destruction of natural habitats.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| Yeah chaotic systems are merely characterized by their
| extreme sensitivity to initial conditions for a
| particular long term outcome. All systems trend when
| modeled mathematically. It's just difficult to know where
| a chaotic system will be at any point in time because of
| how hard it is to establish initial conditions.
|
| One way you can play with a real chaotic system is to
| build one of the circuits in jc sprott's papers and vary
| the control variable. You'll see at some values of your
| control an "orderly" progression of the response
| variables, and at others a difficult to predict
| progression.
|
| https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citatio
| n&h...
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Trends are chaotic too and hit inflection points that are
| hard to predict. He goes deep on the pred/prey model from
| Isle Royal where trends go for a bit then inflect. Tons
| of wolves then tons of elk then low populations of both
| then high of both. There are trends but no hyper static
| state or relationship even.
| nradov wrote:
| Humans have destroyed natural habitats, but at the same
| time some species have come to thrive in the _unnatural_
| habitats we have created. Think of pigeons, rats,
| cockroaches, coyotes, racoons, etc. Life expands to fill
| every niche where enough energy is available for
| survival.
| miroljub wrote:
| Our planet is both chaotic and stable, depending on the
| timescale we are looking at.
|
| Chaotic on the long timescale, but pretty stable given
| the much shorter timescale of known human history.
| nradov wrote:
| If you believe that then I think you haven't spent much
| time out in nature. Some wild species populations boom
| and crash in chaotic ways even in areas that haven't been
| impacted much by humans. Nature is far from stable on any
| time scale longer than a year.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Doesn't it all average out over time though? I suppose
| things like erosion do cause permanent changes but other
| than that?
| rektide wrote:
| AWOBMOLG was more about mythologization of tech as
| oracular & all powerful, leading us to think that we can
| handle anything. Techno-utopianism.
|
| A lot of the series is about the belief that we could,
| with technologies predictive powers & neoliberal market
| ethos... And how it doesn't pan out. We have "New
| Economies" greatly bloom in the world. And about how
| instead we got the 1997 Asian financial crisis. We
| thought we were taming market complexity (via in part
| neoliberalism weirdly) but turns out not so much. We have
| the rise of cybernetic thinking & _Limits of Growth_ ( &
| it's limitations in assuming we cannot change human
| behavior).
|
| "Sure everything is trending towards shit, but we're
| humans, we can definitely go create some genius machine
| that will fix this, right"
|
| Curtis rarely comes out and makes broad conclusions, but
| the watcher is definitely left with impression of absurd
| hubris & folly & chaos-triumphant, in AWOBMOLG and in
| much else of Curtis's excellent excellent catalog of
| contemporary history documentaries.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Curtis rarely comes out and makes broad conclusions
|
| Indeed; his films (and their titles!) are oblique and
| suggestive. They are about politics, but it's very hard
| to discern his own political posture clearly. I wonder
| what kind of a man he would be to meet.
| rektide wrote:
| He's still a bit reserved somewhat in interviews but they
| are fun to watch.
|
| Just my take, but I think the core concept is really that
| there is no one actually genuinely leading, no one left
| with a compelling believable vision in any position of
| power, and that total power vacuum keeps letting mad
| scenes play out across history.
|
| The need for hope, to show a willingness to go in
| authentically good direction at scale, is a fuel that
| powers the public spirit, and we keep suffering long eras
| where it's simply unavailable.
| sharkweek wrote:
| He gives the example in (maybe my favorite content of the
| last decade) _Can't Get You Out Of My Head_ about how
| climate scientists looking to alter weather patterns to
| fight the Cold War discovered, accidentally, how even the
| tiniest of changes cause Earth's climate system to spiral
| wildly out of control.
| rektide wrote:
| CGYOOMH was amazing. One of his best most sprawling
| works.
| jvm___ wrote:
| "There is no natural state as defined by hyper static
| equilibrium. Only brief moments where we purport to control
| it -- building up a chaotic momentum beneath it."
|
| The moment when, after many years of hard work and a long
| voyage
|
| you stand in the centre of your room,
|
| house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
|
| knowing at last how you got there,
|
| and say, I own this,
|
| is the same moment when the trees unloose
|
| their soft arms from around you,
|
| the birds take back their language,
|
| the cliffs fissure and collapse,
|
| the air moves back from you like a wave
|
| and you can't breathe.
|
| No, they whisper. You own nothing.
|
| You were a visitor, time after time
|
| climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
|
| We never belonged to you.
|
| You never found us.
|
| It was always the other way round.
|
| Margaret Atwood
| tsunamifury wrote:
| It's taken me half a lifetime to even learn enough to
| start to appreciate her wisdom.
| ask_b123 wrote:
| I might not have lived enough to appreciate it, how do I
| do so?
| jvm___ wrote:
| "You" in a geological and time sense are almost nothing.
|
| Fill the room your in with dead-body clones of yourself,
| it will probably take well over a hundred.
|
| Collect all the humans on the surface of the Earth,
| they'd all fit inside Rohde Island (thanks XKCD).
| Humanity is a tiny fraction of the mass and surface area
| of the world.
|
| You've been alive for less than 100 years and only seen,
| heard, touched or felt the smallest fraction of the
| surface of the Earth. Met a tiny fraction of the people.
|
| Time wise you're limited to 80? years of cognizant
| thought. Maybe 90? Humans have been around for thousands
| of years, and earth has been around for billions.
|
| Yet, we as humans claim parts of nature as our own. My
| land, my country, my trees, my pet rock. All those things
| aren't yours and never were.
|
| The poem just imagines what would happen if nature
| suddenly decided to reclaim what was always hers.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| If you're being serious, it's more that within time you
| begin to realize both your fragility and lack of power
| over yourself and nature. And on top of that you realize
| the narrow perspectives you held as a child that came for
| your culture, like owning things or believing you have
| control over them, are far less real than we think. Here
| she points out, look, you can say you own something, but
| that's a cultural concept. Long after you are dead and
| gone that land will be there, you will not. Long after
| you said you can control nature, it will consume you in
| the grave. You are a part of it, and for a time you can
| exert some power over it, but in the long term, we are
| just waiting to be overrun by it. What may appear
| inferior, could, over a long time horizon, prove
| superior. Trees for example have survived 100's of
| millions of years, and humans are a mere 10's of
| thousands. We are young, ambitious and naive and we are
| cutting them down -- the thing that provides the very air
| we breath.
|
| Its a broader perspective that come with age I'm
| guessing.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Your account profile appears to claim " This account is
| no longer active in protest of Hacker News censorship."
|
| Did you forget to update it?
| mecsred wrote:
| Try not to die anytime soon!
| C-x_C-f wrote:
| > earth has likely never had as diverse an ecosystem as it
| has this millennium
|
| Don't worry, we can fix that:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
| tsunamifury wrote:
| I think your flippant response here robs us of a
| conversation as to why we do this -- what larger purpose
| does it serve in the macro scale mentioned earlier. Is
| earth a set of short term optimized life leading to
| different eras or are humans the first sentient life that
| must take responsibility for it. If so how and with what
| goals. For our own preservation? To freeze all life as it
| is today?
| inpdx wrote:
| No other species has had this great of an impact on that
| many species. If we were wise and thoughtful,
| collectively we could both advance ourselves and allow
| the diversity to continue. So it's a shame we aren't.
| larkost wrote:
| Arguably cyanobacteria beat us to the punch a bit less
| than 2.5 billion years ago in the Great Oxidation Event,
| when they killed off much/most of the other life by
| producing a lot of oxygen:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
| denton-scratch wrote:
| The lifeforms they killed off were not very diverse, and
| not very interesting - mostly bacteria.
| kevviiinn wrote:
| Humans are notoriously short sighted
| boringg wrote:
| To learn and try to understand that is the goal of human
| life. How can we possible understand our planet if we
| destroy all of its resources, kill off its diversity of
| life before we have an inkling of the complexity of how
| it works?
|
| We can continue to exist and learn without killing off
| the planet.
| bena wrote:
| It's something George Carlin has touched on as well.
| Paraphrasing a bit: We're not really trying to save the planet.
| The planet has been here for billions of years, it'll be here
| for billions of years after we're all dead and gone. The planet
| will be fine. The people? The people are fucked. That's what
| we're trying to save. We're trying to keep the planet
| hospitable to us.
| louison11 wrote:
| And the animals. There is more than planet and humans. If it
| was just us - to some extent - I'd say "we get what we
| deserve." But animals vastly outnumber humans, feel pain just
| like us, and do not deserve any of it. At least that's what I
| find myself experiencing when I think about the future of our
| planet.
|
| Edit: I looked it up. Estimate is 20,000,121,091,000,000,000
| or 20 billion billion animals. "Vastly" was clearly an
| understatement.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Well billions may be stretching it, by some estimates in 1
| billion years Earth will be be hotter by cca 25 degress. All
| kinds of runaway greenhouse effects will happen way before
| that, ocean will become probably unhospitable warm chemical
| gunk and some of it may evaporate out of Earth's atmosphere
| and then taken by solar winds out of gravity well.
|
| Some primitive form of life will probably thrive for another
| billion years till Earth is slowly sterilized by Sun, but not
| complex life like us.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| [dead]
| pil0u wrote:
| Changes are static or not depending on the scale of time you
| consider.
|
| In a time span of billions (even millions) of years, our planet
| indeed went through different eras.
|
| For a duration of one human life, the state of nature is
| expected to remain quite static. The problem with climate
| change is that we started to witness the planet entering in a
| new era in such a small time frame - roughly 200 years.
| nunobrito wrote:
| [flagged]
| tommywg7 wrote:
| What a weird comment. The ozone hole WAS a huge problem...
| and then the world banned CFCs and we fixed it. But it took
| years of lawsuits, journalism, and scientists speaking up.
|
| Similarly, global warming is a huge problem today and
| threatens our future. We will fix it just like we did the
| ozone hole, but again it will take decades of lawsuits,
| science, public outcry.
|
| The problem this time is twofold: the rise of conspiracy
| theorists in the Republican Party, who refuse to even
| acknowledge the problem, and the stranglehold that
| globalist neoliberal corporations have on the economy.
|
| The second being what you meant in your last paragraph.
| It's hard to actually address waste, overconsumption, and
| pollution when our economy and government is controlled by
| a handful of corps, who are getting better and better at
| greenwashing.
| carlmr wrote:
| >The problem this time is twofold: the rise of conspiracy
| theorists in the Republican Party, who refuse to even
| acknowledge the problem, and the stranglehold that
| globalist neoliberal corporations have on the economy.
|
| Well this time it's a lot worse because not using CFCs
| had a comparatively small impact on the world economy,
| with a big payoff.
|
| There is currently no realistic path to keep somewhat
| decent living standards for the number of people we have,
| while ramping down the world economy sufficiently to
| battle global warming.
|
| Even if everybody turned vegan and stopped flying it
| wouldn't be enough.
| nunobrito wrote:
| Wood was once used to power engines, then coal, then oil
| and in current days electricity. The sooner you move to
| the next stage of evolution, the more efficient you can
| become and better afford to preserve natural resources.
|
| What most people forget is that pollution comes from the
| basic need of survival and improving life quality. So you
| need efficiency and balance what matters for most humans.
|
| Instead of forcing everyone to become vegan and to stop
| flying, how about supporting the industries that create
| artificial meat cheaper than the real thing and airplanes
| that run on electricity? (both of these things already
| exist nowadays)
| importantbrian wrote:
| It's bizarre to me that climate skeptics think the ozone
| issue is a point in their favor. Ozone depletion was a real
| issue, but the international community came together and
| banned the use of CFCs. Since then ozone levels stabilized
| and then started to recover. They should reach pre-1980s
| levels this century based on current trends. It is a clear
| example of collective action successfully addressing a
| climate problem.
| morsch wrote:
| I doubt there is much of a discussion to be had here, but
| at least you could try to get easily verifiable dates
| right.
|
| Global cooling: 1970s
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
|
| Ozone layer depletion: succesfully mitigated starting in
| the 1980s https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_for_the_P
| r...
|
| Anthropogenic global warming: scientific consensus since
| around 1990 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_First_Asse
| ssment_Report
|
| For reference, it's the year 2023 now.
| nunobrito wrote:
| Don't really care. Basically the same old tricks with new
| faces. Even worse when you try to use the word
| "consensus" when it was everything except that.
|
| End result for europeans is paying more taxes while other
| places keep doing far worse. I'll be damned to yet see
| any of those groups advocating for more nuclear power
| around here to save the environment.
|
| Sure this isn't binary and plenty has improved in regards
| to ecology when you want to nitpick on reddit-style, what
| truly bothers me is the sheer percentage of green washing
| instead of focus on real improvement.
| akvadrako wrote:
| This isn't true. For most of history we just don't have the
| resolution to see changes over a few hundred years.
|
| But we do have recent examples of much quicker temperature
| changes. During the Younger Dryas the global average temp
| dropped about 5degC over a few decades and about 1000 years
| later, rose again just as quickly.
| kjs3 wrote:
| I often use https://xkcd.com/1732/ when someone says "well,
| temperature has always varied...this is just part of a
| natural cycle".
| bheadmaster wrote:
| It's somewhat odd that one has to explicitly say they're not
| "anti-climate change" when presenting any kind of perspective
| that could be perceived as such. As if they're afraid of the
| somebody punishing them for daring to think such "problematic"
| and "destructive" thoughts...
| jacob019 wrote:
| During the Trump era, conspiracy theories became a prominent
| part of mainstream conversation, while scientific knowledge
| was often dismissed as just one perspective among many. In my
| opinion, a societal culture that treats truth as malleable
| poses a greater threat than individuals on the internet who
| are hesitant to publicly express anti-scientific beliefs.
| beginnings wrote:
| I mean there's science, and then there's an unelected
| global comity acting as an authority, setting an agenda
| that is blindly followed by people who cant think for
| themselves.
|
| If I didn't know covid was a designed scam id be very
| concerned that our brightest and best thought locking down
| the world for a a virus with a 0.01 ifr was logical.
|
| Thankfully it had nothing to do with logic, or health.
| dbtc wrote:
| Then why?
| mcguire wrote:
| Some days I wish I could contemplate the possibility of
| roughly 80,000,000 deaths with such equanimity.
| jacob019 wrote:
| Right? We should consider the added worth of each life
| saved by slowing down the virus's spread, which allowed
| time to develop vaccines. Although the worldwide response
| was far from perfect, I'm truly thankful for the
| technology and measures that protected numerous people.
| While I value freedom and individual rights, it's
| challenging to compare those principles to the importance
| of preserving a life.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| The internet in general and this forum in particular is prone
| to pedantic misinterpretations-- just heading it off.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| I understand why you said it. It just seems that the
| general atmosphere of the internet is that of self-
| censorship and fear. It just doesn't sit well with me.
|
| The intolerance of different views is driving the hostile
| and divisive atmosphere in the social media.
|
| Let's say there's a person who's really anti-climate
| change. How is that person supposed to change their mind,
| if they get attacked every time they voice their opinions,
| instead of being approached in a civil manner? People can't
| be bullied people into agreement, only silenced and driven
| further away into their own echo chamber, at which point
| you lose any chance you had of ever changing their minds.
| carapace wrote:
| I'm not saying it's right or useful, but I think a lot of
| people (especially young people) are just _really sick_
| of climate change denial-ism. I know I am. I 'm nearly
| half a century old and the handwriting has been on the
| wall my whole life.
|
| I don't want to quash discussion (interesting and
| informative discussion is the main reason I use HN) but,
| yeah, it's not a bad thing to differentiate yourself from
| the climate deniers, if you want people to hear you these
| days.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| Being _really sick_ of a certain group of people just
| because they hold different beliefs than you is exactly
| what causes the division.
|
| Why are you sick of them? That's a fairly strong emotion.
| Do you hold resentment because _they_ are the ones who
| are going to bring the apocalypse to the world? Is it
| annoyance from hearing too many incorrect opinions? Or
| something else entirely?
|
| Honest question - why are you, _personally_ , sick of
| them? I'd really like to know.
| bloaf wrote:
| 1. Their existence is the political justification for
| inaction.
|
| 2. They form an unholy alliance with other anti-
| empiricist groups (e.g. anti-vaxxers, young earth
| creationists) to undermine reality-based policies,
| including in education.
|
| 3. Their denialist opinions are typically held in bad
| faith. That is, they are held because _if they were true_
| they would confirm some pre-existing belief (e.g. that
| scientists are tools of a global elite cabal), not
| because an independent evaluation of the facts has led
| them there. This reinforces their hostility towards
| whatever group they think is lying.
|
| 4. Denialists typically engage in a perverse form of
| virtue signaling. The greater and more well evidence a
| claim is, the greater the "cred" they get for denying it.
| This creates a fertile field for sham experts to sell
| lies to members.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| the existence of santa claus is a "belief"
|
| climate change isn't
| Loughla wrote:
| Legitimately, do you believe that people posting on
| internet forums is an effective means of getting someone
| to change their minds?
|
| My take is that by the time the poster goes through the
| effort to post, they have adopted [insert view here] into
| their personal belief system; they're not seeking
| answers.
|
| Don't most studies show that fact based arguments only
| cause people with faulty beliefs to dig in further?
| bheadmaster wrote:
| > Legitimately, do you believe that people posting on
| internet forums is an effective means of getting someone
| to change their minds?
|
| Some percentage of them? Yes. Unfortunately, there's no
| way to know when that happens, so it's very easy to
| assume it doesn't.
|
| > My take is that by the time the poster goes through the
| effort to post, they have adopted [insert view here] into
| their personal belief system; they're not seeking
| answers.
|
| If what you're saying is true, what's the logic behind
| censoring people? Nobody is able to convince anyone of
| anything anyway.
| Loughla wrote:
| >If what you're saying is true, what's the logic behind
| censoring people?
|
| Because at some point, arguing the same topic over and
| over and over is exhausting. The impact of greenhouse
| gases and climate change, for example, has been
| established as 'a thing' for my entire adult life. And
| yet people still want to argue about it even existing.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| > arguing the same topic over and over and over is
| exhausting
|
| Is that, by itself, a good enough reason to censor
| people?
| croes wrote:
| Because therr are people who use such theories to claim that
| climate change always existed and that mankind has nothing to
| do with it.
|
| But usually that ignore the speed of climate change
| psychphysic wrote:
| The real effect of cancel culture is the chilling effect it
| has even on relatively anonymous conversation.
|
| Humans are social beings and the spectre that someone could
| be outcast for sounding like they are from the wrong clan is
| an innate phobia.
| Loughla wrote:
| What I find fascinating about the current debates about
| cancel culture is that it ignores, on both sides, the fact
| that it isn't new. The only thing that has changed is the
| balance of power.
|
| From a US perspective - In the past, social shunning and
| ostracizing was used as a way to norm the culture for the
| predominately white, christian culture. Cancel culture was
| literally being run out of your town, and/or excluded from
| social and religious events. This had a huge chilling
| effect.
|
| Now, the power belongs to a previously marginalized group
| (lgbtq/minority individuals) to 'cancel' people.
|
| It's not new; the only difference is that the people who
| used to have to power are pissed that their views aren't
| the popular views anymore. It's a symptom of a massive
| societal change that has occurred and the subset of people
| who refuse to let go of their outdated ways.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| > It's not new; the only difference is that the people
| who used to have to power are pissed that their views
| aren't the popular views anymore. It's a symptom of a
| massive societal change that has occurred and the subset
| of people who refuse to let go of their outdated ways.
|
| I think this is an extremely skewed perspective on the
| whole issue.
|
| It's not _us vs. them_ - cancel culture was, and still
| is, driven by ignorance and sensationalism. People like
| the rush of a good story, regardless of whether it 's
| true or not - that's what makes cancel culture so unjust.
|
| Whether it's a gay person being called a Satan's spawn,
| or Richard Stallman being called a pedophile, or any
| other case - all cases have one thing in common:
| exaggeration for the sake of sensationalism, and
| punishment being completely out of proportion with the
| crime (note that by "crime" here I strictly mean "the act
| that is condemned by the group doing the cancellation",
| regardless of its actual criminality).
|
| If you're a member of the previously-oppressed-now-
| powerful group, you may rejoice at the thought of
| retribution on those that caused you (your group) so much
| injustice in the past, but I hope you realize how
| hypocritical that makes the whole "tolerance" story that
| your group has been pushing for the last few decades. But
| I guess that power corrupts, no matter who's wielding it.
| psychphysic wrote:
| What on earth are you talking about. 7 years ago a woman
| made a joke before she jumped on a flight and landed to
| see it make the world news.
|
| Are you seriously suggesting that could happen before
| social media?
|
| Perhaps you're quite young and don't realise quite how
| different the world has become over the past 10 years.
| carapace wrote:
| "Cancel culture" was e.g. gays getting beaten up by random
| strangers just for existing, and now it's e.g. getting
| fired for telling a homophobic joke in public.
| derefr wrote:
| Rather than motivating environmental conservation out of some
| species-level nostalgia for "the biodiversity of our youth",
| there's another, forward-looking motivation for it: the species
| that evolved at the same time we did -- our "evolutionary
| cohort" -- are the species of our own Environment of
| Evolutionary Adaptedness. While they may not share our
| ecological niche, they all share a dependency on the same air
| mix we do, the same temperature ranges, the same water
| osmolarity and pH, etc.
|
| This implies two things:
|
| - Insofar as we want to keep the Earth a good place for _us_ to
| live, we can measure our success by the number of our
| evolutionary cohort of species that stick around;
|
| - Insofar as we plan to live in space, terraform other worlds,
| etc., it's only animals of our evolutionary cohort that will be
| able to comfortably survive in the places we optimize for our
| own well-being. If we increase global CO2 levels here on Earth
| to such a point that species on Earth that like our current air
| mix begin dying off, and we see an evolution of replacement
| species that prefer higher CO2 levels (and we ourselves retreat
| to dome cities or something to avoid that fate); but then we
| later terraform Mars to have the environment of Earth ca
| 5000BCE; then the species that inhabit Earth by that point,
| won't be able to be transplanted to Mars. Only the species we
| had _conserved_ -- keeping them in the dome-cities with us --
| would be able to be transplanted.
|
| (Another way to say that second one, is that if we screw up the
| Earth's environment, but later fix it, we'll lose biodiversity
| _twice_ -- we 'll have killed off our evolutionary cohort with
| the screw-up, _and_ we 'll kill off the newer-evolved species
| with our "fix.")
| Ma8ee wrote:
| The time scale for new species adapted to a completely new
| climate is many millions of years, not a few thousands. What
| we destroy today won't be replaced while humans as a species
| as we know it today even exists.
|
| It will always be many orders of magnitude easier to
| terraform Earth, even after we screwed it up, than trying to
| terraform Mars.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > The time scale for new species adapted to a completely
| new climate is many millions of years, not a few thousands.
| What we destroy today won't be replaced while humans as a
| species as we know it today even exists.
|
| When it comes to changing climate (and some degree of
| pollution) instead of newly evolved adaptations you get
| migrations or selection for particular alleles. Adjust up
| and back down and you can end up with diversity constraints
| on both ends.
| njarboe wrote:
| Hopefully in the future we will have two beautiful worlds
| full of life. Doesn't that dream seem great?
| ascar wrote:
| > The time scale for new species adapted to a completely
| new climate is many millions of years, not a few thousands.
|
| On what are you basing this statement? I would argue that
| entirely depends on the complexity of the species and the
| time per generation. Bacteria certainly can adapt to
| extremely different conditions within years, if not even
| quicker. And these "simple life forms" are arguably much
| more important for the ecosystem than more complex ones
| like mammals.
| yummypaint wrote:
| We have been agressively terraforming the earth into a form
| less accomodating of current complex life for some time
| now, and we show no signs of slowing. That's the whole
| problem
| gizmo686 wrote:
| Agressively?
|
| We increased CO2 concentration by about 200 parts-per-
| million (a factor of about 2x), and increased the average
| temperature by about 1-2degC. Rain patterns are slightly
| different. Ocean PH levels dropped by about 0.04 .
|
| Sure, given how delicate the biosphere is, these small
| changes have a significant effect. However, if we look at
| Earth on the same scale as any other object in the solar
| system, the environment on Earth today is almost
| identical to the environment on Earth 1,000 years ago.
| The atmosphere is about 1023 millibars; 78% nitrogen, 21%
| oxygen, 1% argon, and 0.04% everything else. Liquid water
| covers most of the surface, with an active water cycle
| causing water rain to occur periodically over much of the
| planet.
|
| The temperature change is so small, that we would not
| notice it if it were on any other planet in the solar
| system, and it is far below the noise floor of day-to-day
| variance
| RGamma wrote:
| https://ourworldindata.org/land-use
| robocat wrote:
| They might be talking about farmland. For example,
| pastures, agriculture and forestry in New Zealand has
| approximately zero in common with the native flora &
| fauna that was here before humans modified the
| environment. The native plants that remain are virtually
| all in areas that are simply too uneconomic to farm in
| any way (usually mountainous). ~55% of New Zealand is
| being used for sheep and cattle, and another 8% for
| exotic forestry.
|
| We also eat an extraordinary amount of the fish and
| seafood in the world from the ocean. "The global per
| capita consumption footprint in 2011 is estimated at 27
| kg. Our estimate is higher than the 18.6 kg reported in
| FAO statistics for the same year, as it also takes into
| account the indirect use of capture fisheries production
| by the fishmeal sector." "the conversion of wild-capture
| fish that would not be used for human consumption into
| fishmeal and subsequent use as aquafeed, results in an
| overall increase in human consumption of fish". "31% of
| the world's wild fish stocks are estimated to be
| overfished, 58% fully exploited".
| codersfocus wrote:
| Yes aggressively. Raising the _average_ (I don 't
| understand why you'd bring up noise when discussing
| average) temperature of the entire Earth by 1-2 degrees C
| in a period of 100 years, from 1 single organism is
| remarkable. Any why specify CO2 as if that's the only
| thing we're polluting with? What about methane? Remember
| when we disrupted the ozone layer? What about pollution
| with plastics, and industrial chemicals in land and
| water?
|
| And don't forget that the Earth is more than willing to
| enter a negative feedback loop -- she will take that 1-2
| degree increase in temperature and say "I heard you like
| warm weather, so I'm gonna release all this trapped
| methane and CO2 from my frozen parts and let you have it
| too."
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Responding to a + change with another + change is a
| positive feedback loop.
| sclarisse wrote:
| If we want to make the temperature on Mars like the one
| on Earth, it's not going to take 2C and a feedback loop.
| It's going to take like 75C.
| eastof wrote:
| This is such a dangerous perspective. Why would we want
| to make the temperature on Mars like the one on Earth!?!
| We already have 7 Billion people here to take care of and
| we're already witnessing mass heat, flooding, and famine
| deaths from climate change. People focusing on colonizing
| Mars when we have such an immediate problem to address
| TODAY are delusional and actively endangering the most
| vulnerable people in the world.
| sclarisse wrote:
| I don't understand what you're saying is dangerous
| exactly, because the thread you're replying to is full of
| people pointing out the ludicrousness of "terraforming
| Mars" compared to doing anything-at-all on Earth:
| pointing out the massive gulf between "massive" human
| impact and what is necessary for Mars (far, far greater).
|
| I interpret this as you misinterpreting the opinions
| here, confusing them with the opinion of unrelated
| colonization-fanatics, via an unknown mechanism; I will
| not attempt any defense of either perspective right now.
| biotech wrote:
| > People focusing on colonizing Mars when we have such an
| immediate problem to address TODAY are delusional and
| actively endangering the most vulnerable people in the
| world.
|
| I don't agree with the logic that we cannot focus on two
| things at the same time. It's like saying, "People
| focusing on making movies when we have such an immediate
| problem to address TODAY are delusional and actively
| endangering the most vulnerable people in the world." or
| "People focusing on curing fibromyalgia when we have such
| an immediate problem to address TODAY are delusional and
| actively endangering the most vulnerable people in the
| world."
|
| The bottleneck to reversing climate change is not money
| or manpower, it is politics. We cannot force other people
| (especially in other countries) to do the right thing for
| the environment. We can, however, do our best to improve
| things on our side and pressure others to do so as well.
| And while we are putting our best effort towards that, we
| shouldn't stop making art, researching medicine, or even,
| trying to colonize mars.
|
| Also, the research and development needed to colonize
| Mars may very well yield scientific discoveries that
| allow us to reverse climate change. And even if it
| doesn't, and Earth is ruined despite our _best_ efforts
| here, we won 't have all our eggs in one basket.
|
| My point is, I just do not believe that researching
| colonization of Mars will do anything to thwart our
| efforts to improve the Earth. Quite the contrary, it may
| help those efforts.
| ordu wrote:
| I believe that your reasoning misses one crucial detail:
| we do not exactly know how to climate control a whole
| planet, we have almost no experience with that.
|
| Attempts to terraform Mars allow humans to try some
| things and to see what happens. It will allow to make our
| models of climate more precise.
|
| For now our understanding of a climate based on
| _observational_ studies. Not a controlled experiment. So
| when we start to do something having some climatic goals
| in mind, we 'll start to learn a lot. And it would be
| better for Earth if we started with Mars.
|
| Though we have no time, but it doesn't seem a sufficient
| reason not to try get at least some experience from
| terraforming Mars. It may reduce risks.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _Globally agricultural land area is approximately five
| billion hectares, or 38 percent of the global land
| surface. About one-third of this is used as cropland,
| while the remaining two-thirds consist of meadows and
| pastures) for grazing livestock._ "
|
| https://www.fao.org/sustainability/news/detail/en/c/12742
| 19/
| throwway120385 wrote:
| That 1-2 degree C change is enough to cause mature trees
| all over my US state to start dying of heat stress every
| year. So yes, it seems warranted. I've never seen
| anything like it in my 37 years on this earth.
| ke88y wrote:
| _> It will always be many orders of magnitude easier to
| terraform Earth, even after we screwed it up, than trying
| to terraform Mars._
|
| It's many orders of magnitude easier to afford a
| $100,000,000 home if you make $10,000 per year than if you
| only make $1 per year.
|
| But you're never going to afford that home either way.
| replygirl wrote:
| We reversed the Chicago River 120 years ago, protected
| the Netherlands from flooding for centuries, blasted out
| the bed of the East River to make New York one of the
| most successful ports in history, laid at least one canal
| through every major ithsmus, and built dozens of
| reservoirs and irrigation systems into every hydrological
| ecosystem that touches a major population center. That's
| just water projects.
| gus_massa wrote:
| > _We reversed the Chicago River 120 years ago_
|
| I had never heard that. More info
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_River
| ke88y wrote:
| None of these are even remotely close to terraforming.
| ask_b123 wrote:
| What is an isthmus? Do the Pyrenees count as one?
| Tehuantepec?
| RangerScience wrote:
| > evolutionary cohort
|
| This is a very cool idea; I haven't heard of it before, and
| I'm not finding much on this concept on the 'web.
|
| Anything you can point me to? :)
| comboy wrote:
| > unrotted dead plants
|
| That happened with trees because cellulose was new, but I don't
| think there would be an issue with plants which cells have been
| around for a long time.
|
| But maybe I'm missing something in which case I'm happy to
| learn.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| On the blip of the radar that is Human Civilization, it is
| abssolutely appropriate to be "naturalistic" since the
| organisms on this current Earth are very sensitive to sudden
| changes one way or the other.
|
| But philosophically speaking or as hypothetical interestellar
| gods who live for millions of years then yes, worrying about
| what's "natural" as we currently conceive it is narrow-minded.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > And I am not trying to build an anti climate change argument
|
| Oh definitely, Sagan forbid someone cast doubt on the Consensus
| and the Science!
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