Climate change could mean the extinction of our species

[russtafa]

when are yah coming over for a good pounding girl yah know you want that hole pounded yah wench

[Prospero]

An Oxford philosopher's take on the threat of manmade extinction.



http://www.theatlantic.com/technolog...nction/253821/

[russtafa]

An Oxford philosopher's take on the threat of manmade extinction.



http://www.theatlantic.com/technolog...nction/253821/

bullshit ,bullshit

[Prospero]

From the philosophy department of the university of wagga wagga

[Stavros]

Thanks for the link, Prospero, but I was not impressed with Bostrom's arguments. Even with AI and robots, surely humans can programme systems not to morph into the avenging HAL's of the future. I would expect robots to be replacements for astronauts so that 'manned' missions to Mars and other planets can take place.

The most interesting talk on the future I have seen is in the link below where Sarah Harper discussed emerging trends in demography, and the curious way in which evolution seems to have decided that there are enough humans -ultimate forecasts of the world's population are being revised downwards, largely due to decreasing fertility among men -is this nature's way of restoring the balance between humans and nature? Although that does leave plenty of time for humans to transform great swathes of our beautiful planet into concrete and barbed wire....a 20 minute video but worth every second.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...=ILCNETTXT3486

[Prospero]

Thanks Stavros. Will watch asap

[trish]

There’s a conundrum popular among scifi buffs known as Fermi’s Paradox. The paradox makes note of multitude of galaxies, stars and planets; references the Drake equation for computing the expected density of alien civilizations and then asks, “If alien civilizations are so plentiful, why haven’t we’ve seen any evidence of them?”

Among the many possible resolutions, an obvious conjecture is that almost all civilizations are extremely short lived because they tend to exponentially exhaust their resources and collapse. That’s pretty much what happened on Easter Island and it seems to be what’s happening right now on “Island Earth.”

We’ve used up half our the planet’s oil reserves. The U.S. has used up over half of it’s oil reserves. We used to burn natural gas just to get rid of it! Now we’re poisoning our fresh water supplies to “frack up” the last bit of natural gas we can find.

To support our populations we have to blanket our exhausted fields with expensive insecticides and chemical fertilizers. We grow our meat (hogs and chickens) in rank factories whose runoff also threatens our freshwater and depreciates property values for tens of miles around the foul smelling sites.

Our use of fossil fuels injects 30 billions tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually (at least ten times the rate of volcanic carbon dioxide production). Forty percent of the Arctic ice has melted leaving behind a low albedo surface that increases the rate of Arctic warming. The Arctic warming effects atmospheric currents (like the jet stream) in ways that have yet to be understood. One possibility is that the meanders and kinks that naturally form and propagate through the jet stream will have decreased group velocity; i.e. weather patterns that moved through North America and Europe rather quickly (a few hours to a day) will linger for several days and create feedbacks that result in more extreme weather. It’s possible we are already experiencing the consequences of this atmospheric pollution.

Our population is almost at seven billion persons. We don’t want to reach carrying capacity. Believe me, life at carrying capacity is hard, cruel and violent. Carrying capacity is where the forces of natural selection shape our future evolution for us. If that future is not extinction, it is certainly the extinction of our civilization.

The good news is that when effective birth control is made available, most women the over opt to use it. The Island of Tikopia held their population in check well below carrying capacity for 3000 years using coitus interruptus, abortion and infanticide. Of course they had a moral structure that was commensurate with their particular ecological situation. Modern religious morality still allows us abstinence and the rhythm method.

[Stavros]

The conjecture that other forms of life on other planets has been and gone is indeed an intriguing idea, and may even be close to explaining the early history of humans and why there does not appear to have been a uniform growth of human communities across Earth at the same time and same rate. But I think you risk being a determinist if you paint such a gloomy picture of humans destroying the basis of what it is that sustains us; the RapaNui were decimated by the slave trade and the diseases that infected the remaining communities on Easter Island when the slaves with the diseases were repatriated; they may have been impoverished by the erosion of natural resources on the Island from earlier generations, but it isn't clear if this was solely due to human agency or a combination of humans +disease + rats -even climate change.

The first nations of America would be in a similar position -did they hunt the buffalo to extinction? You know how decimated they were by smallpox; I don't know about de-forestation, but human agency I agree cannot be ruled out of the equation.

And yet, the fact that we have survived so long is also intriguing -the USA is now less dependent on petroleum imports than it has been for 20 years; oil and gas are finite resources so this would be an optimum moment to invest in alternative energy to make the transition away from hydrocarbons easier to handle and not least because wind, wave, solar and biofuels have all presented problems of finance, technology and efficiency in the early stages of their careers. If it is true that the Arctic is warming, and if this does mean the evaporation of sea ice, the whole region will be easier to mine for hydrocarbons, although I don't think it will be a new Middle East as far as volume goes. The same goes for the new plays in East Africa, the Eastern mediterranean, the eastern Gulf of Mexico around Cuba, the bitterly contested Falkland Islands/Malvinas Basin, and the intensely contested seas straddling the Philippines (north of Palawan) Japan, Malaysia and N/S Korea. Basically, from here on, even with new fields in the Middle East, its a mopping up of increasingly smaller reservoirs, on and offshore.

As for us, the link to Sarah Chapman's video in my earlier post, may offer you some thought on my recent theme: increasing infertility among men is slowing down the rate of population growth, which will peak around 2050 and then decline -earth will sustain 10 billion or so, but from them on the rate of growth slows; yet life actually gets longer, because chemicals, in the form of medicine can prolong life; I think human societies will eat less and less meat as the decades go on through a combination of a decline in battery farming (which is already happening in Europe) and a change in eating habits; although on that simple basis I won't be around to see it, unless I also live to be 100 or 120!!

Its not as gloomy as it can often sound, Trish -humans can be destructive, yes; but haven't we also shown that over time we can innovate our way out of a crisis? I would have expected you to be erring on the side of the positives in science...

[russtafa]

From the philosophy department of the university of wagga wagga

makes just as much sense as your quacks

[yosi]

http://video.nationalgeographic.com/...l-warming-101/


http://video.nationalgeographic.com/...rward-climate/


http://video.nationalgeographic.com/...c-degree-five/


http://video.nationalgeographic.com/...gc-degree-six/