https://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/...rs-panoramic-photography-awards-revealed.html
This world might be worth saving.
This world might be worth saving.
If only for an hour or two while I check out someone else's world.https://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/...rs-panoramic-photography-awards-revealed.html
This world might be worth saving.
This world might be worth saving.
We can and are killing our planet. Mars is dead, Earth can die to. So please no more talk about were only hurting ourselves. We are not alone here you know!
Daniel, I'm sorry, but I've really got to take issue here.
First, it helps to have precise terms. Part of the problem here is that we are dealing with language, which is inherently imprecise. That said, to the extent that we CAN be precise, we SHOULD. To that end, I'm going to set out some definitions:
'Destroy the earth' - the earth is a planet, one of several in our solar system (as you well know). To 'destroy' the earth would necessarily require the complete disassociation of all its constituent components, such that it would never be possible to reconstitute the planet.
'Render uninhabitable' - life exists on this planet in great profundity and virtually everywhere we have cared to look on it. To 'render uninhabitable' would require us, at minimum, to permanently destroy all life-sustaining elements and compounds. At the least, we'd have destroy both carbon and silicon as these are the two elements we believe to be capable of rendering any form of life possible, and we'd have to somehow prevent them from ever coming here again.
'Sterilize the earth' - as noted above, life is ubiquitous on our planet. To 'sterilize' the earth would require us to make it impossible for even the tiniest, hardiest microbe to survive anywhere on or in the planet.
'Render incapable of supporting human life' - we are rather fragile creates, as noted elsewhere. The conditions required for supporting human life are rather narrowly defined: at minimum we need to be able to access liquid water and sunlight within a particular spectral range so that we can grow crops, raise livestock, and generally sustain ourselves.
Of the terms listed above, I only see us being able to actually carry out the last, and I'm not even fully convinced of that.
As a purely objective matter, we lack the ability to generate the kinds of forces necessary to completely destroy the biome outright. People will point to Venus and shout "But greenhouse!". It's true that Venus is a textbook example of a runaway greenhouse effect, but people conveniently forget that Venus receives very nearly TWICE the solar energy per square meter that we do. In addition, we have historical evidence to indicate that, even at the incredibly elevated levels of CO2 we have now, we have seen levels over twice as high in the fossil record, and life was abundant even then.
Those same people will also conveniently forget that we are currently in a lull between ice advances. Historically speaking, for at least the last 2.5 million years we have been in an ice age, punctuated by periodic warming events. It has actually been the norm through most of our planet's history to NOT have large ice sheets covering the poles, as near as we can tell.
Now, I suspect you have already fired off a stormy response and have not bothered to read this far, Daniel, because that is what you tend to do. HOWEVER, on the off chance you HAVE in fact read this far, I'm going to finish with this:
All of the above is factual and accurate to the best of my knowledge. NONE of that is meant to suggest that I'm OK with the idea of dumping toxic waste in the oceans, filling the air with CO2, CO, or any of the other myriad things that we produce that are deadly, or acting with complete disregard for our environment. I agree that we need to establish a balance.
However, we have to understand that our existence comes with a price. We have to work out what price we are willing to pay, and what price we are willing to ask our planet to pay. If we get the answers to either of those questions wrong, I'm pretty sure we will cease to be. However, the planet will keep on going just fine, and will continue creating new forms of life, some of which will almost certainly come about on the remains of our bones, and the bones of our civilization. Only when our star finally consumes the earth in its death throes will this planet become 'sterile' and 'unable to support life' (probably).
I have to lively up myself before I exit this world. Tall order, I admit! Thanks for reminding me my time left here isn't generous. But your own? You hopefully will stick around, you have important matters to remind us of!
We're pining for the loss of biodiversity adapted for a cold-climate Earth, while setting changes in motion for a hot-climate Earth. Given that life on Earth survived after a large rock collided with the planet, reducing atmospheric oxygen from 30% to just below 20%, and taking a significant fraction of bio-available carbon out of the carbon cycle forever (until humans started liberating it), life will find a way to survive us, too.
So is the argument really that humanity deserves to be saved? Why?
We're pining for the loss of biodiversity adapted for a cold-climate Earth, while setting changes in motion for a hot-climate Earth. Given that life on Earth survived after a large rock collided with the planet, reducing atmospheric oxygen from 30% to just below 20%, and taking a significant fraction of bio-available carbon out of the carbon cycle forever (until humans started liberating it), life will find a way to survive us, too.
So is the argument really that humanity deserves to be saved? Why?
We could answer that if we knew how many species there were to start with. But we don't, and probably never will.What percentage of plant and animal live vanished never to be seem again?
I fulfilled my biological imperative. So what? To me, my family is all-important. To the grand sweep of humanity, we're a speck upon a wave. To the biosphere, we're just a few more blobs of animated protein jostling to propagate our particular pattern of amino acids onto the next generation.Tonight when you kiss or wish you could kiss your son good nigh. Try to remember how you could have ever asked such a silly question. We should be saved because you had a son. Because you would die for his continuation.
We could answer that if we knew how many species there were to start with. But we don't, and probably never will.
Even without human intervention, species come and go. It's wise to (attempt to) mitigate or reverse human impact, but we can't and shouldn't attempt to save everything. Some species would've gone whether we industrialised or not - they were just out-competed.
I fulfilled my biological imperative. So what? To me, my family is all-important. To the grand sweep of humanity, we're a speck upon a wave. To the biosphere, we're just a few more blobs of animated protein jostling to propagate our particular pattern of amino acids onto the next generation.
In the question of whether humanity deserves to survive is a little more abstract than whether I made a mini-me or not. (I made two - always good to have a spare).
Every species that has ever been has evolved to fill a niche, expanded to fill as much of it as they are capable, then die back when either the environment changes, or species evolve to hunt them. In the case of many species of bacteria, the die-off is precipitated by their own metabolic waste products. The inanimate and slightly animate sacs of chemical process simply tip their waste outside their cell membranes, which eventually become toxic to them. Apparently humans are the same, on a somewhat grander scale...
Humans don't care a jot for other species, not really. We keep some as pets, we eat a great many of them, and find a fair few of them annoying, looking to exterminate them from our homes and gardens. Were it not for the fact that we're starting to feel the effect of sitting in our own waste, and our realisation that those species are somehow important in mitigating it, we would continue to exercise absolute dominion over all other life on Earth.
The only reason why we're not blindly following cyanobacteria into a mass die-off having poisoned the planet beyond our survival envelope is that we're just marginally more intelligent than they are. The only reason we pretend to care about the rest of life on Earth is because we can see our own die-back coming.
The question, then, was why should humans be allowed to transcend the natural order of things. We've expanded, filled our niche, changed our environment, and soon will die back. The environment will settle on a new normal (maybe with a smaller human population, maybe not) and new species will rise to fill the gaps.
Nothing at all to do with whether I procreated or not. (Although I'd hope that my family are among the survivors)
By the way, I do hope you weren't implying that I don't love my kids - as that's the way it came across. Let me put it to you that I wouldn't be doing what I do if I didn't hope to provide a better future for them...
Glad to be of use.But I'm puzzled as to who is responsible for your expectations? ":O}Hmm............all I can so to that is "thank you for failing to meet my expectations". It's nice to be surprised occasionally.