Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: IceFire on May 22, 2005, 06:30:56 pm
-
No matter what we do...we keep screwing up the planet...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4563499.stm
-
Agent Smith was right, humans are a cancer to this planet........
-
Well, maybe we'll finally make ourselves extinvt, and end this stupidity once and for all.
-
Yes, won't that be grand. I'm sure all the people will have a big party to cel - ****, there won't be anymore people. Right, right, I keep forgetting. Well, I'm sure all the animals will really appreciate it.
Seriously guys. :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
-
Originally posted by Kosh
Agent Smith was right, humans are a cancer to this planet........
....of course Agent Smith was right. You didn't really think he was saying anything new that people didn't already know, right?
-
Originally posted by Rictor
Yes, won't that be grand. I'm sure all the people will have a big party to cel - ****, there won't be anymore people. Right, right, I keep forgetting. Well, I'm sure all the animals will really appreciate it.
Seriously guys. :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
You do realise that by the time we finally kill ourselves off, Earth will be a barren, LIFELESS wasteland..
-
Right. Suuure. Just because humans cannot survive somewhere doesn't mean that nothing can. There will always be bacterial life, and it will grow and multiply and evolve into another sentient life form capable of living in that environment. :p You wait and see.
-
I question if sentient life can live (with progress of any sort) without trampling on life.
I'm hoping that we can overcome the barriers and make our technology eco friendly.
-
rather than sentient, I think you should ask about superior.
there is a reason why there is 6 billion of us expanding at the expece of all other life on the planet, this exact scenario plays out over and over againg, once evolution produces a superior life form it spreds into all environments it can, pushing out everything that can't compete. it's a game called evolution, and we're winning.
-
Yeah that is an interesting way of looking at things. So what happens when we push everything else out...and I mean everything. Except maybe seagulls that rely on us to supply them with junk to scavenge.
-
We starve to death?
-
it's a game called evolution, and we're winning.
Actually we're losing. At this rate, sooner or later we will evolve ourselves into extinction.
-
That's the plan, though!
-
We turn on ourselves in a big way. ;)
-
Asteroids or something far worse.. i could care less at this point.
-
Screw it. I'm going to Mars.
-
Originally posted by TrashMan
You do realise that by the time we finally kill ourselves off, Earth will be a barren, LIFELESS wasteland..
mother nature's way of never making big ****ing mistakes (humans for example) ever again.
Originally posted by Kosh
Actually we're losing. At this rate, sooner or later we will evolve ourselves into extinction.
actually no, after we kill off all other spiecies we can still rely on cannibalisim to survive. oxygen and drinking water can be made with machines..
-
Originally posted by TrashMan
You do realise that by the time we finally kill ourselves off, Earth will be a barren, LIFELESS wasteland..
Earth has already faced five mass extinctions. It will survive us.
-
You're wasting your breathe....
-
Originally posted by IceFire
Yeah that is an interesting way of looking at things. So what happens when we push everything else out...and I mean everything. Except maybe seagulls that rely on us to supply them with junk to scavenge.
We beat the game and realize we ran out of quarters...
-
i don't think it's such as big problem as they seem to make out (yeah okay its a problem, but not like, hugely huge). they keep mentioning 'against the background of the fossil record' or something, but probably heaps of species went extinct without actually leaving a fossil record, which gives this report a false high in terms of extinctions.
-
Unless we can go through a massive green revolution in the next 20 years or so we might have a chance. But as I see it (really hate being pessimistic) were as good as dead. And who knows you have to remember not ALL the forms of life died out from the different eras that came before.
-
Just because humanity dies, doesn't mean that the rest of nature has to go along with us.
My god you people are so egocentric. Like humanity is the greatest thing to ever pop up on this earth. :doubt:
-
Insects are going to be the next big thing IMO.
-
Originally posted by Raa
Just because humanity dies, doesn't mean that the rest of nature has to go along with us.
My god you people are so egocentric. Like humanity is the greatest thing to ever pop up on this earth. :doubt:
No...just the most potentially destructive one.
-
Originally posted by Swantz
Insects are going to be the next big thing IMO.
...again... :p
-
Picture this:
It is 500 years in the future. There is no ozone, and plants+animals are nonexistant on the surface. We dug into the ground, made cities, used machines to make oxygen and recycle urine into drinking water and **** into plastic, and created underground super-kept gardens. Ever seen Babylon 5? "A self contained city". Ever seen the Matrix? The Matrix defines life in 500 years.
-
I'm sure we'll be dead long before we manage to totally kill the ozone layer if we go that route.
-
Let's not go that route so we don't have to find out. :p
Just because humanity dies, doesn't mean that the rest of nature has to go along with us.
Ever heard of "Nuclear Winter"?
-
Originally posted by Dark RevenantX
Picture this:
It is 500 years in the future. There is no ozone, and plants+animals are nonexistant on the surface. We dug into the ground, made cities, used machines to make oxygen and recycle urine into drinking water and **** into plastic, and created underground super-kept gardens. Ever seen Babylon 5? "A self contained city". Ever seen the Matrix? The Matrix defines life in 500 years.
Could make for an interesting scifi setting.
The runaway greenhouse effect turns the surface into something like Venus.
-
Originally posted by IceFire
Yeah that is an interesting way of looking at things. So what happens when we push everything else out...and I mean everything. Except maybe seagulls that rely on us to supply them with junk to scavenge.
yeah, were going to, for no good reason kill all the cows.
a number of plants and animals have formed sybiotic relationships with us. we don't compete with them, we cooperate and as a result, these organisms flurish along side us, moveing with us into new lands, pushing the native organisms out unless the natives can provide a better symbiote (at least in some regards) than what we have with us already. as long as we can keep at least one of these alive we won't go extinct. we arn't "destroying" the environment, we're changeing it, at a very rapid pace, and many organisms can't keep up.
we are not specal, we are animals.
I know this isn't your standard hippy eco- terror.
it lacks that wonderfull 'humans ****ing themselves with there own stupid aragance' that everyone seems to love.
but think about it, the only things that seporate us from any other animal is more or less an extention of us being realy realy smart. when you look at it we are just part of a 6 billion year evolution game. look up a fellow named Anomalocaris,if it wouldn't have been for that one animal, things would have been much diferent, it was a vastly superior preditory animal and every animal on the earth was forced to adapt to it or die, and as a result we go our modurn gourps of animals. today there is a supreemly deadly omnivor that is able to work cooperatively to gather vast amounts of food and alters it's domain to provide better food suplies. anything that doesn't develop a symbiotic relation ship with it, or otherwise evolves to survive with it dies out.
now it's not that I want to see most speciese die out, it'll suck, those animals are cool, but I don't think that we are going to go extinct because of a lack of biodiversity. in fact it'll probly end up being the opposite.
-
Originally posted by Ace
Could make for an interesting scifi setting.
The runaway greenhouse effect turns the surface into something like Venus.
or perhaps you can try the classic 'the time machine'. damn it peopole there has to be some unexplored aspect of sci-fi that hasnt been remade a million times. everything we have today is dirived from a handful of classics from the 1800s, and even they got there ideas elsewere.
pessimisim, optimisim, im glad the sun will explode in a few million years thus clensing the universe of such bull**** words.
-
Originally posted by Nuke
or perhaps you can try the classic 'the time machine'. damn it peopole there has to be some unexplored aspect of sci-fi that hasnt been remade a million times. everything we have today is dirived from a handful of classics from the 1800s, and even they got there ideas elsewere.
pessimisim, optimisim, im glad the sun will explode in a few million years thus clensing the universe of such bull**** words.
But in the Time Machine the surface eventually recovered :p
...and there were Morlocks... nasty nasty Morlocks...
-
Originally posted by Dark RevenantX
Picture this:
It is 500 years in the future. There is no ozone, and plants+animals are nonexistant on the surface. We dug into the ground, made cities, used machines to make oxygen and recycle urine into drinking water and **** into plastic, and created underground super-kept gardens. Ever seen Babylon 5? "A self contained city". Ever seen the Matrix? The Matrix defines life in 500 years.
What makes you think a lack of ozone would be bad for life? IIRC, radiation is good for stimulating mutation and thus evolution; even a nuclear war wouldn't destroy life.
Humanity is far more adept at killing itself off than life in general. But that's not the point, really, anyway - in killing off other species, we make life on earth less suited for us. Whether it's in unbalancing the ecosystem in a way that leads to famine, or damaging the constituents of the atmosphere, or simple resource depletion.
-
Originally posted by Raa
Just because humanity dies, doesn't mean that the rest of nature has to go along with us.
My god you people are so egocentric. Like humanity is the greatest thing to ever pop up on this earth. :doubt:
If we're not, then what is? If we can't keep this planet alive, then by God, we're not letting the roaches take it over. :p
-
Crocodiles have been around for what? 250 million years? they will inherit when we leave/are destroyed...
-
the world will one day be ruled by giant hyperintelegent cuttlefish :D
-
By Hooloovoos, more likely.
-
ShivanTs will take the place of humanity... Sorry for the pun :)
-
The Ascension of the Ordinary Man
The Ascension of the Ordinary Man
The Ascension of the Ordinary Man
The Ascension of the Ordinary Man
The Ascension of the Ordinary Man
The Ascension of the Ordinary Man
The Ascension of the Ordinary Man
*reprograms defense grid*
-
@ Bobboau - normal evolution? I don't recall a single species ever being responsible for the destruction of so many others.
You call that evolution, natural progress? I call that human stupidity and arrogance.
-
Originally posted by aldo_14
What makes you think a lack of ozone would be bad for life? IIRC, radiation is good for stimulating mutation and thus evolution; even a nuclear war wouldn't destroy life.
Yes, a lack of ozone will be bad for life universally. You don't seem to realize what radiation does and why mutation is a side effect.
Radiation is harmful because it destroys genetic material (DNA, RNA), breaking it apart. Low levels and short term exposure to radiation causes minor damage and the DNA can be reassembled with few errors. Moderate exposure causes more severe damage and usually a few dangerous errors occur such as certain tissue becoming cancerous. Prolonged and intense exposure to high intensity radiation will cause irrovocable destruction to the DNA and thus result in death. This is why the practice of irradiating materials to sterilize them is so effective.
Now any mutations that occur are due to moderate and relatively short exposure. Now this effect is usually highly different for each exposed area. It is impossible for all parts of a large, multicellular organism to experience the same level exposure to a single source of radiation (the skin will always get hit with more than internal organs), and the likelyhood that all cells' DNA will be subject to the same level of destruction and reassembled exactly the same way with exactly the same errors is next to zilch. And because germ cells (reproductive cells) are far more susceptible to radiation than normal body cells, high intensity radiation will cause sterility. So in summary, in a nuclear warzone, you're not gonna find a bunch of Godzillas running around, you'll just find a lot of dead bodies (which is the concept behind the neutron bomb, a nuclear weapon specifically designed to maximize the release of high intensity radiation to the surrounding environment).
Now today the ozone filters out the vast majority of ultraviolet radiation from the sun (think the figure was around to 97 or more %). This tiny level that eventually reaches the surface is enough to cause sunburns and skin cancer in humans after just a few hours of exposure. Now with the complete depletion of the ozone, we're talking 12 hours a day, every day for the next 5 billion years (or really 4 billion cause then the sun will swell up to a red giant and swallow the Earth) of exposure to virtually unmitigated solar radiation. All life on the surface will die, unless it happens to be hiding all the time under several meters of lead. As long as DNA is the genetic material of life, there's no two ways about it: life is dead on the surface. Under full exposure to the sun's radiation, even life in the ocean will eventually be dealt a lethal dose. Hell, even electronics would be eventually destroyed unless specially shielded (satellites and space probes have a limited life span, even with continuous power, because the radiation levels outside our atmosphere eventually cause damage in the electronic systems). The only survivors will be the bacteria that live deep underground, with hundreds and thousands of feet of rock to shield them, and these bacteria don't seem to be in a hurry to be moving anywhere or evolving (iirc, these underground bacteria are essentially the exact same as they were billions of years ago).
So, yeah, that's why I think a lack of ozone would be Bad(tm) for life. As for nuclear war, the primary theorized effect is the same as the asteroid scenario: so much debris and dust is thrown into the atmosphere that sunlight is considerably diminished, causing plant life to die and follows that all herbivores die and thus all carnivores die. The radiation contamination is just the finishing blow. Though in this case, only those at the very surface would die. Creatures living at the bottom of the ocean would escape relatively unscathed (unless everyone decided to drop tens of thousands of nuclear depth charges to the bottom of the ocean).
Anyway, that's all the most extreme case. I doubt even we would be that oblivious to let the ozone layer be completely destroyed or let Bush blow up the planet so there's nothing left. BUt it would still be Bad(tm).
-
Originally posted by Cannikin
Yes, a lack of ozone will be bad for life universally. You don't seem to realize what radiation does and why mutation is a side effect.
Radiation is harmful because it destroys genetic material (DNA, RNA), breaking it apart. Low levels and short term exposure to radiation causes minor damage and the DNA can be reassembled with few errors. Moderate exposure causes more severe damage and usually a few dangerous errors occur such as certain tissue becoming cancerous. Prolonged and intense exposure to high intensity radiation will cause irrovocable destruction to the DNA and thus result in death. This is why the practice of irradiating materials to sterilize them is so effective.
Now any mutations that occur are due to moderate and relatively short exposure. Now this effect is usually highly different for each exposed area. It is impossible for all parts of a large, multicellular organism to experience the same level exposure to a single source of radiation (the skin will always get hit with more than internal organs), and the likelyhood that all cells' DNA will be subject to the same level of destruction and reassembled exactly the same way with exactly the same errors is next to zilch. And because germ cells (reproductive cells) are far more susceptible to radiation than normal body cells, high intensity radiation will cause sterility. So in summary, in a nuclear warzone, you're not gonna find a bunch of Godzillas running around, you'll just find a lot of dead bodies (which is the concept behind the neutron bomb, a nuclear weapon specifically designed to maximize the release of high intensity radiation to the surrounding environment).
Now today the ozone filters out the vast majority of ultraviolet radiation from the sun (think the figure was around to 97 or more %). This tiny level that eventually reaches the surface is enough to cause sunburns and skin cancer in humans after just a few hours of exposure. Now with the complete depletion of the ozone, we're talking 12 hours a day, every day for the next 5 billion years (or really 4 billion cause then the sun will swell up to a red giant and swallow the Earth) of exposure to almost all the sun's radiation. All life on the surface will die, unless it happens to be hiding all the time under several meters of lead. As long as DNA is the genetic material of life, there's no two ways about it: life is dead on the surface. Under full exposure to the sun's radiation, even life at the bottom of the ocean will eventually be dealt a lethal dose. Hell, even electronics would be eventually destroyed unless specially shielded (satellites and space probes have a limited life span, even with continuous power, because the radiation levels outside our atmosphere eventually cause damage in the electronic systems). The only survivors will be the bacteria that live deep underground, with hundreds and thousands of feet of rock to shield them, and these bacteria don't seem to be in a hurry to be moving anywhere or evolving (iirc, these underground bacteria are essentially the exact same as they were billions of years ago).
So, yeah, that's why I think a lack of ozone would be Bad(tm) for life. As for nuclear war, the primary theorized effect is the same as the asteroid scenario: so much debris and dust is thrown into the atmosphere that sunlight is considerably diminished, causing plant life to die and follows that all herbivores die and thus all carnivores die. The radiation contamination is just the finishing blow. Though in this case, only those at the very surface would die. Creatures living at the bottom of the ocean would escape relatively unscathed (unless everyone decided to drop tens of thousands of nuclear depth charges to the bottom of the ocean).
sounds like a plan lets do it. :D really i dont know why you went to such trouble to type all that. its all obvious and partially innacurate. like the thing about the water. nuclear material may be stored beneath 12 feet of water and you could walr around above the tank without radiation gear and be pretty safe. without an ozone you would probibly harm only near surface spiecies. like marine mamals. the ozone itself works the same way, but its much less denser than water, and is probibly a thick chunk of gas.
none the less theres nothing you can do. this thing called free will doesnt exist. humans operate on instinct. technology is a natural evolution. we are set to forever execute the same continuous cycles and patterns that lies at the core oif the universal construct. this thing called change does not exist. its just the pattern progressing to the next stage, intime it will repeat itself. i am a man of vision, i see nothing:D
for ****s and giggles, sweet spots to drop nuclear weapons:
the eastern shore of greenland-because it would release fresh water right into the a major underwater current, thus stoping in and really screwing up global weather
san andreas fault line-ever seen that superman movie
antarctica-penguin bbq/flood the earth
any overopulated urban center-for some serious body count
-
Originally posted by Cannikin
Yes, a lack of ozone will be bad for life universally. You don't seem to realize what radiation does and why mutation is a side effect.
(snip)
As long as DNA is the genetic material of life, of course.
Of course, as you pointed out, life would still exist in the worst case scenario (assuming 100% ozone depletion would be the min required to kill humanity, which I doubt); underground bacteria is still life. (also I'd note that IIRC there have been several documented asteroid impacts, responsible for mass extinction and ice age, but life still exists).
I believe our capacity to exterminate ourselves far outweighs our ability to inflict a life-destroying doomsday scenario, anyways. Like you said, even in the worst case of 100% ozone depletion and global themonuclear war+fallout+winter, life would still exist; that's what I mean.
-
Originally posted by TrashMan
@ Bobboau - normal evolution? I don't recall a single species ever being responsible for the destruction of so many others.
You call that evolution, natural progress? I call that human stupidity and arrogance.
because any event of that nature is always blamed on us, and the fosil record doesn't have the resolution for such minor details, but there is evedence of single speciese makeing world wide changes in most populations (you obviusly didn't look up Anomalocaris). think of all the intorduced animals that run amuck because they have no preditors or are able to tap some food suply that has bult up an imunity to the natives only. it's the _exact_ same behavior.
-
Yeah, I was kind of off on the ocean thing. Looked it up and found water is a better shield against radiation than I thought it was, but ionizing radiation from the sun would still penetrate to a few hundred or thousand feet. Life within this layer would die and any nosy life at the bottom that decides to evolve and take a journey up to the surface will get fried.
As for how stupid humans can get, I just thought of a scenario where some country decides that their new super weapon would be missiles that disperse ozone destroying chemicals over their enemy country!
And if you think that post was long and unnecessary, you should've seen the post(s) that earned me my title. :p
-
How many extinctions have/can be attributed to Anomalocaris, though? I was under the impression that (many of?) the extinctions were attributed to the Permian extinction (and the subsequent changes in life attributed as much to those phenotypes - or is it phyla? - which survived said extinction as to any dominant predator).
I'm not that there has ever been, on a global scale, an animal with the ability humanity has to shape and alter its surroundings.
-
people should be on fire :D
-
Even if we had no ozone and a nuclear fallout, humans would still be here. Whether or not they'd want to be is a different question, but humans are adaptable and I think they'd find some way of squeezing out a meeger living.
-
Originally posted by aldo_14
I believe our capacity to exterminate ourselves far outweighs our ability to inflict a life-destroying doomsday scenario, anyways. Like you said, even in the worst case of 100% ozone depletion and global themonuclear war+fallout+winter, life would still exist; that's what I mean.
Who gives a damn about such life?
I don't want to be extinct, be extinct, you :p