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alien
Humans are not on a self sustaining path. No way there's anything but a small fraction of the current population left 500 years from now.
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Are homo sapiens the best thing to happen to this planet? If so, will they remain so?
- Thread starter Climber
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FXCLM5
bombaclaud
for your track bikeAliens
DataDan
Mama says he's bona fide
My hypothetical is: What if history had been slightly different (dinosaurs not annihilated, for example) and humans had not come to dominate? Suppose instead that another species, equally dominant, had come along. Would it necessarily have been better, or could it have been worse?
Natural selection favors genes that propagate themselves (almost by definition) with little regard for the success of genes in other species. A creature could evolve that mindlessly consumed everything in its path, leaving behind a wasteland, continuing until there was nothing left to consume.
However, while humans have developed the power to wreak worldwide havoc, something happened along the way in our evolution. We developed language, culture, and an appreciation for the world around us. As Brett posted above, biological evolution seems to have slowed. It is now augmented by cultural evolution. Daniel Dennett writes in Darwin's Dangerous Idea:
The primary difference between our species and all others is our reliance on cultural trnsmission of information, and hence on cultural evolution. The unit of cultural evolution, Dawkins' meme has a powerful and underappreciated role to play in our analysis of the human sphere.
Dennett uses meme as coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. While the word has now taken on a different meaning, Dawkins defined it as the unit of cultural evolution analogous to a gene. A meme replicates, it can mutate, it is tested in the environment, and it can be prolific.It is the cultural dimension of evolution that keeps us from becoming my hypothetical all-consuming, planet-destroying critter. We care about our environment and other life in it, and often make great efforts toward its health.
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alien
Would be cool though if dinosaurs still roamed the plains. Of course we wouldn't be calling them dinosaurs, they'd be crop raiding pests and road hazards.
Schnellbandit
I see 4 lights!
In that context "correctable" doesn't necessarily mean good for us but more like returning to a certain direction or path.
I think the planet seeks a balance just because of evolution, it always has. We evolve from natural processes unless the accepted idea is that we were deposited here. Eventually our demise as a species corrects whatever we have done not in a right/wrong sense but in a return to what was before we were here and the evolution continues sans us.
We can't destroy the planet, forces far more powerful than anything we can do have already made the attempt.
We won't destroy ourselves through war or damaging the climate or anything like that. We'll probably do it because we mess around with our own evolution through selective breeding because we really think that we know better. We create conditions where the unviable are artificially supported to continue whatever defects nature would have eliminated, we eliminate those that nature would support as the best and then we also have the audacity to use processes outside of nature to more or less create beings because we know the better way. We deny the judgment of nature in the creation or taking of life in favor of our own judgment yet raise hell when that judgment damages the environment we depend on to live.
Who can say what would be if certain humans who became the worst of humanity to ever walk the earth never became what they did because we refused to accept what nature might have done to eliminate them? Would the millions upon millions who died in wars because of the decisions made by humans who nature would have never let live found a way to avoid the damages we are now doing to the planet and render the premise of the thread irrelevant?
Who knows?
stangmx13
not Stan
interesting hypothetical.
culture might be slowing our consumption of the planet, but it doesnt seem to be enough. id have to look up evidence. but arent we still increasing CO2 emissions, eradicating more species, and generally being shitty for the planet? you and your neighbor might care about the planet enough to replace a lawn with drought resistant plants or drive an electric car. but not everyone cares the same amount nor has the means to do better. Japan is still whaling. everyone in China wanted a car and their smog is ridiculous. old crops are still burned in India. the US and other countries love beef. CA allows tons of water to be used for exporting crops. etc etc. IMO we arent heading in the right direction yet, just walking backwards a little slower.
itd be interesting to see a mindless all-consuming critter. do u really think it could be as bad as humans? our intelligence has allowed us to cause some terrible things. science seems pretty confident that no prev animal has transformed the planet so much in such a short time. we might be a tempered version of some all-consuming critter, but we arent mindless and its prob worse for the planet.
This
Eldritch
is insensitive
All of that has a lot of bias in it. Homo Sapiens are the best thing to happen to Homo Sapiens. They are also the worst thing to happen to Homo Sapiens. Our impact on this planet has not been particularly notable so far. We are still very new.
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I don't see how we are the best thing for this planet. We don't have anything to keep us in check from just breading into the destruction (making it uninhabitable) of this planet. If humans did not exist any predator could only bread so much as there is enough prey for them. If there were no humans I would call that peace on earth (even though mother nature is violent)
I do not believe there is anything we can do to destroy the earth though, once we make it uninhabitable for Humans it will regen and life will continue without us
I do not believe there is anything we can do to destroy the earth though, once we make it uninhabitable for Humans it will regen and life will continue without us
We turned oceans in to garbage dump, most fisheries are on a verge of collapse, we killed off bunch out species, on our way destroying rain forests, there are rivers where there is more raw sewage then water, the CO2 levels keeps rising, etc. Not sure how you can say the impact have not been particularly notable.
Eldritch
is insensitive
You are viewing things from a very small sighted and human perspective. In the last 500 million years earth suffered at least 5 major extinction level events where 70% or more of all life in earth ceased to be.
For the first 2 BILLION years, with a B, the earth sat and was hot and weird and didn't do much, covered in funny little life that was happy to soak up sulfur and the Carbon Dioxide that made up most of the non Nitrogen atmosphere and pooped out some yucky byproduct called Oxygen. Eventually, they were so successful that they crapped enough Oxygen in the atmosphere to kill themselves off to a large extent and other weird Oxygen based life forms starting farting around in the primordial sludge. Those cyanobacteria guys spiked our Oxygen content up to like 25% of the atmosphere. They changed the whole gas dynamic of our atmosphere on a fundamental level.
Another 2 BILLION and change later, we showed up a lousy 300-400 thousand years ago and you want to act impressed about some plastic in the Ocean?
Homo Sapiens will probably be extinct before we ever even leave a real mark on the planet.
Brother Crocodile has been here for like 200 Million years, at least he has been around for a minute and SEEN some shit.
yeah yeah, in million/billion year time frame nothing matters, blah blah blah. Predictable.
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Schnellbandit
I see 4 lights!
For some reason human beings think they have a right to exist past when nature says "times up".
Eldritch
is insensitive
yeah yeah, in million/billion year time frame nothing matters, blah blah blah. Predictable.
The question is from the perspective of the planet. Of course the answer is obvious. Humans are a small, absurd, and meaningless little varmint. I doubt they will last much longer. Maybe a thousand years, probably less.
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The question is from the perspective of the planet. Of course the answer is obvious. Humans are a small, absurd, and meaningless little varmint. I doubt they will last much longer. Maybe a thousand years, probably less.
But as far as we know, humans are the smartest motherfuckers to occupy this spinning marble so far.
The question is from the perspective of the planet. Of course the answer is obvious. Humans are a small, absurd, and meaningless little varmint. I doubt they will last much longer. Maybe a thousand years, probably less.
It was from perspective of humans also. The whole "in billion of years" is a cop out. In that time scale nothing matters. Eventually universe will die one way or the other. Cool, and doesn't matter. We are talking about us, and timelines that matter to us.
tuxumino
Purrfect
the planet don't care, and apparently neither do humans. So it's us against our selves, and we seem to be winning in the wrong way.
in the infinite universe one planet isn't that much to lose, does it tip balance? in this instance highly unlikely that a dust ball on the edge of the galaxy is that important.
So it's only important to our children.
in the infinite universe one planet isn't that much to lose, does it tip balance? in this instance highly unlikely that a dust ball on the edge of the galaxy is that important.
So it's only important to our children.
DataDan
Mama says he's bona fide
Earth deserves whatever she gets.
Due to her size, chemical composition, and proximity to a radiative energy source, Earth produced a class of substances with the extraordinary ability to make copies of themselves. They do this by building self-sustaining devices to house a reproductive mechanism, which can withstand hostile surroundings and even move great distances to spread the substance far and wide.
Moreover, a replicator, or gene, can modify its reproductive device, its critter, to improve efficiency and better compete for scarce resources against critters used by other genes. This results in never-ending escalation of battle among genes to gain advantage over each other. The process Earth set in motion four billion years ago is never static and has no ideal state. What is, is. And what is now, will never be again.
Don't give me this humans-as-interlopers bullshit. We are merely a recent iteration in the intraplanetary competition for genetic dominance.
However, we have the extraordinary advantage of self-awareness, so we can overcome the genetic tendency to overwhelming dominance through another replication mechanism, culture. This will enable us to reduce our impact on the surroundings while still sustaining ourselves during the geologically brief time our species is around.
Four billion years ago Earth set in motion a runaway process that will ultimately occupy every niche of her habitable space. Nothing is going to stop it.
Due to her size, chemical composition, and proximity to a radiative energy source, Earth produced a class of substances with the extraordinary ability to make copies of themselves. They do this by building self-sustaining devices to house a reproductive mechanism, which can withstand hostile surroundings and even move great distances to spread the substance far and wide.
Moreover, a replicator, or gene, can modify its reproductive device, its critter, to improve efficiency and better compete for scarce resources against critters used by other genes. This results in never-ending escalation of battle among genes to gain advantage over each other. The process Earth set in motion four billion years ago is never static and has no ideal state. What is, is. And what is now, will never be again.
Don't give me this humans-as-interlopers bullshit. We are merely a recent iteration in the intraplanetary competition for genetic dominance.
However, we have the extraordinary advantage of self-awareness, so we can overcome the genetic tendency to overwhelming dominance through another replication mechanism, culture. This will enable us to reduce our impact on the surroundings while still sustaining ourselves during the geologically brief time our species is around.
Four billion years ago Earth set in motion a runaway process that will ultimately occupy every niche of her habitable space. Nothing is going to stop it.
WRONG.
Most animals self regulate. Lions will stop hunting when they are satiated. Also if their prey's population dwindles so do theirs. They are in sync with their environment. Same can be said for other animals.
The only two species that doesn't is humans and viruses. We take a certain pride in how many humans we have put on this planet and there are no signs of humans stopping to overpopulate this planet. And just like viruses, we won't stop until our host dies. Which is a tragedy because other life forms are not the cause.
Eldritch
is insensitive
I think that is a pretty safe bet. I'm not making any assumption that intelligence is valuable though.
There you go, Champ, now you're starting to catch on.