With Timelapse in Google Earth, 24 million satellite photos from the past 37 years have been compiled into an interactive 4D experience. Now anyone can watch time unfold and witness nearly four decades of planetary change.
This is amazing, will this be included in the VR versions of google earth? For those who haven't tried it yet Google Earth is the first thing I show friends who've never tried VR before by giving them a Godzilla's eye view of Tokyo. I've yet to find someone who doesn't ":o"
It works on all the usual suspects (anything that supports SteamVR). Valve Index, HP Reverb G2, WMR headsets, Oculus Quest (via link cable or wifi streaming) etc
Google has bailed on VR apps (for the most part, Owlchemy is still there), so I imagine not. It'd be cool if Google Earth VR was opensource like Tiltbrush. Like Tiltbrush it was one of the foundational early VR apps that people demoed, it's fun to imagine a world where Google continued to put money into VR, but I'm actually not sure how that fits into their business outside of just another platform for Android.
It's a shame. Google Earth on VR is probably the most amazing and practical use for VR for normal people at the moment. I like to street-view in to other countries and stand in the middle of crowded places with people around me imagining that it's a thousand years from now and humanity is gone and it's the documentation of life on earth.
I've had good times passing the headset around in a room full of people to share places we've been.
It's also cool to look down, as a giant, at paths you've taken irl and get a sense of scale.
Via Link? (I hadn't ever gotten around to verifying that would work. I partly ask, as the Google Earth VR experience was particularly epic in a way the Google Street View app--which was available on Quest--was not, even if the latter still causes a feeling of wonder in me... and the GP is talking about street view and people surrounding their position and the such.)
I'm very happy with it and haven't experienced the tracking issues others complain about.
At work I've previously tried some of the early oculus dev versions, the original Vive, and the PSVR. The Cosmos was the first which felt like a really great product and not just tech with potential if it were a bit better.
It's an absolutely amazing experience especially for first timers (once they figure out the controls). But like most things with VR, you use it a few times and forget it about (besides giving demos here and there).
Yeah, whats up with that? Unless its all under wraps, Google is letting what lead they had whither away. Its silly to think they had working inside out tracking (Tango) in 2014.
"Bailed" is a bit over the top. I would characterize it more as being at a stand still.
Earth VR and Tilt Brush are still around, and as mentioned about, Tilt Brush is even open sourced. They just haven't had as much interest making new stuff. VR didn't pick up the way most hoped it would, and at this point there isn't really much to do until we get another wave of innovation that pushes the boundary forward.
Also Tango was more AR than VR. I don't think they ever had any lead in VR. Cardboard was neat but just that.
Tiltbrush is opensource, but not actively being maintained by Google and hasn't been for a long time. Some of the original team is involved in maintaining an opensource fork, however, but this is not a Google product. Daydream was sunset a while ago and cardboard support has stopped also. VR is an interesting category for Google because there are often no services to maintain in VR apps. So, like an indie developer with a failed game, they can leave their VR apps on the Steam store with zero maintainence as long as SteamVR works. There are zero employees working on Google's VR apps except for Owlchemy, which I suspect is still around because they cost very little or they're profitable. Google Poly, which is a service related to VR, is getting shutdown.
As for VR not picking up, it didn't pick up on startup folks timeline but there has been steady growth in the market and it's close to sustainable for many developers. Facebook, Valve, Sony, Microsoft and Apple have been more persistent and came in with realistic expectations. I think this is a case where Google was premature entering the market and also premature exiting. If they re-enter they'll probably look like Microsoft trying to re-enter the mobile or tablet market in the 2010s after not succeeding in the 90s and 2000s. That's not to say that VR will "take over the world" like smartphones, but its on its way to evolving into a sustainable category with a variety of compelling use cases.
You kinda alluded to this, and kinda got the wrong conclusion, but when a game developer releases a complete game, and then after fixing some patches, it moves on to other things, no one claims that they "bailed out" on the game. Do you think Valve "bailed out" on HL:Alyx? It just makes no sense.
Earth VR and Tilt Brush are pretty complete apps, not everything needs to be worked on forever. At some point you get diminishing return and start wasting your time.
>Also Tango was more AR than VR. I don't think they ever had any lead in VR.
They had inside out headsets before Oculus. Check out their partnership with Lenovo and the Mirage Solo headset. Despite working well for 6dof tracking it had the same terrible Daydream controller.
A year later Oculus released the quest with a better industrial design, camera array and 6dof controllers to much more success. The chip was a generation newer but arguably the success came from things that could have happened a year sooner.
Not just that, the Mirage Solo cameras create a _much_ more believable stereo image when you get pass-through. It's my favorite pass-through system. Have you seen the Rift S pass-through image? Horrendous. Quest is also terrible, but Rift S is just unbelievably bad.
It's standard Google practise to abandon old projects and move onto fresh new ones. It's due to how the internal promotion system works. Everyone should be aware of this by now..
Technology enthusiasts (read: HN users) may not like it, but it's a business practice that's working as intended. Sometimes Google may seem shortsighted but often times they're just measuring the market correctly.
I worked on AR/VR at Google and the projects have mostly paused because there's no visible financial benefit. No one in the real world cares enough about VR to justify it as a business. We prototyped hundreds of applications—every idea you can possibly think of—and all of them are either impractical with today's technology, or not useful enough to bother putting a VR headset on your head.
AR/VR is one of those things that feels so magical that you think, "There must be amazing things we can do with it!" but it turns out there's not. At least not yet. The situation is pretty clear because Facebook, Apple, and Google all bet big on AR/VR and all of them have stalled indefinitely.
Yeah the Microsoft contract is up to $21B, and it's over 10 years. It's also a military contract, which is a different beast from consumer goods.
And if the Quest 2 has sold 2-3 million units so far, that's unremarkable. The Apple Watch was considered a failure in its first year and it made 10 million sales. We've already passed Christmas so you're not going to see a further spike in sales.
If Apple enters the market it might reignite the spark. Apple can do that because they deliver extremely high quality products that inspire people. Google can't do that because it's not in the company DNA and Googlers knows it, so it's a waste of time.
Thanks for commenting - like others, I'm a big VR fan and hugely perplexed by how Google has walked away from it. Leaving us with Facebook is a horrible outcome and locked-in Apple not much better. Even if I'm disappointed by what you say, its really helpful to know this was the thought process within Google.
I guess I think Google is taking a huge risk here by taking their hat out of the ring so early. Even if others have slowed their investment, Microsoft/Apple/Facebook are under the radar continuing very significant work and it really feels like we could flip over a tipping point and Google might be way behind. This may be more like gcloud than Android and they could find themselves a decade behind other players.
My personal use case is being able to have any number of monitors of any size and shape, eg: [0]. So far its been limited by screen resolution and lack of good hand tracking and dedicated accessories, but these are very close to being solved with the next gen. devices.
Yes - its just so unfortunate all the good alternatives don't offer (easy, cheap) wireless / stand alone support. After using Virtual Desktop, I actually think there's a huge opportunity for a super "thin client" device that is just a companion for your laptop/tablet and offloads everything there.
I think the problem is that you really need quite high resolution and frame rate for it to be a good enough experience to be worth the hassle. Which then means you need a lot of GPU power, more than your typical laptop or tablet can offer.
I have a Play Station VR headset and it's awesome but I always felt sad that I coudln't experience this. How is the experience? I know a lot of friends felt sick when we play a space videogame or some game where the environment isn't clear and they can't see where they are standing, I guess having a view from outer space can trigger same feelings.
It's got the usual "comfort controls" (i.e. vignetting while moving). If you leave those switched on then it's OK for people that haven't got their VR legs yet.
But - yeah - with everything switched off it can be at the "intense" end of the spectrum.
>unfold and witness nearly four decades of planetary change.
four decades of meaningless uncontrolled overpopulation, destruction of pristine nature and its ecosystems, a march of techno-globalism across the planet. Every time I see these timelapses it depresses me quite a bit.
Low rates of growth lead to a population collapse in 2 generations or so and an inverted demographic pyramid where mostly old people exist with few youngsters. Not a good recipe for the species or a civilization.
Look at predicted population numbers in Japan for example.
Not really sure how you can call it underpopulation. Was underpopulation also a problem in the preceding 30,000 years or so of human civilization in Europe leading up to today, when the population has always been always smaller?
The population in Europe is larger than it has ever been in any point in history.
If you assume total consumption is a problem, and you assume that total consumption will not go down because consumption per capita will not go down, then the conclusion you end up with is overpopulation.
With our western ressource and energy consumption, and nuclear family lifestyle, it kinda is.
I wish there were less people and that we could keep using cars and the internet, and eating meat. Instead we have more people, accelerating the rush for resources (water in third world, or for us developed countries, housing).
I agree that we're doing things that harm the planet, but I downvoted you because it's more complicated than just "there are too many people", and "We're cutting down forests".
If you look at the advanced countries, they are often the ones who exploited their resources and grew in size early. Britain, for instance, slashed their forests generations ago to get ahead. The US used to shoot herds of bison from trains. Now Britain and the US wag a finger at less developed countries for consuming the forests and ecosystems in their countries.
Similar with population growth and the concept of 'overpopulation'. If you assert we have overpopulation, you have to assert how you'll address it, and there's no way to do that without saying, "Some group of people doesn't get to have kids." That seems like a really bad thing to say.
I'm incredibly lefty, a self described socialist and eco-socialist, but I believe that we need to think differently than just "those people over there are destroying their environments and having too many babies!" We could start at home, transforming our own economy and society to live less exploitatively. We could reduce our own use of meat and dairy, for instance. We could ensure we had adequate housing for everyone, and medical care for everyone, both of which would lead to less waste. We could strictly limit single use plastics, remove older dams to improve fish stocks, set aside more land for forests, etc.
The overpopulation crowd is like a meta-NIMBY. People with high income, “concern” for various problems, and who are amused by their toys and aren’t family oriented usually fall into that position.
Of course, like all NIMBY types, their consumption of air and Brazilian hardwoods is just fine.
This is a straw man. There are absolutely people who are concerned about both overpopulation, and individual overconsumption.
I am one. I limit my personal carbon footprint. I do not own a car (and hopefully never will). I rarely eat meat. I live in a cheap, inefficient apartment because I'm living on a student income, but I keep the heat low to try to limit my energy consumption.
I probably won't have kids, because it wouldn't be consistent with my concerns about climate change to bring another high-consuming American into the world.
Just for the sake of fun and clashing some worldviews, I am quite concerned that the population size will be shrinking.
As soon as some nation makes contraceptives economically available, the native population growth goes negative. Do you know many families with three children? Because that seems like a minimal number, no?
Immigrants who (1) come when younger, and further (2) have more children mask this problem a bit, but their supply is limited. (Sorry for my insensitivity, I'm not from The West myself.) The easy contraceptives will get to even poorest countries in a generation or two. There will be a Big Shrink before the narrative of fertility takes hold again.
Humanity as a whole, not individual beings. Our boundless quest for growth is clearly getting out of hand on many levels. What else exponentially grows until the death of its eco system ?
Something to get excited about: we now have a tool that will be used by the world to see the changes. Sometimes a picture can be a much more powerful argument than a billion data points.
While I don't disagree, you're not exactly a spectator. If you're on a computer in a western country, you are in the top percentage of the world contributing not so insignificantly to this problem.
People sitting in traffic complaining about traffic or cancer cells complaining about the devastation caused by cancer sounds a bit silly.
A problem like a traffic jam needs systemic coordinated action though to be able to solve. Complaining about the lack of perceived ability to get everyone acting is legitimate.
Is it just me or is this feature not showing up? When I put in my address, the little place card on the side doesn't show any controls to move through time.
IIRC, once you've proven that you can reliably run a registry (which Google does anyway for their other TLDs), the application and fees for an additional TLD is much cheaper than you would expect (5-low 6 figures/year)
I think I remember hearing at DNW that the uncontested TLD application fee and annual fee are flat $185K and $25K. Donuts probably owns many more TLDs than Google, but I'm pretty sure they still paid the $185K fee.
I would assume most fairly-tech-savvy people wouldn't trust such a link. It doesn't obey the rules for what we've been taught a real URL should look like.
Like it or not Google does all this with the ad money they bring in. Imagine if all Google service were subscription based. Will they even have 25% of the capabilities they have now?
I agree with you, its something only possible because they are throwing off cash. But is it worth them having turned much of the internet into a cesspit?
I'm conflicted. On one hand you could argue it's like some dictatorship putting on lavish parades while conditions in their regime are generally terrible (I'm not trying to compare the magnitude of the problem, just the idea that having something fancy to show doesn't necessarily cancel out all the harm done)
Or is it a natural positive byproduct of capitalism that the internet has garbage strewn corners filled with listicles and "content" alongside genuinely cool stuff. And trying to clamp down on this would just make everything mediocre.
Anyway, there are definitely lots of good things Google had done, in research, in public availability of tech, and in cool stuff like this. Are we making the right tradeoff against all the bad they have done, I don't know.
There's plenty of shit to throw at Google (Timnit Gebru). Let's not dilute concrete criticisms with bland whatevers like "turned much of the internet into a cesspit".
FWIW, I was not trying to pass a value judgement on whether Google, on net, is good or bad. It was just a thought I had when I saw the time lapse thing.
But I don't think Google turned internet into a cesspit. Yes, Youtube's recommendation algorithms are pretty bad. But there other actors who deserver a bigger share of the blame.
I appreciate the cool stuff, but I could also accept a reality where there's much less tracking going on, and Google Earth and smartphones are less impressive.
Ya, it seems like someone really wanted a gif and threw it in a free video -> gif converter. Gifs can have over 256 colors (with some tricks) or they could have used `video autoplay loop muted` and achieved the same effect.
I don't think the surprise is they made a bad gif as much as they used gif at all considering this is the company that literally made vp9 and webm for this exact use case.
This is the stuff I'd like to see Google do more of. Build things that are true to their mission of Collecting and organising the world's information. Truly remarkable.
Is this different than the historical imagery feature that was introduced in 2009?
I played around with it a bit. Timelapse seems to only exist at large scales. I can't seem to resolve anything more detailed than a highway. Previously Google had higher resolution historical data. I used this to see how my house, neighborhood, and city changed over decades. There was black and white photography at the far end of the data. This was in the desktop version of Google Earth.
I just downloaded the desktop version of Google Earth and was happy to find out the historical data is still available there. :) Hope that makes it to the web version.
Google Earth pro (I think) used to be a paid product. I remember downloading it and using GETPFREE as my activation key thinking it was so cool that benevolent Internet leader Google would give that out for free. 2013 was a different time.
This is an incredible tool. I know there are other ways to look at timelapses of aerial views but this is just so easy and useable.
Watching the change of specific suburban areas in the US brings a lot of negative emotions for me. Seeing what used to be green areas slowly transform into more suburban sprawl, I can't help but think of the number of species who experienced their ecosystem's walls closing in on them.
As someone who builds a lot of data visualizations, this would be in my top experiences for the category. It's in a way... an art piece.
I cant wait to see what everyone, including myself can create with this!
EDIT; This should be one of the most important augmenting data tools for Environmental Impact studies.
Take a site that was built at the beginning of this dataset - which had an EIS done, compare the results seen in this tool to the predictions in the EIS... and use that for MANY EIS which had some of the same impact or variables and see how the surroundings compare etc...
There's also https://earthtime.org/explore which is based off the same satellite imagery, but in the browser. And, it has a lot more available data layers with social, economic, and environmental data on a global scale.
Geez, I'll just go and blame the pandemic for a complete loss of sense of time on that! I could've sworn I saw a beta of that just not so recently, but I had no idea it's been mainstream for that long.
Outstanding!! now we can have a look at how we all were blessed with our planet (history) and what we have had done to it. Hopefully we all contribute to restore it for better future...
I'm no fan of the deforestation that is being shown here, but for a Westerner to tell people in the Global South to not deforest is hypocritical and economically deceitful. Look at pretty much all of Europe and the Eastern United States. It has almost been all deforested and replaced with farmland at some point. Agriculture is an important step in a county's economic stability and progress. Some trees need to be cut down and that land be turned into farmland to help that developing county's citizens. Imagine being a poor framer supporting a growing family with an opportunity to grow more of your crop by cutting down some trees and having rich white people in a post scarcity society telling you you're a bad person.
Bill Gates covers this extensively in his recent excellent book: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. Even if all the rich world countries went to emissions zero, that wouldn’t be enough, because the developing world needs to continue to develop. This is a good thing but it is a problem of progress, and underscores how complicated the solution is
He is one of those do as I say, not as I do type of toxic people (e.g. tells everyone to cut emissions while himself enjoying private jet flights). I don't feel that he is genuine, but for entertainment value could be worth a try.
> I have a higher-than-average carbon footprint, so I’m taking extra steps to do my part. In the book I briefly mention how I’m offsetting my own emissions. I spend about $5 million every year to offset my family’s carbon footprint. As of now, the standard calculation for carbon footprints is based on an estimate of $400 per ton of emissions. But since the way we calculate carbon footprints is still in its infancy, I take our family’s carbon footprint and double it to make sure we are fully covering our footprint and then some.
> I also like to think of my investments in zero-carbon technologies as another kind of offset for my emissions. Investing in companies doesn’t make my carbon footprint smaller. But if I’ve picked any winners, they’ll be responsible for removing much more carbon than I am responsible for creating. I have given more than $1 billion toward innovations and ideas that I hope will help the world get to zero—including affordable and reliable clean energy, low-emissions cement, steel, meat, and more.
> I spend about $5 million every year to offset my family’s carbon footprint.
It's not like this money magically got created. In order for him to have $5 million, someone had to pay it, maybe by creating even more pollution. At least he is aware that he is doing bad thing, but the attitude "I am rich, so I can" is narcissistic and wrong.
You're treating economics as a zero-sum game, which is false. The world as a whole is significantly better off than it was before, and we cannot attribute all of our productivity and qualify-of-life gains solely to the exploitation of natural resources and oppressing people.
Does terrible things happen as a result of moral hazard? Sure. But does anyone who earns a dollar take a dollar from someone else, or the world, to obtain it? No.
> I spend about $5 million every year to offset my family’s carbon footprint.
And how much carbon does he emit to earn that 5 million. That emission isn't part of his family's emission because it comes from microsoft. It's like tax evasion but for carbon emission.
He's done more than most -ref. Polio eradication, his (foundations') work on malaria... What have you done in this space? I know I've done shamefully little, but ride an electric scooter and take my son to school and back in a Bakfiets, trips I used to make in the car.
> and having rich white people telling you you're a bad person.
While their predecessors done exactly the same.
Rich people become gatekeepers. If everyone could be rich, then they wouldn't be so special anymore. That's why they lobby for high taxes (with appropriate loopholes, so they don't pay them, but anyone who starts from 0 won't get rich), excessive regulation (so that poor man's company will never be able to compete) and other measures to keep population "in check".
This is why we need a plan to build enough cities in the United States for a billion citizens and swap land in the “global south” for a free home and prompt citizenship. We can’t just let the world’s lungs be cut down by the logic that we made the same mistake 200 years ago.
There's reverse geocoding data at the end of each video – and most of the time, it picks spots in the middle of nowhere, which is difficult to reverse geocode in a way that's useful, so I don't show this information more prominently.
I kinda wish that there was a timelapse for Google search. Search seems to be heavily biased towards stuff popular right now. It seems older things disappear fairly quickly.
I've been in a position where I wanted to search for a website that was popular in 2012 without having the exact name, and having to find an old forum post that linked to it to find it.
I hear you - it would probably need to be cross integrated with web.archive.org in order to actually vend most results given how rapidly we are seeing bit rot.
I think I read somewhere that behind-the-scenes the Google crawler is in-effect a super-archive.org, keeping a copy of every page it has crawled. This sounds outrageous, but I believe it's feasible with compression.
Given that the set of possible searches is unbounded, first instinct is that the whole system would have had to be designed around that use case from the bottom up for the problem to be remotely tractable
At the very least, I wish they would update the UI for that. Every time I want to use it, it's like 4-5 clicks and very hard to use. I wish they could just give a nice timeline and let you slide across a given range, and maybe also see a graph of the activity (basically like Google Trends)
There's a good chance that the additional clicks are deliberate. Certain queries are a lot more resource-intensive than the average and it's not very difficult to turn Google Search into a money losing business, even with the ads.
A bit off topic: The Google's feature requires me to input date on MM/DD/YYYY format even though locale is ja-jp (We NEVER use it). When I just wrongly input "2021/04/16" to field and search, they even don't show format error, but show the result of 184/05/04. What??? I believe it never tested by locals. I've sent report but of course no response.
I miss the ability to get the cached version of a page easily, without having to jump into the advanced search settings - if it is even possible to do that anymore, they may have pulled it completely.
Pretty sure it’s just Landsat data, which is freely available. As is Sentinel, MODIS, and a number of other satellite platforms.
Google has been a pretty great pioneer on geospatial data science and visualization platforms, especially with Earth Engine (also free to use and allows you to access vast repositories of free geospatial data and use Googles computing resources to do data science with them).
What's really striking to me about timelapse videos of the Earth is how, at a grand enough scale, the growth of human settlements on Earth really looks no different than the growth of bacterial and fungal colonies on Petri dishes.
We think of ourself as special, as having conquered environments, technology and more - and when zoomed out you could explain everything we've built and accomplished as the achievements of a sufficiently robust slime mold simply using available resources to continue growing.
I think “we” do, but we don’t quite care as much about future generations as we like to think we do. Especially not when others today are disproportionately benefiting.
If you tell me to deprive myself of some conveniences because some people in another part of the world in another decade/century will suffer as a consequence of my actions... I agree with the selfless option in theory, but in practice I will usually choose the selfish option.
I think humans have a hard time with sustaining independent action. If you knew that everyone around you was going to be deprived of some convenience, say a restriction on driving to every other day (like they do in some countries based on the last digit of your license plate), I think it'd be easier to accept and adhere to for a long duration. I think this is both because you know the burden is shared, but also because the impact of a large adherence will tend to be more measurable.
If, on the other hand, you independently decide to stop driving your car because you know the world is getting smothered with carbon dioxide, but see people daily driving modified diesel pickups belching smoke into the sky, you're going to feel a bit like you're pissing in the wind even trying.
Because individual motivation and macro-behavior aren't necessity aligned, individual understanding might not be enough to changes behavior of the system as a whole. Maybe individual bacteria understand the impact they might have on a host system and are concerned about outcomes as well.
I sometimes think that it is a valid mental model to think of us as not much different from ants in a hive who think they possess more control and freedom than they do
> I sometimes think that it is a valid mental model to think of us as not much different from ants in a hive who think they possess more control and freedom than they do
I think it is the opposite. We are different from ants, and have a lot of control and freedom, so we know that if others will not make the sacrifice, why should we?
In an ant colony, I imagine the orders are being given top down and they do not think about what others are or are not sacrificing.
As I understand it, ants and other similar it's like bees don't have a hierarchical structure that issues orders. Instead they follow quasi-baked in behavioral patterns and pheromone signals provided by peers.
I'm not a biologist though and also have no experience in what it's like to be a bee or ant
We understand it but humans are composed of a variety of minds and what the rational one wants isn’t necessarily what we do.
Although conservation probably has more to do with reality looking different depending on your own local observations, to a Brazilian cattle rancher or Indonesian logger at the frontlines of the biodiversity crisis, things look different. For a consumer of those goods and materials, they likely don’t realize the connection.
We do. Problem is, while individually, we're much smarter than bacteria, as a large group, we're just as dumb as groups of them.
Take our main coordination mechanism - the market. For all that's been said and written about it, it's still basically gradient descent. As greedy as it gets - in the technical sense. It's what's been driving the development of humanity ever since we formed societies. It's what controls the behavior of everyone.
We may think we're smart and have principles - and we do. But the reality still is, everyone is spending most of their lives trying to align themselves to exploit the local economic gradient - because that's how individuals get more of what they want, and less of what they don't want. Nobody is strong enough to single-handedly reshape the larger economic gradient. So while individually, we play complex games, at macro scale, we're not all that different from slime molds or fungal growths.
Maybe one day our economy grows so sophisticated it'll gain sentience. But that doesn't necessarily mean things will get better - much like an individual human being sentient doesn't mean their cells are happy.
> I'd like to share a revelation I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with their surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to another area, and you multiply, and you multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure.
I've heard the idea expressed by many people in many different ways. Most versions compare our civilizations progress to a cancer or virus instead of just any old bacteria, because of the way we treat our environment. My favorite example is this[1] post about Factorio, which is a game in which you constantly add to a factory and expand to use more resources.
Yes this has been around for a long time. Sometimes instead of bacteria it's viewed as a cancer because cancer is metabolic and will continue to grow until is destroys it's host.
We do precisely what bacteria does, albeit at a much more complicated level. And I'd argue bacteria does what basic particles do, albeit at a much more complicated level. There are vast number of parallels in the behavior of systems from the microscopic to the macroscopic.
Did you honestly believe that the person you are replying to was under the mistaken impression that humans photosynthesize, or were you instead choosing to willfully misinterpret their shorthand phrase standing in for "engaging in agriculture"?
Obviously the entire point of this thread is to disparage humanity and not come to meaningful conclusions. For your own sanity, just leave the anti-humanists to their own devices.
You can say the same thing about ant colonies. I think it's probably just what anything that groups and branches around resource deposits looks like. If I recall slime molds are optimal planners regarding surrounding resources so it just sounds like a natural optimality to me.
I'd be more interested in what you think it "should" look like for an "advanced" species besides optimal?
Looking at it is disparagingly is weird to me, when the conclusion is maybe humans in aggregate are optimal with regards to finding and using resources to grow.
Not that we're growing unbounded either because that would be bad, we're in population decline across many major nations right now and are working towards a greener future in multiple industries to avoid resource collapse.
The level of doom and gloom and misanthropy is generally unwarranted if you look around at the steps we're taking to better ourselves as a species and every time I read things like this I can't help but think people revel in the supposed helplessness of our potential destruction and inability as some perverted pleasure.
> I'd be more interested in what you think it "should" look like for an "advanced" species besides optimal?
An advanced species would recognize the uniqueness and importance of the natural world, and would fence off huge sections of it to protect it for future generations.
Wouldn't some weird interpretation of the Pareto Principle [0] mean that we should be using 20% of the available resources for 80% of our production goals?
You are just projecting what you think on this hypothetical advanced species. They might find, instead, that they don't need or care for any of that and just wipe it out faster.
A more charitable interpretation is that an advanced civilization would be more likely to ensure it's own longevity and durability by engaging in serious, disciplined conservation of resources. Pretty simple observation, really.
Why conserve when there are so many resources to acquire? Better to efficiently spend the available resources as quickly as possible to expand to space and start on the exponential growth.
Unless your scale of 'conserving resources' involves putting out the stars to save their hydrogen for later use, you're doing it wrong.
the classic scifi trope of an advanced extraterrestrial race is one that is able to not merely ensure its existence but also develop and advance itself rapidly through aggressive intergalactic colonization and resource extraction.
Their resources don't have to be the same ones you need. They might have technology to produce everything they need and disregard any other ecosystem, especially ours.
You are again just projecting what you/we need on them, like the parent comment.
I agree, but your comment might be better served by giving reasons why. An advanced species that we can observe is, by definition, a successfully self-reproducing species. That is, a species that didn't die out in an early stage of its (social and technological) evolution. This means you have to ask (1) what steps did they take to avoid extinction, and (2) what social values allowed them to achieve those moves.
The biggest threat we face as a species in the foreseeable future is the exhaustion of our natural resources. Ergo, it makes sense to reserve as much as we can for future generations to decide what to do with. Some argue that we should use them as fast as possible in order to blow past some (claimed) barrier to entirely technological reproduction (producing a self-sustaining system on the Moon, for example), but this strikes me as hasty. The difficulties of achieving this might be far more difficult than advocates imagine, and if so we're likely to hit resource exhaustion.
That's before you even deal with the values. We don't have a lot of choice over those, but it's worth pointing out that many of our personal scruples are more compatible with collaborative than combative approaches to growth. The real moral challenge is whether the new frontier of growth (wealth acquisition) hits any wall before it destroys the environment.
We’re another level of the fractal of life, replicating patterns seen in bacterial biofilms, slime molds, circulatory systems, nervous systems, leaves, all manner of multicellular architectures.
It’s certainly a bad thing that we are growing in a sort of zero-sum manner against many original ecosystems though.
We need to learn to restrain our own growth (a tough one that we’re in the process of trying to beat into all of our heads it seems), and also we need to learn how to maximize the potential for biodiversity to exist within the structure of human occupied areas as well. (A good book on this last subject is “Win-win Ecology”).
The human footprint already covers nearly the entirety of the planet. Conservation of systems that are within or directly adjacent to that footprint is actually very important. Extraordinary amounts of biodiversity are contained in these areas and we need to study how to reconcile our land use with the needs of that biodiversity. We shouldn’t ignore it out of a fear that people will get the wrong idea.
Almost all (80-90%?) of the human footprint is making food. To try to grow our food and ensure biodiversity on the SAME LAND is going to be less productive per acre and would mean even MORE of the Earth’s surface is needed to feed humanity. That’s a losing proposition as we’re already near land usage limits in much of the world that uses less efficient production methods. The best way to ensure biodiversity is to INCREASE the intensity of farming, at the limit to just convert our staple food production to vat-based food production (think methane fermentation ala Calysta Feedkind, or maybe microalgae). Corn and wheat and meat gets highly processed anyway; you can hardly tell it WASNT made in a vat. Fresh fruit and veggies that retain their grown form are a relatively small part of our footprint.
Grow food in vats, and the vast majority of the planet can just be like National Parks.
But I do think we can think of smart ways to ensure biodiversity under, say, solar arrays. Solar arrays are (or can be made to be) biologically inert. If they are high enough, they can act as a sort of technological canopy over a biodiverse forest floor. And that would only be a small portion of the planet (the rest would be National Parks). We’d use solar electricity to produce food super efficiently from vats. About 2000-4000W nameplate solar per person (at least in the 30N to 30S latitude that most people live in) should be enough to provide the macronutrients for the average person. At high efficiency, that’s about 10 square meters per person at noon. That’s just 100,000 square kilometers to feed 10 billion people, compared to over 50,000,000 square kilometers used for agriculture today (which is half of the habitable land surface of ~100 million km^2). It can be over the ocean, too. That’s just 0.02% of the Earth’s surface.
I agree that we should ideally minimize our agricultural footprint and turn everything else into a nature reserve. But we’ve got to work from the realities of where we are today.
Notice that for the USA for example, not very much of the land is state or federal parks. The vast majority is used by humans in some way, and the reality is that they’re not about to turn it all into parks.
So, while pushing for the protection of as much land as possible, we should also study conservation on land that’s not already a protected area.
The book I mentioned has a number of examples where good conservation work has actually been done on such lands.
That “cow pasture/range” chunk is largely extremely low productivity scrub land owned by the federal government and leased basically for free by cattle folk. We could convert all of it to national parks without much more than a blip in food calories produced in the US.
As far as actually farmed land, productivity has increased by an order of magnitude, MUCH faster than population, so we actually farm less land than in the 40s in spite of having a much larger population that eats more. We burn that corn in our cars, for goodness sake. The land area use for ethanol corn in our country is more than enough area to convert the entire nation’s electric production to solar.
> That “cow pasture/range” chunk is largely extremely low productivity scrub land owned by the federal government and leased basically for free by cattle folk. We could convert all of it to national parks without much more than a blip in food calories produced in the US.
Agreed!
I would emphasize restoration and protection in almost every case.
Just that there’s also ways we can work towards conservation on land that is being utilized too.
You talked about farms but there’s also: managed forests, anywhere anything is grazing, private lands, fisheries, artificial reefs and kelp forests, any area we already use which we can also stack on an incidental conservation benefit ontop of (as you mentioned renewable energy infrastructure will be a big one, the book I mention is full of other surprising examples such as military bases), things like wildlife underpasses, suburban lawns, and so on. This adds up to a lot of land.
I hope we protect half of the land and ocean like Edward O. Wilson and other major biologists recommend, but also I think it’s smart to look at everything and not just protected areas.
Yeah, military bases is definitely one area... I'm thinking of Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center, which are both launchports AND nature reserves... and another one is nuclear power plants.
I hate mowing the lawn. I actually prefer the typical "weeds" like clover and dandelion over the typical grass. Dumb that we basically mandate weird, chemical and labor-intensive grass monoculture.
I actually think about 90% of the land ought to become basically national parks and/or protected wilderness. Maybe even more. We can live in dense cities in absolute luxury and abundance (with 10,000 square foot condos... why not? multiple stories make it possible) and then those of us who like to can go camping on the weekends. Traveling by electric motorgliders to our weekend campsite. Cars only underground (but everyone has one still).
Some of that cow pasture/range land used to be better land, and has been degraded by bad farming techniques and/or overgrazing. The area around Pipe Springs, Utah for example, was significantly more lush 150 years ago, and now it's scrub land. It would be a mistake to think of land as static and only fit for a limited set of purposes, and to therefore exploit it without concern for what it is or could turn into (for better or worse).
We're also causing top soil to erode and blow away in much of the corn belt [0]. That productivity has a cost and shouldn't be assumed.
The sad part is that many of us have to constantly fight against those of "us" who are actively working against those improvements.
It's easy to take an outside look and say "well, see, humankind fixed it", but the personal energy and misery that goes into fighting for those fixes is enormous. I wouldn't call it "misanthropy".
A substantial amount of Earth's resources would need to be eviscerated to accomplish that goal, the the space colonies are extremely likely to fail anyway, in the end.
Humans establishing self-sufficient communities beyond Earth would prove that humans have the capability to thrive sustainably on Earth. It would silence forever any technological objections to the possibility of human sustainability on Earth.
And a firm idea that humans can never establish self-sustaining communities in space is not that far from the idea that we probably cannot do so on Earth, either.
It really is not a huge step from pessimism about human future (ie in space) to nihilism about sustainability on Earth, and I do wish people would acknowledge this more: people enthusiastic about permanent settlements in space are, in fact, more certain about the possibility of sustainable thriving on Earth than the space-pessimists are.
I don’t think there’s anything more important than being an outward-looking, striving species.
Once we get depressed and nihilistic and give up, the universe will be forever deprived of the colour and drama human civilization can add to all those bare rocks up there.
I never considered that the implication is we could live here sustainably, but you’re right.
These discussions tend to be heavy on Asimov-inspired scifi-think and weak on just taking a walk in a forest on a nice sunny day in late spring. All this talk about having to colonize space is just rubbish, compared to the wonders of nature that would be worth preserving.
But the audience here is strongly biased. If most of your day is spent in front of a computer and reading scifi novels in the evening, then that's where the discussion moves.
I’m talking about expanding the scope of human civilization, not abandoning this planet.
Also, are you saying that forests are nature and space isn’t? Or are you saying that there aren’t any wonders of nature to experience out there?
Setting up nice sunny walk-ready forests in space is something that’ll take centuries, but if we don’t do it we’re doomed. Incidentally, so are the forests.
I remain unable to comprehend the kind of brain damage that leads some to dismiss the challenge of living sustainably on a fit-for-purpose planet but embrace the challenge of abandoning it.
Nah, we just need to bootstrap a cislunar economy. There's plenty of resources to use upwell, more than there ever were on Earth - but we need to seed the infrastructure for turning them into useful goods, and make it self-sustaining.
There are millions of tons of thorium on earth and on Mars. We can have sustainable energy (and thus basically everything else) with basically 60s technology.
> I'd be more interested in what you think it "should" look like for an "advanced" species besides optimal?
In a word, sustainable. An advanced civilization should be able to develop in a coordinated and self sustaining way, rather than as a grand experiment in tragedy of the commons. Microbes don’t coordinate their growth, and therefore fall into boom-bust cycles that dominate and exhaust their local environment. Humans can reason about these issues, but we see insufficient ability to collectively coordinate in response to them.
I agree that it's _possible_ we're headed for the boom-bust cycle that you're talking about, but unlike microbes that's a hypothesis, not a scientifically verifiable fact, as humans have never (to my knowledge) experienced the sort of planet-wide bust that you're implying.
I'm not sure if it's technically a counterexample, but it's fascinating. Society seemed to collapse due to a series of causes, more or less unexplained to this day. (We have hypotheses, but it's still something of a mystery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples)
Wasn't it hypothesized that the collapse was due to an Ice Age? I thought there was strong geological evidence for that, and the challenges it put on human population, but I don't know enough about history to place the last Ice Age on a timeline relative to the Bronze Age without doing research.
Update: Upon some brief research, the last Ice Age ended about 12,000 years ago, whereas the Bronze Age Collapse was around 1200 BCE. So totally unrelated.
You probably described my complete complaint of humans in a perfect paragraph. We keep choosing this laissez-faire attitude (also conservative) attitude.
Seems to me like you are expecting too much.
Worst part is, if that kind of thinking - do not exploit nature wins out - we might not even get there. Exploitation is key for scientific advancement in capitalism.
> Exploitation is key for scientific advancement in capitalism
What a weird objection. It’s our science that tells us we need to radically reform how we consume resources. I’m not worried we’re going to waste all our resources in scientific endeavors, I’m concerned that we’re destroying the environment on which we depend for frivolous short term gains.
I think humanity is, and has been going through a collective learning experience over thousands of years, and any "advanced" civilization will necessarily have to go through a similar phase to get to that "advanced" stage. So while it's true humanity can do better, I think this - the global coordination challenge - is fundamental and irremovable in any collection of self-interested individuals.
More cynical take: because most societies have to go through this experience, most societies don't make it to "advanced". That's one of the ideas behind the "Great Filter" hypothesis.
I think deferring to reason is a nouveau fad among men of letters -- as if it's some truth machine; wherein one inputs one's observations and, by the grace of reason, out pops "what should be done." This ignores the very basest of truths that all men's* reason is self-centered, generating only courses of action that benefit him -- no matter how indirectly (ex. donating to a charity does help others, but it also helps the donator on some emotional (see: moral/spiritual/conditioned) level; otherwise, the donator wouldn't have done it).
Every man* has his own temperament, value system, -- and so on -- that reason alone begets wildly different what-should-be-dones. That is, unless the achievement of a narrow aim would benefit the many---and therefore all those different reason machines come together to collectively strive towards some end---then we have all sorts of different, many times conflicting, what-should-be-dones (politics is a prime example here).
Perhaps then an authority should be appointed?; someone or some group whose sole purpose is to reason all day and all night, until they come up with a what-should-be-done that benefits their constituency (of course, this assumes they didn't ascend by force, coercion, or some other deviousness).
But now, we get into this dreadful stalemate: the more constituents there are, the more the means and the ends have to be tailored to them, and the more the whole venture becomes watered down, in order to suit some muddied "average." Or perhaps the authority decides to "draw a line in the ground," to create some abstract "core" of acceptable means and ends (as well as people to enlist), and shun out the rest---in order to maintain some semblance of identity and individualism.
Yet, now we have two very inefficient differentiations. On one hand, we have the all-inclusive reasoning-body, that is so held back by trying to please all, that it pleases none. On the other hand, we have the some-exclusive reasoning-body, that -- fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on one's own reasoning -- shuts out the "others," and does nothing to support the advancement of their ends (many times, quite the opposite).
I think it is self-evident that both are inefficient towards the coordination of all humanity. So are there any alternatives?
Perhaps we could simply do away with collective coordination -- or atleast some less rigid approach?
What about some type of individualism?; where each man* decides his own fate. Therein, each member is responsible for his own fate, and therefore---collectively---the fate of all man? Each soul going in his own direction, serving his interests foremost, and pushing the fate of humanity, in his own image, little by little -- like some plant, slowly rooting itself into the most impenetrable places, and overcoming the, otherwise apparent, impossible odds.
On a local level, humanity is ever unsustainable, "booming-and-busting," but on the world level we have survived, and will continue until we lose our survival instincts (impossible, collectively). Each member of the human race will do what he must to survive and improve his own circumstances, even if it leaves others worse off; then, those worse-offs must now improve their circumstances further, and strive for a better life. In the end, each man guarantees the survival (but not thrival) of the human race, by the virtue of his selfishness.
*Are we still doing the "man" is not synonymous with "human" fad? It's more of a stylistic choice, rather than an "only men can use reason." I.e, it flows better than "hu-man."
I'm not 100% sure what you're getting at, but I don't think it really addresses my point. Much of what you've said could be read as just a descriptive reason why the human world is the way it is - no objection there, except to note that I'd hope for better from an "advanced civilization", regardless of what mechanisms were at play. Preferably, a super-majority would be aware of the issues and willing to coordinate extensively to mitigate them for the greater good, but I don't think anyone would argue that we're there yet.
As a stylistic choice, I also have an aversion to dressing up human decision-making in such abstract and flowery terminology. We've invented lots of cool tools for thinking and doing, but we're still simply advanced primates with lots of baggage.
An answer to your problem is isolated countries with strong local cultures and nationalism. Each country's population has a shared set of beliefs about what-should-be-done so they can implement it locally and the winners can impose their superior culture on their less successful neighbors. Hopefully not exterminating all different cultures and optimizing for short term gain though. We've always been doing this and still are. Islamic culture has some commonly agreed upon ideas of what-should-be-done and those countries implement it without being watered down by individualism. So does western culture but we've already done it and take it for granted so it's hard to notice. For instance, you don't see western politicians fighting to deny women the right to vote because we do have a common what-should-be-done idea about that.
In response to your final question: To my ear using "men" as a substitute for "all people" doesn't flow better, I found it rather jarring and antiquated and, yeah, a little insensitive. I'm also not convinced it's a purely stylistic decision, as you claim... There's a rather long history of using men as a substitute for everyone in, say, medicine, politics, finance, and many (most?) disciplines, with outcomes most of us agree were not so great. It can also muddy the interpretation of your arguments, as (asterisks aside) it's not perfectly clear when you say "men" if you're referring to everyone or just actually just males. It's an easy thing to change, and your rhetoric will be clearer, more persuasive, and less likely to be immediately dismissed by a fraction of your audience.
I thank you for your take; yet I refuse to yield to your sensibilities.
I think where we differ is in our approach to language. I see it as a medium of art -- like a song or a painting. "Man" is but a certain, evocative hue of brown that I believe fits best into the feelings I'm trying to elicit; and "human" is a lesser, albeit passable substitute.
I think this scientificization, making it more rigorous and "comprehensible," has done the opposite. Words have connotations, denotations, and all sorts of deeper meanings behind them. "Human" is such a sterilized, unnevocative word; and I refuse to use it.
However, certainly you've felt something from its usage -- even if that feeling was not the one I felt (compare it to: human -- which only the most scientifically-obsessed would have their hearts sing from its utterance).
"Human" is a perfectly evocative word that does make people's "hearts sing". You have the "human touch", humanitarianism, treating things humanely. It reflects our highest aspirations for ourselves, and your rejection of it reflects upon you.
"Man" connotes... well, men. It depicts a society where the real movers and shakers are men. No one really hears "man" and thinks "men and women" (or "women and men" - why should men come first?). Notably, they say they do, but this has been shown by experiment to be inaccurate. If you say "man", people can't help but picture one. Indeed I also notice you use gendered language everywhere, not just in the word "man" to mean humanity. You say "men of letters", for instance, and you take care to match the pronouns. Am I really meant to imagine women when you write that? Would "people" not do just as well?
Lastly - far from being a "fad", this debate was active in the 70s, and has been entirely resolved now; nobody uses "man" this way anymore, and it sticks out like a sore thumb when you do. It sounds archaic to the point of comical. Consider if the subtextual message you want to send with your word choices is "I stubbornly refuse to adapt to the times".
Human as its own word, not as a derivative for others---and in its own, separate, unmodified context---has a specific, insipid connotation, compared to humanitarian, "human touch," etc.
Frankly, my experience has been that men are the real moves and shakers (and women impelling them to move, shake, and writhe around). It takes a certain amount of ego, and internal and emotional drive to "shake" and "move" (which I must assume you consider to be "good" aspects of humanity) the world -- one that most women do not have, and the ones that do require external resources to maintain that "drive" (mostly food).
I don't understand why you would rally around for this point. Being someone of substance is a worthless affair, compared to being someone of culture. The first comes easily to men, and arduously for women. The last comes easily to women, and arduously for men. It's an atrocity to eschew woman's gifts, to pursue men's. That's how you destroy a nation's culture, tradition, its children, and thereby its society. There must be a duality, with a strict boundary, else you get muddied people that don't know a single thing about what it means to be human. (in this context, it fit just right)
I use man in this way. I don't care what anyone---justifying their schooling and existence---has to say about it. Progress without purpose is wasted breath. Conforming for its own sake is death. Anything Western Intellectuals have written in the past 70 years I believe to be without merit.
...
Yet, I'll admit Hofstadter got a chuckle out of me with that riddle: I thought the surgeon was the male spouse of the deceased father! I yield.
I agree with your take, after it's been shoved in my face, and forced me to self-reflect. However, I'll still use "man" as a more archaic synonym of "human," albeit with a more apt note this time.
You got me. Take your upvote, and let me live in my crotchety, curmudgeon fantasy-land.
But we're moving towards sustainability. Whether it's fast enough is up to interpretation but the push for green tech, sustainable farming etc etc it's not like this is an unknown, it's just always been the case that it must be sufficiently cheap and easy for the average person to latch onto it. Unfortunately in a lot of areas we're getting there but not there yet.
Mind providing me some of that research? I've heard this a few times but when I go looking for it nothing really pops up, it's mostly things saying we need to act now but can avoid the biggest issues.
Going to need something a little stronger than xkcd here. I'm not a climate scientist but a lot of the names attached to both links seem to be and they're saying if we act decisively in the next 29 years we can avoid the worst effects, which in that second link is defined as < 1.5C change this century
Edit: I also want to make it clear just in case anyone misinterprets my skepticism over the depth of the effects as skepticism in climate change or the urgency of it in general. I agree we need to do what we can to make sure things like this don't come to pass because I happen to like our somewhat diverse ecosystem and that we continue to damage it isn't great.
The first link says we can learn to adapt to the massive changes brought about by global warming.
The second link says we are unlikely to keep global warming in this century below 2.7° Fahrenheit (1.5° Celsius) which has severe consequences for the environment.
I think you’re reading into their optimistic language a bit too much.
Do you watch the news? Have you seen a completely ice-free North Pole earlier in January? The ice in Norway, Russia and Iceland melting completely, permanently damaging the permafrost and releasing huge amounts of methane? Might be hard to notice from your apartment but the weather is going absolutely nuts in most of the world. Insect populations down by up to 90%. These are not “feelings”.
"It’s true that without dramatic action in the next couple of decades..."
You missed the first part of their sentence.
On the flipside perhaps you're a little too much into doomsday scenarios?
We've quite literally transformed the entire planet and way of living inside of 30 years since personal computation technology took off. I really don't see it as particularly farfetched that we can correct for our negative consumptive habits inside of the same timeframe, considering our rate of advance and change only accelerated within that same timeframe.
I'll live out just the end of this century if I'm lucky so I'll be able to eat my words just fine if I'm wrong, but I'll bet you I'm not.
How many governments have commited to doing something about the irreversible damage being done to the ocean by overfishing?
Everyone here is going crazy about climate change, when it is very well known information that eating fish is the greatest current contributor to climate change. (See Seaspiracy)
So would you mind explaining what Orange man bad has done differently to any other puppet placed on the US throne?
He withdrew from trash agreements that do nothing to actually improve climate change, yes.
Based on your profile I would guess that you are the kind of person preaching to everyone about using plastic straws while eating your poisonous salmon nagiri.
> Even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, global warming would continue to happen for at least several more decades, if not centuries
or
> In the absence of major action to reduce emissions, global temperature is on track to rise by an average of 6 °C
There is not much major action going on (except for the electrification of vehicles which is being driven by commercial venture) so your hopes are just that, hope. Hope is not a strategy. It is quite far fetched to expect a correction when literally all data points are going the other way.
Your view does not reflect the common scientific consensus. We’re at a stage where changes are irreversible and all we can do is minimize and prepare for them, as seen in the article.
This is not fatalism, much to the contrary: I’m saying corrective action is much, much more urgent than you seem to believe and has to be started immediately. We don’t have another 30 years to sit on it.
You keep picking half sentences that leave off the part saying we can do things to prevent catastrophe. At this point I can only believe you aren’t coming from a place of intellectual honesty.
You also keep saying scientific consensus and data points but considering I keep finding information to the contrary and you’ve provided nothing I really think you mean your own personal and emotion driven stance. Of which I don’t buy.
Yup climate change is a big issue, we'll probably solve it to a point humanity and the broader earth will be fine in a reasonable time. Just like every other crazy things we've pulled off during the same geological instant.
I’m puzzled. The sentences I quote are straight from the article, and it doesn’t go much further than that. It’s five paragraphs long. It doesn’t show any possibilities for reversal or offer an alternative scenario.
All it offers is a meaningless “it’s up to us what happens next”. Where is the information to the contrary you see?
As someone who has studied modeling, these situations are fundamentally unmodelable with the tools we have.
Whenever you read a study saying that 'In complex system X, Y will happen in a decade' breathe easily -- we can't model what the stock market will look like in a day. We can't model what user demand for a sale will be in a week. We can't model most complex things in any large time frame, and believing any conclusions in the XX years for something as complex as climate is bizarre.
While it's not good, it's not that bad. A lack of biodiversity may, if taken to extremes, limit the variety of things humans have access to. However, even in that case, we should be able to rely on our wind pollinated crops (possibly with more genetic modification, if required) to feed us while we research synthetic alternatives to anything we start to loose access to.
Pick an area of science which intersects with human development and I'll find you something - the underlying truth is that we can't hope to disrupt such a huge percentage of our biosphere without nasty consequences, and we can't hope to have remediation efforts compete with the global engine of human development. We've essentially organized an entire global society around the injection of carbon into the atmosphere, while turning habitat into development at astonishing rates. To make things worse, humans are really good at adapting, so we're (by and large) comfortable while the world burns.
Press releases and pop-science articles tend to try to strike a more hopeful tone, because it's extremely tiring and depressing just hearing "we're screwed" all day. I try to stay hopeful, but my faith that enough people will care soon enough is basically gone.
I can't tell if this is a joke or not. Where do we start?
Do you think running out of oil will go smoothly? We already can't stand still for 5 minutes without blowing someone up in a resource war and basically all of our resources are plentiful for now.
Rising sea levels decreasing usable land. Rising temperatures destroying key organisms in the food chain. Mass deforestation is destroying the very things that allow us to breathe.
How much climate change affects you is a function of your wealth and your country's wealth (cost of basic resources as well as required countermeasures are growing). Anyone who's been on the low side of one or both of those variables will tell you that it's already miserable.
Imagine, if you even can, what being in a poor country will be like when all the oil is gone, food can't grow the usual way (you need either hydroponics or serious genetic modification), increasingly unstable weather destroys everything you build and everyone else is out to get you to squeeze out every last drop of resources you might have?
What people with no such experience don't realize is that unlike our economic system, which funnels resources upwards, ecosystem collapse doesn't funnel them anywhere. It's just an endless pit and eventually, everyone is poor.
One of the greatest features of mankind is the response to disasters. When situation gets really bad, we are capable of achieving incredible things that would normally be impossible.
Example: Second world war.
You might argue that it was not disaster comparable to climate change, but it did turn entire world upside down, disrupting everything aspect of life of vast majority of world's population. But it also led to incredible advancements in many areas, new discoveries in all sciences, new technologies, massive changes in societies as well.
So I don't see the situation as gloomy, we will survive, because we always do.
Oh ffs. Yes, "we" will survive, as in there will not be a human race extinction event, most likely. However, that's ignoring the hunger, suffering, and deaths that are coming our way. Many of "us" won't survive, and/or will have miserable lives, especially those of us who happen to be poor. As just one example of many, have a look at the potential of large regions reaching a wet-bulb-temperature above human tolerability: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/19/eaaw1838
Taking an approach that "we will sort it out" ignores that the disaster is already unrolling, just too slow for most of us to notice. The longer we linger, the worse the situation, and the higher the human toll.
Sorry, I meant it differently. What I was trying to say was that we (mankind) respond best to disasters = sudden catastrophic events, but really bad to frog-boiling ones.
It would be best to do nothing and let it all reach a critical point to trigger that survival instinct, because nothing short of that will be able to force us to do anything about it, other than some weak, irrelevant attempts.
One of the worst features of humanity is that we’ve proven ourselves incapable of planning more than a few years ahead. The fact that it takes acute crises to get us to take dramatic action is the problem: climate change and biosphere collapse take a while to start affecting people (especially the global rich), and once things get bad enough for mass action it’s probably too late to save our civilization.
I look at the insanity in how the US responds to small movements of people now and despair at the thought of how we’ll deal with simultaneous waves of millions of climate refugees alongside the predictable handful of domestic crises.
I made a more specific offer which received no response, meanwhile others have posted a number of research articles in this very thread.
Nothing I’ve said disagrees with the scientific consensus, so you could also just Google it rather than whining that someone on the internet isn’t holding your hand.
Hi OP here way too many different talking points going on in the thread, your offer went right past me. I'd love to know more about our energy generation and how that is working against our climate change goals. I know that at the start of 2020 we produced 25% of our energy from renewable in the US and that we're moving more of that percentage yearly but understand we have more to do globally among other nations. I figure that's a perfectly specific topic that if you have all this damning research that we won't get there you can just quickly drop it on me.
some highly advanced extinction experiments include large-scale rainforest fragmentation, and the collapse of coral reefs, with accompanied dieback of mangroves and seagrass. These are highly significant because of their advanced progress and the anticipated downstream planetary impact.
"way way behind" and "pretty bleak" are completely subjective and thus meaningless for trying to understand nature. If you can't quantify it, you're only able to think using feelings and feelings can't tell you important answers like what we should do. They can make you believe you know what we should do, but you'll be wrong because your feelings won't be accurately tuned to the reality.
Congratulations, you've discovered that I'm commenting on an internet forum rather than submitting something for publication. My assessment is based on my own reading, and on being involved in conservation efforts and trying to stay educated generally. Sorry I didn't prepare a set of bullet points for you, and instead went with an informal an easily intelligible lay summary.
To the best of my knowledge, my language (while imprecise) is completely and totally uncontroversial in the scientific community.
It's not an easily intelligible lay summary because the meaning could be anything. It only conveys emotion, not knowledge about nature. I suppose you're being an activist trying to convert people to your religion of doom. In that case, you do need to convey emotions like fear to fool people into imagining things are unboundedly bad. Quantitative predictions put a cap on how bad it is so they're not as scary as the unknown.
Are you seriously suggesting that every mention of a negative issue needs to be a self contained and cited polemic piece? Stop being absurd. If you want to talk specifics, make a specific objection, or at least narrow in on an issue you want to get into in more depth.
"I'm sorry Ms Smith but you have a tumour. The good news is that it is completely operable - at the moment. The bad news, well, until we can measure every conceivable metric relating to this tumour, and unless we can determine every conceivable path its progression might take, we are very reluctant to operate. We have chosen, instead, to wait until the outcome of this cancer is more certain and, having weighed these against the small but measurable risks of surgery, that we are comfortable that we are certain of the benefit surgery will provide."
"And when will that be?"
"Well, not to beat around the bush, but when the cancer has metastisized and is about to kill you, we will be certain enough of the benefit of surgery now. Yes, this will likely result in your death, but to move before we have solidified all of these variables to a five-sigma measure would be allowing too much emotion into our descision making."
I found the “subjective” comment easier to understand than this one. Not every opinion or generalization requires citation. Your stance and reply are also subjective. I do prefer quantitative data and references, especially when the topic is at all scientific. It doesn’t automatically make qualitative or broad statements pointless though. It especially doesn’t mean they don’t contribute to understanding.
Sure, but the internet is awash with similar activist opinions when it comes to climate change, biodiversity, and sustainability. They go in circles reinforcing each other without being grounded in reality. Their aim seems to be to mislead people with fear instead of sharing understanding. I think that underhandedness is what grates on me when I read them.
In terms of the definition of "advanced", the question I was answering was a subjective one. I think it's appropriate to use the term "advanced" for societies that can plan for their long term futures and continue to exist in stable equilibria in a given environment.
The second point isn't dependent on an external comparison.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make or if you're objecting to anything in particular, but being global carbon negative seems like a good start.
If you're calling for action then we need to have clear metrics, goals, and standards that we can prioritize, plan for, evaluate decisions against, and measure the results against. Thank you for adding one.
Alternatively, if you're simply putting out a Vision to inspire enthusiasm or incite fear, then "we're behind" is sufficient and doesn't require anything more because at best, it's the "race to the moon" and at worst, it's the "missile gap."
I mean, I guess I am, but really I'm mostly relaying my understanding of the scientific consensus. I didn't make my comment in some sort of vacuum where readers are supposed to understand the last few decades of climate science just from my comment...
I've been reading reports and analysis since the Kyoto Protocols. The most fascinating things since that time is that we (the US) were behind in those requirements but significantly ahead of everyone else. The Paris Agreement is roughly the same so far too.
In a situation where "we're behind" and "we're ahead" are both accurate statements point to a significant problem in the approach.
You choosing one of them exclusively means you're playing for "your team" instead of looking at reality of the situation which is neither useful nor honest.
I'm strongly against governments controlling population growth.
OP I was responding to stated:
"Microbes don’t coordinate their growth, and therefore fall into boom-bust cycles that dominate and exhaust their local environment. Humans can reason about these issues, but we see insufficient ability to collectively coordinate in response to them."
Government is how we collectively coordinate. Microbes exhaust their local environment by reproduction, hence the question.
Sustainability is orthogonal to the geographic patterns of development - it's always going to be more efficient (even in environmental impact!) to cluster around resources and transportation.
It may be sustainable on a longer time scale than you're thinking of. For instance, perhaps we use fossil fuels to provide the value needed to find new sustainable sources of energy. Could we really make nuclear fusion reactors without ever having first burnt a lot of coal and oil?
Lots of things are unsustainable in the short term but sustainable in the long term. Hunter-gathering for instance. If you pick the berries off a bush, they're gone. You can't keep doing that all day every day or the plant will never reproduce and eventually stop producing berries. But if you look at the hunter-gatherer's berry picking habits over a whole year, it may well be sustainable because he's not doing it at the same rate all the time. Similarly, our unsustainable behaviors may be limited to a few centuries of rapid change taking us into a new and different sustainable future that wouldn't have been possible otherwise.
That's some excellent wishful thinking, and I hope you're right. Meanwhile, I've read plenty of articles suggesting that we're likely in for unavoidable and hugely disruptive warming, at the very least, and I don't currently see us globally acting quickly enough.
I've also taken an amateur interest in ecology and the natural sciences, and once you actually learn a bit about the species around you, the loss of habitat and biodiversity we're undergoing becomes a staggeringly obvious fact that most people are just completely oblivious to.
I've never understood why people wouldn't just figure something out as global warming gets worse.
There's lots of nuclear power plants out there, shut down for political reasons, that'd be ready to go in weeks if you didn't have all the anti-nuclear protests, for starters.
There's also geo-engineering and such - spraying black stuff in the atmosphere to reduce the amount of incoming sunlight.
The idea that humanity couldn't deal with this situation if it spent anywhere in the ballpark of 100% of its resources on it seems to me frankly laughable.
> I've never understood why people wouldn't just figure something out as global warming gets worse.
We've just seen first-hand evidence that millions of people could be dying and some would find it politically expedient to pretend that it wasn't actually occurring.
We absolutely have the resources and capability to solve these problems. We just don't have the will or the policy.
> We've just seen first-hand evidence that millions of people could be dying and some would find it politically expedient to pretend that it wasn't actually occurring.
I'm sorry, I don't follow, who do you mean? Colonialism? The Uighurs in China? People in India/Pakistan? Possible victims of global warming? The Holocaust?
>We just don't have the will or the policy.
Right, that's what I mean. The minute things get anywhere near serious, people are gonna figure something out real quick. Restarting the nuclear power plants and closing the coal plants would take weeks, be profitable in economic terms, and hugely reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The fact that nobody's done this means we aren't serious about it.
I mean, if you were really serious, you would just deregulate nuclear power totally. If the estimates of the harms of global warming are true, you could take 1 Chernobyl-scale incident per year and still come out on top. The fact that nobody's done this means we aren't serious about it.
The combination of facts that (1) we aren't serious about this and (2) there's plenty of low-hanging fruit we could reap if we were, leads me to believe this will not really be a problem, as soon as we do get serious about it.
Can we really stop a planet sized chain reaction? We can’t even pass carbon taxes, there are many many climate change deniers, so unfortunately I can’t see a too bright future ahead.
Sure, human technology is super advanced, but we are no play for the elements.
Nuclear’s problem is not regulation, it’s that it is relatively slow to come online with large upfront investments. It’s simply not well aligned with the current financial world. The “fix” for this within the neoliberal paradigm would be to do the same as with renewables: have the state put long term price guarantees and subsidies for it. Alas, unlike renewables, this doesn’t also create a market for gas producers, so very little chance for it to happen magically if you ask me.
That’s a very common line of reasoning which I would call magical thinking. Sure, there’s not really any risk that humans will go extinct in the near future, but our technological global civilization is much more fragile.
First, we look at the numbers concerning best case scenarios and see that a few degrees of warming is basically inevitable. Then, we ask how likely it is that well make rapid corrections now - personally I see little evidence of that, but I hope I’m wrong.
Next, try to remember that nothing in the world is disconnected. There’s a long scholarship concerning resource conflict and the destabilizing effects of mass migration. We don’t have a good track record of dealing with this, and I see little reason to expect us to become better at it soon.
The geoengineering idea is especially ludicrous to me - what we’re really talking about are emergency uncontrolled experiments to stave off a worse disaster. We’ve organized our entire global economic system around carbon - any geoengineering project has to not only compete with that, but actively remove more carbon from the atmosphere, which is a problem you’re underestimating the difficulty of.
Meanwhile, we need to worry about positive feedback cycles from various sources of methane, and the rest of the related threats to our biosphere (ocean acidification, wildfire, extreme weather).
To close, what has humanity done to convince you that we’ll 100% restructure our society to collaboratively solve this crisis “once it gets bad enough”?
Good riddance. If our technological global civilization results in conditions that make technological global civilization impossible, then so be it. It wasn't fit to exist to begin with. It's a self-regulating problem.
> There’s a long scholarship concerning resource conflict and the destabilizing effects of mass migration. We don’t have a good track record of dealing with this, and I see little reason to expect us to become better at it soon.
I don't know what you mean here - are you suggesting mass migration is inevitable?
> The geoengineering idea is especially ludicrous to me - what we’re really talking about are emergency uncontrolled experiments to stave off a worse disaster. We’ve organized our entire global economic system around carbon - any geoengineering project has to not only compete with that, but actively remove more carbon from the atmosphere, which is a problem you’re underestimating the difficulty of.
No, I mean spraying dust into the atmosphere to make it darker, so less sunlight comes in.
It's not just a matter of economy - people aren't even picking the low-hanging fruit. If any country wanted to severely cut CO2 emissions, there's a simple thing they could do:
1) reopen all the closed nuclear plants
2) deregulate nuclear power plant construction, focus on mass producing cheap power plants with no regard for safety
3) shut down the coal plants
4) throw everyone who protests in prison
Obviously, this isn't done because all of these steps are politically impossible. But it just goes to show - if we were serious about this, we'd have picked the low-hanging fruit already. If we haven't even picked the low-hanging fruit yet, how can you say it's impossible?
> To close, what has humanity done to convince you that we’ll 100% restructure our society to collaboratively solve this crisis “once it gets bad enough”?
It's like people procrastinating their homework until 5 minutes before the deadline. Eventually they'll get it done.
Matter of preference I guess. I like to hope humanity will continue to learn things about and explore the broader universe rather than descent into feudal oppression (or some-such) in the ashes of our former civilization, but whatever.
> I don't know what you mean here - are you suggesting mass migration is inevitable?
At this point, that's the conclusion, yes. Climate impacts cause incredible destabilization for folks who rely more closely on their local environment (subsistence farmers and the global poor generally), and yes - disruption leads to mass migration.
> No, I mean spraying dust into the atmosphere to make it darker, so less sunlight comes in.
.... yes, an emergency uncontrolled experiment to solve some of the symptoms of a global problem. The global economy as it currently exists is geoengineering at an absolutely monumental scale.
Also, your reply is just incredibly baffling and frustrating, to the point that I half think you're not being serious. "Oh, we'll just spray some dust in the air and reflect more sunlight to solve the problem" - it's ludicrous, and nobody serious who studies geoengineering shares your attitude. I do believe we're going to have to engage in geoengineering, but it's not something to be taken lightly (and the experts who study it generally agree). Never mind the fact that even if your "solution" worked, it wouldn't solve things like ocean acidification, and would at best buy us some time... while having potentially unforeseen consequences on cancer rates, crop production, solar efficiency, etc.
> It's like people procrastinating their homework until 5 minutes before the deadline. Eventually they'll get it done.
Talk about unearned optimism. Not everything is a problem you can just go "fix".
Probably fair to say that it's not low hanging fruit then.
I think a lot of time is being spent on finding politically correct solutions, but maybe we'll come full circle back to your solution after wasting a lot of time with fancy solutions that don't have a significant enough effect.
You're big on worrying about problems which you seem to only have subjective feelings about the severity of. How do you know "hugely disruptive warming" is bad enough to be worth all that worry or worth people paying a high price to try to prevent?
I's not misanthropy to note that we're not so different from other species and that our growth/behavior is in many respects similar to other natural phenomena involving complex systems. Our long term success is correlated with our ability to shift resources away from negative-sum behaviors so as not to exceed the carrying capacity of our environment.
I don't think it is possible for humans to be optimal vs, say, slime. Slime, presumably, does not have incentive structure that individual humans collude in at their benefit to the detriment of others. For example, why did the US build roads at the expense of rail? The incentive structure of the auto industry.
And yet, would the rail corridors have looked drastically different, or stopped at different cities? Or would it still have run between the same major metro hubs we have now?
Right, obviously as scale goes up, much more complexity is needed to maintain the same level of behavior. A bit like how unicellular organisms can replicate simply, but humans need to go through a whole process to make an offspring.
Very nice, but of course this was designed/engineered to act like this. It's basically a computer implemented in the game of life, which runs the game of life.
I raise you HL Mencken's "since the first 'advanced' gorilla put on underwear, cultivated a frown and began his first lecture tour"! Here's the paragraph, from a much longer piece:
Man’s natural instinct, in fact, is never toward what is sound and true; it is toward what is specious and false. Let any great nation of modern times be confronted by two conflicting propositions, the one grounded upon the utmost probability and reasonableness and the other upon the most glaring error, and it will almost invariably embrace the latter. It is so in politics, which consists wholly of a succession of unintelligent crazes, many of them so idiotic that they exist only as battle-cries and shibboleths and are not reducible to logical statement at all. It is so in religion, which, like poetry, is simply a concerted effort to deny the most obvious realities. It is so in nearly every field of thought. The ideas that conquer the race most rapidly and arouse the wildest enthusiasm and are held most tenaciously are precisely the ideas that are most insane. This has been true since the first “advanced” gorilla put on underwear, cultivated a frown and began his first lecture tour in the first chautauqua, and it will be so until the high gods, tired of the farce at last, obliterate the race with one great, final blast of fire, mustard gas and streptococci. (Meditation on Meditation, 1922)
It's hard to believe the USA's top newspaper editor once wrote like that! Writing worth paying for. Here's some more:
[The Declaration of Independence is] "a mere string of sonorous phrases, a piece of windy flapdoodle, a rhapsody almost empty of intelligible meaning, and probably composed under the influence of ethyl alcohol. And yet, as I say, it is more powerful than a million swords. It looms larger than the massive fact of Gettysburg. It is worth more than the whole Civil War. The man who loosed it upon posterity has left it a vaster heritage than the man who invented baseball." (Smart Set, 1914)
He said of US politics:
"It was Americans who invented the curious doctrine that there is a body of doctrine in every department of thought that every good citizen is in duty bound to accept and cherish; it was Americans who invented the right-thinker. … In the face of this singular passion for conformity, this dread of novelty and originality, it is obvious that the man of vigorous mind and stout convictions is gradually shouldered out of public life. He may slide into office once or twice, but soon or late he is bound to be held up, examined and incontinently kicked out. This leaves the field to the intellectual jelly-fish and inner tubes." (Baltimore Evening Sun, 1920)
The Devil's Dictionary[0] has long been one of my favourites—did he write anything else as good?
[0] e.g. "OCCIDENT: The part of the world lying west (or east) of the Orient. It is largely inhabited by Christians, a powerful subtribe of the Hypocrites, whose principal industries are murder and cheating, which they are pleased to call war and commerce. These, also, are the principal industries of the Orient."
that would seem to follow from a historical materialist perspective (which makes sense to me, if you consider cultures to optimise their ideals to fit their environment). Human history is a function with material conditions as an input.
The bacteria within us certainly don't know anything about our consciousness. Yet somehow the sum total of their activity results in a conscious being. If we as humans look and act like bacteria when we zoom out, do we suffer the same myopia of our bacteria friends, unable to recognize the consciousness our collective activity creates? It's fun to think about.
Humans are essentially a collective of symbiotic organisms which have been working together for so very long that some are no longer distinguishable as separate. We know that we have DNA that came from external sources. We know that we carry around a host of bacteria that are vital to our life and health. Somehow all of this (Scientifically speaking)results in an entity with a sense of "I". If you aren't thinking about it religiously, how else would one think about it?
I think you could be right. At least, we know but choose or are too lazy to do anything about it.
Recently I've found myself too stressed to even think about it. Too many stresses in life and I can do without the planet for now.
Totally selfish I know, but I'll get back to it when other things have died down.
I think what we need is something which helps us recognise the issues. Not only that but show us what we can do to help! We have to understand at a micro-level, how we can make an impact in aggregate.
My question is what would not look like microorganisms colonising? There is a range of manners that they expand from growing from a core, spores, milliary, fronds. I imagine most simple growth patterns possible are taken advantage of by microorganisms.
What's so fascinating to me about our civilizations that look like fungal colonies on Petri dishes from a cosmic perspective, is that if you zoom in enough you see all sorts of individuals doing and creating all sorts of fascinating things. No one would ever suspect it if they didn't focus in to look. Billions of autonomous individuals, self-aware creating art, innovating technologies, and in general being a fascinating conduit through which the universe becomes aware of itself.
I guess what makes humans different is that culture can let us go beyond our phenotype. And whilst it may look simplistically deterministic it really isnt. For example in the UK a lot of development clusters around old WWII airfields. The pattern of development is a result of aircraft needing flat places for runways. Runways that were needed because of a complex geopolitical conflict. And then selected for development due to politics. Slime molds don't do that.
To suggest we are somehow not different is another kind of arrogance. We absolutely are and that gives us a unique level of agency and control. That is brilliant and scary. We are able to turn down the thermostat of an entire planet (reduce co2). That kind of culturally motivated intervention is completely unprecedented and totally different to historic humans and other species.
"Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure." - Agent Smith, The Matrix
I think this pattern of exponential growth of human beings is a curse of their intelligence. All other animals end up being controlled by these large ecosystem dynamics because they can't adapt and/or do group work sufficiently. Species with this property are easily influenced/controlled by large scale dynamics.
Maybe, a species with more intelligence than us wouldn't grow so fast and unorderly because they can see the future consequences of their own dynamics more easily. We just happen to not deal with large temporal scales very well.
This is why I think reproduction is unethical. We have the capacity to understand the implications of birthing new sentient lifeforms, knowing the harm it will cause to the planet and the other species we share it with.
Yet people breed anyway, for a multitude of selfish reasons. Everyone else is having babies so why shouldn't I, it's my right as a human to reproduce, I want to pass on my genes, I want my life to be fulfilling, I don't want to die alone, the list goes on. It is these lines of thinking that have caused our population to balloon to over 7 billion people with no end in sight.
Somewhere, some overlord in a galaxy far, far away is looking at us through a faster-than-light telescope and going "Yeppers. They are about to hit critical mass. Either a population crash is imminent or they start colonizing their solar system. Schedule a diplomatic mission for their corner of their galaxy to invite them to the intergalactic council should they survive this completely normal, though adolescently awkward, stage of development."
The eternal optimist in me hopes their spies on Earth tell them that humans are entering a third industrial revolution which has a chance of making future growth sustainable, or at least much more so.
Somewhere outside the ancestor simulation we’re in our descendants are about to learn what life and decisions were like during the near-extinction event that nearly prevented their creation.
Agent Smith is wrong. Every organism does this — that's how life works. Population crashes are common among many species, rabbits to rats. Trees produce a million seeds. Grasses expand into areas that juuuust barely support them. The "natural equilibrium" is not at all steady.
And let's remember that Agent Smith is itself attempting to take over the world.
There's some evidence that around 2B years ago microbes decreased the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere so much by overpopulation that 99% of the biosphere died.
I guess you mean The Great Oxygen Extinction Event (2.4-2.0 Ga).
In that case, it's presumed it was indeed a massive extinction (but no data to quantify any % over, due to no microbial fossils preserved).
... But for a different reason. It wasn't due to decrease in oxygen levels; contrary to that. At that time, oxygen was being first ever introduced into the atmosphere. This has left a unique geological trace we observe everywhere across the planet: the white sedimentary + red rust striped 2 Ga rocks.
The "microbes" were the first photosynthesisers. The oxygen was a toxic byproduct. Resistance to it had to be learned by evolution, and that learning took ~1e8 years. Many of life didn't manage to and went extinct.
Isn't this growth pattern a straightforward consequence of disorderly growth?
When microorganisms divide, the children "appear" in the same location. Our species growth dynamics kind of has this same property in that it's easier to build something closer to the already established region than far away.
So, in the end, looking from far away, the growth pattern is the same.
Greed seems like a slightly more individualistic version of a need for growth. The only reason that we don't call the behavior of bacteria greedy is that they're not sentient.
But we know about it and we can't exchange on how unspecial we are, you maybe in the US and me here in China.
Potentially, one of us could even decide to stop being a parasite and scale down, move to the forest and live naked as a result.
My personal theory is that we're nature way of extending beyond earth. Yes we're a funghi, but a clever enough one we can be the earth's tentacle to go spread beyond.
I often think about that, and recently I thought about something else: zoom out enough and humans appear as a single individual /intelligence, the same way it you zoom out of our own cells the aggregate of it all seems to be acting as one intelligent individual (a human).
Now can we extrapolate? If we zoom out more do we see the same happening? Does the interaction between all the galaxies create a thought? A slow one perhaps.
Yikes. You can't be vicious like this here, and unfortunately you've been breaking the site guidelines elsewhere also. I've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
This is a really sad (and rather disgusting) comment. Your comment takes an incredibly depreciating view of humanity, and it ignores / rejects the beauty and wonder of humans, by comparing us to bacteria. Humans are the peak of Earth life; humans are the most glorious form of life that’s existed on this planet. I agree with everything that the user Grimm said in reply to you. I have no clue why such a horrible, repulsive, and repugnant comment would be the most-upvoted/top comment on HN.
It’s an interesting observation and sparks thought and discussion. Discussion into how the observation is true in many ways, e.g. the clustering around resources. But also discussion into how it’s not true, e.g. political lines or nature preserves.
Exactly the sort of comment that fits the community here. I hope that gives some clue why this is an upvoted comment.
I think what you are noticing is the ‘fractal’ nature of growth patterns which exists all throughout nature. It’s a fascinating topic that I know almost nothing about. The Wikipedia mentions slime mold though :)
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 409 ms ] threadThis is amazing, will this be included in the VR versions of google earth? For those who haven't tried it yet Google Earth is the first thing I show friends who've never tried VR before by giving them a Godzilla's eye view of Tokyo. I've yet to find someone who doesn't ":o"
I've had good times passing the headset around in a room full of people to share places we've been.
It's also cool to look down, as a giant, at paths you've taken irl and get a sense of scale.
I love google earth in VR
Which is PC-only, no Macs.
I'm very happy with it and haven't experienced the tracking issues others complain about.
At work I've previously tried some of the early oculus dev versions, the original Vive, and the PSVR. The Cosmos was the first which felt like a really great product and not just tech with potential if it were a bit better.
I'm wondering if the Timelapse will get added to it.
(Used on a Quest 1 and 2 over Virtual Desktop to a PC)
Yeah, whats up with that? Unless its all under wraps, Google is letting what lead they had whither away. Its silly to think they had working inside out tracking (Tango) in 2014.
Earth VR and Tilt Brush are still around, and as mentioned about, Tilt Brush is even open sourced. They just haven't had as much interest making new stuff. VR didn't pick up the way most hoped it would, and at this point there isn't really much to do until we get another wave of innovation that pushes the boundary forward.
Also Tango was more AR than VR. I don't think they ever had any lead in VR. Cardboard was neat but just that.
As for VR not picking up, it didn't pick up on startup folks timeline but there has been steady growth in the market and it's close to sustainable for many developers. Facebook, Valve, Sony, Microsoft and Apple have been more persistent and came in with realistic expectations. I think this is a case where Google was premature entering the market and also premature exiting. If they re-enter they'll probably look like Microsoft trying to re-enter the mobile or tablet market in the 2010s after not succeeding in the 90s and 2000s. That's not to say that VR will "take over the world" like smartphones, but its on its way to evolving into a sustainable category with a variety of compelling use cases.
Earth VR and Tilt Brush are pretty complete apps, not everything needs to be worked on forever. At some point you get diminishing return and start wasting your time.
They had inside out headsets before Oculus. Check out their partnership with Lenovo and the Mirage Solo headset. Despite working well for 6dof tracking it had the same terrible Daydream controller.
A year later Oculus released the quest with a better industrial design, camera array and 6dof controllers to much more success. The chip was a generation newer but arguably the success came from things that could have happened a year sooner.
I worked on AR/VR at Google and the projects have mostly paused because there's no visible financial benefit. No one in the real world cares enough about VR to justify it as a business. We prototyped hundreds of applications—every idea you can possibly think of—and all of them are either impractical with today's technology, or not useful enough to bother putting a VR headset on your head.
AR/VR is one of those things that feels so magical that you think, "There must be amazing things we can do with it!" but it turns out there's not. At least not yet. The situation is pretty clear because Facebook, Apple, and Google all bet big on AR/VR and all of them have stalled indefinitely.
I'm not surprised when Google walks away from things, but this seems premature and short sighted.
And if the Quest 2 has sold 2-3 million units so far, that's unremarkable. The Apple Watch was considered a failure in its first year and it made 10 million sales. We've already passed Christmas so you're not going to see a further spike in sales.
If Apple enters the market it might reignite the spark. Apple can do that because they deliver extremely high quality products that inspire people. Google can't do that because it's not in the company DNA and Googlers knows it, so it's a waste of time.
I guess I think Google is taking a huge risk here by taking their hat out of the ring so early. Even if others have slowed their investment, Microsoft/Apple/Facebook are under the radar continuing very significant work and it really feels like we could flip over a tipping point and Google might be way behind. This may be more like gcloud than Android and they could find themselves a decade behind other players.
My personal use case is being able to have any number of monitors of any size and shape, eg: [0]. So far its been limited by screen resolution and lack of good hand tracking and dedicated accessories, but these are very close to being solved with the next gen. devices.
[0] https://twitter.com/oculus/status/1286345820699340801/photo/...
If you're on more of a budget the PSVR is quite good if you happen to have a PS4.
But - yeah - with everything switched off it can be at the "intense" end of the spectrum.
The motion sickness factor isn't zero, but its' small.
four decades of meaningless uncontrolled overpopulation, destruction of pristine nature and its ecosystems, a march of techno-globalism across the planet. Every time I see these timelapses it depresses me quite a bit.
Look at predicted population numbers in Japan for example.
The population in Europe is larger than it has ever been in any point in history.
If you look at the advanced countries, they are often the ones who exploited their resources and grew in size early. Britain, for instance, slashed their forests generations ago to get ahead. The US used to shoot herds of bison from trains. Now Britain and the US wag a finger at less developed countries for consuming the forests and ecosystems in their countries.
Similar with population growth and the concept of 'overpopulation'. If you assert we have overpopulation, you have to assert how you'll address it, and there's no way to do that without saying, "Some group of people doesn't get to have kids." That seems like a really bad thing to say.
I'm incredibly lefty, a self described socialist and eco-socialist, but I believe that we need to think differently than just "those people over there are destroying their environments and having too many babies!" We could start at home, transforming our own economy and society to live less exploitatively. We could reduce our own use of meat and dairy, for instance. We could ensure we had adequate housing for everyone, and medical care for everyone, both of which would lead to less waste. We could strictly limit single use plastics, remove older dams to improve fish stocks, set aside more land for forests, etc.
Of course, like all NIMBY types, their consumption of air and Brazilian hardwoods is just fine.
I am one. I limit my personal carbon footprint. I do not own a car (and hopefully never will). I rarely eat meat. I live in a cheap, inefficient apartment because I'm living on a student income, but I keep the heat low to try to limit my energy consumption.
I probably won't have kids, because it wouldn't be consistent with my concerns about climate change to bring another high-consuming American into the world.
As soon as some nation makes contraceptives economically available, the native population growth goes negative. Do you know many families with three children? Because that seems like a minimal number, no?
Immigrants who (1) come when younger, and further (2) have more children mask this problem a bit, but their supply is limited. (Sorry for my insensitivity, I'm not from The West myself.) The easy contraceptives will get to even poorest countries in a generation or two. There will be a Big Shrink before the narrative of fertility takes hold again.
Most life forms?
p.s. username checks out.
People sitting in traffic complaining about traffic or cancer cells complaining about the devastation caused by cancer sounds a bit silly.
This is outstanding.
https://www.globalforestwatch.org/
https://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/science-2013-global-...
I built an app which visualizes global fire history per year from 2001 to 2020, still working out some kinks but maybe will share here.
Would probably break some apps which don’t correctly handle TLD-only domain names though, I suppose.
Like it or not Google does all this with the ad money they bring in. Imagine if all Google service were subscription based. Will they even have 25% of the capabilities they have now?
I'm conflicted. On one hand you could argue it's like some dictatorship putting on lavish parades while conditions in their regime are generally terrible (I'm not trying to compare the magnitude of the problem, just the idea that having something fancy to show doesn't necessarily cancel out all the harm done)
Or is it a natural positive byproduct of capitalism that the internet has garbage strewn corners filled with listicles and "content" alongside genuinely cool stuff. And trying to clamp down on this would just make everything mediocre.
Anyway, there are definitely lots of good things Google had done, in research, in public availability of tech, and in cool stuff like this. Are we making the right tradeoff against all the bad they have done, I don't know.
There's plenty of shit to throw at Google (Timnit Gebru). Let's not dilute concrete criticisms with bland whatevers like "turned much of the internet into a cesspit".
But I don't think Google turned internet into a cesspit. Yes, Youtube's recommendation algorithms are pretty bad. But there other actors who deserver a bigger share of the blame.
I played around with it a bit. Timelapse seems to only exist at large scales. I can't seem to resolve anything more detailed than a highway. Previously Google had higher resolution historical data. I used this to see how my house, neighborhood, and city changed over decades. There was black and white photography at the far end of the data. This was in the desktop version of Google Earth.
I just downloaded the desktop version of Google Earth and was happy to find out the historical data is still available there. :) Hope that makes it to the web version.
There is a little clock icon above the imagery area with a counter clockwise green arrow you must click to access historical imagery.
Luckily they do release a version of the desktop app that works on linux.
[Download page] https://www.google.com/earth/versions/#download-pro
Watching the change of specific suburban areas in the US brings a lot of negative emotions for me. Seeing what used to be green areas slowly transform into more suburban sprawl, I can't help but think of the number of species who experienced their ecosystem's walls closing in on them.
As someone who builds a lot of data visualizations, this would be in my top experiences for the category. It's in a way... an art piece.
I cant wait to see what everyone, including myself can create with this!
EDIT; This should be one of the most important augmenting data tools for Environmental Impact studies.
Take a site that was built at the beginning of this dataset - which had an EIS done, compare the results seen in this tool to the predictions in the EIS... and use that for MANY EIS which had some of the same impact or variables and see how the surroundings compare etc...
> I have a higher-than-average carbon footprint, so I’m taking extra steps to do my part. In the book I briefly mention how I’m offsetting my own emissions. I spend about $5 million every year to offset my family’s carbon footprint. As of now, the standard calculation for carbon footprints is based on an estimate of $400 per ton of emissions. But since the way we calculate carbon footprints is still in its infancy, I take our family’s carbon footprint and double it to make sure we are fully covering our footprint and then some.
> I also like to think of my investments in zero-carbon technologies as another kind of offset for my emissions. Investing in companies doesn’t make my carbon footprint smaller. But if I’ve picked any winners, they’ll be responsible for removing much more carbon than I am responsible for creating. I have given more than $1 billion toward innovations and ideas that I hope will help the world get to zero—including affordable and reliable clean energy, low-emissions cement, steel, meat, and more.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/What-you-can-do-to-fight-c...
It's not like this money magically got created. In order for him to have $5 million, someone had to pay it, maybe by creating even more pollution. At least he is aware that he is doing bad thing, but the attitude "I am rich, so I can" is narcissistic and wrong.
Does terrible things happen as a result of moral hazard? Sure. But does anyone who earns a dollar take a dollar from someone else, or the world, to obtain it? No.
And how much carbon does he emit to earn that 5 million. That emission isn't part of his family's emission because it comes from microsoft. It's like tax evasion but for carbon emission.
While their predecessors done exactly the same.
Rich people become gatekeepers. If everyone could be rich, then they wouldn't be so special anymore. That's why they lobby for high taxes (with appropriate loopholes, so they don't pay them, but anyone who starts from 0 won't get rich), excessive regulation (so that poor man's company will never be able to compete) and other measures to keep population "in check".
Europe is actually reforesting, and not by a little bit either:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/...
http://coffeespoons.me/2014/12/the-reforestation-of-europe/
You can take a look at the source code here if you’re interested: https://github.com/doersino/earthacrosstime
I've been in a position where I wanted to search for a website that was popular in 2012 without having the exact name, and having to find an old forum post that linked to it to find it.
Does this help?
foobar before:2012
It's not perfect but quick and easy for what I mostly do which is trying to find older news articles on stories that have changed
Google has been a pretty great pioneer on geospatial data science and visualization platforms, especially with Earth Engine (also free to use and allows you to access vast repositories of free geospatial data and use Googles computing resources to do data science with them).
We think of ourself as special, as having conquered environments, technology and more - and when zoomed out you could explain everything we've built and accomplished as the achievements of a sufficiently robust slime mold simply using available resources to continue growing.
If, on the other hand, you independently decide to stop driving your car because you know the world is getting smothered with carbon dioxide, but see people daily driving modified diesel pickups belching smoke into the sky, you're going to feel a bit like you're pissing in the wind even trying.
I sometimes think that it is a valid mental model to think of us as not much different from ants in a hive who think they possess more control and freedom than they do
I think it is the opposite. We are different from ants, and have a lot of control and freedom, so we know that if others will not make the sacrifice, why should we?
In an ant colony, I imagine the orders are being given top down and they do not think about what others are or are not sacrificing.
I'm not a biologist though and also have no experience in what it's like to be a bee or ant
Although conservation probably has more to do with reality looking different depending on your own local observations, to a Brazilian cattle rancher or Indonesian logger at the frontlines of the biodiversity crisis, things look different. For a consumer of those goods and materials, they likely don’t realize the connection.
Take our main coordination mechanism - the market. For all that's been said and written about it, it's still basically gradient descent. As greedy as it gets - in the technical sense. It's what's been driving the development of humanity ever since we formed societies. It's what controls the behavior of everyone.
We may think we're smart and have principles - and we do. But the reality still is, everyone is spending most of their lives trying to align themselves to exploit the local economic gradient - because that's how individuals get more of what they want, and less of what they don't want. Nobody is strong enough to single-handedly reshape the larger economic gradient. So while individually, we play complex games, at macro scale, we're not all that different from slime molds or fungal growths.
Maybe one day our economy grows so sophisticated it'll gain sentience. But that doesn't necessarily mean things will get better - much like an individual human being sentient doesn't mean their cells are happy.
> I'd like to share a revelation I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with their surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to another area, and you multiply, and you multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure.
Anyone studying mathematical biology has also probably come to the same conclusion.
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/b6gsxp/spreading_...
i saw global warming and covid19 as part of the earth's immune system to curb human impact. however, with our technology we are too resilient.
They don't bother me nearly as much as the taboo against speaking frankly about them.
I'd be more interested in what you think it "should" look like for an "advanced" species besides optimal?
Looking at it is disparagingly is weird to me, when the conclusion is maybe humans in aggregate are optimal with regards to finding and using resources to grow.
Not that we're growing unbounded either because that would be bad, we're in population decline across many major nations right now and are working towards a greener future in multiple industries to avoid resource collapse.
The level of doom and gloom and misanthropy is generally unwarranted if you look around at the steps we're taking to better ourselves as a species and every time I read things like this I can't help but think people revel in the supposed helplessness of our potential destruction and inability as some perverted pleasure.
An advanced species would recognize the uniqueness and importance of the natural world, and would fence off huge sections of it to protect it for future generations.
30 by 30.
Or, 30% of the planet’s surface as protected areas by 2030.
The Biden administration adopted it, but it’d be cool to see it as a global goal as well.
You are just projecting what you think on this hypothetical advanced species. They might find, instead, that they don't need or care for any of that and just wipe it out faster.
Yours could be one that retreats into hermetic shelters and plays Call of Duty between themselves all day long.
Your "interpretation" is just making them after your self image, thinking that that is what it means to be "advanced".
Unless your scale of 'conserving resources' involves putting out the stars to save their hydrogen for later use, you're doing it wrong.
You are again just projecting what you/we need on them, like the parent comment.
The biggest threat we face as a species in the foreseeable future is the exhaustion of our natural resources. Ergo, it makes sense to reserve as much as we can for future generations to decide what to do with. Some argue that we should use them as fast as possible in order to blow past some (claimed) barrier to entirely technological reproduction (producing a self-sustaining system on the Moon, for example), but this strikes me as hasty. The difficulties of achieving this might be far more difficult than advocates imagine, and if so we're likely to hit resource exhaustion.
That's before you even deal with the values. We don't have a lot of choice over those, but it's worth pointing out that many of our personal scruples are more compatible with collaborative than combative approaches to growth. The real moral challenge is whether the new frontier of growth (wealth acquisition) hits any wall before it destroys the environment.
We’re another level of the fractal of life, replicating patterns seen in bacterial biofilms, slime molds, circulatory systems, nervous systems, leaves, all manner of multicellular architectures.
It’s certainly a bad thing that we are growing in a sort of zero-sum manner against many original ecosystems though.
We need to learn to restrain our own growth (a tough one that we’re in the process of trying to beat into all of our heads it seems), and also we need to learn how to maximize the potential for biodiversity to exist within the structure of human occupied areas as well. (A good book on this last subject is “Win-win Ecology”).
I also think we shouldn’t attempt to constrain growth but instead constrain footprint upon the Earth.
The human footprint already covers nearly the entirety of the planet. Conservation of systems that are within or directly adjacent to that footprint is actually very important. Extraordinary amounts of biodiversity are contained in these areas and we need to study how to reconcile our land use with the needs of that biodiversity. We shouldn’t ignore it out of a fear that people will get the wrong idea.
Grow food in vats, and the vast majority of the planet can just be like National Parks.
But I do think we can think of smart ways to ensure biodiversity under, say, solar arrays. Solar arrays are (or can be made to be) biologically inert. If they are high enough, they can act as a sort of technological canopy over a biodiverse forest floor. And that would only be a small portion of the planet (the rest would be National Parks). We’d use solar electricity to produce food super efficiently from vats. About 2000-4000W nameplate solar per person (at least in the 30N to 30S latitude that most people live in) should be enough to provide the macronutrients for the average person. At high efficiency, that’s about 10 square meters per person at noon. That’s just 100,000 square kilometers to feed 10 billion people, compared to over 50,000,000 square kilometers used for agriculture today (which is half of the habitable land surface of ~100 million km^2). It can be over the ocean, too. That’s just 0.02% of the Earth’s surface.
Consider this image: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/img/2018...
Notice that for the USA for example, not very much of the land is state or federal parks. The vast majority is used by humans in some way, and the reality is that they’re not about to turn it all into parks.
So, while pushing for the protection of as much land as possible, we should also study conservation on land that’s not already a protected area.
The book I mentioned has a number of examples where good conservation work has actually been done on such lands.
As far as actually farmed land, productivity has increased by an order of magnitude, MUCH faster than population, so we actually farm less land than in the 40s in spite of having a much larger population that eats more. We burn that corn in our cars, for goodness sake. The land area use for ethanol corn in our country is more than enough area to convert the entire nation’s electric production to solar.
Corn yields: https://extension.entm.purdue.edu/newsletters/pestandcrop/wp...
Agreed!
I would emphasize restoration and protection in almost every case.
Just that there’s also ways we can work towards conservation on land that is being utilized too.
You talked about farms but there’s also: managed forests, anywhere anything is grazing, private lands, fisheries, artificial reefs and kelp forests, any area we already use which we can also stack on an incidental conservation benefit ontop of (as you mentioned renewable energy infrastructure will be a big one, the book I mention is full of other surprising examples such as military bases), things like wildlife underpasses, suburban lawns, and so on. This adds up to a lot of land.
I hope we protect half of the land and ocean like Edward O. Wilson and other major biologists recommend, but also I think it’s smart to look at everything and not just protected areas.
I hate mowing the lawn. I actually prefer the typical "weeds" like clover and dandelion over the typical grass. Dumb that we basically mandate weird, chemical and labor-intensive grass monoculture.
I actually think about 90% of the land ought to become basically national parks and/or protected wilderness. Maybe even more. We can live in dense cities in absolute luxury and abundance (with 10,000 square foot condos... why not? multiple stories make it possible) and then those of us who like to can go camping on the weekends. Traveling by electric motorgliders to our weekend campsite. Cars only underground (but everyone has one still).
We're also causing top soil to erode and blow away in much of the corn belt [0]. That productivity has a cost and shouldn't be assumed.
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-say...
edit: I don't think we disagree, much. I'll leave the above for reference.
(Especially part 2 starting around 10m in).
I would like to note though that if we start mining and settling space, our growth would in fact be essentially unbounded.
Combined with the fact that some types of stars are expected to continue radiating energy for trillions of years...
https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
https://www.openculture.com/2015/06/isaac-asimovs-favorite-s...
It's easy to take an outside look and say "well, see, humankind fixed it", but the personal energy and misery that goes into fighting for those fixes is enormous. I wouldn't call it "misanthropy".
Humans establishing self-sufficient communities beyond Earth would prove that humans have the capability to thrive sustainably on Earth. It would silence forever any technological objections to the possibility of human sustainability on Earth.
And a firm idea that humans can never establish self-sustaining communities in space is not that far from the idea that we probably cannot do so on Earth, either.
It really is not a huge step from pessimism about human future (ie in space) to nihilism about sustainability on Earth, and I do wish people would acknowledge this more: people enthusiastic about permanent settlements in space are, in fact, more certain about the possibility of sustainable thriving on Earth than the space-pessimists are.
Once we get depressed and nihilistic and give up, the universe will be forever deprived of the colour and drama human civilization can add to all those bare rocks up there.
I never considered that the implication is we could live here sustainably, but you’re right.
These discussions tend to be heavy on Asimov-inspired scifi-think and weak on just taking a walk in a forest on a nice sunny day in late spring. All this talk about having to colonize space is just rubbish, compared to the wonders of nature that would be worth preserving.
But the audience here is strongly biased. If most of your day is spent in front of a computer and reading scifi novels in the evening, then that's where the discussion moves.
Also, are you saying that forests are nature and space isn’t? Or are you saying that there aren’t any wonders of nature to experience out there?
Setting up nice sunny walk-ready forests in space is something that’ll take centuries, but if we don’t do it we’re doomed. Incidentally, so are the forests.
In a word, sustainable. An advanced civilization should be able to develop in a coordinated and self sustaining way, rather than as a grand experiment in tragedy of the commons. Microbes don’t coordinate their growth, and therefore fall into boom-bust cycles that dominate and exhaust their local environment. Humans can reason about these issues, but we see insufficient ability to collectively coordinate in response to them.
I'm not sure if it's technically a counterexample, but it's fascinating. Society seemed to collapse due to a series of causes, more or less unexplained to this day. (We have hypotheses, but it's still something of a mystery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples)
Update: Upon some brief research, the last Ice Age ended about 12,000 years ago, whereas the Bronze Age Collapse was around 1200 BCE. So totally unrelated.
Like where do you think we are? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
Seems to me like you are expecting too much. Worst part is, if that kind of thinking - do not exploit nature wins out - we might not even get there. Exploitation is key for scientific advancement in capitalism.
In capitalism? You mean, compared to the sustainable and non-exploitive nature of communism, for example?
The universe doesn’t grade on a curve.
> Exploitation is key for scientific advancement in capitalism
What a weird objection. It’s our science that tells us we need to radically reform how we consume resources. I’m not worried we’re going to waste all our resources in scientific endeavors, I’m concerned that we’re destroying the environment on which we depend for frivolous short term gains.
Every man* has his own temperament, value system, -- and so on -- that reason alone begets wildly different what-should-be-dones. That is, unless the achievement of a narrow aim would benefit the many---and therefore all those different reason machines come together to collectively strive towards some end---then we have all sorts of different, many times conflicting, what-should-be-dones (politics is a prime example here).
Perhaps then an authority should be appointed?; someone or some group whose sole purpose is to reason all day and all night, until they come up with a what-should-be-done that benefits their constituency (of course, this assumes they didn't ascend by force, coercion, or some other deviousness).
But now, we get into this dreadful stalemate: the more constituents there are, the more the means and the ends have to be tailored to them, and the more the whole venture becomes watered down, in order to suit some muddied "average." Or perhaps the authority decides to "draw a line in the ground," to create some abstract "core" of acceptable means and ends (as well as people to enlist), and shun out the rest---in order to maintain some semblance of identity and individualism.
Yet, now we have two very inefficient differentiations. On one hand, we have the all-inclusive reasoning-body, that is so held back by trying to please all, that it pleases none. On the other hand, we have the some-exclusive reasoning-body, that -- fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on one's own reasoning -- shuts out the "others," and does nothing to support the advancement of their ends (many times, quite the opposite).
I think it is self-evident that both are inefficient towards the coordination of all humanity. So are there any alternatives?
Perhaps we could simply do away with collective coordination -- or atleast some less rigid approach?
What about some type of individualism?; where each man* decides his own fate. Therein, each member is responsible for his own fate, and therefore---collectively---the fate of all man? Each soul going in his own direction, serving his interests foremost, and pushing the fate of humanity, in his own image, little by little -- like some plant, slowly rooting itself into the most impenetrable places, and overcoming the, otherwise apparent, impossible odds.
On a local level, humanity is ever unsustainable, "booming-and-busting," but on the world level we have survived, and will continue until we lose our survival instincts (impossible, collectively). Each member of the human race will do what he must to survive and improve his own circumstances, even if it leaves others worse off; then, those worse-offs must now improve their circumstances further, and strive for a better life. In the end, each man guarantees the survival (but not thrival) of the human race, by the virtue of his selfishness.
*Are we still doing the "man" is not synonymous with "human" fad? It's more of a stylistic choice, rather than an "only men can use reason." I.e, it flows better than "hu-man."
As a stylistic choice, I also have an aversion to dressing up human decision-making in such abstract and flowery terminology. We've invented lots of cool tools for thinking and doing, but we're still simply advanced primates with lots of baggage.
I think where we differ is in our approach to language. I see it as a medium of art -- like a song or a painting. "Man" is but a certain, evocative hue of brown that I believe fits best into the feelings I'm trying to elicit; and "human" is a lesser, albeit passable substitute.
I think this scientificization, making it more rigorous and "comprehensible," has done the opposite. Words have connotations, denotations, and all sorts of deeper meanings behind them. "Human" is such a sterilized, unnevocative word; and I refuse to use it.
However, certainly you've felt something from its usage -- even if that feeling was not the one I felt (compare it to: human -- which only the most scientifically-obsessed would have their hearts sing from its utterance).
"Human" is a perfectly evocative word that does make people's "hearts sing". You have the "human touch", humanitarianism, treating things humanely. It reflects our highest aspirations for ourselves, and your rejection of it reflects upon you.
"Man" connotes... well, men. It depicts a society where the real movers and shakers are men. No one really hears "man" and thinks "men and women" (or "women and men" - why should men come first?). Notably, they say they do, but this has been shown by experiment to be inaccurate. If you say "man", people can't help but picture one. Indeed I also notice you use gendered language everywhere, not just in the word "man" to mean humanity. You say "men of letters", for instance, and you take care to match the pronouns. Am I really meant to imagine women when you write that? Would "people" not do just as well?
Lastly - far from being a "fad", this debate was active in the 70s, and has been entirely resolved now; nobody uses "man" this way anymore, and it sticks out like a sore thumb when you do. It sounds archaic to the point of comical. Consider if the subtextual message you want to send with your word choices is "I stubbornly refuse to adapt to the times".
Douglas Hofstadter (you may have heard of him!) wrote a lot about this in the 80s and 90s - I challenge anyone to read what he wrote and fail to be convinced: https://leeclarke.com/courses/intro/readings/Hofstadter_Chan...
Frankly, my experience has been that men are the real moves and shakers (and women impelling them to move, shake, and writhe around). It takes a certain amount of ego, and internal and emotional drive to "shake" and "move" (which I must assume you consider to be "good" aspects of humanity) the world -- one that most women do not have, and the ones that do require external resources to maintain that "drive" (mostly food).
I don't understand why you would rally around for this point. Being someone of substance is a worthless affair, compared to being someone of culture. The first comes easily to men, and arduously for women. The last comes easily to women, and arduously for men. It's an atrocity to eschew woman's gifts, to pursue men's. That's how you destroy a nation's culture, tradition, its children, and thereby its society. There must be a duality, with a strict boundary, else you get muddied people that don't know a single thing about what it means to be human. (in this context, it fit just right)
I use man in this way. I don't care what anyone---justifying their schooling and existence---has to say about it. Progress without purpose is wasted breath. Conforming for its own sake is death. Anything Western Intellectuals have written in the past 70 years I believe to be without merit.
...
Yet, I'll admit Hofstadter got a chuckle out of me with that riddle: I thought the surgeon was the male spouse of the deceased father! I yield.
I agree with your take, after it's been shoved in my face, and forced me to self-reflect. However, I'll still use "man" as a more archaic synonym of "human," albeit with a more apt note this time.
You got me. Take your upvote, and let me live in my crotchety, curmudgeon fantasy-land.
https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/16/is-it-too-late-to-prevent-cl...
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/can-we-slow...
Going to need something a little stronger than xkcd here. I'm not a climate scientist but a lot of the names attached to both links seem to be and they're saying if we act decisively in the next 29 years we can avoid the worst effects, which in that second link is defined as < 1.5C change this century
Edit: I also want to make it clear just in case anyone misinterprets my skepticism over the depth of the effects as skepticism in climate change or the urgency of it in general. I agree we need to do what we can to make sure things like this don't come to pass because I happen to like our somewhat diverse ecosystem and that we continue to damage it isn't great.
The second link says we are unlikely to keep global warming in this century below 2.7° Fahrenheit (1.5° Celsius) which has severe consequences for the environment.
I think you’re reading into their optimistic language a bit too much.
Do you watch the news? Have you seen a completely ice-free North Pole earlier in January? The ice in Norway, Russia and Iceland melting completely, permanently damaging the permafrost and releasing huge amounts of methane? Might be hard to notice from your apartment but the weather is going absolutely nuts in most of the world. Insect populations down by up to 90%. These are not “feelings”.
You missed the first part of their sentence.
On the flipside perhaps you're a little too much into doomsday scenarios?
We've quite literally transformed the entire planet and way of living inside of 30 years since personal computation technology took off. I really don't see it as particularly farfetched that we can correct for our negative consumptive habits inside of the same timeframe, considering our rate of advance and change only accelerated within that same timeframe.
I'll live out just the end of this century if I'm lucky so I'll be able to eat my words just fine if I'm wrong, but I'll bet you I'm not.
If we manage to get it started, what if another Trump gets elected and sabotage it from the top?
> Even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, global warming would continue to happen for at least several more decades, if not centuries
or
> In the absence of major action to reduce emissions, global temperature is on track to rise by an average of 6 °C
There is not much major action going on (except for the electrification of vehicles which is being driven by commercial venture) so your hopes are just that, hope. Hope is not a strategy. It is quite far fetched to expect a correction when literally all data points are going the other way.
Your view does not reflect the common scientific consensus. We’re at a stage where changes are irreversible and all we can do is minimize and prepare for them, as seen in the article.
This is not fatalism, much to the contrary: I’m saying corrective action is much, much more urgent than you seem to believe and has to be started immediately. We don’t have another 30 years to sit on it.
You also keep saying scientific consensus and data points but considering I keep finding information to the contrary and you’ve provided nothing I really think you mean your own personal and emotion driven stance. Of which I don’t buy.
Yup climate change is a big issue, we'll probably solve it to a point humanity and the broader earth will be fine in a reasonable time. Just like every other crazy things we've pulled off during the same geological instant.
All it offers is a meaningless “it’s up to us what happens next”. Where is the information to the contrary you see?
Here is an extensive report, from the same source, on the effects of predicted global warming: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2865/a-degree-of-concern-why-g...
Read it carefully, and note that the 1.5C scenario is extremely optimistic and assumes humanity will zero out emissions completely by 2050.
Whenever you read a study saying that 'In complex system X, Y will happen in a decade' breathe easily -- we can't model what the stock market will look like in a day. We can't model what user demand for a sale will be in a week. We can't model most complex things in any large time frame, and believing any conclusions in the XX years for something as complex as climate is bizarre.
Press releases and pop-science articles tend to try to strike a more hopeful tone, because it's extremely tiring and depressing just hearing "we're screwed" all day. I try to stay hopeful, but my faith that enough people will care soon enough is basically gone.
Do you think running out of oil will go smoothly? We already can't stand still for 5 minutes without blowing someone up in a resource war and basically all of our resources are plentiful for now.
Rising sea levels decreasing usable land. Rising temperatures destroying key organisms in the food chain. Mass deforestation is destroying the very things that allow us to breathe.
How much climate change affects you is a function of your wealth and your country's wealth (cost of basic resources as well as required countermeasures are growing). Anyone who's been on the low side of one or both of those variables will tell you that it's already miserable. Imagine, if you even can, what being in a poor country will be like when all the oil is gone, food can't grow the usual way (you need either hydroponics or serious genetic modification), increasingly unstable weather destroys everything you build and everyone else is out to get you to squeeze out every last drop of resources you might have?
What people with no such experience don't realize is that unlike our economic system, which funnels resources upwards, ecosystem collapse doesn't funnel them anywhere. It's just an endless pit and eventually, everyone is poor.
Example: Second world war. You might argue that it was not disaster comparable to climate change, but it did turn entire world upside down, disrupting everything aspect of life of vast majority of world's population. But it also led to incredible advancements in many areas, new discoveries in all sciences, new technologies, massive changes in societies as well.
So I don't see the situation as gloomy, we will survive, because we always do.
Taking an approach that "we will sort it out" ignores that the disaster is already unrolling, just too slow for most of us to notice. The longer we linger, the worse the situation, and the higher the human toll.
I look at the insanity in how the US responds to small movements of people now and despair at the thought of how we’ll deal with simultaneous waves of millions of climate refugees alongside the predictable handful of domestic crises.
Nothing I’ve said disagrees with the scientific consensus, so you could also just Google it rather than whining that someone on the internet isn’t holding your hand.
Can you prove what the scientific consensus is? What if I were claim the scientific consensus is different than what you claim it to be?
To the best of my knowledge, my language (while imprecise) is completely and totally uncontroversial in the scientific community.
"And when will that be?"
"Well, not to beat around the bush, but when the cancer has metastisized and is about to kill you, we will be certain enough of the benefit of surgery now. Yes, this will likely result in your death, but to move before we have solidified all of these variables to a five-sigma measure would be allowing too much emotion into our descision making."
> The near universal consensus of people who study natural systems is that we’re way, way, way behind.
What other advanced civilization is our benchmark for making such an assessment?
The second point isn't dependent on an external comparison.
If the goal/definition is concrete, then we can plan better and understand what is "enough" once we're caught up.
Alternatively, if you're simply putting out a Vision to inspire enthusiasm or incite fear, then "we're behind" is sufficient and doesn't require anything more because at best, it's the "race to the moon" and at worst, it's the "missile gap."
I mean, I guess I am, but really I'm mostly relaying my understanding of the scientific consensus. I didn't make my comment in some sort of vacuum where readers are supposed to understand the last few decades of climate science just from my comment...
In a situation where "we're behind" and "we're ahead" are both accurate statements point to a significant problem in the approach.
You choosing one of them exclusively means you're playing for "your team" instead of looking at reality of the situation which is neither useful nor honest.
I don't think we are. As long as we accept unbounded population growth, nothing is sustainable.
Information systems are very important in this regard IMHO. For most of human history information was a weapon.
OP I was responding to stated:
"Microbes don’t coordinate their growth, and therefore fall into boom-bust cycles that dominate and exhaust their local environment. Humans can reason about these issues, but we see insufficient ability to collectively coordinate in response to them."
Government is how we collectively coordinate. Microbes exhaust their local environment by reproduction, hence the question.
Why isn't coordination the grand experiment? Glancing nervously through history, or in the mirror, it's never sufficient -- and not for lack of vigor.
Suppose each microbe is unique: every one has a name, dreams, fears, love, grief, joy -- stories.
I can't understand the enduring appeal of reducing people's lives to fungible grey mush.
Lots of things are unsustainable in the short term but sustainable in the long term. Hunter-gathering for instance. If you pick the berries off a bush, they're gone. You can't keep doing that all day every day or the plant will never reproduce and eventually stop producing berries. But if you look at the hunter-gatherer's berry picking habits over a whole year, it may well be sustainable because he's not doing it at the same rate all the time. Similarly, our unsustainable behaviors may be limited to a few centuries of rapid change taking us into a new and different sustainable future that wouldn't have been possible otherwise.
I've also taken an amateur interest in ecology and the natural sciences, and once you actually learn a bit about the species around you, the loss of habitat and biodiversity we're undergoing becomes a staggeringly obvious fact that most people are just completely oblivious to.
There's lots of nuclear power plants out there, shut down for political reasons, that'd be ready to go in weeks if you didn't have all the anti-nuclear protests, for starters.
There's also geo-engineering and such - spraying black stuff in the atmosphere to reduce the amount of incoming sunlight.
The idea that humanity couldn't deal with this situation if it spent anywhere in the ballpark of 100% of its resources on it seems to me frankly laughable.
We've just seen first-hand evidence that millions of people could be dying and some would find it politically expedient to pretend that it wasn't actually occurring.
We absolutely have the resources and capability to solve these problems. We just don't have the will or the policy.
I'm sorry, I don't follow, who do you mean? Colonialism? The Uighurs in China? People in India/Pakistan? Possible victims of global warming? The Holocaust?
>We just don't have the will or the policy.
Right, that's what I mean. The minute things get anywhere near serious, people are gonna figure something out real quick. Restarting the nuclear power plants and closing the coal plants would take weeks, be profitable in economic terms, and hugely reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The fact that nobody's done this means we aren't serious about it.
I mean, if you were really serious, you would just deregulate nuclear power totally. If the estimates of the harms of global warming are true, you could take 1 Chernobyl-scale incident per year and still come out on top. The fact that nobody's done this means we aren't serious about it.
The combination of facts that (1) we aren't serious about this and (2) there's plenty of low-hanging fruit we could reap if we were, leads me to believe this will not really be a problem, as soon as we do get serious about it.
Sure, human technology is super advanced, but we are no play for the elements.
First, we look at the numbers concerning best case scenarios and see that a few degrees of warming is basically inevitable. Then, we ask how likely it is that well make rapid corrections now - personally I see little evidence of that, but I hope I’m wrong.
Next, try to remember that nothing in the world is disconnected. There’s a long scholarship concerning resource conflict and the destabilizing effects of mass migration. We don’t have a good track record of dealing with this, and I see little reason to expect us to become better at it soon.
The geoengineering idea is especially ludicrous to me - what we’re really talking about are emergency uncontrolled experiments to stave off a worse disaster. We’ve organized our entire global economic system around carbon - any geoengineering project has to not only compete with that, but actively remove more carbon from the atmosphere, which is a problem you’re underestimating the difficulty of.
Meanwhile, we need to worry about positive feedback cycles from various sources of methane, and the rest of the related threats to our biosphere (ocean acidification, wildfire, extreme weather).
To close, what has humanity done to convince you that we’ll 100% restructure our society to collaboratively solve this crisis “once it gets bad enough”?
Good riddance. If our technological global civilization results in conditions that make technological global civilization impossible, then so be it. It wasn't fit to exist to begin with. It's a self-regulating problem.
> There’s a long scholarship concerning resource conflict and the destabilizing effects of mass migration. We don’t have a good track record of dealing with this, and I see little reason to expect us to become better at it soon.
I don't know what you mean here - are you suggesting mass migration is inevitable?
> The geoengineering idea is especially ludicrous to me - what we’re really talking about are emergency uncontrolled experiments to stave off a worse disaster. We’ve organized our entire global economic system around carbon - any geoengineering project has to not only compete with that, but actively remove more carbon from the atmosphere, which is a problem you’re underestimating the difficulty of.
No, I mean spraying dust into the atmosphere to make it darker, so less sunlight comes in.
It's not just a matter of economy - people aren't even picking the low-hanging fruit. If any country wanted to severely cut CO2 emissions, there's a simple thing they could do:
1) reopen all the closed nuclear plants 2) deregulate nuclear power plant construction, focus on mass producing cheap power plants with no regard for safety 3) shut down the coal plants 4) throw everyone who protests in prison
Obviously, this isn't done because all of these steps are politically impossible. But it just goes to show - if we were serious about this, we'd have picked the low-hanging fruit already. If we haven't even picked the low-hanging fruit yet, how can you say it's impossible?
> To close, what has humanity done to convince you that we’ll 100% restructure our society to collaboratively solve this crisis “once it gets bad enough”?
It's like people procrastinating their homework until 5 minutes before the deadline. Eventually they'll get it done.
Matter of preference I guess. I like to hope humanity will continue to learn things about and explore the broader universe rather than descent into feudal oppression (or some-such) in the ashes of our former civilization, but whatever.
> I don't know what you mean here - are you suggesting mass migration is inevitable?
At this point, that's the conclusion, yes. Climate impacts cause incredible destabilization for folks who rely more closely on their local environment (subsistence farmers and the global poor generally), and yes - disruption leads to mass migration.
> No, I mean spraying dust into the atmosphere to make it darker, so less sunlight comes in.
.... yes, an emergency uncontrolled experiment to solve some of the symptoms of a global problem. The global economy as it currently exists is geoengineering at an absolutely monumental scale.
Also, your reply is just incredibly baffling and frustrating, to the point that I half think you're not being serious. "Oh, we'll just spray some dust in the air and reflect more sunlight to solve the problem" - it's ludicrous, and nobody serious who studies geoengineering shares your attitude. I do believe we're going to have to engage in geoengineering, but it's not something to be taken lightly (and the experts who study it generally agree). Never mind the fact that even if your "solution" worked, it wouldn't solve things like ocean acidification, and would at best buy us some time... while having potentially unforeseen consequences on cancer rates, crop production, solar efficiency, etc.
> It's like people procrastinating their homework until 5 minutes before the deadline. Eventually they'll get it done.
Talk about unearned optimism. Not everything is a problem you can just go "fix".
Probably fair to say that it's not low hanging fruit then.
I think a lot of time is being spent on finding politically correct solutions, but maybe we'll come full circle back to your solution after wasting a lot of time with fancy solutions that don't have a significant enough effect.
I's not misanthropy to note that we're not so different from other species and that our growth/behavior is in many respects similar to other natural phenomena involving complex systems. Our long term success is correlated with our ability to shift resources away from negative-sum behaviors so as not to exceed the carrying capacity of our environment.
At a macro scale, both fire and life create net entropy. The difference is when you zoom in and see either created order or uniform destruction.
Why would the traditional mathematics of growth make all that less?
This Game of Life video shows what I mean perfectly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8
Yes, there's a ton of complexity in there, but when you zoom out enough, it looks and acts very similar to the lower level.
Man’s natural instinct, in fact, is never toward what is sound and true; it is toward what is specious and false. Let any great nation of modern times be confronted by two conflicting propositions, the one grounded upon the utmost probability and reasonableness and the other upon the most glaring error, and it will almost invariably embrace the latter. It is so in politics, which consists wholly of a succession of unintelligent crazes, many of them so idiotic that they exist only as battle-cries and shibboleths and are not reducible to logical statement at all. It is so in religion, which, like poetry, is simply a concerted effort to deny the most obvious realities. It is so in nearly every field of thought. The ideas that conquer the race most rapidly and arouse the wildest enthusiasm and are held most tenaciously are precisely the ideas that are most insane. This has been true since the first “advanced” gorilla put on underwear, cultivated a frown and began his first lecture tour in the first chautauqua, and it will be so until the high gods, tired of the farce at last, obliterate the race with one great, final blast of fire, mustard gas and streptococci. (Meditation on Meditation, 1922)
It's hard to believe the USA's top newspaper editor once wrote like that! Writing worth paying for. Here's some more:
[The Declaration of Independence is] "a mere string of sonorous phrases, a piece of windy flapdoodle, a rhapsody almost empty of intelligible meaning, and probably composed under the influence of ethyl alcohol. And yet, as I say, it is more powerful than a million swords. It looms larger than the massive fact of Gettysburg. It is worth more than the whole Civil War. The man who loosed it upon posterity has left it a vaster heritage than the man who invented baseball." (Smart Set, 1914)
He said of US politics:
"It was Americans who invented the curious doctrine that there is a body of doctrine in every department of thought that every good citizen is in duty bound to accept and cherish; it was Americans who invented the right-thinker. … In the face of this singular passion for conformity, this dread of novelty and originality, it is obvious that the man of vigorous mind and stout convictions is gradually shouldered out of public life. He may slide into office once or twice, but soon or late he is bound to be held up, examined and incontinently kicked out. This leaves the field to the intellectual jelly-fish and inner tubes." (Baltimore Evening Sun, 1920)
[0] e.g. "OCCIDENT: The part of the world lying west (or east) of the Orient. It is largely inhabited by Christians, a powerful subtribe of the Hypocrites, whose principal industries are murder and cheating, which they are pleased to call war and commerce. These, also, are the principal industries of the Orient."
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/972/972-h/972-h.htm
It covers how similar growth patterns can be identified, from cities, vegetation, motors and human life.
It is a long book, but recommended by none other than gates [1]
[1] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Growth
"If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9905847
The bacteria within us certainly don't know anything about our consciousness. Yet somehow the sum total of their activity results in a conscious being. If we as humans look and act like bacteria when we zoom out, do we suffer the same myopia of our bacteria friends, unable to recognize the consciousness our collective activity creates? It's fun to think about.
That seems like a slightly peculiar idea of what a conscious being is.
In a real sense we are a joint venture.
Recently I've found myself too stressed to even think about it. Too many stresses in life and I can do without the planet for now.
Totally selfish I know, but I'll get back to it when other things have died down.
I think what we need is something which helps us recognise the issues. Not only that but show us what we can do to help! We have to understand at a micro-level, how we can make an impact in aggregate.
Too much/little X causes outbursts of Y.
The question is, has Earth got a few spots lurking behind the earlobes. Or is there a feature-length episode of Dr Pimple Popper taking place?
Slime mold doesn't have the same ring as "rail network planning AI", but it seems that's what it is.
1: https://outline.com/t8hxKh (original: https://www.wired.com/2010/01/slime-mold-grows-network-just-...)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_growth
When you zoom out, the law is the law.
To suggest we are somehow not different is another kind of arrogance. We absolutely are and that gives us a unique level of agency and control. That is brilliant and scary. We are able to turn down the thermostat of an entire planet (reduce co2). That kind of culturally motivated intervention is completely unprecedented and totally different to historic humans and other species.
I think this pattern of exponential growth of human beings is a curse of their intelligence. All other animals end up being controlled by these large ecosystem dynamics because they can't adapt and/or do group work sufficiently. Species with this property are easily influenced/controlled by large scale dynamics.
Maybe, a species with more intelligence than us wouldn't grow so fast and unorderly because they can see the future consequences of their own dynamics more easily. We just happen to not deal with large temporal scales very well.
Yet people breed anyway, for a multitude of selfish reasons. Everyone else is having babies so why shouldn't I, it's my right as a human to reproduce, I want to pass on my genes, I want my life to be fulfilling, I don't want to die alone, the list goes on. It is these lines of thinking that have caused our population to balloon to over 7 billion people with no end in sight.
No one is thinking of the planet.
And let's remember that Agent Smith is itself attempting to take over the world.
In that case, it's presumed it was indeed a massive extinction (but no data to quantify any % over, due to no microbial fossils preserved).
... But for a different reason. It wasn't due to decrease in oxygen levels; contrary to that. At that time, oxygen was being first ever introduced into the atmosphere. This has left a unique geological trace we observe everywhere across the planet: the white sedimentary + red rust striped 2 Ga rocks.
The "microbes" were the first photosynthesisers. The oxygen was a toxic byproduct. Resistance to it had to be learned by evolution, and that learning took ~1e8 years. Many of life didn't manage to and went extinct.
But to me the fascinating part is that we're aware of looking like bacterias. We are matter that became conscious of itself.
Isn't that the weirdest thing?
When microorganisms divide, the children "appear" in the same location. Our species growth dynamics kind of has this same property in that it's easier to build something closer to the already established region than far away.
So, in the end, looking from far away, the growth pattern is the same.
We are mostly lead by greed and not a need of growth. This is ofcourse not the case for all individuals but good enough portion.
Potentially, one of us could even decide to stop being a parasite and scale down, move to the forest and live naked as a result.
My personal theory is that we're nature way of extending beyond earth. Yes we're a funghi, but a clever enough one we can be the earth's tentacle to go spread beyond.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgS1Lwr8gq8
Now can we extrapolate? If we zoom out more do we see the same happening? Does the interaction between all the galaxies create a thought? A slow one perhaps.
Virtue signalling and hypocrisy. It always amuses me how many people fall for it.
Here is some little inspiration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMCFoudyYxQ&ab_channel=ITSTa...
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Exactly the sort of comment that fits the community here. I hope that gives some clue why this is an upvoted comment.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal