4 ms·

You just listed two incidents which, on the face of it, support the grandparent's argument.

flukus 10y ago
Being on the right side of a knifes edge event (Toba example) doesn't prove we're resilient, it shows how susceptible we are to forces beyond our control, just as retrospectively guessing a coin toss doesn't mean we can predict the future, that's the anthropic principal at work. The second example shows how susceptible Civilization is. For more examples look at our closest relatives which survived on earth longer than we did but ultimately went extinct.
- ckastner 10y ago
  Can you please provide a credible example for such an event. Regarding your first example, Toba: we have no record of what may or may not have happened to a small population of Neanderthals 75.000 years ago, and your source itself states "Both the link and global winter theories are highly controversial". Your second example marks the decline of a civilization, but does not even come close to what could be described as an "extinction".
  - flukus 10y ago
    For Toba, I wouldn't expect it to be definitively settled one way or another for a long time, if ever. Volcanology, geology and genetics are very young fields of study, particularly in developing nations that are home to much of the evidence. The theory is that it caused a population bottleneck in humans though, not Neanderthals (who probably had a pretty hard time as well) and that humans nearly fell below the genetic diversity needed to survive. It's the only example that I know of because humans have only been around for the blink of an eye, Toba maybe be the worst that nature has thrown at us, which is a fraction of what it's capable of. There are some other more documented examples the merely bought down civilizations (or helped anyway), like the Justinian Famine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535%E2%80%93536 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535%...) thought to be caused by a volcanic eruption. > Your second example marks the decline of a civilization, but does not even come close to what could be described as an "extinction". I didn't mean to imply otherwise, though I would say they are one and the same thing in the long term. For humanity to survive and spread beyond our planet we need civilization and we've used up so many natural resources that I'm not sure we could rebuild one to match what we have today without them.
    - antisthenes 10y ago
      > I didn't mean to imply otherwise, though I would say they are one and the same thing in the long term. For humanity to survive and spread beyond our planet we need civilization and we've used up so many natural resources that I'm not sure we could rebuild one to match what we have today without them. There's no point in spreading beyond our planet if we cannot create a fully sustainable planetary civilization first. The energy expenditures of GOING to another STAR and terraforming a planet in its orbit are many magnitudes more than it takes to create a paradise here, on Earth, at least from the perspective of energy requirements of modern countries.
saiya-jin 10y ago
This is a classic survivorship bias - we wouldn't be discussing here if we didn't make it that time. In situations like [1], we are here by pure luck (isn't all life?) We can discuss to great lengths how resilient is some Mad max-ish civilization would be, but in reality we have no clue. Especially about things we have no clue not taking into consideration [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve

Being on the right side of a knifes edge event (Toba example) doesn't prove we're resilient, it shows how susceptible we are to forces beyond our control, just as retrospectively guessing a coin toss doesn't mean we can predict the future, that's the anthropic principal at work. The second example shows how susceptible Civilization is. For more examples look at our closest relatives which survived on earth longer than we did but ultimately went extinct.

ckastner 10y ago
Can you please provide a credible example for such an event. Regarding your first example, Toba: we have no record of what may or may not have happened to a small population of Neanderthals 75.000 years ago, and your source itself states "Both the link and global winter theories are highly controversial". Your second example marks the decline of a civilization, but does not even come close to what could be described as an "extinction".
- flukus 10y ago
  For Toba, I wouldn't expect it to be definitively settled one way or another for a long time, if ever. Volcanology, geology and genetics are very young fields of study, particularly in developing nations that are home to much of the evidence. The theory is that it caused a population bottleneck in humans though, not Neanderthals (who probably had a pretty hard time as well) and that humans nearly fell below the genetic diversity needed to survive. It's the only example that I know of because humans have only been around for the blink of an eye, Toba maybe be the worst that nature has thrown at us, which is a fraction of what it's capable of. There are some other more documented examples the merely bought down civilizations (or helped anyway), like the Justinian Famine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535%E2%80%93536 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535%...) thought to be caused by a volcanic eruption. > Your second example marks the decline of a civilization, but does not even come close to what could be described as an "extinction". I didn't mean to imply otherwise, though I would say they are one and the same thing in the long term. For humanity to survive and spread beyond our planet we need civilization and we've used up so many natural resources that I'm not sure we could rebuild one to match what we have today without them.
  - antisthenes 10y ago
    > I didn't mean to imply otherwise, though I would say they are one and the same thing in the long term. For humanity to survive and spread beyond our planet we need civilization and we've used up so many natural resources that I'm not sure we could rebuild one to match what we have today without them. There's no point in spreading beyond our planet if we cannot create a fully sustainable planetary civilization first. The energy expenditures of GOING to another STAR and terraforming a planet in its orbit are many magnitudes more than it takes to create a paradise here, on Earth, at least from the perspective of energy requirements of modern countries.

saiya-jin 10y ago

This is a classic survivorship bias - we wouldn't be discussing here if we didn't make it that time. In situations like [1], we are here by pure luck (isn't all life?) We can discuss to great lengths how resilient is some Mad max-ish civilization would be, but in reality we have no clue. Especially about things we have no clue not taking into consideration [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve