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Us humans are very adaptable. Maybe this is our next evolutionary step? (Apart from the obvious other step of symbiosis with technology). Maybe we'll become the
by gravitate 4y ago
Us humans are very adaptable. Maybe this is our next evolutionary step? (Apart from the obvious other step of symbiosis with technology). Maybe we'll become thermophiles?[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermophile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermophile
- quickthrower2 4y agoEvolution may not save us though! I think symbiosis with technology is the key: air conditioning is expensive and energy intensive. However there are devices that attach to your arm and can cool you down quickly.
- AstralStorm 4y agoYou're trying to beat evaporative cooling... Good luck with that.
- quickthrower2 4y agoEvaporative cooling ceases to work if water is almost condensing on your body! I imagine a dry ice pack and associated tech to slow release that coolness to exposed veins would work well.
- lm28469 4y ago"technology" put us here, more of it without a dramatic paradigm change won't do any good. See EVs for example, sold as a solution to global warming when it reality it's just ever so slightly displacing the problem and not actually solving anything besides car manufacturers from bankruptcy
- nine_k 4y agoHave you tried to fuel your car with gasoline collected from your rooftop? Electric cars can and are routinely charged from solar panels. Yes, solar panel production consumes a lot of energy; quite some of that energy is electric, and can be provided by solar panels. So yes, solar panels may be energy-positive, not just shifting consumption of fossil fuels to factories.
- lm28469 4y agoIn theory it's all clean and nice, in practice half europe is still running on non renewable and the new renewables aren't replacing non-renewable, they're mostly stacking on top thanks the the rebound effect. The sad truth is that we're over consuming energy, and until we consume less we'll just run in the same problems over and over.
- nine_k 4y agoAs soon as we consume renewable energy, there's no over-consuming it, Sun has a few hundred million years of runtime left. What we are overconsuming is fossil hydrocarbons, and this has to stop.
- lm28469 4y agoYou still have to solve many issues, mining raw material, recycling, storage are just a few of them. As I said, it's all clean and nice on paper, once you take everything into equation we're faaaar of from that green future. I think people simply don't understand the sheer scale of it all and the cost of externalities, from the mine to the landfill. Slapping a "renewable" sticker on it doesn't solve the root issues, it certainly is perpetuating the myth that energy and growth are unlimited though
- quickthrower2 4y agoWe need a bit if everything. Hedged bets. There is no world authority that can force every country to change unfortunately. The best bet is technology making it in countries interests to move to greener ways of producing power, and at a consumer level saving people money is usually a winner form changing habits.
- pvaldes 4y agoProbably not with our current set of enzymes fine-tuned for 37 C degrees. Most probably our metabolism would stop working accurately into a waterfall of malfunctions. Would be more realistic to expect evolving a pair of feathered wings than to reset our blood temperature to several degrees higher.
- wesleywt 4y agoThis is an emphatic no. Thermophiles are bacteria and archea. We are not that. We evolved during period of mild geological climate. We move out of this period we will cease to exist as a species. Which I am not against.
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoI'll take on this ... incredibly ... dumb take. It doesn't matter if we are "adaptable". We are directly reliant on a functioning global biosphere. This ain't changing. One of the scariest aspects of the current mass extinction is that other mass extinctions occurred on the timescale of tens to hundreds of thousands of years. That can be viewed as a proper timescale for overall evolutionary adaptation to occur in the global biosphere. Our current mass extinction is really on the scale of a couple hundred years. Previous temperature shifts likewise occurred on the scale of 10,000s of years. That provides time for adaptation, migration of entire biomes to shifting locations. See: https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/ https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/ Our current one is ridiculously fast. Even if the biomes / ecosystems could migrate, humanity is industrializing all the possible locations for the biomes to migrate too with farming. Unless you are a colonist from mars with experience in surviving in a world without a functioning biosphere, kindly never repeat this sentiment again.