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I think it’s wild and deeply inspiring to imagine how the surface of the earth had radically different forms over billions of years. Huge landscapes of unrotted

I think it’s wild and deeply inspiring to imagine how the surface of the earth had radically different forms over billions of years. Huge landscapes of unrotted dead plants. Then massive landscapes of fungus and decomposing bacteria breaking that down into dirt. And on and on. I think it is wise to understand that earth has been through many eras and is not as homeostatic as our narrowly imagined “natural” state we seek today. And I am not trying to build an anti climate change argument, just that static “naturalism” is a human construct.

flerchin 4y ago
Over human lifespans, it's generally been pretty static.
shisisms 4y ago
Totally agree. And beyond that human life assumes it’s own sentience through an incredibly narrow view. Isn’t it fair/logical to assume that if giant mushrooms did over the earth that given the passing of considerable time they’ve likely evolved to a far more considerable state of intelligence/harmony than humans have. Their survivability/adaptability being an illustration. Likewise, one ends up sounding like an anti climate nut, but the existential fear for the planet seems arrogant at best and massively over emphasises our place in the universe. See, I sound like an anti climate nut.
- ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
  the fear is of the threat to humans and the human livability of the planet, not for the planet itself, which will still be fine after we all die not sure what's arrogant about that, it's a bit of perspective
  - lo_zamoyski 4y ago
    Indeed. This sort of misanthropic talk is shockingly incoherent and absurd. For starters, demeaning human life automatically undermines the value of any life, even more drastically than how acceptance of infanticide undermines all human rights. The notion of sacrificing ourselves for "the planet" is pure nonsense. Most of this talk is unthinking affectation and empty emotionalism, I suspect, something you might expect a mopey teenager to say, but it does betray some degree of viciousness. Envy and pride come to mind.
- technothrasher 4y ago
  > Isn’t it fair/logical to assume that if giant mushrooms did over the earth that given the passing of considerable time they’ve likely evolved to a far more considerable state of intelligence/harmony than humans have. No? Intelligence isn't needed for a stable evolutionary state to exist in an organism. You would have define what you mean by intelligence and then show evidence of that before it would be reasonable to make that assumption.
rektide 4y ago
I really like this comment & it has a lot going for it. At the same time I think it's also worth pointing out that earth has likely never had as diverse an ecosystem as it has this millennium. The tree of life has become incredibly wide & complex. The naturalist tendency doesn't have to be as static as portrayed here. Nature itself is such a dynamic & changing system death & population booms chasing each other around wildly. What, I think, is so scary about right now is how in jeapordy so much life seems. Insects & birds are disappearing at mass scale. Large life is hunted to breaking points. Many animals lack for habitat and access to essential food & water. We see strictly worse coming & that has built a fervor for the worlds we are actively losing/destroying.
- C-x_C-f 4y ago
  > earth has likely never had as diverse an ecosystem as it has this millennium Don't worry, we can fix that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
  - tsunamifury 4y ago
    I think your flippant response here robs us of a conversation as to why we do this — what larger purpose does it serve in the macro scale mentioned earlier. Is earth a set of short term optimized life leading to different eras or are humans the first sentient life that must take responsibility for it. If so how and with what goals. For our own preservation? To freeze all life as it is today?
    - inpdx 4y ago
      No other species has had this great of an impact on that many species. If we were wise and thoughtful, collectively we could both advance ourselves and allow the diversity to continue. So it's a shame we aren't.
      - kevviiinn 4y ago
        Humans are notoriously short sighted
pil0u 4y ago
Changes are static or not depending on the scale of time you consider. In a time span of billions (even millions) of years, our planet indeed went through different eras. For a duration of one human life, the state of nature is expected to remain quite static. The problem with climate change is that we started to witness the planet entering in a new era in such a small time frame - roughly 200 years.
- nunobrito 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - tommywg7 4y ago
    What a weird comment. The ozone hole WAS a huge problem… and then the world banned CFCs and we fixed it. But it took years of lawsuits, journalism, and scientists speaking up. Similarly, global warming is a huge problem today and threatens our future. We will fix it just like we did the ozone hole, but again it will take decades of lawsuits, science, public outcry. The problem this time is twofold: the rise of conspiracy theorists in the Republican Party, who refuse to even acknowledge the problem, and the stranglehold that globalist neoliberal corporations have on the economy. The second being what you meant in your last paragraph. It’s hard to actually address waste, overconsumption, and pollution when our economy and government is controlled by a handful of corps, who are getting better and better at greenwashing.
    - carlmr 4y ago
      >The problem this time is twofold: the rise of conspiracy theorists in the Republican Party, who refuse to even acknowledge the problem, and the stranglehold that globalist neoliberal corporations have on the economy. Well this time it's a lot worse because not using CFCs had a comparatively small impact on the world economy, with a big payoff. There is currently no realistic path to keep somewhat decent living standards for the number of people we have, while ramping down the world economy sufficiently to battle global warming. Even if everybody turned vegan and stopped flying it wouldn't be enough.
bheadmaster 4y ago
It's somewhat odd that one has to explicitly say they're not "anti-climate change" when presenting any kind of perspective that could be perceived as such. As if they're afraid of the somebody punishing them for daring to think such "problematic" and "destructive" thoughts...
- tsunamifury 4y ago
  The internet in general and this forum in particular is prone to pedantic misinterpretations— just heading it off.
  - bheadmaster 4y ago
    I understand why you said it. It just seems that the general atmosphere of the internet is that of self-censorship and fear. It just doesn't sit well with me. The intolerance of different views is driving the hostile and divisive atmosphere in the social media. Let's say there's a person who's really anti-climate change. How is that person supposed to change their mind, if they get attacked every time they voice their opinions, instead of being approached in a civil manner? People can't be bullied people into agreement, only silenced and driven further away into their own echo chamber, at which point you lose any chance you had of ever changing their minds.
    - Loughla 4y ago
      Legitimately, do you believe that people posting on internet forums is an effective means of getting someone to change their minds? My take is that by the time the poster goes through the effort to post, they have adopted [insert view here] into their personal belief system; they're not seeking answers. Don't most studies show that fact based arguments only cause people with faulty beliefs to dig in further?
      - bheadmaster 4y ago
        > Legitimately, do you believe that people posting on internet forums is an effective means of getting someone to change their minds? Some percentage of them? Yes. Unfortunately, there's no way to know when that happens, so it's very easy to assume it doesn't. > My take is that by the time the poster goes through the effort to post, they have adopted [insert view here] into their personal belief system; they're not seeking answers. If what you're saying is true, what's the logic behind censoring people? Nobody is able to convince anyone of anything anyway.
bodhi_mind 4y ago
It’s saddening that a comment like this needs to disclaim that it’s not anti climate change. I get it, I’ve posted things in the past that were attacked as anti climate change and I was perplexed. My gut tells me there are just people that like to stir up trouble and will post “enraging” things on anything really. It’s unfortunately discouraging and makes me not want to engage in social media.
- yazzku 4y ago
  Don't worry, this is not social media; VC does the talk.
  - circuit10 4y ago
    I don’t know what the bit about VC (venture capital? voice chat?) is but this site is definitely social media
samstave 4y ago
I read that book and watched the later documentary about what happens when the earth takes over, about how nature just over-runs human endeavors ... it was pretty depressing (though the writing was sophomoric) but I am always amazed at how much 'nature' has been interrupted by humans laying concrete (streets and buildings etc) Manhatten Island was once a sanctuary and now is a concrete cemetary.
bena 4y ago
It's something George Carlin has touched on as well. Paraphrasing a bit: We're not really trying to save the planet. The planet has been here for billions of years, it'll be here for billions of years after we're all dead and gone. The planet will be fine. The people? The people are fucked. That's what we're trying to save. We're trying to keep the planet hospitable to us.
- louison11 4y ago
  And the animals. There is more than planet and humans. If it was just us - to some extent - I’d say “we get what we deserve.” But animals vastly outnumber humans, feel pain just like us, and do not deserve any of it. At least that’s what I find myself experiencing when I think about the future of our planet. Edit: I looked it up. Estimate is 20,000,121,091,000,000,000 or 20 billion billion animals. “Vastly” was clearly an understatement.
  - mr_toad 4y ago
    And most of those animals are livestock, and most would die along with us.
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      Huh? No, most animals are not livestock; that's pretty ridiculous. The vast, vast majority of animals are insects.
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  Well billions may be stretching it, by some estimates in 1 billion years Earth will be be hotter by cca 25 degress. All kinds of runaway greenhouse effects will happen way before that, ocean will become probably unhospitable warm chemical gunk and some of it may evaporate out of Earth's atmosphere and then taken by solar winds out of gravity well. Some primitive form of life will probably thrive for another billion years till Earth is slowly sterilized by Sun, but not complex life like us.
comboy 4y ago
> unrotted dead plants That happened with trees because cellulose was new, but I don't think there would be an issue with plants which cells have been around for a long time. But maybe I'm missing something in which case I'm happy to learn.
- astrange 4y ago
  I was looking this up yesterday and apparently there's evidence against it. https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/lack-fungi-did-not-lead-copious-carboniferous-coal/ https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/lack-fungi-did-not-lea...
  - comboy 4y ago
    Oh, thank you. Now I'm confused to be honest, I've encountered lignin theory stated as a fact in a few books and I have no basis to tell who's right. Why does it always have to be "it's complicated".
avgcorrection 4y ago
On the blip of the radar that is Human Civilization, it is abssolutely appropriate to be “naturalistic” since the organisms on this current Earth are very sensitive to sudden changes one way or the other. But philosophically speaking or as hypothetical interestellar gods who live for millions of years then yes, worrying about what’s “natural” as we currently conceive it is narrow-minded.
izzydata 4y ago
And then after millions of years and all of the biological matter turning into oil we will eventually use it all up within ~300-400 years. The era that humans will utilize this kind of gasoline combustion is such a tiny blip of the whole human history, but today it seems like civilization can't possibly exist without it. I don't see how airplanes are even going to exist for mass transit and cargo 200 years from now or how we will ever escape Earths gravity again without building some kind of space elevator before we run out.
- shiftpgdn 4y ago
  Rockets (especially SpaceX ones) can fly without fossil fuels. Hydrocarbons can easily be synthesized with thermal depolymerization or wasteful processes like how we make ethanol from corn. That's to say nothing of how all the oil fields we've tapped are the easy to get ones, and the deep sea holds a ton of oil.
- beebeepka 4y ago
  https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/12/porsches-synthetic-gasoline-factory-comes-online-today-in-chile/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/12/porsches-synthetic-gaso...
  - izzydata 4y ago
    This is very interesting. Thank you.
- drewm1980 4y ago
  Electric and hydrogen fueled airplanes are progressing. There are also futuristic ideas about powering the planes with ground or space based lasers powered by solar. Zeppelins still scale really well, and ships can use sails again. I believe a lot of this stuff would have already been resolved if we had stopped propping up the fossil fuel industry by funding wars to maintain supply and allowing the industry to externalize its costs.
  - drewm1980 4y ago
glitchc 4y ago
Thank you! People don't realize how much of a blip we are in Earth's long history, and trying to hold on to what we are used to i.e. conservatism, is actually the most unnatural thing to do.
theGnuMe 4y ago
We want to keep the earth habitat habitable for humans.
mc32 4y ago
>static “naturalism” is a human construct. Eh, I think lots of living things "presume" today's state of things --and involuntarily evolve and try to adapt when things change from what is now to what will be then. But otherwise, I agree.
derefr 4y ago
Rather than motivating environmental conservation out of some species-level nostalgia for "the biodiversity of our youth", there's another, forward-looking motivation for it: the species that evolved at the same time we did — our "evolutionary cohort" — are the species of our own Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness. While they may not share our ecological niche, they all share a dependency on the same air mix we do, the same temperature ranges, the same water osmolarity and pH, etc. This implies two things: - Insofar as we want to keep the Earth a good place for us to live, we can measure our success by the number of our evolutionary cohort of species that stick around; - Insofar as we plan to live in space, terraform other worlds, etc., it's only animals of our evolutionary cohort that will be able to comfortably survive in the places we optimize for our own well-being. If we increase global CO2 levels here on Earth to such a point that species on Earth that like our current air mix begin dying off, and we see an evolution of replacement species that prefer higher CO2 levels (and we ourselves retreat to dome cities or something to avoid that fate); but then we later terraform Mars to have the environment of Earth ca 5000BCE; then the species that inhabit Earth by that point, won't be able to be transplanted to Mars. Only the species we had conserved — keeping them in the dome-cities with us — would be able to be transplanted. (Another way to say that second one, is that if we screw up the Earth's environment, but later fix it, we'll lose biodiversity twice — we'll have killed off our evolutionary cohort with the screw-up, and we'll kill off the newer-evolved species with our "fix.")
- RangerScience 4y ago
  > evolutionary cohort This is a very cool idea; I haven't heard of it before, and I'm not finding much on this concept on the 'web. Anything you can point me to? :)
  - maxerickson 4y ago
    Large land animals only really survive in Africa, where they evolved alongside early hominids. Everywhere else they got slaughtered.
    - CyberDildonics 4y ago
ericmay 4y ago
> just that static “naturalism” is a human construct. I think you are somewhat strawmanning environmentalism and climate-change concerns here (not with malicious intention or anything) because I don't think that many argue that things are or should be static - though they mostly appear to be static from our short viewpoint. Instead the concern is that the changes are too fast. It's more akin to consciously bringing a meteor down on the planet than it is to "the world is changing and always have and humans are a tiny blip in the existence of the world".
Balgair 4y ago
PBS Eons on YT does a good job of diving into the many and extreme phases that Earth has seen. Check it out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1LdMWlNYS4&list=PLi6K9w_UbfFRC8P7CPSWi7YEBwyM3ytOx https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1LdMWlNYS4&list=PLi6K9w_Ubf... Also, Darwin wrote a lot about the extreme variations that we see in the 'balanced' ecosystem. He tallied up the birds near him and found that ~4/5ths of all the birds would die every winter. He remarked that a 10% death rate illness in humans would be considered a huge event, but that every year, nearly all the birds near him just up and die. This was in a passage on how the 'balance' that we see is really just a lot of species furiously competing with each other and trying to eek out minuscule improvements in the deadly chaos.
- fiftyfifty 4y ago
  I've been a falconer for a couple of decades and in general try to keep up with the research around birds of prey. The general consensus is only about 10% of birds of prey survive the first year. It doesn't surprise me that the survival rate for most other birds is equally as bad. I've been out in the field a number of times in the winter and found wild birds of prey that were so weak they couldn't fly and you could just walk up to them and pick them up. In every one of these cases the birds were skin and bones, starving to death. Nature can be brutal.
otabdeveloper4 4y ago
> And I am not trying to build an anti climate change argument Oh definitely, Sagan forbid someone cast doubt on the Consensus and the Science!
lovecg 4y ago
The phase shifts in huge dynamic systems are fascinating. The Earth can look more or less the same for millions of years (with minor variations), then an extreme event happens and the world is completely transformed, never to return to a previous state again. We humans sure like to play with fire.
daniel-cussen 4y ago
There were fires then too.
__MatrixMan__ 4y ago
A similarly wild thing to think about is that Pangaea was just the most recent supercontinent. The landmass on earth has split and merged several times. Time. It's deep.
api 4y ago
Concern about climate change is about its effects on us. Most of our great cities are coastal. We thrive in a temperate climate. We are dependent on fisheries and a whole food chain of other Holocene organisms. Having all that change would be incredibly disruptive to us. We’d survive (as a species) all but the most extreme scenarios but our quality of life could take a huge dive and many people could die. Obviously life will just keep evolving. There have been times in the geological record when there has been little to no polar ice and times of “snowball Earth.” Life existed during all these times but both these extremes would be more hostile to humans than the current epoch.
8bitsrule 4y ago
And Prototaxites happpened in just the most recent 10% of the Earth's history. (-Blinking incomprehension-) A lot of time for unfathomable stuff to arise, then disappear!

flerchin 4y ago

Over human lifespans, it's generally been pretty static.

shisisms 4y ago

Totally agree. And beyond that human life assumes it’s own sentience through an incredibly narrow view. Isn’t it fair/logical to assume that if giant mushrooms did over the earth that given the passing of considerable time they’ve likely evolved to a far more considerable state of intelligence/harmony than humans have. Their survivability/adaptability being an illustration. Likewise, one ends up sounding like an anti climate nut, but the existential fear for the planet seems arrogant at best and massively over emphasises our place in the universe. See, I sound like an anti climate nut.

ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
the fear is of the threat to humans and the human livability of the planet, not for the planet itself, which will still be fine after we all die not sure what's arrogant about that, it's a bit of perspective
- lo_zamoyski 4y ago
  Indeed. This sort of misanthropic talk is shockingly incoherent and absurd. For starters, demeaning human life automatically undermines the value of any life, even more drastically than how acceptance of infanticide undermines all human rights. The notion of sacrificing ourselves for "the planet" is pure nonsense. Most of this talk is unthinking affectation and empty emotionalism, I suspect, something you might expect a mopey teenager to say, but it does betray some degree of viciousness. Envy and pride come to mind.
technothrasher 4y ago
> Isn’t it fair/logical to assume that if giant mushrooms did over the earth that given the passing of considerable time they’ve likely evolved to a far more considerable state of intelligence/harmony than humans have. No? Intelligence isn't needed for a stable evolutionary state to exist in an organism. You would have define what you mean by intelligence and then show evidence of that before it would be reasonable to make that assumption.

rektide 4y ago

I really like this comment & it has a lot going for it. At the same time I think it's also worth pointing out that earth has likely never had as diverse an ecosystem as it has this millennium. The tree of life has become incredibly wide & complex. The naturalist tendency doesn't have to be as static as portrayed here. Nature itself is such a dynamic & changing system death & population booms chasing each other around wildly. What, I think, is so scary about right now is how in jeapordy so much life seems. Insects & birds are disappearing at mass scale. Large life is hunted to breaking points. Many animals lack for habitat and access to essential food & water. We see strictly worse coming & that has built a fervor for the worlds we are actively losing/destroying.

C-x_C-f 4y ago
> earth has likely never had as diverse an ecosystem as it has this millennium Don't worry, we can fix that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
- tsunamifury 4y ago
  I think your flippant response here robs us of a conversation as to why we do this — what larger purpose does it serve in the macro scale mentioned earlier. Is earth a set of short term optimized life leading to different eras or are humans the first sentient life that must take responsibility for it. If so how and with what goals. For our own preservation? To freeze all life as it is today?
  - inpdx 4y ago
    No other species has had this great of an impact on that many species. If we were wise and thoughtful, collectively we could both advance ourselves and allow the diversity to continue. So it's a shame we aren't.
    - kevviiinn 4y ago
      Humans are notoriously short sighted

pil0u 4y ago

Changes are static or not depending on the scale of time you consider. In a time span of billions (even millions) of years, our planet indeed went through different eras. For a duration of one human life, the state of nature is expected to remain quite static. The problem with climate change is that we started to witness the planet entering in a new era in such a small time frame - roughly 200 years.

nunobrito 4y ago
[flagged]
- tommywg7 4y ago
  What a weird comment. The ozone hole WAS a huge problem… and then the world banned CFCs and we fixed it. But it took years of lawsuits, journalism, and scientists speaking up. Similarly, global warming is a huge problem today and threatens our future. We will fix it just like we did the ozone hole, but again it will take decades of lawsuits, science, public outcry. The problem this time is twofold: the rise of conspiracy theorists in the Republican Party, who refuse to even acknowledge the problem, and the stranglehold that globalist neoliberal corporations have on the economy. The second being what you meant in your last paragraph. It’s hard to actually address waste, overconsumption, and pollution when our economy and government is controlled by a handful of corps, who are getting better and better at greenwashing.
  - carlmr 4y ago
    >The problem this time is twofold: the rise of conspiracy theorists in the Republican Party, who refuse to even acknowledge the problem, and the stranglehold that globalist neoliberal corporations have on the economy. Well this time it's a lot worse because not using CFCs had a comparatively small impact on the world economy, with a big payoff. There is currently no realistic path to keep somewhat decent living standards for the number of people we have, while ramping down the world economy sufficiently to battle global warming. Even if everybody turned vegan and stopped flying it wouldn't be enough.

bheadmaster 4y ago

It's somewhat odd that one has to explicitly say they're not "anti-climate change" when presenting any kind of perspective that could be perceived as such. As if they're afraid of the somebody punishing them for daring to think such "problematic" and "destructive" thoughts...

tsunamifury 4y ago
The internet in general and this forum in particular is prone to pedantic misinterpretations— just heading it off.
- bheadmaster 4y ago
  I understand why you said it. It just seems that the general atmosphere of the internet is that of self-censorship and fear. It just doesn't sit well with me. The intolerance of different views is driving the hostile and divisive atmosphere in the social media. Let's say there's a person who's really anti-climate change. How is that person supposed to change their mind, if they get attacked every time they voice their opinions, instead of being approached in a civil manner? People can't be bullied people into agreement, only silenced and driven further away into their own echo chamber, at which point you lose any chance you had of ever changing their minds.
  - Loughla 4y ago
    Legitimately, do you believe that people posting on internet forums is an effective means of getting someone to change their minds? My take is that by the time the poster goes through the effort to post, they have adopted [insert view here] into their personal belief system; they're not seeking answers. Don't most studies show that fact based arguments only cause people with faulty beliefs to dig in further?
    - bheadmaster 4y ago
      > Legitimately, do you believe that people posting on internet forums is an effective means of getting someone to change their minds? Some percentage of them? Yes. Unfortunately, there's no way to know when that happens, so it's very easy to assume it doesn't. > My take is that by the time the poster goes through the effort to post, they have adopted [insert view here] into their personal belief system; they're not seeking answers. If what you're saying is true, what's the logic behind censoring people? Nobody is able to convince anyone of anything anyway.

bodhi_mind 4y ago

It’s saddening that a comment like this needs to disclaim that it’s not anti climate change. I get it, I’ve posted things in the past that were attacked as anti climate change and I was perplexed. My gut tells me there are just people that like to stir up trouble and will post “enraging” things on anything really. It’s unfortunately discouraging and makes me not want to engage in social media.

yazzku 4y ago
Don't worry, this is not social media; VC does the talk.
- circuit10 4y ago
  I don’t know what the bit about VC (venture capital? voice chat?) is but this site is definitely social media

samstave 4y ago

I read that book and watched the later documentary about what happens when the earth takes over, about how nature just over-runs human endeavors ... it was pretty depressing (though the writing was sophomoric) but I am always amazed at how much 'nature' has been interrupted by humans laying concrete (streets and buildings etc) Manhatten Island was once a sanctuary and now is a concrete cemetary.

bena 4y ago

It's something George Carlin has touched on as well. Paraphrasing a bit: We're not really trying to save the planet. The planet has been here for billions of years, it'll be here for billions of years after we're all dead and gone. The planet will be fine. The people? The people are fucked. That's what we're trying to save. We're trying to keep the planet hospitable to us.

louison11 4y ago
And the animals. There is more than planet and humans. If it was just us - to some extent - I’d say “we get what we deserve.” But animals vastly outnumber humans, feel pain just like us, and do not deserve any of it. At least that’s what I find myself experiencing when I think about the future of our planet. Edit: I looked it up. Estimate is 20,000,121,091,000,000,000 or 20 billion billion animals. “Vastly” was clearly an understatement.
- mr_toad 4y ago
  And most of those animals are livestock, and most would die along with us.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    Huh? No, most animals are not livestock; that's pretty ridiculous. The vast, vast majority of animals are insects.
saiya-jin 4y ago
Well billions may be stretching it, by some estimates in 1 billion years Earth will be be hotter by cca 25 degress. All kinds of runaway greenhouse effects will happen way before that, ocean will become probably unhospitable warm chemical gunk and some of it may evaporate out of Earth's atmosphere and then taken by solar winds out of gravity well. Some primitive form of life will probably thrive for another billion years till Earth is slowly sterilized by Sun, but not complex life like us.

comboy 4y ago

> unrotted dead plants That happened with trees because cellulose was new, but I don't think there would be an issue with plants which cells have been around for a long time. But maybe I'm missing something in which case I'm happy to learn.

astrange 4y ago
I was looking this up yesterday and apparently there's evidence against it. https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/lack-fungi-did-not-lead-copious-carboniferous-coal/ https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/lack-fungi-did-not-lea...
- comboy 4y ago
  Oh, thank you. Now I'm confused to be honest, I've encountered lignin theory stated as a fact in a few books and I have no basis to tell who's right. Why does it always have to be "it's complicated".

avgcorrection 4y ago

On the blip of the radar that is Human Civilization, it is abssolutely appropriate to be “naturalistic” since the organisms on this current Earth are very sensitive to sudden changes one way or the other. But philosophically speaking or as hypothetical interestellar gods who live for millions of years then yes, worrying about what’s “natural” as we currently conceive it is narrow-minded.

izzydata 4y ago

And then after millions of years and all of the biological matter turning into oil we will eventually use it all up within ~300-400 years. The era that humans will utilize this kind of gasoline combustion is such a tiny blip of the whole human history, but today it seems like civilization can't possibly exist without it. I don't see how airplanes are even going to exist for mass transit and cargo 200 years from now or how we will ever escape Earths gravity again without building some kind of space elevator before we run out.

shiftpgdn 4y ago
Rockets (especially SpaceX ones) can fly without fossil fuels. Hydrocarbons can easily be synthesized with thermal depolymerization or wasteful processes like how we make ethanol from corn. That's to say nothing of how all the oil fields we've tapped are the easy to get ones, and the deep sea holds a ton of oil.
beebeepka 4y ago
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/12/porsches-synthetic-gasoline-factory-comes-online-today-in-chile/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/12/porsches-synthetic-gaso...
- izzydata 4y ago
  This is very interesting. Thank you.
drewm1980 4y ago
Electric and hydrogen fueled airplanes are progressing. There are also futuristic ideas about powering the planes with ground or space based lasers powered by solar. Zeppelins still scale really well, and ships can use sails again. I believe a lot of this stuff would have already been resolved if we had stopped propping up the fossil fuel industry by funding wars to maintain supply and allowing the industry to externalize its costs.
- drewm1980 4y ago

glitchc 4y ago

Thank you! People don't realize how much of a blip we are in Earth's long history, and trying to hold on to what we are used to i.e. conservatism, is actually the most unnatural thing to do.

theGnuMe 4y ago

We want to keep the earth habitat habitable for humans.

mc32 4y ago

>static “naturalism” is a human construct. Eh, I think lots of living things "presume" today's state of things --and involuntarily evolve and try to adapt when things change from what is now to what will be then. But otherwise, I agree.

derefr 4y ago

Rather than motivating environmental conservation out of some species-level nostalgia for "the biodiversity of our youth", there's another, forward-looking motivation for it: the species that evolved at the same time we did — our "evolutionary cohort" — are the species of our own Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness. While they may not share our ecological niche, they all share a dependency on the same air mix we do, the same temperature ranges, the same water osmolarity and pH, etc. This implies two things: - Insofar as we want to keep the Earth a good place for us to live, we can measure our success by the number of our evolutionary cohort of species that stick around; - Insofar as we plan to live in space, terraform other worlds, etc., it's only animals of our evolutionary cohort that will be able to comfortably survive in the places we optimize for our own well-being. If we increase global CO2 levels here on Earth to such a point that species on Earth that like our current air mix begin dying off, and we see an evolution of replacement species that prefer higher CO2 levels (and we ourselves retreat to dome cities or something to avoid that fate); but then we later terraform Mars to have the environment of Earth ca 5000BCE; then the species that inhabit Earth by that point, won't be able to be transplanted to Mars. Only the species we had conserved — keeping them in the dome-cities with us — would be able to be transplanted. (Another way to say that second one, is that if we screw up the Earth's environment, but later fix it, we'll lose biodiversity twice — we'll have killed off our evolutionary cohort with the screw-up, and we'll kill off the newer-evolved species with our "fix.")

RangerScience 4y ago
> evolutionary cohort This is a very cool idea; I haven't heard of it before, and I'm not finding much on this concept on the 'web. Anything you can point me to? :)
- maxerickson 4y ago
  Large land animals only really survive in Africa, where they evolved alongside early hominids. Everywhere else they got slaughtered.
  - CyberDildonics 4y ago

ericmay 4y ago

> just that static “naturalism” is a human construct. I think you are somewhat strawmanning environmentalism and climate-change concerns here (not with malicious intention or anything) because I don't think that many argue that things are or should be static - though they mostly appear to be static from our short viewpoint. Instead the concern is that the changes are too fast. It's more akin to consciously bringing a meteor down on the planet than it is to "the world is changing and always have and humans are a tiny blip in the existence of the world".

Balgair 4y ago

PBS Eons on YT does a good job of diving into the many and extreme phases that Earth has seen. Check it out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1LdMWlNYS4&list=PLi6K9w_UbfFRC8P7CPSWi7YEBwyM3ytOx https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1LdMWlNYS4&list=PLi6K9w_Ubf... Also, Darwin wrote a lot about the extreme variations that we see in the 'balanced' ecosystem. He tallied up the birds near him and found that ~4/5ths of all the birds would die every winter. He remarked that a 10% death rate illness in humans would be considered a huge event, but that every year, nearly all the birds near him just up and die. This was in a passage on how the 'balance' that we see is really just a lot of species furiously competing with each other and trying to eek out minuscule improvements in the deadly chaos.

fiftyfifty 4y ago
I've been a falconer for a couple of decades and in general try to keep up with the research around birds of prey. The general consensus is only about 10% of birds of prey survive the first year. It doesn't surprise me that the survival rate for most other birds is equally as bad. I've been out in the field a number of times in the winter and found wild birds of prey that were so weak they couldn't fly and you could just walk up to them and pick them up. In every one of these cases the birds were skin and bones, starving to death. Nature can be brutal.

otabdeveloper4 4y ago

> And I am not trying to build an anti climate change argument Oh definitely, Sagan forbid someone cast doubt on the Consensus and the Science!

lovecg 4y ago

The phase shifts in huge dynamic systems are fascinating. The Earth can look more or less the same for millions of years (with minor variations), then an extreme event happens and the world is completely transformed, never to return to a previous state again. We humans sure like to play with fire.

daniel-cussen 4y ago

There were fires then too.

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago

A similarly wild thing to think about is that Pangaea was just the most recent supercontinent. The landmass on earth has split and merged several times. Time. It's deep.

api 4y ago

Concern about climate change is about its effects on us. Most of our great cities are coastal. We thrive in a temperate climate. We are dependent on fisheries and a whole food chain of other Holocene organisms. Having all that change would be incredibly disruptive to us. We’d survive (as a species) all but the most extreme scenarios but our quality of life could take a huge dive and many people could die. Obviously life will just keep evolving. There have been times in the geological record when there has been little to no polar ice and times of “snowball Earth.” Life existed during all these times but both these extremes would be more hostile to humans than the current epoch.

8bitsrule 4y ago

And Prototaxites happpened in just the most recent 10% of the Earth's history. (-Blinking incomprehension-) A lot of time for unfathomable stuff to arise, then disappear!