7 ms·

Imagine an asteroid causing a glaciation event on Earth that lasts 1.4 million years. That's mindblowing.

_joel 3y ago
I think it goes to show just how short of a blink of the cosmic eye, that humanity has really existed for and the need to spread our bets by exploring the universe.
- dsign 3y ago
  [flagged]
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Only if you want the species to survive, if you're more nihilistic like me, it just doesn't seem to matter. Or if you're optimistic, WE don't matter because there's loads of other life and societies out there. It does make you wonder whether life as we know it was a preceding civilization that launched life into the wider universe for the continued existence of life. But on tectonic timescales, any traces that e.g. a carrying vessel would have left behind are long gone.
  - _joel 3y ago
    Probably one of the best episodes of Trek imho - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708803/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708803/
    - gloria_mundi 3y ago
      Another related Trek episode - the one I expected you to link: VOY's "Distant Origin" - https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_Origin https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_Origin
  - VHRanger 3y ago
    That's a question in geology and archaeology called the Silurian Hypothesis: Could we even detect a millions-of-years old civilization in the geological record? 1. https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748 https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
      An Earth-originating civilization would have left our species bereft of the natural resources to industrialize with. Coal was only made once. Maybe if abiotic theory of petroleum is true, you get that back over immense timescales, but you don't get a second shot at coal. Without coal, you can't even do metallurgy at scale. Is there some gotcha that I'm missing?
      - px43 3y ago
        Maybe that is what happened, and we somehow managed to make due without energon deposits and vibranium.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - Retric 3y ago
        Coal was only made once because the earth basically ran out of carbon to turn into coal. There’s 1,100,000 million tons of economically viable coal and we’re running into environmental issues by burning ~1/1,000th of it. Most projections suggest coal use is going to plummet over the next 50 years, both because we have better options and because we have little choice. There’s enough coal in the ground to make earths atmosphere actively lethal to humanity. At ~70,000 ppm people are rendered unconscious in minutes and there’s enough coal go well over 100,000 ppm. There’s no way for humanity to use up the worlds coal as fuel, perhaps we could ship it into space as carbon source but that seems unlikely.
        NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
        > Most projections suggest coal use is going to plummet over the next 50 years, both because we have better options and because we have little choice. Sure. Already industrialized civilizations have better options. But if you're starting from scratch, you don't get to jump immediately to photovoltaics or whatever. > and we’re running into environmental issues by burning ~1/1,000th of it. But which 1/1000th? We didn't dig out the deepest coal first. "Economically viable coal" by 21st century standards isn't the same "economically viable coal" by the standards at the dawn of the industrial revolution.
  - xwdv 3y ago
    Before social media I thought yes this was something we should do. But now after being exposed to the true collective nature of mankind, it doesn’t matter. This species is a net negative for the universe. Just a bunch of monkeys squabbling over stupid things.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
      > This species is a net negative for the universe. We're not important enough to be net negative, nor have we been around long enough. I am still hopeful that 10 million years from now, we'll have rampaged across the supercluster, spreading despair and wickedness in our wake. Then, and only then, will we have achieved net negativity. Do your part, help us become that.
    - goatlover 3y ago
      The universe doesn't care one way or another. There's no such thing as a net negative for the universe itself. It's amoral and has no values.
  - CaptArmchair 3y ago
    > Only if you want the species to survive Paradoxically, "survival" assumes adapting to ever-changing circumstances, which means that homo sapiens, given enough time, is bound to evolve into one or multiple new species given enough time. Regardless of that happening elsewhere or on Earth. Arguably, a species is just a mode of survival for a genome; a convenient vessel through time as the genome reproduces. The language we use is, ultimately, a social construct, but biological speaking by and large inconsequential in so far that language is a trait that fosters survival. Evolution isn't opinionated, it just 'is'. The fate of the Neanderthal people feels apt here. While the species is extinct, our Sapiens genome still caries 1-4% of Neanderthal genes to date. Some of that influences traits in modern humans, some of that just doesn't. (Evolution is messy, in that regard) Now, maybe Neanderthals wondered - just like us today - what would become of them aeons in the future. Little did they know that we, Sapiens, are distant relatives to them. In the same vain, our written record and collective memories spanning no longer then a few millennia, distant relatives in the far future may look back at our detritus in the soil and in their genes and maybe wonder the exact same thing. Maybe the Great Filter isn't some civilization destroying event. Maybe it's just evolution. Maybe become a space-faring species might be the biggest mistake we could make. I think more then a few sci-fi authors coined the notion of the arrival of malevolent alien species in a distant future which turned out to be our distant relatives from space-faring humans who left Earth eons ago. Of course, that's just speculation. But there's some poetic food for thought there, it's a probability one can't readily exclude.
    - stOneskull 3y ago
      circle symmetry like petals round a flower a galaxy's earths
    - samus 3y ago
      There's plenty that could have gone wrong in the last century that could have led to humanity's extinction. The next challenge is how to deal with exceeding the capacity of the planet to sustain our civilization. You're definitely on to something with your last paragraph.
  - Jibbedeyeah 3y ago
    [dead]
  - Andrex 3y ago
    > It does make you wonder whether life as we know it was a preceding civilization that launched life into the wider universe for the continued existence of life. There's data out there about the First Ancestral Race but AFAIK they've never released the unredacted version of the Secret Dead Sea Scrolls, so it's hard for the public to say.
  - networkchad 3y ago
    [dead]
- shakna 3y ago
  We're certainly setting a record at destroying this planet.
  - Loughla 3y ago
    We're certainly setting a record at destroying ourselves. It's seems like a pedantic distinction, but it's important. Earth doesn't care if we're here or not. The universe doesn't care if we're here or not. We are the only ones who should care, and we seem not to. The planet will be fine, eventually, after we die out. Life will continue after we're long gone. But we'll be long gone, and it's like we've all decided that's okay.
    - SamPatt 3y ago
      Destroying ourselves, as measured by population, which is the highest in the history of our species? Or measured by longevity, or leisure time, or other living standards, all of which are drastically higher than they were only a few generations ago?
      - krisoft 3y ago
        Those are all true! And they are important to remember. It is also important to remember that if you are driving a car to a brick wall, almost every metric will be perfect right until you hit it.
        SamPatt 3y ago
        It's also important to remember that history is full of people claiming we're about to run into a brick wall (Malthus, Erlich and company), yet things just keep getting better. Perhaps humans are better drivers than you think?
        samus 3y ago
        Malthus was essentially correct, but wrong about the when and how. Industrializing societies can play whack-a-mole with constraints that limit their population growth, successfully so far. What saved us was the surprising phenomenon that those societies tend to have quite low birthrates. Multiple possible reasons for that: * high cost of living and raising children,* * availability of birth control, * waning social pressure of getting many children, * no immediate economic benefits of raising children (in agrarian societies, they are essentially free labor on the farm, and a huge young population makes it easier to bootstrap an industrial economy). Of course, eventually there will be a problem when a huge percentage of the population is too old to work. We will be fine as long as we can sustain agriculture: * oil must be a-plenty to run farming equipment. It will be a long time before electricity has taken over * we need farmland with intact soil and water * we need fertilizer (phosphorus is running low soon, and oil is required as well) * we need pollinators for many crops. Hand-pollinating is expensive * We must not run out of pesticides to maintain yields And probably some more requirements. If any of them is not fulfilled, society collapses and things can get ugly quickly. These things partly contribute to recent wars in Africa, the Middle East, and other places. Edit: *: low child mortality makes it necessary to actually support most children all the way to adulthood
- short_sells_poo 3y ago
  I agree with you and I'm saddened by the nihilist (and defeatist!) outlook that many people seem to have here. I'm fundamentally a humanist. I want humanity to survive and thrive. I never understood the defeatism. It seems to arise from having the intellect to recognize that humans can (and do) have impact on their environment, and in the same breath resign on that impact being only negative and thus declaring that humans as a species should go extinct. But there's so much good in this world that people do, isn't that worth saving? We know our capabilities are only limited by our own imagination, so why not strive for a grander human civilization that can span at least the solar system, if not the galaxy? We can try, and we may still fail. Nothing is certain, except the way to ensure our demise by accepting that our fate is to go extinct and do nothing about it.
  - lazide 3y ago
    Eh, frankly it’s giving too much rational basis to emotional states IMO. People posting on web forums, especially engineers, like to poke holes in things and aren’t big into expansion and exploration at the moment. Probably a bit depressed from sitting in front of their computers all day too. Ask someone who just spent a month on the pacific coast trail, or who is about to go to Antarctica the question, and you’ll get a different set of answers.
    - oceanplexian 3y ago
      I think it's more than the web but the way media is being curated. I'm one of those people who's really optimistic about society. However being a positive person is actually a lot of work. I basically have to tune out all modern movies, television, news. Every new TV show is about some dystopia or the end of the world or a Zombie apocalypse or whatever. I watch mostly old TV shows from the 50s and 60s and read science fiction. In rare cases I'll watch a new show that's actually positive. You have to be careful though, even long-running franchises can quickly turn toxic when Hollywood gets a hold of it; Star Trek was headed that way until Strange New Worlds came out.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    > I never understood the defeatism. It seems to arise from having the intellect to recognize that humans can It actually correlates really well with the advent of teaching young children to be guilty about the civilization which gave birth to them. Maybe we shouldn't be slamming first graders with the ideas that everyone who came before them were supervillains and that they must shoulder the burden of correcting long dead injustices. In any event, doesn't much matter. Every week there's a new article about how one nation or another has below-replacement fertility that doesn't seem to have any real prospect for reversing (tied to, more than anything else I think, what was described above). We are probably already a dying species, or at least heading into a post-civilization phase, and just don't know it yet.
- jklinger410 3y ago
  > and the need to spread our bets by exploring the universe. I would like for us to get our house in order before we start this process.
  - prox 3y ago
    I feel this is a why-not-both thing. We should fix our house and explore. We have enough people and capability to do both if we are politically and mentally willing.
    - bradgessler 3y ago
      Yeah. If anything, not having our house in order is even more motivation to create offsite backups.
  - d12345m 3y ago
    Which problems do we need to solve before you would deem our species worthy of survival?
  - mulmen 3y ago
    This is such a tired and simplistic take. The space program has been helpful in tidying our home. It’s not an either or choice.
    - JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
      That is a lie that is conveniently told to preserve the legacy of the Apollo program and the morale of the Nation, as well as the legacy of one of the most beloved figures in the history of the Nation: JFK , who by the way, when you start to dig deeper emerges to be just a younger Trump.
      - mulmen 3y ago
        We literally have satellites in space that monitor the atmosphere and detect greenhouse gas emissions.
- localplume 3y ago
  [dead]
jacquesm 3y ago
You can expect one of the really big (Chicxulub-size) impact every 100 million years or so (there is enough uncertainty here that experts all have their own ideas on the exact frequency but typically 25 to 500 million years seems to be the agreed upon range. We keep finding new craters though and then have to increase the estimate). https://www.thespacereview.com/article/761/1 https://www.thespacereview.com/article/761/1 https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/how-often-do-chicxulub-level-asteroids-hit-earth/ https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/how-often-do-chic... And endless papers on the subject. TEOTWAKI is a fun rabbit hole to dive in to.
- someplaceguy 3y ago
  > You can expect one of the really big (Chicxulub-size) impact every 100 million years or so Still, the Chicxulub asteroid is estimated to have caused a global cooling of the surface by around a decade, not 1,400,000 years.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Sure, ask the dinosaurs how that went. The point is: that was only a decade and only a relatively small asteroid and the effect was that the dominant species of the time was wiped out. Size is inversely correlated with frequency, so those smaller ones happen far more frequent. Anything larger than that and it is definitely game over.

I think it goes to show just how short of a blink of the cosmic eye, that humanity has really existed for and the need to spread our bets by exploring the universe.

dsign 3y ago
[flagged]
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Only if you want the species to survive, if you're more nihilistic like me, it just doesn't seem to matter. Or if you're optimistic, WE don't matter because there's loads of other life and societies out there. It does make you wonder whether life as we know it was a preceding civilization that launched life into the wider universe for the continued existence of life. But on tectonic timescales, any traces that e.g. a carrying vessel would have left behind are long gone.
- _joel 3y ago
  Probably one of the best episodes of Trek imho - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708803/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708803/
  - gloria_mundi 3y ago
    Another related Trek episode - the one I expected you to link: VOY's "Distant Origin" - https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_Origin https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_Origin
- VHRanger 3y ago
  That's a question in geology and archaeology called the Silurian Hypothesis: Could we even detect a millions-of-years old civilization in the geological record? 1. https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748 https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    An Earth-originating civilization would have left our species bereft of the natural resources to industrialize with. Coal was only made once. Maybe if abiotic theory of petroleum is true, you get that back over immense timescales, but you don't get a second shot at coal. Without coal, you can't even do metallurgy at scale. Is there some gotcha that I'm missing?
    - px43 3y ago
      Maybe that is what happened, and we somehow managed to make due without energon deposits and vibranium.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - Retric 3y ago
      Coal was only made once because the earth basically ran out of carbon to turn into coal. There’s 1,100,000 million tons of economically viable coal and we’re running into environmental issues by burning ~1/1,000th of it. Most projections suggest coal use is going to plummet over the next 50 years, both because we have better options and because we have little choice. There’s enough coal in the ground to make earths atmosphere actively lethal to humanity. At ~70,000 ppm people are rendered unconscious in minutes and there’s enough coal go well over 100,000 ppm. There’s no way for humanity to use up the worlds coal as fuel, perhaps we could ship it into space as carbon source but that seems unlikely.
      - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
        > Most projections suggest coal use is going to plummet over the next 50 years, both because we have better options and because we have little choice. Sure. Already industrialized civilizations have better options. But if you're starting from scratch, you don't get to jump immediately to photovoltaics or whatever. > and we’re running into environmental issues by burning ~1/1,000th of it. But which 1/1000th? We didn't dig out the deepest coal first. "Economically viable coal" by 21st century standards isn't the same "economically viable coal" by the standards at the dawn of the industrial revolution.
- xwdv 3y ago
  Before social media I thought yes this was something we should do. But now after being exposed to the true collective nature of mankind, it doesn’t matter. This species is a net negative for the universe. Just a bunch of monkeys squabbling over stupid things.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    > This species is a net negative for the universe. We're not important enough to be net negative, nor have we been around long enough. I am still hopeful that 10 million years from now, we'll have rampaged across the supercluster, spreading despair and wickedness in our wake. Then, and only then, will we have achieved net negativity. Do your part, help us become that.
  - goatlover 3y ago
    The universe doesn't care one way or another. There's no such thing as a net negative for the universe itself. It's amoral and has no values.
- CaptArmchair 3y ago
  > Only if you want the species to survive Paradoxically, "survival" assumes adapting to ever-changing circumstances, which means that homo sapiens, given enough time, is bound to evolve into one or multiple new species given enough time. Regardless of that happening elsewhere or on Earth. Arguably, a species is just a mode of survival for a genome; a convenient vessel through time as the genome reproduces. The language we use is, ultimately, a social construct, but biological speaking by and large inconsequential in so far that language is a trait that fosters survival. Evolution isn't opinionated, it just 'is'. The fate of the Neanderthal people feels apt here. While the species is extinct, our Sapiens genome still caries 1-4% of Neanderthal genes to date. Some of that influences traits in modern humans, some of that just doesn't. (Evolution is messy, in that regard) Now, maybe Neanderthals wondered - just like us today - what would become of them aeons in the future. Little did they know that we, Sapiens, are distant relatives to them. In the same vain, our written record and collective memories spanning no longer then a few millennia, distant relatives in the far future may look back at our detritus in the soil and in their genes and maybe wonder the exact same thing. Maybe the Great Filter isn't some civilization destroying event. Maybe it's just evolution. Maybe become a space-faring species might be the biggest mistake we could make. I think more then a few sci-fi authors coined the notion of the arrival of malevolent alien species in a distant future which turned out to be our distant relatives from space-faring humans who left Earth eons ago. Of course, that's just speculation. But there's some poetic food for thought there, it's a probability one can't readily exclude.
  - stOneskull 3y ago
    circle symmetry like petals round a flower a galaxy's earths
  - samus 3y ago
    There's plenty that could have gone wrong in the last century that could have led to humanity's extinction. The next challenge is how to deal with exceeding the capacity of the planet to sustain our civilization. You're definitely on to something with your last paragraph.
- Jibbedeyeah 3y ago
  [dead]
- Andrex 3y ago
  > It does make you wonder whether life as we know it was a preceding civilization that launched life into the wider universe for the continued existence of life. There's data out there about the First Ancestral Race but AFAIK they've never released the unredacted version of the Secret Dead Sea Scrolls, so it's hard for the public to say.
- networkchad 3y ago
  [dead]
shakna 3y ago
We're certainly setting a record at destroying this planet.
- Loughla 3y ago
  We're certainly setting a record at destroying ourselves. It's seems like a pedantic distinction, but it's important. Earth doesn't care if we're here or not. The universe doesn't care if we're here or not. We are the only ones who should care, and we seem not to. The planet will be fine, eventually, after we die out. Life will continue after we're long gone. But we'll be long gone, and it's like we've all decided that's okay.
  - SamPatt 3y ago
    Destroying ourselves, as measured by population, which is the highest in the history of our species? Or measured by longevity, or leisure time, or other living standards, all of which are drastically higher than they were only a few generations ago?
    - krisoft 3y ago
      Those are all true! And they are important to remember. It is also important to remember that if you are driving a car to a brick wall, almost every metric will be perfect right until you hit it.
      - SamPatt 3y ago
        It's also important to remember that history is full of people claiming we're about to run into a brick wall (Malthus, Erlich and company), yet things just keep getting better. Perhaps humans are better drivers than you think?
        samus 3y ago
        Malthus was essentially correct, but wrong about the when and how. Industrializing societies can play whack-a-mole with constraints that limit their population growth, successfully so far. What saved us was the surprising phenomenon that those societies tend to have quite low birthrates. Multiple possible reasons for that: * high cost of living and raising children,* * availability of birth control, * waning social pressure of getting many children, * no immediate economic benefits of raising children (in agrarian societies, they are essentially free labor on the farm, and a huge young population makes it easier to bootstrap an industrial economy). Of course, eventually there will be a problem when a huge percentage of the population is too old to work. We will be fine as long as we can sustain agriculture: * oil must be a-plenty to run farming equipment. It will be a long time before electricity has taken over * we need farmland with intact soil and water * we need fertilizer (phosphorus is running low soon, and oil is required as well) * we need pollinators for many crops. Hand-pollinating is expensive * We must not run out of pesticides to maintain yields And probably some more requirements. If any of them is not fulfilled, society collapses and things can get ugly quickly. These things partly contribute to recent wars in Africa, the Middle East, and other places. Edit: *: low child mortality makes it necessary to actually support most children all the way to adulthood
short_sells_poo 3y ago
I agree with you and I'm saddened by the nihilist (and defeatist!) outlook that many people seem to have here. I'm fundamentally a humanist. I want humanity to survive and thrive. I never understood the defeatism. It seems to arise from having the intellect to recognize that humans can (and do) have impact on their environment, and in the same breath resign on that impact being only negative and thus declaring that humans as a species should go extinct. But there's so much good in this world that people do, isn't that worth saving? We know our capabilities are only limited by our own imagination, so why not strive for a grander human civilization that can span at least the solar system, if not the galaxy? We can try, and we may still fail. Nothing is certain, except the way to ensure our demise by accepting that our fate is to go extinct and do nothing about it.
- lazide 3y ago
  Eh, frankly it’s giving too much rational basis to emotional states IMO. People posting on web forums, especially engineers, like to poke holes in things and aren’t big into expansion and exploration at the moment. Probably a bit depressed from sitting in front of their computers all day too. Ask someone who just spent a month on the pacific coast trail, or who is about to go to Antarctica the question, and you’ll get a different set of answers.
  - oceanplexian 3y ago
    I think it's more than the web but the way media is being curated. I'm one of those people who's really optimistic about society. However being a positive person is actually a lot of work. I basically have to tune out all modern movies, television, news. Every new TV show is about some dystopia or the end of the world or a Zombie apocalypse or whatever. I watch mostly old TV shows from the 50s and 60s and read science fiction. In rare cases I'll watch a new show that's actually positive. You have to be careful though, even long-running franchises can quickly turn toxic when Hollywood gets a hold of it; Star Trek was headed that way until Strange New Worlds came out.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  > I never understood the defeatism. It seems to arise from having the intellect to recognize that humans can It actually correlates really well with the advent of teaching young children to be guilty about the civilization which gave birth to them. Maybe we shouldn't be slamming first graders with the ideas that everyone who came before them were supervillains and that they must shoulder the burden of correcting long dead injustices. In any event, doesn't much matter. Every week there's a new article about how one nation or another has below-replacement fertility that doesn't seem to have any real prospect for reversing (tied to, more than anything else I think, what was described above). We are probably already a dying species, or at least heading into a post-civilization phase, and just don't know it yet.
jklinger410 3y ago
> and the need to spread our bets by exploring the universe. I would like for us to get our house in order before we start this process.
- prox 3y ago
  I feel this is a why-not-both thing. We should fix our house and explore. We have enough people and capability to do both if we are politically and mentally willing.
  - bradgessler 3y ago
    Yeah. If anything, not having our house in order is even more motivation to create offsite backups.
- d12345m 3y ago
  Which problems do we need to solve before you would deem our species worthy of survival?
- mulmen 3y ago
  This is such a tired and simplistic take. The space program has been helpful in tidying our home. It’s not an either or choice.
  - JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
    That is a lie that is conveniently told to preserve the legacy of the Apollo program and the morale of the Nation, as well as the legacy of one of the most beloved figures in the history of the Nation: JFK , who by the way, when you start to dig deeper emerges to be just a younger Trump.
    - mulmen 3y ago
      We literally have satellites in space that monitor the atmosphere and detect greenhouse gas emissions.
localplume 3y ago
[dead]

jacquesm 3y ago

You can expect one of the really big (Chicxulub-size) impact every 100 million years or so (there is enough uncertainty here that experts all have their own ideas on the exact frequency but typically 25 to 500 million years seems to be the agreed upon range. We keep finding new craters though and then have to increase the estimate). https://www.thespacereview.com/article/761/1 https://www.thespacereview.com/article/761/1 https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/how-often-do-chicxulub-level-asteroids-hit-earth/ https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/how-often-do-chic... And endless papers on the subject. TEOTWAKI is a fun rabbit hole to dive in to.

someplaceguy 3y ago
> You can expect one of the really big (Chicxulub-size) impact every 100 million years or so Still, the Chicxulub asteroid is estimated to have caused a global cooling of the surface by around a decade, not 1,400,000 years.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Sure, ask the dinosaurs how that went. The point is: that was only a decade and only a relatively small asteroid and the effect was that the dominant species of the time was wiped out. Size is inversely correlated with frequency, so those smaller ones happen far more frequent. Anything larger than that and it is definitely game over.