RE: Human Survival
July 26, 2013 at 5:36 am
(This post was last modified: July 26, 2013 at 5:39 am by Creed of Heresy.)
(July 25, 2013 at 12:26 pm)Severan Wrote: I've been thinking recently (oh no!) about our species, and our ultimate goal to survive. I was thinking about how in the past, primitive people just survived off the scraps they found, unaware what their survival would mean for the world. We became advanced and learned how to expand, and thrive. Now, we are faced with extinction again, not from animals, starvation, disease, but from cosmic disasters, such as asteroids, supernovae and our own destruction, nukes, war, etc. I was talking to my friends recently, and they said that humans will last about 2000 years more. 2000 puny years?!?! I think we deserve more than that! We need to be AT LEAST a two planet species. If one is destroyed, the other can come back. What do you think?
We need WAY more than merely two species. One of the theoretical insurances of planet-wide extinction is the sudden mass-destruction of the biosphere. Complexity, as we are all aware, leads to fragility; the more components are relied upon for full functionality, the more a critical failure can occur from damage or degradation to the parts. Hell, look at the bees for example; plants are HIGHLY reliant upon them for reproductive purposes. Remove bees from an ecological web, and all the agricultural aspects of the biosphere are suddenly at a drastically heightened risk for extinction due to lack of ability to procreate. Wipe out a half of the existing biosphere and biological catastrophe WILL follow. Yes, the species will adapt, more will evolve to fill the niches, but the biosphere we rely upon will be altered to an extent that it's possible it could cause our own destruction, or at the very least cause extreme problems for our species in regards to economy, agriculture, and society/culture.
(July 25, 2013 at 4:00 pm)Gilgamesh Wrote:(July 25, 2013 at 3:45 pm)Chuck Wrote: A billion christians didn't stop us from learning the universe predated god by 13.7 billion years.It did - for a quite while.
Quite a while, but yes: This ^
A millenium of scientific repression. Who knows what point we could be at today if religion had not persistently fucked our intellectual progress over at every conceivable turn. Fuck, for all we know we could've cured death itself by this point.
(July 25, 2013 at 4:22 pm)Rahul Wrote:(July 25, 2013 at 4:00 pm)Gilgamesh Wrote: It did - for a quite while.
In geological terms it was a blink of an eye.
But in terms of human intellect and society, it might as well have been the approximation of a nigh-eternity.
