:rolleyes:
Here’s a couple of theories:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~mke/exitmundi.htm
Even more crackpot ones like Revelations.
Enjoy
Some facts…
Within reason, it’s generally accepted that for every extra billion people who live on the planet, that another 10,000 species of fauna become extinct.
In just 200 years of European settlement in Australia, at least 3,000 species have died off.
In 1940 the worlds population was 2.9 billion people.
In 2000 the worlds population had jumped to 6.1 billion people.
Only 2.5% of the worlds water supply is fresh water. Of that, 2/3rds is frozen in alpine regions and the North and South poles. Of the remaining, non frozen fresh water in the world, 60% is polluted.
Already, fishing stocks off France and the North Sea are showing desperate depletion levels. Every species from sharks to tuna to herring have dropped like stones in just 20 years.
And yet, we humans value just one human life above everything else. It’s built into our DNA. Our population growth continues to explode.
Do the math. It’s a barren planet we’re creating.
There are certain folks who propose that the final extrapolation of this trend will result in just two remaining life forms… just human beings on land… no birds, or bears, or anything else. And just plankton in the oceans. No fish or tuna or dolphins.
Just ponder something for a moment… go back to that population growth between 1940 and 2000. Somebody, anybody, please try and convince me that for the world’s population to double in just 60 years is a good thing.
Now THAT’S depressing! Soylent Green, baby!
Long before any Big Crunch, mankind as we know it will cease to exist. Either we will destroy ourselves, or someone else will destroy us, or we will have evolved into something else.
If we evolve into something quite different, we’ll still be organic beings facing doom!
The world is going to end someday. Whether or not we strip it clean before then is a matter of opinion. The earth has undergone mass extinctions before.
We could start on the Gaia hypothesis here, but nah.
Anyway. Unless we get off this rock, life as we know it will end. Maybe we are supposed to evolve enough to get off this rock, or at least send microbes or some life off to another planet to at least hope evolution will bring forth another form of life that will do the same when that new world ends.
I can imagine a world in which the only animals are domestic pets and food animals, such as cows. No matter what, I don’t think we’d ever let them go extinct, even if the cattle had to live confined to a barn eating only soy-product foods instead of grass and grain. . I think its pretty safe to say that any other non-directly-beneficial species will eventually exist only on small preserves, or in zoos.
We’re not yet to the point where the soil is too contaminated for farming, so I’d imagine that barring any genetically-engineered accidents, we’ll have crops. The rest of the world, not endowed with our wealth, may starve, because their technology won’t be able to keep up with the climate changes. However, I do have faith that the United States will still be able to grow food, even if it’s more expensive and bio-chemically engineered.
Fish can be farmed, but probably will rise in price after all of the ocean’s stocks have been depleted. Perhaps with a hundred or so years of recovery, the oceans can become bountiful and thriving once more. I have to believe this, because the thought of vast, blue emptiness is too sad to comtemplate.
I agree Lissa. It’s so sad that I often try to forget those facts I listed above just so that I don’t go through life in a constant state of despair. It can get you down if you’re not careful.
Only 650 Mountain Gorillas left apparently.
Lissa, where will the “food animals” live?
Like I said before, Soylent Green Baby!
You’re going to die. Get over it.
Only 650 Mountain Gorillas left apparently
At the zoo when I look through the thick glass and beyond the dry moat at a proud silverback gorilla who stares back with intense dawn-man eyes that ask, “What the hell are you, and what the hell am I doing in this place?”, I cry inside.
At that moment I am ashamed of the entire human race. This is not an educational exibit, this is, instead, incarceration.
Yesterday I learned that while checking out almost twenty thousand acres left by the closing of Fort McClellan in Anniston, Alabama, nine thousand acres that the army was using for an artillery range was discovered to be a virgin forest of longleaf white pine. This was the way much of the south looked before the coming of the white man.
The joy I felt at reading this was akin to that when I became a first time grandfather.
But…
I would shoot the last ape and cut down every tree on earth and build a giant oxygen making machine if it would further the perpetuation of we menkind.
At this stage of our knowing, we are the only lifeform that gives hope to the idea that one day the universe might understand itself.
You will never die, get ready for it. Stop whimpering and start helping others. Go beyond the ego into the wisdom of humility and learn.
I get the feeling that humanity is doomed long before Sol pitching a bitch or the the universe collapsing on itself. I think we’ll either go about doing ourselves in one way or another, or some celestial piece of rock will do the job for us.
I mean … as for supernova or Big Crunch … the odds that we get shumushed by an asteroid alone before that is more probable.
Personally, my money is on nuke-yoo-lar winter.
Most of the Western World has shrinking human populations if you cut out immigration. Food animals will be raised where they have always been raised.
It’s countries like India and China that will have severe problems with space assuming diease or starvation doesn’t wipe bring the population back down.
Well you know, HPL, it just occurred to me that most of the world’s population is NOT the Western World - accordingly, your assertion is somewhat of a disingenuous one - and I offer that in a kind and respectful way.
Consider my milestone point earlier… between 1940 and 2000 the world’s population doubled from 2.9 billion people to 6.1 billion people. In the context of the Earth in totality being in danger, it matters not where those people live… what counts is that on a global scale they exist… and their presence cannot be denied. It’s in the interests of the planet for those in the Western World to somehow fashion the Thrid World into a Western World as quickly as possible. It might not be in the interests of certain cultural groups who want to keep their current way of life, but certainly, it’s in the interests of the planet as a whole.
Further, when you consider modern humanoids have been around for tops, 140,000 years, then when you consider that the worlds population in 1300 AD is calculated to have been only 250 million people, perhaps you can begin to appreciate the stratospheric growth rate we’ve unleashed in the last 150 years in particular.
Human beings, by and large, are horribly destructive messy creatures. We create waste and pollution almost everywhere we go. It’s simply in our nature to put US FIRST at the expense of everything else… and as David Suzuki pointed out, the problem for the forests, and the oceans, and the fauna of this world is that THEY don’t get to vote.
Human population growth cannot be contained into nice little subjugated regions. It has a spillover quality which innately is exacerbated by our love of building transport devices.
Hence, to point out the Western World (in the abscence of immigration) is undergoing a negative birth rate is quite disingenuous because the desire of people in the worlds most crowded regions to move to places far less crowded will always be present. This is why the entire Global Population is such an important figure. It affects us all. No one is free from the problems it brings.
Also, the world is more crowded today than it has ever been. Which is why it so incredibly offends me that the inherent flaw within the human psyche known as tribalism is allowed to flourish the way it does in places like the Balkans, or the Middle East, or Ireland, or Rwanda or Liberia etc etc etc. Those guys are propagating bitterness and acrimony which sometimes goes back centurys - and they insist on bringing it into the modern era.
When you ponder such selfishness in the context that all of us are more crowded than ever before, tribalism is singularly our greatest inbuilt threat it seems to me. It unleashes the innate ugliness and violence which exists within our souls.
Accordingly, it’s my considered opinion that Mother Nature has conveniently prewired us with a predetermined kill switch. I don’t quite know what the trigger wire will be… perhaps the kill switch might be a killer global pandemic, or perhaps it might be our incredible tribalism problems will cause mass genocide, but the evidence is overwhelming (to me) that we’re destined to wipe ourselves out at some point. And yet, the amazing instinct within all of us to sire offspring remains.
My only sadness is that we’ll probably take so many millions of years of evolution with us along the way.
Addendum to my last post…
We can look at the world any way we wish, if we can only see hopelessness and doom then we are staring at our own navel.
So go find someone elses navel in which to stare.
Awake! Poor flagellants, your predictions of impending doom reveal more about your deep psychological needs than any well attuned understanding of reality.
Go now with peace in our time .
Look on the bright side, I’m sure we’re only a couple years away from delicious Soylent Green. Remember, Tuesday is Soylent Green Day!
Some say the world will end in fire, some in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with those that favor fire. But if I had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction, ice is also great and would suffice
Robert Frost
Entropy.
Is there any species on earth that doesn’t put itself first?
A quaint, but silly, concept with no basis in reality. If it eases your guilt to believe this, then go ahead.
There is a book called “Time” by Stephen Baxter. Its a sci fi book that among other things explores the future of civilisation, showing how for untold billions and billions of years civilisations attempts to “beat” entropy.
They go though stages of creating new stars for energy, then surrounding these stars with material to absorb every last bit of energy. Eventually even the stars go out, and our descendents use black holes to generate energy, until most of the universes’ mass is inside black holes. Then they collide these black holes together to generate more energy, until there is only one supermassive black hole left. At that point, they have really run out of options, and don’t even have enough energy to think with.
Even if they somehow leave some record of their minds, this will be destroyed when the constituents of matter itself (protons, neutrons, and electrons) decay into quarks. The universe turns into a giant expanding sea of quarks, and entropy has in effect increased to its maximum value.