Disappointment about our own species

That's plummeting fast.

I'm thankful for the possibilitities offered by organic solar cells, however.

Imagine colonial times but with solar power and whatever other technologies we could support without oil. I don't know about you but I could live with that.

 

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Right, but who decides who is to procreate to make up for "accidental losses", a privileged class of "breeders"?

According to theism we are the children of god, why so many? Oh wait, the "only begotten son of god" was Jesus. The rest of us were created just to worship him?

There are only two states of life. Immortality or Procreation. There is no such thing as immortality of a steady state of life.

There is just one organism which displays a form of immortality and that is a very simple jellyfish,

But note the mechanism by which it achieves its immortality. Is it possible for humans to revert back to an embryonic state? Or should we start cloning our best and brightest?

I can see an inherent conflict between natural selection and immortality.

Thus in the absence of immortality, the alternative is procreation. Natural selection will decide which is most suited for procreation. And we may become just another failed mutation.

 

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I brought attention the number of days to the end of oil. This estimate is an upgrade from previous shorter estimates, with the advent of fracking which allows us to squeeze the last drop of oil from the earth. But already we see the "unintended" adverse effects of this technology.

I can foresee the extinction of the simple earthworm, which has been tasked by nature to replenish the soil for edible plants.
The honey bee is already disappearing from many areas which produce flowering plants. In China, they already use humans to "dust" each individual flower on fruit trees. It takes them weeks to cover an area which a single beehive could pollinate in one day. It is estimated that when the honeybee becomes extinct, most life on earth would have but a few years before mass extinction from starvation becomes apparent.

Immortality? Maybe (if you are a theist), but only after we are dead, and I expect we all would end up in Hell, for eternity.

If I were to assign moral behavior to living things, mankind would be at the lowest rung, if not wholly immoral, in our arrogant and wasteful use of the earth's abundance.

 

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I find it ironic that while here we are advocating for population control, the Republicans are proposing the total elimination of "planned parenthood". Go figure.

 

You really think we are going to be able to drive the earthworms in Himalayan valleys to extinction?

1) Bees other than honeybees pollinate flowering plants.
2) Insects other than bees pollinate flowering plants.
3) Many plants don't need any assistance (other than wind) to pollinate. Corn, for example.

 

Talk about intellectual dishonesty and self serving sociopathy. They want to eliminate our democratic form of governance. They want to belong to an oligarch brotherhood. These people aren't republicans they're seditionists.

 

I admit that was a sweeping statement and not entirely accurate. I was thinking of the earthworms in the general areas (mostly farmlands) in the US, where the aquifers ( subterranean water supply) are being polluted with deadly toxins used in the fracking process. Even if we import earthworms from the Himalayan valleys, they would not last long in polluted soil. But I admit the idea of earthworm depletion is my own and not supported by scientific fact (as far as I know). If no one has already researched this, perhaps we should.

True, but then we do not commercially use those other insects and don't keep track of their health either. Perhaps all pollinating insects are affected by our pesticides and other pollutants.

A small aside, bee venom is an effective cancer killer. All we need is a targeted delivery vehicle (nano technology).

Also consider, if the totality of pollinating insects was sufficient to insure pollination, why are commercial growers importing honey bees? I recently saw a tv program about bee breeders, who are going out of business, because currently some 75% of their carefully cultured hives are failing from viruses spread by mites. The mites are not so much of a problem, but apparently they carry a specific virus to which bees are no longer immune. This could be a natural phenomena, but considering that bees have been around for a long long time, it seems more than coincidence that, since the introduction of pesticides which are designed to kill or impair insects, bees are dying.

As Carlin observed, we build homes at the foot of an active volcano and then wonder why we have lava in the living room!

Also true, but consider that whereas corn does not require insect pollination it is a water guzzler;

and more worrysome,

Or almonds, which require 1 gallon of water to produce 1 almond.

OTOH, the growing of Hemp, the ideal commercial crop plant, is outlawed in the US.

Oh, and it requires very little water and is a natural CO2 scrubber. What can I say?

 

In the interest of science I feel compelled to add this information for clarity. Note, I have no agenda or ax to grind in agriculture., but this should be of interest to all commercial crop growers or bioresearchers.

And hopefully to concerned people in general, such as myself. I was astounded by the versatility of LOW THC Hemp and its high commercial value due to its versatility of uses and ease of growing.

ENVIRONMENTAL BENEFITS OF HEMP

http://eap.mcgill.ca/CPH_3.htm

Save the forests, plant the hemp!

p.s. Both BMW and Mercedes use hemp moldings in their cars' interiors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemp#Building_material

 

Absent immigration into this country, we are already at negative population growth, and have been for decades.

 

I agree with you there that extinction or near-extinction of honeybees would make our lives a lot harder.

Because it's easy; we've gotten very good at beekeeping, and it helps improve yields on flowering crops.

Those really don't worry me as much as alfalfa, which takes even more water, and which we grow by the ton to feed cattle. Eating less meat overall would do far more to preserve water than eating fewer almonds (although that would help too.)

Beans would be even better. Also low water, also a CO2 scrubber, you can eat them - AND they return nitrogen to the soil.

 

It is really quite easy to be disappointed in something that has no known comparison. To the other, we are the human species. Show me another that can do what we can, and you're probably looking at some sort of fantasy.

In other words, we don't really need to be disappointed in the species itself at least until, you know, the Zetas arrive in their Lazar sport model and we all get to envy the ground kit.

It's also true, though, I am a bit disappointed in how we regard our human experience. We're sort of stuck on this seemingly revolutionary idea of treating everything in our experience as some manner of marketplace. It's not quite what Tevna meant when he reminded that suffering turns attention inward, but the more we mix with this market dynamic, the less interested we seem in the rest of the Universe. To a certain degree, the point still seems applicable.

We can still wreck ourselves with this dumbassed market notion, but generally speaking, we're doing alright.

Watch the dolphins. When the dolphins turn against us, we'll know we've lost.

 

A coal-based economy? I fear that would be even worse for the environment.

 

I meant to include all fossil fuel technologies along with oil.

 

Amazing link:
Of those deaths listed:
It would seem that abortion is the leading cause of death

 

Yes, and for wildlife as well.

Not anymore. Beekeepers are going out of business. Moreover, it seems that wild pollinators are now becoming infected also.

Thanks for that info on Alfalfa. I wasn't aware that it was a water guzzler. We grew Alfalfa for our horses (No.Idaho) and never used sprinklers, but still managed 2 good harvests each season. But I do remember big growers using sprinklers in order to produce 3 good crops p/yr.

We are on the same page.
The link I provided did suggest that hemp (due to its short growing time) is ideally suited for crop rotation with beans.

Both are pest resistant and eco-friendly, but they fill different primary needs.

Beans (Legumes) have limited application other than as a nutritious food source, whereas hemp's commercial uses are almost unlimited, due to its long, strong fibers.

 

That is true, but regardless of the method, the US population is still growing.

But more importantly, IMO, is the fact that the world's population is still growing at a steady rate, and that is the determining factor in the exponential function. There is a limit, which must be addressed eventually.

 

As Prof. Bartlett observed there are two ways of controling population growth, a shorter lifespan or lower birthrate. Either one can be made by choice. If we do not practice one or the other, Nature itself will take population control out of our hands as it does with every invasive species which exhausts its food supply.

As the world's population is enjoying a longer lifespan (in general) and fundamentally humans will procreate, birth control (prevention or abortion) becomes a necessity, IMO.

Most abortions are caused from unintended pregnancy and the economic costs of raising an unplanned child. Thus our lower population growth in the US (a good thing) is in no small part due to abortions.

Bottom line, unless we can migrate to other habitable planets in large numbers, population growth will stop at some point from any number of causes, and except for prevention (the pill, hysterectomy, vasectomy), none of them desirable or satisfactory.

 

soylent green
grok?

 

Oh, don't say that. I just got a visual of Orio cookies.

Of course Nature has practiced recycling from the beginning, it just does it in a roundabout way.
It is part of our material immortality.

 

why i don't like cremation
i'd rather rot, decompose, and be reborn through the guts of bacteria and worms, ...(flies, i ain't so fond of)