What would be your vision of a better humanity?

True and it's possible we will only experience these localized disasters for a long time to come. But there are possible world wide disasters looming which we will not so easily recover from and anytime we all get reduced to worrying about where our next meal is going to come from we will be in big trouble from everybody around us that's trying to feed themselves and their families. We will effectively be back in the new dark ages with every local community protecting it's turf.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Killjoy

Maybe that is correct. Perhaps we should all support Dr. Stephen Hawking's idea that humanity needs, ASAP, to develop space travel, and get a representative population off planet Earth to provide a survival nucleus.

Of course, getting off Earth is one thing. Developing a self sustaining colony is much more difficult.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

The big question is are we going to have the time needed to do that? I very much want to believe we will, but I fear we won't and much of my pessimistic attitude comes from my impatience to be moving along at a faster pace. So I see an Earth with hundreds of separate governments all with their own agendas a real drag on faster progress.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Nor do I. Yet, the only political unit that is of any real consequence, that has any truth to it, or is of any relevance, is the family. One does not need to be "genetically" related to a child to be a parent. One can just as well adopt a child as one can produce one of their own. So, I guess it is my assumption there that is flawed, thank you.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

The point here being, we can not, nor should we, depend on governments, institutions, or systems, laws, or codifications to get us out of the bind that humanity is in now. It is what has got us in this mess in the first place. Our solution lay in the foundation of humanities communities, it's bedrock, the families. It isn't about "ego" it is about raising a child to the light. Only by "freeing" the next generation from bondage can we free humanity from the cycle of ignorance, waste, violence, boredom, consumption, and greed. As the situation stands now? We do the same thing, generation after generation, expecting different results. . . .

No, I believe we among the enlightened must invest our time, effort, knowledge and love in raising the next generation to the light.

 

To killjoy

Perhaps you can enlighten me on what disasters you are talking about.

It cannot be global warming, since that is eminently survivable, even if we lose some coastal cities. After all, in the Cretaceous, temperatures were 5 to 10C more than we have today, and the world was burgeoning with life.

An asteroid impact could do it, but the last one of that magnitude was 65 million years ago, and the odds against one soon are astronomically low.

So what....

 

Here is a highly unlikely but not impossible (IMHO) means to end all life on Earth via methane hydrates:
See: http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2494605&postcount=14 , but see posts 3 & 8 of that thread also

I think a much more likely cause of at least human extinction, is that the current (and the soon increased) human level of knowledge ("intelligence"?) has a "half life" of less than a few thousand years. I.e. in less than 500 years, I expect it will be possible for a small group, or even single deranged individual, to create an un-stoppable life form and release it (or have it escape accidentally) which is incompatible with the human life form.

The fatal life form does not need to attack humans directly. It could be a wind-born virus or prion* that infects plants, multiply many fold in each leaf as it destroy the process of photosynthesis.

* Pirons are responsible for mad cow disease (and others) and are more simple than virus - easier to construct as only a single molecule - probably a "garage project" for one in a few hundred years or less.

BTW, this is why I have never thought SETI had any significantly non-zero chance of finding / hearing from / "ET." Man like creatures are probably evolutions dead end - its greatest mistake.

 

Hmmm!

None of those would strike me as likely. Methane hydrate disaster would follow extended and very severe global warming. So far, the world has warmed only 0.8C on average. To get to methane hydrate disaster would require something massively greater, and that would require total mismanagement of future economies. Not likely, since we are already beginning measures to limit global warming.

The release of an inimical life form seems unlikely to be extinction level disaster. A virus or similar might wreak havoc, and kill a billion people, but humans are very capable, and will engage remedial action.

I sometimes wonder about electronic brains. I saw an estimate that the first electronic brain to exceed human brain complexity (and presumably ability) will be built by 2035. Some time after that, we can expect electronic or robotic intelligence to be orders of magnitude greater than our own. What if such a mega-brain decided the human species was overdue for demolition?

But all these are speculation. I tend to think that the past record of humanity will continue into the future. That is : using technology to solve problems.

 

You seem to be a most pragmatic individual, Skeptical. I rather agree that our species is capable of wrecking a lot of havoc without totally annihilating mankind and that we may become greatly reduced in numbers, yet save for a catastrophic event that stripped the planet of it's atmosphere or knocked the earth out of orbit, we are stubborn enough to cling to life against the odds.

It appears to be part of our genetic programming.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Skeptical: I think the following is very optimistic

I saw an estimate that the first electronic brain to exceed human brain complexity (and presumably ability) will be built by 2035.​

 

Yeah.

The hardest thing in this world is to make accurate predictions....especially about the future.

I guess that the prediction of 2035 was based on Moore's Law. Whether that law will continue to hold true over the next few decades remains to be seen. I do suspect, though, that the second half of this century will see much of the world run by electronic brains that are way, way smarter than even Einstein.

What will that do for our rate of scientific and technological progress?

I am consoled by the fact that I will not be here to experience it, or suffer the consequences.

 

I don't know how much of my prior posts about this "switch to Earth's hot stable state" (high pressure steam atmosphere at the surface) you read but your reply indicates you missed the main point, if you read them. So I quickly summarize it (for others also).

No we are NOT now limiting the process that could make the switch - we are not even slowing the currently increasing rate of releases of CO2. Slowly increasing concentration of CO2 in the air to even a factor of three times the current level is not a serious problem, will not make Earth sterile, as it has been at least that high in the past. It is the UN-PRECIDENTED and increasing RATE of CO2 release that could be a serious problem.

Methane, CH4, is about 15 times stronger IR absorber than CO2; however, CH4 is oxidized and destroyed in the air. (I forget half life, a few months now, I think. It depends upon many things. Currently the OH radical is used in the oxidation / destruction / process but the supply of that is produced very high up in the atmosphere by harsh UV splitting water and in the lower atmosphere OH can be exhausted. (For each CH4 molecule destroyed, an OH is destroyed too as it, with an H from CH4, becomes H2O.) If the CH4 concentration were to became equal to that CO2 has now, then the CH4 half life would become years, instead of months.

Current rate of global warming (due to current rate of CO2 release) and man’s activities (even trash dump and the huge cattle herds) that are releasing CH4 and with the CO2 are releasing now naturally stored CH4 from the hydrates and the CH4 simply dissolved in deep, previously-frozen lakes, especially those in Arctic plus the now melting permma frost, bogs, etc. so that the total CH4 release rate is already significantly greater than the destruction rate. Proof: CH4 atmospheric concentration is growing, percentage wise, more rapidly than CO2’s rate of increase.

I.e. we already have a positive feedback system, but the loop gain is currently less than unity. BUT the loop gain could become greater than unity if the atmospheric life time of CH4 were to increase as it would if the rate of OH being delivered down to the lower atmosphere were less than the rate of CH4 being released from the surface.

I.e. too rapid CH4 release flux can overwhelm the lower atmosphere's OH and make the atmospheric life time of CH4 become years, not months. Then with greater than unity feedback loop gain the temperature begins to rise on an exponential growth curve.

All exponential growths eventually saturate and stabilize. If this one is stabilized by exhausting the stored CH4 then that, rather than the tropical ocean surfaces starting to boil, could occur but most estimates say there is more carbon in CH4 stored than all the carbon stored in coal and oil. If the oceans start to boil, or even if the air temperature becomes too hot for water vapor to fall from the sky as rain, then the exponential temperature rise accelerates as the lower layer of the air become mainly water vapor. (Water vapor is a much better absorber of the IR trying to escape from Earth’s surface than even CH4 is).

SUMMARY: afaik, NO ONE CAN SAY WITH CERTAINTY THAT EARTH IS NOT ALREADY IN THE EARLY STAGES OF SWITCHING TO ITS HOT STABLE STATE. (This due to the un-precedented RATE of CO2 release, not due to the level of CO2) For other reasons, Venus switched from an Earth like state to its hot stable state some millions of years ago. I.e. any lead on the surface of Venus is liquid. If Earth switches, the oceans will eventually boil away into space and then, when the water vapor is gone and there is no more CH4 to release, the surface temperature will rapidly (a few thousand years) drop - perhaps down to only about 250F and then over many thousand of years may become even cooler than it is today (if it no longer has an atmosphere).

Please suggest what mankind could do if in 200 years some deranged but brilliant scientist makes a piron in his garage that is:

Wind born, enters leaves it falls on, and in the process of replicating its self 100 times inside EACH leaf, kills the leaf and plant (for example by interfering with the photosynthesis process). I think that all life would die in a few years, except possibly some ocean creatures if his piron cannot attack photo plankton. For example, if the piron only enters leaves via their stoma (where the CO2 enters) which AFAIK photo plankton do not have. Piron molecules, although only single molecules, may be too big to diffuse thru the cell wall as the CO2 does, I think, in photo plankton. Compared to making the DNA for living cell (already done) making a much smaller piron molecule is very easy. - Not yet a one man job in his garage, but wait 200 or less years and it will be.

Would mankind try to collect every leaf on Earth, food crops included, and burn it? Or try to stop the wind? Again: Please suggest what mankind could do.

Top get back on thread, If you want mankind to be able to survived for next million years, I suggest decreasing his intelligence to that of a turtle - they have made it about a million years, I think.

 

Billy

I understand your arguments. Just don't agree with them.

For example : your suggestion that the world may already have moved into a positive feedback system leading to a hot state. Unlikely. My reason for saying that, is that 120,000 years ago, during the previous interglacial warm period, temparatures reached 2 to 3 C hotter than now as global average. Yet the warming stopped, and the world fell back into a cold glaciation period.

Your idea of infection (prions - not pirons) is not something that has any precedent or any scientific backing. Prion infections are passed by eating infected materials - not airborne.

You don't have to come up with silliness like that, though. Virus infections are every bit as bad as you need for a doomsday scenario. And they can be airborne, unlike prions. If you want a virus based doomsday, you merely need to suggest a militant government trying to genetically engineer a biological weapon, which gets out of control.

However, pandemics of immense horror have happened before. A future one with a worse virus might kill lots more people, but history suggests it will be self limiting, and humanity will recover. A really, really nasty virus may cause incurable and fatal illness, but people learn to apply strategies to prevent further infection.

 

I did not suggest quite that. I said: "NO ONE CAN SAY WITH CERTAINTY THAT EARTH IS NOT ALREADY IN THE EARLY STAGES OF SWITCHING TO ITS HOT STABLE " and in many post have said I think it very improbable that the process I describe can switch the earth to the hot stable state.
The expected disaster is near infinite (Some re-settlement on Mars may be possible so not exactly infinitely bad) and the probability of it happening is near zero (I think) so hard to evaluate the "expectation value of disaster" - i.e. the product of near infinity by near zero.

Your reply still indicates you are thinking of (and taking comfort in) prior higher values of levels (temperatures in your last post and CO2 levels in earlier post) instead of the important and totally UNPRECIDENTED factor - i.e. the RATES of increase (of CO2, temperature and thus of CH4, whose high rate may remove OH from the lower levels.)

I am willing to grant that man can probably survive even 5 degree C average temperature increase and CO2 levels three times higher than present, IF these changes take place very slowly as they have in the past, but not if they cause a great deal of CH4 to be released much more rapidly than it can be destroyed by atmospheric process. It is the RATES, not the LEVELS that are of concern.

Telling me higher LEVELS have existed in the past is meaningless - not any assurance that a sterile Earth will be avoided.

Thanks for spelling correction; however, you seem to be thinking too narrowly and based on Mad Cow Disease which does seem to mainly have been spread by having some feed with those prions in it. In my example, obviously leaves don't "eat" as that is normally understood. They do however have open surface structures called stoma (hope that is spelled correctly) thru which the much smaller pirons could enter to be inside the leaf. - Sort of a more generalized form of "eating."

Once inside the leaf, they need to find natural molecules they could cause to fold differently to make more copies of the piron but the mad scientist would have given the piron molecules a shape that does that. I would expect that with 200 years more of the current rapid explosion of molecular biological knowledge and technology, this would be easy - a one man garage project of less than a year.

I agree there probably are viral structure that can kill 99% of humans, but everyone's immune system is different and all are very adaptive. Some humans would survive. For example some cannot be infected by the Aids virus etc.

Thus attacking mankind with a virus is not likely to make man extinct. Better to attack indirectly - remove something essential like oxygen or food he can eat and do that in something that does not have anything like an immune system. As all food is based on photosynthesis, I first though a piron that infected leaves (thru their stoma) and destroyed all version (only two, I think) of photosynthesis could make mankind extinct.

 

Less people...

 

I said this exact thing this morning.

 

Billy

I doubt that making CO2 increase faster is going to result in a much worse situation than if we saw the same increase, only slower. I also feel that global warming will come under control. My guess is that by 2050 we will have effective measures under way, which will slow the whole process, and by 2100, it will be effectively under control. After all, quite a lot of progress towards this has already been made. I cannot see temperatures exceeding those that existed 120,000 years ago, at a time of very healthy global ecosystems.

On prions.

I am aware of several prion diseases, such as scrapie, vCJD, and kuru. All are passed on by eating infected tissue - not airborne.

Nothing I have heard here is sufficient to make me think there is a significant probability of any global disaster that will carry off even as much as half the human species.

My view is that our species will continue to thrive, and make the world a better place for future generations of people.

 

Do you not understand that CH4 is destroyed in the air by reaction with OH and that the OH is destroyed in the reaction also?

If the rate of release of CH4 exceeds the rate at which OH can migrate down from the high atmosphere where it is produced, then the destruction rate of CH4 remains equal to the rate OH migrates down but there is no corresponding limit on the surface release rate of CH4 and it increases as it now lives years instead of months before destruction in what may be a positive feedback loop with greater than unity gain driving the temperature higher than CO2 release can. I.e. perhaps temperature rise is on and exponential curve?

Rates can be more important than levels. To make a crude example:

A speed level, say in a car of 45mph can be more fatal than 450mph speed level in an airplane if the car has 100 times higher rate of de-acceleration. (Stops in one second instead the plane's 100 seconds). Thus fact that temperature levels have been 3 degrees higher or CO2 levels have been three times higher (like the plane's higher speed level) without also considering the rate at which the level is changing is useless for predicting how fatal the situation is.

The amount / rate the average CO2 levels are now changing in a week took decades to change in the past. I.e. are very much without precedent in the past and we don't know what that high rate of change may cause. It seems possible that it could make CH4 accumulate in the atmosphere at an ever increasing rate with much longer half lives against destruction, once the OH destruction rate is surpassed.

 

It really does not make any difference how the prion get inside the organism. Mastication and swallowing are not essential to becoming infected. Most (all?) plants have a direct opening, the stoma, to their "insides" - an easier direct path to the insides. Actually even after being swallowed, the prion still is not inside the organism. It must still pass thru the intestine wall.*

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

The green spots are air exposed chlorophyl (via stoma holes).

As the chlorophyl processes the air's CO2 the chlorophyl, very typically, adjoins the stoma opening as show here (right photo) in tomato leaf. Extremely easy for the prion to contact it and cause it to refold or simply attaching to the chlorophyl molecule to make it non-functional and then replicating say 100 fold before the leaf dies could in a few years kill all humans that eat.

Getting thru the intestine walls is an extra step for eaten prions, not needed for infecting plants. Thus you have it backwards - the oral route to "inside the body" is more complex and difficult to achieve than just passing thru the stoma opening. For vCJD (the human version of Mad Cow Disease) there is also a second barrier to cross before infection can occur- i.e the "blood/brain" barrier.

More on "inside the organism" - I have stock in SPHRY, which has done very well for me. Its main product, now less than a year from the market, is a cream with specially designed micro-particles in the cream that comes in a cheap plastic insertion tube which a woman uses to put the cream inside her vagina even hours before sex. These micro particles attach to virus particles making them too large to pass thru the walls of the vagina and protects against ALL viral diseases, including AIDs and Herpes and most bacterial diseases, including BV, a cause of vaginal irritation, discharge and malodor which affects 1/3 of the adult females in US. Getting it FDA approved will be much easier as this medicine does not actually enter the body - never contacts the blood, etc.

------------
* From a topology POV, humans and doughnuts have exactly the same shape.

 

What about dipping a cue tip in prions. Then placing inside the ear?

Sounds like a great, long term, assassination attempt?

 

Again: "inside the ear" is NOT inside the body. The skin (largest human organ) is a very effective barrier, much more so than the intestines which must permit some, but not all, small molecules like amino acids that meat you eat was made of when you ate it to pass thru the intestine wall. The job of the stomach is to break down what you eat into these small molecular pieces. Remember stuff in your ear or in your intestines is NOT inside your body. Your body has the topology of a doughnut. A fly inside the hole of a doughnut is not inside the doughnut.