Posts by Kracklite
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Whisky, Isla single malts, for me Kracklite- but these are are our 'hoping'
I'm with you on that for sure! Ah, Laphroaig! Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we will be so hungover, we will wish that we were dead!
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Geeky elaboration: biologists sort reproductive strategies into r and K types, though the two are relative. r-types produce lots of offspring who suffer high mortality rates and as a consequence, decline rapidly under environmental or predatory stress, but recover quickly afterwards whereas K-types produce few offspring, but invest a lot of energy in their upbringing so that their survival rates are very high. K-types are more resilient, but due to their low fertility rates, if they do suffer a dieback, they take time to recover and if they don't recover, they may become extinct.
We're clearly K-types, but perhaps on the verge of becoming a new type, "super-Ks", through the agency of our technological civilisation, who are virtually infertile (many Western countries report birthrates below the replacement level) but also virtually immortal. Already we have invented grandparents, which are remarkable in their own right and serve a vital function in supplementing parents in child rearing and as reposititaries of tribal lore.
Again, I think that longevity could be cause for hope for us as a species and the earth as a whole simply because people will learn - over centuries - that either they die when they could live longer or they live with the consequences of their actions and act therefore to ensure a comfortable old age.
In the short term, I'm afraid that the selection pressure of arrangements created by governments and corporations favour behaviour that is indistinguishable from that of sociopaths and their offspring will prosper.
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We all want to think that we care about the deep future, but if we actually had the reasonable prospect of living into it, then I think that things might get a whole lot better.
Doctor Johnson said that when a man knows he is going to be executed in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind marvelously, but perhaps when a man knows that he could live for another century or more, perhaps that might concentrate his mind too...
Nobody wants to die, so if medical technology provided the incentive of having to live long enough to face the consequences of one's actions...
Well, here's hoping. It's that or bloody cold lentils and an early grave and I want neither. I demand chocolate at least.
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Oh, sure, there are condiitions it could happen under. But as a result of human activity?
Ceres-sized, no, but Chicxulub, oh yes - already, too late and ongoing.
It's not that we shouldn't be investigating it, it's that it needs to be a method of last resort, rather than a handy way to avoid having to cut emissions.
I agree, but I think that on the timescales required to practically and politically avoid having to do so... no. It won't happen for decades yet, but it will have to happen because too many countries will force exemptions in treaties to be "fast followers" or dishonour their commitments. It will be a late measure and doubtless it will be fucked up with unintended consequences, but the optimist in me, who like my inner child, I have not yet succeeded in throttling, says that in balance, it might be better than nothing.
Anyway, I will make one prediction that I am absolutely confident about: the future will be weird, and weird in big ways, and it will happen by steps that taken individually seem only temporary, short term aberrations that somehow accumulate - but that's always been the case.
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That qualifies as a "few", I think. Orders of magnitude and all that. Personally, and it's purely a gut instinct thing (but we know what comes out of guts), I think that if worst come to absolutely unfuckingbelievably bad, it'll still be millions who make it through any bottleneck.
The best case is, if the Earth doesn't become an underpopulated wasteland replicating the post Chixulub impact biosphere (and we have already been the latest Great Extinction, no matter what happens), then its future will have to be as a garden. That sounds great, but gardens are artificial by their nature. Personally, I don't mind artificiality considering how sordid the natural can be.
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You implied we were on the road to turning into Venus. Or starting another Younger Dryas. Neither of those are particularly viable scenarios, given current conditions, and the Venus one is actually laughable.
Well, in about a billion years (well before the Sun really gets going as a red giant), not so laughable as solar flux increases. Venus, it seems, might have had oceans, and plate tectonics depends on oceans providing water to lubricate the subduction of the plates. In a real runaway greenhouse effect, the seas evaporate, the H2O breaks up under UV radiation, solar wind blows away the H2 and the O says hello to C and then we get the ninety Bar CO2 atmosphere.
Meanwhile the saga of the ALH 84001 meteorite continues, suggesting that 'habitability' is something measured in temporal windows, not absolutes - both Venus and Mars may have had life, when they had oceans, but neither do now.
Short version: three planets in the Goldilocks zone, only one is habitable, and getting a bit lower down into the nitty gritty of the habitability question, yes, a civilisation will cope very well indeed with the sort of CO2 and/or oxygen levels that have existed at various times in the Earth's past (me, I'd be quite delighted to see the giant dragonflies that lived when there were higher O2 portions to support big insects), but the point is the rapidity of change. To use an analogy, cars change velocity all the time, but you can stop a car by braking gently or crashing it into a brick wall. One outcome is fatal, the other not, so the loons who accept AGW but don't care and say that warmer weather is per se a good thing are... loons.
According to analyses of our genetic diversity, there was a stage when the total human population was down to a couple of thousand, perhaps caused when the Toba supervolcano erupted.
I'm very confident that "we" will get through "it" but the questions are: what exactly how severe is "it" and "how many in the end"? If you're Buck Turgidson, you might not worry about getting your children's hair mussed...
I'm also convinced that there will be severe climate change because even with the best of declared intentions, all commitments to action will be watered down due to short-term political interests and we will have to live with the changes. Do we then end up having to terraform Earth through geoengineering?
The thing that depresses me about denialists, but also about "progressives" is their refusal to think about the really long term because it's too "weird". The prospect of having to vote for the Greens who think that all will be well if we turn into Ents or live in straw huts and eat cold lentils is what is laughable... well, I've got to laugh, really, and it's damned hard work.
Is that sort of perspective "unhelpful"? Sadly, I'd have to say, "yes".
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Worst case of testosterone poisoning I've seen for ages.
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I supported the principle that they were fighting for - namely that decisions about refugees shouldn't be a case of quiet decisions behind closed doors nudge nudge wink wink, but IMHO Zaoui was the wrong battle to wage that fight.
I get what you mean, but unfortunately, ideal battles don't come along to order and I'd be very disturbed if one had to be vetted for sainthood before being granted the full application of legal aid.
Quothe Graham Chapman: "Who among us can say that they have not burned down a large public building? I know I have."
Glass - yes, I'm in that fan club too... but will it have me as a member?
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So was it you 2 that bought down building 7? :)
Actually, no. On that day I was in China, busy training the butterfly that caused Hurricane Katrina.
*Gio - thank you for your moving and eloquent article on Gage's Te Papa presentation. It reminded me exactly how I feel about these lunatics.
Seconded!
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<i>I think there's no doubt that the USA went to the moon at least once. But there's less certainty that they went as many times as they claim to have done</i>
All of the sites have been photographed by recent lunar orbiters, in enough detail to show footprint trails and wheel tracks from the rovers that were on the later missions.
Of course, any conspiracy theorist will move the goalposts again and say that those pictures are fakes. At which point Craig and I will stage a minimalist performance worthy of Steve Reich in which our heads impact our desks in a rhythm out of phase with each other, producing aesthetically interesting patterns of sound.