Dodos
When humans become extinct, we will probably take the rest of the animal kingdom with us. How selfish is that? At least when the Dodo went extinct, it didn’t take anyone else down.
Except perhaps animals that ate nothing but Dodo.
Archives
- June 2011
- April 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- September 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
Categories
What an unusually strange and interesting blog entry.
Probably something like 99% of all species that have ever lived are now extinct. As man has only been around for 120,000 years or so in various guises so we can’t be blamed for everything! Since the very beginning of earths existence there have been 6 or more events that have caused mass extinctions. The rapid evolution of mankind being the latest of course. Our very-own on-going mass extinction-event is the biggest seen since the dinosaurs checked-out at the end of the Cretaceous. Apparently 50% of the species that exist today will be gone by 2150 and mainly due to our ferocious appetites outpacing their own evolution.
This is however, nothing new. Fundamentally depressing to consider, okay, but new it aint. There will be new speciation. There will be new Lazari. It’s going to get cold again, then hot again, then cold again – every 100,000 years. (regardless of what we do) The Milankovitch cycles are undisputed.
The last major study (1980) predicted that the *long-term* cooling trend which began 6 thousand years ago will continue for at least the next 23,000 years. (cooling, not warming!)
Man has been around for the blink of an eye in the earths history. We think we are so clever but we actually understand very little. The so-called scientists are all too willing to base their global-warming predictions on estimated data of just the last 100k years. The *actual* real data (temperature etc.) goes back at best a couple of HUNDRED years. Considering the earth is about 4.5 Billion years old it’s a bit like saying that as it is raining today it will clearly also be raining in 100000 years as well. (If you live in Wales that might well be true, but it’s not very scientific!!!)
By all means turn the lights off when you are not using them and choose and use resources sparingly and thoughtfully but let’s keep evolution and extinction in context. Typically a species will become extinct within 10 million years of it’s original appearance. We’ve only been here 120,000 and the didn’t get around to inventing the internal combustion engine until 200 years ago! 200 years of data versus 4,500,000,000 years of history…
Natural forces are far far more powerful than we. I wonder why so many people think that it’s the tail that wags the dog? Mankind happens to be around during a blip on the chart. The big question is: are we causing the blip or is it just a blip? Chaos theory anyone? My money is it just being a blip. ‘Irrelevant really as I will be gone in about 40, and that’s if some of our number haven’t terminated all our contracts before that with a nuclear-fusion or other catastrophic event.
Sir Bedevere: …and that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana shaped.
King Arthur: This new learning amazes me, Sir Bedevere. Explain again how sheep’s bladders may be employed to prevent earthquakes.
What was it that Julius Caesar said?
Jon
I meant fission naturally! If we are in fact causing the blip on chart some practical nuclear fusion could be the answer not the problem!
Sorry for the lengthy comment but extenction theory is a subject that greatly interests me!
Jon
Oh, see, now you’ve mentioned the dodo. Which means I am now feeling morally obligated to point out Adam Savage’s quite excellent talk from The Last HOPE, about nerdy obsession and his quest to make a dodo skeleton.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1515761638951440862&hl=en
Boneheaded hunters used to take great pride in boasting that they had been the one to bag
the very last of a particular species, the morally reprehensible buggers!
I sometimes wonder whether any supreme being would take any more notice of humanity
than humanity takes notice of ants, say.
Peace and philosophy, Kara
Strange.. Just few days ago I was discussing with Marjaana how short time the human being has been on Earth.
When we saw the new version of ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still,’ my wife and I had a lengthy conversation afterwards concerning the apparent short-sightedness of the aliens who were going to wipe out humanity because we were killing the planet.
As White City points out, the planet doesn’t really care about us. It will endure and life will go on. Mr. Dolby’s lament on the legacy of humanity is correct also, but ultimately short-lived. At some point WE will become the oil that evolved roaches will burn in THEIR cars.
And to add my geek to White City’s:
Arthur Dent: It’s a shame. At the moment, it’s a beautiful planet.
But with that said, why are we as humans so vain as to think we should continue on? Like White City stated, MANY species have become extinct. I take a fatalistic standpoint in that we cannot control everything, but our vanity in not thinking beyond scientific inventions, in that there are consequences with each new gadget or gizmo developed, have brought us here: to the brink. Why do you think there’s this big push to get to Mars? To live in the caves as our predecessors, no less. Because there is a definite possibility that this existence here will no longer be plausible for the continuance of human life.
I think our torment as human beings is that we know that extinction may be imminent…unlike the dodo.
Does the planet give a poop about us? No.
Are we, however, changing how nature works? Yes.
Long term, once we do ourselves in, our actions won’t make a difference once the Earth erases our tracks, but the way the planet behaves NOW…yes. We DO make a difference in how the planet is working. If we disappeared things would go back to its own flow without our meddling. But we are making changes with OUR meddling.
Nature is huge, but that doesn’t mean we can’t “control” it in the short term. And we do, and don’t much care when the short term economy is in question.
Do all these postulations apply to a flat earth…?
Lunesse, I really hear what you say and as you know from my Facebook electricity saving fetish I am commited to reducing my consumption. My recent car choice was totally guided by fuel economy and CO2 output. I don’t want to add to the problem – if indeed that is the case at all.
However, here’s some further food for thought. If you transform the entire length of time that earth has existed so far into a 24 hour period, the fraction of time that man has walked it would come to a little under 2.5 seconds.
The amount of time that industrialised mankind has polluted the atmosphere and water is a mere 260th of ONE of the 86400 seconds that the earth has existed.
Doesn’t it strike you as a little far-fetched that we have disrupted such a well-established massive cyclical force-system in that tiny fraction of time? Us, the ones that haven’t even managed to figure out where gravity is yet?
We are but a brief sentence in the long story of planet earth. Humans shouldn’t flatter themselves that they are anything more but that doesn’t mean we don’t need to look after the place while we are here.
(I did manage to work one DD reference into that!)
Jon
Incidentally, I’m really intrigued to know the background to the original blog entry. Evolution and subsequent extinctions are a fascinating subject. ‘Makes good song material too!
Jon
“With your arms spread wide… to represent all time on earth, look at one hand with its line of life. The Cambrian begins at the wrist, and the Permian extinction is at the outer end of the palm. All of the Cenozoic is in a fingerprint, and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history.” John McPhee, Basin and Range, 1969.
Wow, I should write short cryptic blog entries more often! The ‘community’ makes all my content for me!
Short, cryptic and *thought-provoking*! A basis for interesting discussions…
Aha, your experiment worked then!
The whole Dodo subject is quite interesting. People today sentimentally think of the Dodo as an innocent victim of mans greed. That is true but it’s not the whole story by a long way.
Dodo’s originally could fly and fly they did. Being smarter than their pigeon brethren they flew to Mauritius rather than Trafalgar Square and it was so splendid there they decided never again to leave. On Mauritius they found a lovely place with plentiful food and no predators. They gradually evolved.
Feeding themselves excessively and not needing to maintain the ability to fly, fight or out-smart, they evolved over many thousands of years into 1m tall 20Kg lazy birds who sat around all day unchallenged in their cozy ground-level nests, eating and occasionally having sex.
This was really cool! They loved it and got fatter, stupider and less agile by the generation. It was like an all-inclusive hedonism-resort for excessively big, rather ugly and no-longer very streetwise creatures.
Fast forward to the year 1600. The Dutch arrive in their ships bringing with them rats, cats and pigs. During the space of a mere 80 years they cut down much of the forest habitat for Dodo’s to build infrastructure. The new predators on the block had a field-day nicking the eggs, ruffling feathers and generally pissing off the locals. The fact that the Dodo’s were slow-moving, flightless, not very smart and weighed in at a hefty 20kg made them into … er… a rather good stew when cooked properly.
The moral of this tale is that he who evolves for a very specialist life-style and doesn’t have to be concerned anymore about mere survival will invariably end up excessively big, rather slow-moving and not very well able to protect themselves. Such a creature will, in the presence of ‘abundant resources’ have little enthusiasm to care one jot for their tomorrows. They will probably end-up sitting around all day in cozy ground-level ‘nests’, eating incessantly and occasionally having sex!
Unfortunately it is a certain fact of life that the Dutch WILL always turn up again sooner or later. Throughout history there were probably many thousands of easy-living species that went the same way at the hands of more fearsome, agile or industrious opportunist-predators.
The Dodo is typified as being the last major creature to have forced into extinction through the direct actions of humans. One has to argue that it did a pretty damned good evolutionary job preparing for it’s eventual demise. When you look at the human tourists today on Mauritius sprawled out in the sun their ground-level ‘nests’ without the slightest ability to feed, protect and provide for themselves in that environment you have to wonder whether the Dodo really died out after all?
Their pigeon brothers seem to have managed pretty well though…
Jon
Looks like I’m not the only person here who read The Ancestor’s Tale
“…sat around all day unchallenged in their cozy ground-level nests, eating and occasionally having sex.
This was really cool! They loved it and got fatter, stupider and less agile by the generation. It was like an all-inclusive hedonism-resort for excessively big, rather ugly and no-longer very streetwise creatures.”
I guess Social Darwinism doesn’t apply to the people at the local trailer park.
White City. No, I do not see it as far-fetched. The evidence is here, right before us. How little time we have been here has no bearing on how much we can change where we are once here. Why should length of time have anything to do with it when we are the first species to dramatically change the landscape? Palm Springs, for example, is a little microcosm of how Man can change an area. Golden Gate Park, one of the largest, lushest parks in North America, was once sand dunes.
Lastly, so you say it is irrelevant to you since you will be gone in 40 years. You have kids. Even the possibility that we are indeed changing things to the point they will make life harder for future generations should make it relevant, don’t you think?
I personally think TD was watching old TED episodes with too many G&T’s to not get riled up.
Hmmm, for the record what I actually said was:
>The big question is: are we causing the blip or is it just a blip? Chaos theory anyone?
>My money is it just being a blip. ‘Irrelevant really as I will be gone in about 40
- Meaning that it’s irrelevant what my money is on as I won’t be around long enough to see how it actually pans-out anyway.
I’m extremely concerned about the legacy our and previous generations are leaving for our children. Whether it is the aspects of precession, obliquity and eccentricity that predominently determine Earths warming and cooling cycles or whether human intervention has played a significant role in the extreme short-term remains to be seen.
Regardless of that result we still have every reason and duty to preserve and protect the only home we have.
However, the possibility that a lot of the current talk about global warming causing sea-level rise comes primarily from computer modelling. The paleogeophysics and geodynamics scientists that *actually go outside and take readings* are recording no rises at all and in many documented cases they are seeing falls in sea levels.
The fact of the matter is that regardless of my level of confidence in the computer models I’m currently in the process of planning a wind-turbine generator for our house, have just selected a car based virtually entirely on it’s emissions-credentials and monitor our energy usage at home down to the last watt.
I’ve done these kind of things already for years and continue to do them simply because it makes perfect sense, not because some modelling data-set comes in looking bad. If certain demographics would curb their vorracious appetites for consumption we wouldn’t even have half the problems we face anyway.
I’m totally the environmentally conscious person and have been for decades. Even more extremely now living in Finland. -Just to put things back into perspective-
Jon
Jon,
So many of the things scientists are saying are now up for question? That is totally believable because it is all just a “logical” guess as to how things will eventually turn out. Strange thing being is that YEARS ago my grandmother told us that things were moving faster and faster, to eventually spiral out of control. Being who she was and how she said it, we mocked her “revelations.” Now, I’m not so sure.
I don’t know, there are so many of us, and so many who don’t give a damn as to how their actions (or lack thereof) directly affect not only the environment, but the climate. Am I fatalistic in thinking that the efforts of a few will not affect the world picture? That conservation on the part of one or two families within an entire community will not positively impact the global outcome?
I limit my exposure to news broadcasts at this point. I’m tired of all the predictions of gloom and doom without the scientific community stating that if indeed we did follow a “green” way of living that disaster could be averted. I don’t know how, or even if, we could mobilize the entire human population into staving off the appetite for more than we need. For those of us who have always lived without want of anything; giving that up is like a junkie giving up his dope.
The difference between creatures facing previous mass extinctions and the one possibly facing us now, is that we have a posable thumb and intelligence.
If we can combine the two the outcome is potentially different, despite that combination having got us into the present mess.
Nobody knows whether it’s too late to avoid mass extinction via environmental destruction
(if the planet dies, so does every living thing on it), so, although I do recycle and use CFL bulbs,
I sometimes wonder whether it’s all too little, too late. We who are alive now didn’t cause global
warming, etc., and shouldn’t be held responsible for it. Previous generations basically may have
upset the delicate balance that helped our planet function so well for so long, and now our
living generations are forced to try to fix what we didn’t break.
what a laugh,well done TD !,seems like people need to be heard. As for me let the music play.
O gawd, mindless consumerism must be easier on the mind than what
we thinking people go through! At least, until the credit-card bills come
due…
Party on, english boy.
whats a credit card ? sorry its all good but lets be nice.
Show me your stats, White City. =)
http://www.worldviewofglobalwarming.org/pages/glaciers.html
Pictures have always spoken of truth of a subject that I can see myself.
As to the irrelevant statement, ah, I got it now and understand you better. =)
Carry on. If you worry too little, too late, and do nothing, then it’s definitely too late. Pointing fingers and playing the blame game of who is responsible isn’t very helpful either. Working to help nations who are developing now to NOT follow the same path, that is something we should aspire to in developed areas. IMHO, anyway.
Hey, no one except crazy people are disputing that the average temperature is rising on Earth at the moment. That’s a well understood fact and it is not in question. Although the rising and falling of temperature is a perfectly natural phenomonen, it is completely plausible, even likely, that human production of CO2 is accelerating this effect to one degree or another. This remains however, unproven.
Glaciers are melting. True. Undisputed. Your pictures are good illustrations of how rising global temperatures are receding glacial ice. They do not prove that the rise in temperature is man-made, man-assisted or anything else. They only prove that temperature has risen.
The fossil evidence in the UK for example, proves that it was once a tropical environment. All the associated fauna, flora and animal life from this exotic lanscape vanished as that part of the land-mass became temperate. Now why did THAT happen? There were no humans pumping out CO2 then, but happen it did. There are many reasons why these things happen but certain people are ‘keeping it simple’ because it is convienient for their own agendas.
However, the big issue is the one of sea level rise. The simplistic and widely believed fallacy about global warming that is causing hysteria in the media and general population is the one that says: our CO2 makes temperature rise, poles melt and we drown our major cities in a Hollywood-style disaster scenario.
This is the one that is worrying as it is based on really, really incredibly flawed representation of data. The reason that the very short amount of time man has been industrialised and producing CO2 is only indirectly relevant when compared to the entire Earth history is because it is simply not long enough to be able to establish a trend.
Earths temperature goes up and down. The long term trend is down, the short term trend is currently up. Has man got anything to do with that? We simply don’t know but to use that tiny data snapshot as *fact* when designing modellinmg software to predict sea-level rise is at best irresponsible and at worst fraudulent.
There are some people out there making huge amounts of money out of the manufactured and thoroughly artificial problem of rising sea-levels.
Maybe human activity is accelerating the current short-term warming but then again maybe it is not.
Either way reducing pollution and making better use of our resources is an obvious good policy. I can’t help thinking that these scare tactics are being used as an instrument to lower our threasholds to accepting more taxation and for interested parties to make profit from controlling technologies and resources that are needed to fulfill this artificial need.
Call me a sceptic but someone IS making a lot of cash out of this situation. I wouldn’t be surprised if those same people are the ones fanning the flames of the sea-level rise story in the first place.
Jon
Appologies for the length again. This is a fascinating subject to discuss.
The world is aware of all the changes. But unless there is a way to single-handedly “cure” global warming, I’m afraid ain’t nuthin’ gonna change in regards to the habits which brought us to the edge in the first place. It might be too little, too late at this point.
There does seem to be a growing global awareness of impending climate change. Problem being is there is a lot of talking when there should be some concerted effort to make a positive change. If they can send a rocket to the moon and beyond, then there should be some viable solution to global warming. It’s all about priorities! It’s like the “powers that be” know something we don’t, and are planning an intergalactic “Noah’s Ark!” Am I imagining things?
Climate change is a fact of life on earth. The human race cannot stop it. The earths climate has continually cycled up and down since the dawn of time. It’s not stopping because of anything we might do. We are truly just passengers on this ship.
The question is, can we do anything to lessen the effects which are negative towards our existance? Can we evolve to manage it and reduce the burden by being more responsible towards our usage of what we have?
I firmly believe we can if there is political will. Unfortunately I can’t see it that will. I make my personal effort as do growing numbers of others. Whether it will make any real difference is actually irrelevant. Reducing consumption and pollution is good in every possible scenario.
If CO2 is to blame for the rapid warming we are seeing in the extreme short-term then of course we should do everything possible to reduce our carbon emmissions as that will help reduce factors causing the extreme weather events that we are frequently seeing. If it slows warming entirely then all the better but that remains to be seen.
It’s worth a try. Reducing carbon emission has a direct relationship with reducing financial emissions. If for no other reason than to save money, turn stuff off and buy less stuff. How much does a person REALLY need?
Jon
My money’s with Thomas. Either he’s right working off the grid or it’ll float his boat.
“An intergalactic ‘Noah’s Ark’”–what an awesome turn of phrase, korky123! I’ve often wondered
about that myself, whether all of that money for space exploration has been wasted in an
effort to find a terraformable planet for humanity to flee to once the flat Earth can no longer
support life. Why else care whether or not there might be water beneath the surface of Mars?!
Kara, loving this meeting of brilliant minds (and mine too, hee hee).
White City & Thomas
just found this blog and the comments … guys I’m currently re-writing by book, best seller in Uganda, LOL … and about to embark on a 6 day, 6 continent tour speaking about “Leadership 3pointzero” – “we share responsibility for our future success “you win. I win, we all winâ€
The dodo thing is really great I love the whole decadence thing…. would it be possible to discuss use this.
I’m aware this is TMDR’s site/blog and White City’s metaphor but it’s so bloody powerful I’d love to use it in the work I’m doing.
Let me know your thoughts guys.
regards
andy