Our species has a duty to save the universe...in a manner almost no one considers: ending natural, biological evolution and replacing it with a system in which life is genetically engineered.
We must survive long enough to develop the technology to spread across the universe doing this. The penalties of not doing so could be billions, or even trillions of years of life forms being shoved into the gladiatorial arena called the natural world without any thought by their parents about whether or not they should be. I'll explain myself in more detail below.
Darwinian evolution has been described by Harvard evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in the following unsettling manner:
“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
And this is a highly accurate description. Nature is beautiful...but nature is also red in tooth and claw. We don't want to think about the "red in tooth and claw" aspects, and there is sense is that avoidance. It's unpleasant to ponder and, regardless of our actions, regardless of if we never buy meat raised in factory farms, billions of animals are constantly being devoured, starving, freezing, etc. and so there is a short limit to how much we can do about it anyway, aside from not worrying about it too much.
I don't want society brewing in misery over the thought of all that chaos. The only self-help book I've ever approved of was "The Tao of Pooh" by Benjamin Hoff, which encourages a much more carefree, childlike, and perhaps even naively content attitude than the mentality I have. If what I've typed so far depresses you, I encourage you not to think about it any longer. Instead, spend a little more time with your kids, or reading a good book, or doing your taxes, or doing any number of things that can help improve the world a little more.
However, if you think like I do...if the weird and eerie variants of thought interest you, I encourage you to read on, because I may have some interesting ideas for you that no one besides me seems to mention.
Our species has the power to stop, potentially, trillions of years of suffering by animal life...and it may only be our species which possesses that power. There is a respectable chance that no spacefaring aliens, or any aliens with human-level or above intelligence exist in our galaxy or galaxies near us. If they do...then something odd is going on, because anything that behaves like humans would have expanded over the whole of the galaxy by now, given that the universe has existed for so long.
Obviously we don't have the ability to use that power yet. We're still part of nature. We could, I suppose, nuke the world. That would be a potential way to end biological evolution of multicellular organisms on Earth...but we're not going to do that no matter what, anyway. Even if widespread nuclear war breaks out, there would be areas untouched...and when most experts talk about nuclear war radiation, even on a global scale, they're talking about rising cancer rates rather than global extinction.
So we're stuck living life the way we do...but the power to change the universe lurks within us. We have the power to invent. We can build potentially anything, given enough time. We are gods, more or less...at least to the animals around us. We have so much more choice than them. We have so much more power than them. We'd best be good gods to them.
Our species must survive long enough to spread into space, so that we can unseat the mad scientist Mother Nature from her throne - stop her cackling, cruel and blind experiments on living things and replace her with the empathetic and thoughtful mind of a human, or an alien, or anything sentient and understanding of the universe around it.
We have to survive, as a species, long enough to genetically engineer many, if not all, life forms to lead less violent, miserable lives. Or...we might consider just destroying all nonhuman life that isn't as, more or, intelligent than us, swiftly and painlessly. That would be another respectable option.
The thought of wandering the universe destroying life forms makes people reel in horror. I've been accused of being a psychopath upon suggesting it. Truth be told, I do have problems experiencing emotional empathy. People are interchangeable to me on an emotional level - even friends and relatives I've known all my life. Perhaps this makes this sort of topic easier for me to ponder...but what I lack in concern for individuals I may make up for, somewhat, in concern about my fellow life forms in general. I have a kind of intellectual empathy. I don't feel concern for people I see who are harmed, but I can think, "This is my fellow life form. I do not like pain. This person feels pain just like I do. It feels the same to them as it does to me. Their pain is similar to my pain. Therefore, I should desire that this person not feel pain."
Before me, I see a planet of animals experiencing quite a lot of pain, quite often, and other negative sensations. They did not choose to exist. Unlike humans, their parents have no understanding of the world they're bringing their offspring into. Nonhumans are not capable of understanding the concept of "Well...maybe we should wait to have kids until we're ready."
Nonhuman animals do not understand death the way humans do. For humans, if we, say, legalize murder, that would be undesirable for a great many reasons...aside from the pain of being murdered. Our society would collapse. The bonds of trust holding our society together would be broken. People might cease planning for the future due to the fear their lives might be ended at any moment...and fear would be rampant. People's hopes and dreams are stolen when they're killed as well. We miss our lost friends and relatives too.
None of that except for the pain applies to most nonhuman species...and the missing of companions only applies to social organisms. Death, to a nonhuman, is not the scary thing it is to humans. We're tempted to perceive animal death as a negative thing...and in a way that is sensible, but only because death tends to be associated with suffering. It's the suffering that the animals dislike, though, not the actual death. Death is a neutral state to all life besides humanity and our fellow social organisms - neither good or bad, and even being killed without one's consent in a painless manner is only a negative thing to humans and some of our fellow social organisms.
Animals do not view death the way humans view it, nor extinction. Extinction, in particular, is a totally foreign concept to them. Much of the endangered species list, I suspect, is mostly for the benefit of humanity rather than the animals on that list. We like nature to be "diverse" in the same way we like a pretty painting. We don't tend to think of what actually benefits the members of that species any more than we're interested in the feelings of a painting though. We like our natural world to be pretty - a work of art, maintained for the benefit of humanity, so that we have something pleasant to look upon.
Pain, however, may be something that many animals, particularly mammals, experience similar to humans. I am not a vegetarian. This is partly because of my innate lack of emotional empathy, and partly this is just because I'm human and we like to...not worry about stuff. I eat meat because of the same reason I play videogames rather than working to donate to starving African children. However, if the pain felt by mammals is similar to human pain, I will propose the following scenario, that I think pretty accurately describes what is really going on in the natural world, all around us, all the time:
Imagine, if you will, two teams of people with very low I.Q.'s - the most intelligent of them has an I.Q. of 65. Members of one team wear red shirts. Members of the other team wear blue shirts. All members of both teams are tossed into a jungle without any survival training and only limited supplies and left to fend for themselves.
Many members of both teams do survive long enough to learn how to survive in the wild for years. They start having babies. The two teams split began in separate locations, and one day they meat each other. They fight over limited resources. Some members are killed and the survivors eat the bodies so as not to waste the meat. They get into a habit of this.
Let's imagine that the blue-shirted team eats all the members of the red-shirted team. This is basically the equivalent of a species extinction. Then, lets imagine both teams continue to cannibalize each other, but at a slow enough of a rate that both teams can give birth to enough new children that neither team ever ceases to exist completely. This perpetual cannibalism is basically how what is commonly described with words like "natural balance" and "natural diversity" and other terms with lots of positive connotations...but if a bunch of humans with severe mental problems were routinely cannibalizing each other...there would be no words with positive connotations used to describe that scenario, despite those people quite possibly feeling the exact same way squirrels in the wilderness feel when being chased by wolves.
Our species must survive long enough to develop the technology to end this process for the same reason we wouldn't allow dozens of mentally handicapped people to cannibalize each other.
We can extend the sorts of concepts I've discussed into other areas too, such as abortion. Much like with nonhumans, we tend to personify fetuses in unrealistic ways. This is often a good thing. The more concern someone has for anything that kind of seems like a child, the better of a parent the person will often be.
We're not all parents though, and not everyone wants to be a parent. A fetus perceives death very similarly to nonhuman animals. Pain is a negative thing for the fetus, as are other forms of suffering. Death is a neutral state for it, however.
According to a very large authority on the topic of abortion: The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists,
*A human fetus does not have the capacity to experience pain until after viability. Rigorous scientific studies have found
that the connections necessary to transmit signals from peripheral sensory nerves to the brain, as well as the brain
structures necessary to process those signals, do not develop until at least 24 weeks of gestation.i Because it lacks these connections and structures, the fetus does not even have the physiological capacity to perceive pain until at least 24 weeks of gestation.
In fact, the perception of pain requires more than just the mechanical transmission and reception of signals. Pain is “an emotional and psychological experience that requires conscious recognition of a noxious stimulus.”ii This capacity does not develop until the third trimester at the earliest, well past the period between 20 weeks and viability. The evidence
shows that the neural circuitry necessary to distinguish touch from painful touch does not, in fact, develop until late in the third trimester. The occurrence of intrauterine fetal movement is not an indication that a fetus can feel pain.iii*
That information can be found here (which came from the ACOG website :[acog.org]
You can find similar, although not exactly the same information at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists website for the U.K.
Now...despite that, states like Alabama and my own state, Missouri, have lawmakers who've been trying to implant laws that would, if not for Roe v. Wade, ban abortion at stages of pregnancy as early as 8 weeks.
Remembering that pain doesn't appear to occur in fetuses until late into the pregnancy, we can also take into account that abortions can end birth defects and any other undesirable situation the fetus would be born into.
All our instincts scream out what I'm about to say is monstrous...but abortions really are a miracle cure for all ailments that has a potential side effect of pain for the fetus late into the pregnancy...and our irrational society listens to our instincts created by the same mindless source that created biological evolution: Mother Nature.
We would be wise to question our instincts. We would be wise to, rather than imagining them coming from some benevolent and caring parental god figure...to imagine our instincts coming from a more appropriate representation: a character from many fables: the witch Baba Yaga. Those who've researched a bit of Baba Yaga lore will know that she is often depicted as a symbol of nature. She can be a helpful guide, but might also lure Hansel and Gretel into her candy house and cook them in a pot.
Now, when I've posted my aforementioend thoughts on discussion forums, I've received many comments about how corrupt humanity is at heart, and how the more power we gain over nature the more destruction we'll wreak. Such people dread nothing more than the prospect of humanity spreading out accross the cosmos and genetically altering everything.
I disagree, of course, for three reasons. Reason #1 is that there isn't much worse we can do than what Mother Nature has already done. Chaos is all around us. Reason #2 is that the harm we see humanity currently doing to the environment and to itself is the result of the actions o a species that still hungers for resources for its very survival. We're kind of desperate now. Any gas taxes I pay that might protect the environment mean I have to work more, which means less time with my kids (if I had kids) and we'll always be an extremely individualistic species...at least as long as we're still fit to be called human. We're just going to care more about ourselves and our friends and families than the planet, because that's the way we are...but through technological innovation we can rid ourselves of time-consuming jobs and needs for ...
4
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6 comments
Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.You start with: "Our species has a duty to save the universe."
To whom is this 'duty' owed, in your opinion?
dmatic
Level 8
May 3, 2020
0
to our fellow life forms in our universe that I've advocated assisting through destroying or radically genetically altering...with that in mind, it wouldn't be a question of "who" we have a duty to, but what. Most animals couldn't really be described as a "who."
You seem like a brain I want to collaborate with.
Please consider the theory I've been developing.
I'm confident in my theory and wide open to criticism. I loved your comment:
"May you think up ideas that are far superior to mine. May you scoff at my ignorance, because you've become so much wiser than me...and may that provide me with some wonderfully entertaining intellectual competition."
Competition is the only way to know what's best.
I want to find out what's better than my grand unified theory.
Cheers, please let me know what you think.
SupraLibrix
Level 7
Mar 27, 2020
0
I think the one on the right looks overly simplistic...but maybe not. I don't know. I think I'd have to know how you arrived at that conclusion first, and maybe some more details about its significance. I would assume that greater intelligence tends to result in less work needed to accomplish a task though.
The one on the left looks kind of interesting. I'd have to know more about what its purpose is though...and what all the symbols such as Ix and 0 and 1 and such refer to though. I'm also someone who thinks best through reading strait-forward paragraph descriptions. I've never been very good at converting symbols into concepts. I'm horrible at math and computer science for that reason.
@MrShittles I'm not a math guy, it's a spectator sport for me, but I have a feel for general concepts.
On the right is the approximate slope of how intelligence has been incorporated into the tools we use.
Any high tech tool is no so advanced that no single person understands or can fix one entirely, you don't repair a computer chip, you chuck it.
Physical work is devalued where a robot can do it better (automation).
The amount of human time to accomplish an advanced task has dropped as tools become automated and more intelligent. We are near peak, you can summon a symphony of sound by command to alexa, Amazon will deliver almost anything you want in what was either impossible or took years for a ship to deliver from around the world.
Please consider this, I'm trying to put it out there in a way that appeals and is understandable to everyone.
Life = 1
Death = 0
From there you can construct a binary morality.
Life is binary. You live or you die. You do something or you do not. Thinking doesn't count, reasoning, vacillating, imagining doesn't count for anyone but yourself.
I'm a computer guy, I imagined how AI would perceive our actions and be mystified why we act irrationally.
I appreciate any thought and feedback.
Facebook is here:
[facebook.com]
If you are on facebook, I have a private group. I'd love to have more brains poring over it to find flaws.
I'm on IDW because facebook is relatively intolerant of freethought.
I'm looking for energetic folk, I have from what I can tell some unique ideas about how to fix the issues we all battle as we attempt to divine what's true on the net.
Much appreciation for the thought, please let me know what you think.
It is unlikely that our species will spread beyond the solar system. The nearest "exostar" is 4.2 light years from Earth and the fastest vehicle we have ever launched from the solar system has a speed under 100,000 mph. It will take the vehicle 50,000 years to get a Alpha Centuri. Even if we could build a vehicle that could achieve 1/10 of light speed the time dilation effect is negligible. Our species currently has a life span of 100 years (order of magnitude). Even if we could boost it to 1000 years most of the stars in our galaxy (the Milky Way) are out of our reached. The Cosmos has a diameter of at least 48 billion light years. If the Cosmos needs "saving" we are not the rescue party.
BobK
Level 2
Mar 22, 2020
0
I once heard some scientist or other say that "humans have a tendency to radically over-estimate what science can accomplish over the short term, but radically under-estimate what science can accomplish over the long term."
Let's put things in perspective...Our cell phones would probably make us look like magicians to anyone living only a century. The "saving" of even just our own home planet I'm referring to is something I wouldn't imagine occurring for many centuries, if not millennia.
Now, regarding interstellar travel...if you're interested, you might research the idea of light sails on spacecraft. After that, you might research nuclear fusion propulsion. We could put an enormous sail on a spacecraft...many, many miles/kilometers across, and push it with a laser mounted on...maybe...the moon. Getting the thing up to respectable percentages of light speed wouldn't be that hard to do. The main problems would be slowing the thing down (maybe this could be done via nuclear fusion drives) and keeping the spacecraft's intact, because hitting any space debris could be disastrous when going at significant percentages of light speed.
You might also google the "Breakthrough Starshot." project. Some people are actually seriously considering figuring out how to send a swarm of tiny spacecraft to Alpha Centauri using something along the lines of that method...but on a much smaller scale...and therefore with a much smaller light sail. They'll be sending many tiny spacecraft because it's assumed that many of them will be destroyed by spacecraft.
Furthermore...I don't think it's necessary that we spread to other solar systems at any point in the next thousand years or more. As long as we have some system where humans can survive in space stations...or wherever...just in other places in our solar system besides Earth, I don't know why our species wouldn't almost inevitably survive for the thousands more years it might require to develop the technology to travel between solar systems.
Also...I'd be very surprised if we don't cure aging at some point...just because of how much people want to do that, even if it takes many centuries.Or, even if we don't cure aging, I'm not sure multi-generational ships would be an unreasonable possibility either.
#1- man is not changing the climate at lest not yet and this planet is big and chaos has been created by the elite we didn't have chaos until 2000 and it was these pricks destabilizing the world economies for there own benefit #2 if you feel you must end your days because you can no longer survive in cold climate move to a warmer one...if you still feel you can't survive than leave the planet if that your wish it isn't mine! or you can teach your children the way to survive i live in the country not like the NWO wants you to live stacked in city full of disease being herded like cattle and killed off because some out of this world nut thinks the planet is over populated. by the way do the math 7 billion people will fit into the state of texas and each person would have about 1200sq ft to move around. all your activist groups you praise are what's phucking up the planet....so get your head screwed and straight and start living life.....
1patriot
Level 9
Mar 13, 2020
1
#1. If you do not believe man is changing the climate...that is something that warrants, at bare minimum, an intelligent discussion, preferably with research...not just assertions. You're disagreeing with the dominant scientific community right now.
#2. I do not feel I must "end my days"
#3. We could also fit a lot of people into a closet. That doesn't mean they'll be happy there.
#4. And what about when the massive migration due to global warming results in hundreds of millions of immigrants moving into the United States? Hey...you suggested that as the solution to global warming, not me.
- no i am agreeing with the 32,000 scientist from around the world that say man is not changing the climate you should read more that what MSM media is selling you.
2- glad you don't feel like ending your days with all the bullshit the MSM is selling you should how ever read both side of the media as there's shit on both side. so you might have some hope.
3- the rockers and the rotchildren have been selling the idea of of the planet being over popuated since the 1700's Bill gates and gang are selling it to you....make sure you get his vaccine. have you gone to south africa have you seen the starvation....do you know with out a doubt they are starving...if you live in a drought corner of the world would you not grow a garden show others how to grow a garden.
4- mass migration is not from climate change it's being force on the western nations using our tax dollars against us to create public discourse in all so called western nations and they have bought the politician of every nation. our world is not in crisis but many of the elite want to create a crisis as chaos is cash for the wealthy your being sold agenda 21 and and they love the lap dogs....
@1patriot
#1. The most popular news sources on television are, indeed, often biased towards the left. Every time I hear something about Trump, I know there's a good chance it's been taken out of context. Every time I hear something about a forest fire or hurricane being possibly caused by global warming...I know there's a decent chance there are climate scientists not associated with the news, who are very concerned about manmade global warming, who are not confident that particular incident was caused by manmade global warming.
However...the vast majority of right wing internet sources of information and public speakers I see talking are extremely biased, spouters of propaganda who rely on emotional appeals whereas left-leaning sources of information...not related to the mainstream news...on average seem far more likely to rely on science and studies, in my experience. That's why I don't really watch the news. I do my own research and compare different sources to make sure they're as unbiased as possible.
(I'll get to your video later at some point...maybe. It could be awhile. It might never happen...It'll depend on how much work it'll take to delve into to make a response to it), as well as your comment about the 32,000 scientists
#3. I don't really know what you're talking about with your comments about South African starvation and Bill Gates vaccines and such...and everything else in that paragraph. You're being too vague for me to understand your point. Overpopulation is not something anyone has to prove though. That's just a basic concern that we can't really deny should be a concern. Forget about not having enough food or, (much less) not having enough land. If necessary, we can just rely on GMO's to endlessly produce more food...if we're organized enough about it. Think about fresh water. Ocean-de-salinization is quite expensive. That's an option for wealthier nations...if they also want to pay for it. For a lot of the world that's not an option though. Just do a little bit of research into fresh water concerns. It's a concern everywhere.
then, also, consider the amount of trash building up in the ocean. There's an island of garbage in the middle of the Pacific ocean as large as the state of Texas. That's the sort of stuff people are talking about when they refer to overpopulation problems...not anyone running out of room.
#4. I agree that most mass migration is currently not coming from climate change...for now. That's because most of Earth's temperature increasing only began in the 1970's...I think...although maybe more of it than I suspect could be caused by global warming. I'd need to look into that more.
@MrShittles have you been to the island of trash in the ocean....[wattsupwiththat.com]
sorry it was 31,000 scientist
[ossfoundation.us]
the planet is not warming up at all!!!!!
@1patriot I don't need to have gone to the island of trash in the ocean. There is no motivation for anyone to lie about that...and it's pretty common knowledge. From what I understand, you can't really see it on google Earth...which makes sense to me. A lot of it's probably underwater or spread out or something.
The planet is warming. This is not up for debate by anyone who should be taken seriously...including those 31,000 you mentioned. the question is, to what degree humans are causing it. If you'd like, I can link you to numerous sources explaining why Earth is warming. I think this could be sufficient for now though: [climate.nasa.gov]
Keeping in mind the fact that Earth has been warming pretty steadily since about 1970 or so...we can filter out most of the possible reasons for that besides human behavior.
^The sun has not been increasing in activity since 1970 for any lengthy period of time...so Earth's temperature increase cannot have been caused by increased solar activity.
*The increased temperature cannot have been caused by increased volcanic activity, because humans emit far, far more C02 every year than volcanoes do. You'll find this information all over the place. Here's an example that says humans emit 40 to 100 times as much C02 as volcanoes do each year:
[deepcarbon.net]
*Water vapor, though it does radically alter Earth's temperature and is a potent greenhouse gas, doesn't increase in the atmosphere unless something else warms Earth more first...so that's probably not going to be the root cause of Earth's temperature increase, so much as a magnifier. (it can also cool Earth through cloud creation and the ensuing reflection of solar energy back into space)
*Some people argue that cosmic rays "seed" low-lying clouds, creating more of them. Low-lying clouds reflect away sunlight well...cooling the Earth. Cosmic rays come from interstellar space. Our sun protects our planet from them, so increased solar activity reduces their number. From what I understand, cosmic rays actually don't seem to have much of an effect on cloud formation. Also...if cosmic rays were seeding low-lying clouds, creating more of them, they would increase as our sun became less active, cooling the Earth more, magnifying the effect of the weakening solar activity. There's a Skepticalscience.com article on that. It's the best website for researching global warming in existence...different levels of explanation, defined language, and cited sources. There's an "arguments" segment with over a hundred different arguments against global warming it deals with. Unfortunately, I just went to the website and it locked up by computer for five minutes. It's such a laggy, crappy, web page that you shouldn't go there unless you've got nothing better to do...because it might lock up your website for about five minutes. Sometimes it has worked okay though. I can search for another source if you're interested.
*Some people suggest that perhaps undersea vents are heating our oceans more and causing them to outgass C02 (the hotter the oceans get, the less C02 they can hold). However, our oceans are currently absorbing more C02 than they release. I can explain that in more detail...particulalry if the damn skepticalscience.com website starts working again. But it'll take a little work looking everything up so I don't want to do that unless you're interested.
Now...can you think of any other plausible explanations for why Earth is warming, besides humanity having caused it? Because it looks like...the thought is that, if humans are not causing global warming, nobody seems to have a good idea about why it's happening. It appears like it's either humans causing much of it...or who the hell knows?
@MrShittles sorry i didn't finish reading your post as you are very ill informed on climate your speaking to a old farmer watched the climate everyday for age 10 or so.... answer these questions
1- what are the top 5 natural emitters of C02
2- is C02 a pollutant
3-why are the polar ice caps increasing in ice
4- why have the sea levels not increased if it warming we been warm for the last 10,000 years by about .5 a degree
@MrShittles [friendsofscience.org]
our orbit around the sun and through space accounts for temp rise and fall distance our planet from the sun the cycle of solar flares etc. and don't forget the lies IPCC, NOAA and Nasa when Jim Hansen was falsifying records. the elite have been doing it for years. and all you need to do is fallow the money! Foreign philanthropies have dumped millions of dollars into environmental groups which
in turn have had exceptional influence on Canada’s climate and energy policies. Geo soros,rockerfeller and rothschild have all tried to convince us of climate change but the planet has more scientist than what they have on their pay roll. skeptical science is one of the worst sites toget information they have many scientist that have quit working for them because they lied and than they would go after them to discredit top scientist how lame is that! so because of the lies you must go find your island of garbage cause you will not find it!
@1patriot Unless you've been looking at worldwide data...you've been watching the weather, not the climate. Local weather has nothing to do with the climate. Climate relates to worldwide temperature...not local temperatures. For example, if melting glaciers push the gulf stream down a bit, that could actually make Britain and the Eastern United States much colder...despite that being caused by Earth warming. That's just an example. I've heard concerns about that potentially occurring someday, but not that it's happening yet or that it will happen in the future...so far.
#1. I don't know what the top 5 natural emitters of C02 are...but that's partly because I'm not sure how best to define an emitter. Technically, plants emit C02 when they die...but they also re-absorb it as they grow. Technically, the soil releases C02 when it's...messed with enough, but it also absorbs lots of it through the roots of plants until it becomes saturated with it. The ocean can be a pretty major producer of C02 depending on the temperature, I know. In interglacial periods...I'd assume the biggest natural producer of C02 is typically the ocean. Volcanoes are also a major natural producer of C02 and they're more relevant in many ways than plants releasing C02 when they die because volcanoes release C02 from deep within Earth that would never have existed above Earth's surface without them.
#2. Yes and no. C02 up to a certain point is not a pollutant. It appears, however, that C02 beyond a certain amount becomes a pollutant, however, through causing undesirable harm to our species.
#3. I don't know...maybe some kind of wind pattern...ish stuff or something. That was only Antarctica that was increasing in ice, however. The Arctic circle has been decreasing in ice quantity for decades. Also...a couple years ago Antarctica's ice quantity dropped strait down like a rock off a cliff...so we'll see if it goes back up again or plummet's further. [climate.nasa.gov]
I assume it had something to do with that weather I was talking about earlier (weather deals with local, rather than global issues).
#4. I don't understand your question. I really don't understand what any of those questions have to do with whether or not humans are causing global warming, actually.
@1patriot None of that explains the steady increase in Earth's temperature since the 1970's. Solar flares are short little outbursts...not continuous events. Also, like I mentioned before, Earth's temperature has been rising since the 1970's but solar activity has not.
@MrShittles show me your source for what you call temp rise from 1970 to present day!
@MrShittles way more scientist say that man has very little if any to do with climate change and yes i am a farm and the weather is the dam climate as it affect my crops every year. the arctic has increased in ice for the last 3 years and if you want to know about the pile of garbage in the dam ocean you should golook for it because you are not reading the truth!!!!
@1patriot No...you misunderstand what climate is. Climate involves worldwide trends. Weather involves local trends. Please link me to any source of information you've found that says that arctic ice has increased for the last 3 years. That way I can verify or refute it, and check it for trustworthiness. Otherwise, I have no reason to believe you.
Also...I've recently learned the island of garbage in the middle of the Pacific ocean may be more of a metaphor than an actual island. I don't think that matters a whole lot though for our discussion. The point is...there's a lot of garbage in the ocean and it's increasing. I think this is what they're usually talking about when they refer to garbage island:
There are five massive patches of plastic in the oceans around the world. These huge concentrations of plastic debris cover large swaths of the ocean; the one between California and Hawaii is the size of the state of Texas[3] [earthday.org]
I may get around to dealing with your statement that most scientists believe humans have little to do with climate change later. I'm skipping that one for now though. That'll require a little research.
@1patriot Well...first of all, I'll just link this again, [climate.nasa.gov] and emphasize that there's a graph that shows a temperature rise that happened pretty steadily from about 1970 until now...and there are four, similar, lines of data. Those four lines of data came from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Berkeley Earth, the Japanese Meteorological Agency, and the Met Office Hadley Centre/Climate Research Center. I'm talking about the graph that's titled "A world of Agreement: Temperatures are Rising."
Here's a graph of U.S. weather over the last century:
[epa.gov]
Here's a graph of Canada's weather over the last several decades:
[canada.ca]
Here's a graph of Australia's climate since 1910
:[macrobusiness.com.au]
Here's a graph of the Arctic:
[berkeleyearth.org]
Here are some areas around China and Mongolia that were raising in temperature but may have stopped rising. We'll see if they drop noticeably further or pop back up again in a few years, I guess:
[briangunterblog.wordpress.com]
I was looking for one concise database with all temperatures from multiple nations over the course of the past several decades. I didn't find anything...but generally, if you look at a nation's temperatures since about 1970...they'll probably have been, on average, increasing.
Here's a study that says that Earth's ocean's have been increasing in temperature by a lot since about 1980 or so. That's particularly noteworthy because our oceans are major heat sinks. They'll tend to store a lot of heat before the rest of the world starts to warm up.
[insideclimatenews.org]
Finally, various organizations over the world have found 2010-2019 to have been the first, second, or third hottest decade ever recorded: [noaa.gov]
@MrShittles Dr. Tim Ball one of Canada's top scientist on climate change i think he's from Winnipeg [wattsupwiththat.com]
i have studied the climate change in depth for the last 6 years NOAA skeptical Science (cook university) NASA (when Jim Hanson was there) are cooking the information and to me if you want believe it's warmer go right ahead and be a minion it's all staged by the NWO and their are many twisting the truth and climate change is one the virus is the other they get paid in money or in sex trafficking so your eyes will be be awaken one day soon! have a great life....
@1patriot I've heard the claim that the purpose of encouraging concern about global warming is to advance socialism before. I'm just about certain they have it backwards. It's more that stronger central government programs are probably the best way to combat global warming. So...if you want one, you'll probably want the other, but that's because the government is a useful tool to use to solve your problem.
The following is my way of thinking. I see you live in Canada. In the U.S. Obama was pushing for stronger vehicle emission regulations. He wanted to alter the laws to mandate that care companies produced vehicles that produced fewer pollutants...and presumably that had higher gas mileage. This would have hurt American businesses...but it could have saved Americans some money through decreasing gas usage. It would have definitely saved Americans who wished to buy more environmentally friendly vehicles cash. It would have also pushed American companies to develop more environmentally friendly technologies that probably wouldn't develop nearly as quickly without that kind of government mandate.
Another idea I've heard proposed is a system in which everybody gets a carbon tax. Everybody puts the money from that tax into a pot. People who use more gas or whatever pay a higher tax. At the end of the year, the money in the pot is distributed back to the populace. Wealthier people tend to fly more, so they'd probably end up paying more carbon taxes, and some people have complained about that prospect being a sneaky way to re-distribute wealth from the rich to the poor. However...I'm not sure that's really true because those the amount of money poor people spend on gas will be a greater percentage of their income than for wealthier people...but regardless of whether it's wealth redistribution from the rich to the poor or not...it's one of those potential ways of dealing with the problem that would probably prolong our oil supply while encouraging the development of more environmentally friendly technologies.
In particular, people have complained about the Paris Climate accords being just a sneaky way for globalists to send off a bunch of money to third world nations from first world nations. That may or may not be true to some degree. However, one idea that a lot of environmentalists like is the idea of "cap and trade" programs in which nations that have higher C02 outputs than a certain amount would pay a sort of fine for that, and the money from that fine would reward nations producing lower than that amount of C02. Third world developing nations tend to have a lot less of C02 output than first world nations like Canada and Australia. Those developing nations don't have the money for wind or solar plants...and often not nuclear power plants. What they can most easily afford is coal. If they're being paid for producing less C02, however, that makes cleaner forms of energy than coal more cost-effective, rewarding them for building environmentally friendly technologies and infrastructures while simultaneously discouraging first world nations from having high C02 outputs.
I think it's very important that we develop cheap, clean energy as quickly as possible so that those developing first world nations don't industrialize into a massive amount of coal power...which would radically increase any global warming problems we have now.
Now...there are government groups, particularly outside the U.S., that are concerned about manmade global warming, but want a more free-market approach. I hear various more right-wing-leaning political parties outside the U.S. are like that. Within the U.S...awhile back there was a group called the Green Tea Party that was very free-market, capitalistic. They wanted to combat global warming by reducing some government restrictions or other that kept people from saving money on power by using solar panels or something...I'm not sure about the specifics. Maybe it involved limits on solar panels or something.
My personal concern about free-market solutions is that...one reason we're not using those environmentally friendly technologies now is that they tend to be more expensive than the less clean ones. I don't see much financial incentive to develop those environmentally friendly technologies unless we have gas or carbon taxes making them more cost-effective, or governments pushing them somehow.
I know there is a lot of government bureaucracy, so I'm sure the free-market-loving people concerned about global warming have their good points too.
China is rapidly industrializing. However, Chinese people are also, at least for now, a lot more used to not driving. They ride bikes or walk a lot more. Per person...they currently have much lower of a C02 output than the U.S. Whether they'll become bigger producers per person than us eventually...I don't know. It wouldn't surprise me that they would. However...in my mind those developing nations industrializing into coal is MORE of a reason to develop environmentally technologies rather than less. I want our first world nations to be the inventors of technologies that allow third world nations to industrialize into clean energy. It couldn't hurt to be a good example for those other nations by decreasing our C02 output too...but I'm mostly just interested in developing environmentally friendly technologies.
Tim Ball...the guest speaker in your article, appears to have been a professor specializing in climatology...so he has decent credentials. None of the specifics relating to why he holds those opinions are on that page though. The page itself is quite vague. The most useful thing on it I see is that one person with decent credentials asserts that the idea of manmade global warming is, in some unexplained way, inaccurate. I could look more through the links for some more concrete data...but I haven't seen anything particularly interesting upon browsing through a couple of them.
I'm interested in studies/ideas suggesting specific ways global warming models are wrong or that Earth could be warming without humanity impacting it, etc. Assertions made by one guy aren't real impressive to me.
*This is the original maker of the above comment (MrShittles). My post was cut off due to having too many words. I've typed the rest of it below
I disagree, of course, for three reasons. Reason #1 is that there isn't much worse we can do than what Mother Nature has already done. Chaos is all around us. Reason #2 is that the harm we see humanity currently doing to the environment and to itself is the result of the actions o a species that still hungers for resources for its very survival. We're kind of desperate now. Any gas taxes I pay that might protect the environment mean I have to work more, which means less time with my kids (if I had kids) and we'll always be an extremely individualistic species...at least as long as we're still fit to be called human. We're just going to care more about ourselves and our friends and families than the planet, because that's the way we are...but through technological innovation we can rid ourselves of time-consuming jobs and needs for wealth for survival...and if we're thinking on a scale of thousands of years, that technology should inevitably develop if our species does not go extinct...and we should then have more time and resources to spend on caring about the world around us.
Reason #3 rather complex and what I like to describe as "The Formula for Morality." I've thought about this a great deal more than what I'll type here...but basically I am confident that all rational species, whether they're cybernetic or hive-minded or human, will tend to veer towards their societies having a moral code of "The purpose of existence is to maximize pleasure and minimize suffering for all life." I don't know how anything else would be the case. It's just a pretty simple universal truth, so far as I can tell, that my pain and suffering feels pretty much the same to me as your pain and suffering likely feels to you. You, also, look out through your eyes and see and interact with the world around you like I do. You experience it. I don't see much of a difference between you and I, and I'm thinking the only reason I'm not as concerned about your well-being as my own is my emotional bias...but the longer a species exists in a post-scarcity state (and I don't know how any species could survive for long if they didn't achieve a post-resource scarcity state once they achieve human-level and above technology) the more they will seek meaning and purpose in their lives once the purpose of survival is alleviated, and the more time they'll have to ponder ethics, and they should find before them an infinite wellspring of meaning and purpose that all species should find quite attractive in terms of fulfilling their emotional needs: maximizing pleasure and minimizing suffering for all life.
So...all humanity needs to do us survive, and eventually most of our descendants should develop cultures that strive towards improving the universe as much as possible anyway.
Now...most of what I've been talking about so far involves a future centuries from now, if not longer. You may be asking yourself, "Why is that relevant now?"
Well...there are paths our species can take to increase our odds of long term survival. Most of what I've been discussing so far is just my reasoning for why our long term survival is important.
I have some other ideas about cultural changes that I suspect would help us survive longer as well. I may delve into some of these ideas in a later post.
Thanks for reading.
May you think up ideas that are far superior to mine. May you scoff at my ignorance, because you've become so much wiser than me...and may that provide me with some wonderfully entertaining intellectual competition.
MrShittles
Level 7
Mar 13, 2020
2
You may imagine an alternative to what nature is, but there is no alternative.
man his been on this planet for a few million years, the new world order wants to change that for the worst we are part of nature....that should not be changed in my opinion in the last few million years there have been thousands of species come and go on this planet.....man is not always the planets problem....cities in ancient times were for safety.....they aren't safe any more i am safe in the country and i do my part to keep my environment clean!
@Facci - I agree that there is no alternative to nature. I was merely describing "mother nature" a an enemy to try to encourage a the type of mentality I was advocating.
@Facci, @1patriot - cities in modern times are far safer than they were in the past. Smallpox used to be so common that it was thought to be a child's disease...something you likely got as a child and just either got over...or died from.
We're inevitably going to have to become more of a global civilization over time. Our survival depends on that. That's in regards to environmental concerns, as well as disease. There's also an element of simple empathy to that...and, also, birthrates tend to dramatically decrease once a certain standard of living is achieved. If we develop cheap clean energy and third world nations are able to industrialize enough...that could be the ending of our overpopulation problems. We'd probably have to also supplement that with a lot of automation too, though, because we'll no longer have third world cheap labor supplying us with so many goods. That extensive automation could mean corporations gain much more power, however, so we may quite plausibly have to develop stronger governments that place more controls on private corporations to prevent private corporations from essentially ruling the world.
So...an ideal, safe world, will probably involve more socialization and more globalism...so globalism and socialism are not things to fear in themselves. What we should be concerned about us just how we go about implanting that. There are just...freedoms we can afford to give up (like not being legally allowed to genetically engineer viruses in our basements) and freedoms we can't afford to give up.
I dream of, and hope for, a future society, many centuries from now, in which every citizen is born genetically engineered, and not doing so is illegal because it puts them at risk of birth defects and such. No more kids born with missing limbs or heart defects or sickle cell anemia...perhaps every child is born cured of aging...but most of those general forms of improvement for society and the world require increased government power, and increased centralized power structures...and that's not really avoidable. It's how early America changed from squabbling city states, many of them with individual currencies - making things confusing, and occasionally even warring with each other. It's how our society will improve more in the future...and there are risks, of course...but it's also the only way our world can really improve...so we should focus on doing things right, rather than merely demonizing globalism in general.
@MrShittles corporations are taking the planet over already!and if you want to see what snowden was exposing you would see what the military complex has been experimenting on all in secret and it is human and it's not pretty either why can we not evolve like we have for the last million years! and if your a globalist, we likely won't be speaking much as i don't care for totalitarianism
@1patriot I like to speak more to people i disagree with...rather than less, personally.
I agree that corporations are already taking over the world.
I'm sure there are messed up things the government is already doing.
*We are evolving like we did over the last several million years. We're essentially doing the same thing our ancestors did when they learned to use stone tools. Government helps people to survive and live happier, freer lives, just like stone tools did.
Now...depending on the lifestyle someone wants, a lot of people could probably have been much happier existing 30,000 years ago in some hunter-gatherer society. Our numbers are too great for that lifestyle to be possible for most of us, however, and it's debatable whether or not that lifestyle would be better or worse.
Really though...I'd have to know what your idea for the alternative is before knowing whether or not it's better than striving to enter into a more globalist, socialistic socialistic society over time. You haven't really been specific about that.
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