Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, I think he's more seen as a pulp-y xenophobe than a genius. But could he write portentous purple prose, or what?
> xenophobe More than the people of his time?
Yes extremely more. And I like his stories.
Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost
181–190 of 305 posts
Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, I think he's more seen as a pulp-y xenophobe than a genius. But could he write portentous purple prose, or what?
"Lovecraftian" is still used as a general term for an entire genre of fiction. He was a xenophobe, but that is not what he's best known for. Similarly, Aristotle was a misogynist, but it would not be accurate to say that Aristotle is best known as a navel-gazing misogynist.
I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Lovecraft is fundamentally about confronting modernism and the inevitable decay of humanity in the faces of forces beyond our control. Central to that is the decay of the Anglo-Saxon genetic stock.
Xenophobic isn't quite the right word. Racist is closer, but even that misses the mark. Every story he writes is terrified of black voodoo savages, or toothless white hill people, or inbred decadent Boston brahmin families, or fishermen that are half-white-half-Chinese-half-fish.
Aristotle, by contrast, isn't that concerned with gender. He is happy to treat it as a topic, but he has nowhere near the same level of preoccupation.
Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is something we can do. We can enjoy what we have here and now, for as long as it lasts, for as long as we can.
In the abstract what you wrote is fine, but my impression is that "enjoy what we have here and now" means "keep polluting" to most people. I think people can maintain or even improve their own happiness while decreasing their pollution. At least this could make humanity last longer. I'm a transportation cyclist. I mostly ride to save money and improve my physical fitness. The environmental benefits seem to depend on…
I always thought about cycling to work, but that would mean more than doubling the amount of time commuting and thus complicating the family organization (basically my wife, who is also having a full-time job, would need to take care of everything, while I am polluting less).
So far I haven't found a definite solution to how, in the modern world, work at least 8-10 hours per day, possibly far from home, while having a family, and not polluting.
Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
God that is hard to read. The guy might be thought a genius but I got absolutely nothing from that passage save the penguins.
Honestly, I think he's more seen as a pulp-y xenophobe than a genius. But could he write portentous purple prose, or what?
He had an imaginative genius and a capability to create worlds but he was a bad writer plain and simple. He writes poorly but he has massive emotional and psychological force.
Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost
#185It seems like global climate has low-CO2/low-temperature and high-CO2/high-temperature clusters of attractors. And that anthropogenic CO2 emissions have pushed global climate toward high-CO2/high-temperature. But at least, it seems that there's enough of a barrier from the Venus extreme.
Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost
#186It seems the only way to combat the thawing permafrost problem is to deploy world-scale carbon capturing schemes of some sort. Here's to hoping that we can develop something like that in time.
Suddenly: Snowpiercer.
Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the Earth has been a lot warmer and colder in the past. We've had massive volcanoes going off for thousands of years, we've had iceball earth, we've had crocodiles and palm trees in the arctic. The Earth's systems always balance out over the long run. We don't stay trapped in ice ages or hot phases.
agree, but in the long long run it will lean towards hotter as the sun changes phases. eventually earth will be a scorched rock without anyone's help. you have to consider, the earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and we only have 1 billion left, but life will be wiped out much 'sooner' then that.
Why does the Earth have one billion years left?
Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the Earth has been a lot warmer and colder in the past. We've had massive volcanoes going off for thousands of years, we've had iceball earth, we've had crocodiles and palm trees in the arctic. The Earth's systems always balance out over the long run. We don't stay trapped in ice ages or hot phases.
agree, but in the long long run it will lean towards hotter as the sun changes phases. eventually earth will be a scorched rock without anyone's help. you have to consider, the earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and we only have 1 billion left, but life will be wiped out much 'sooner' then that.
> we only have 1 billion left
Not disputing, but have a source for that theory?
Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the Earth has been a lot warmer and colder in the past. We've had massive volcanoes going off for thousands of years, we've had iceball earth, we've had crocodiles and palm trees in the arctic. The Earth's systems always balance out over the long run. We don't stay trapped in ice ages or hot phases.
The difference is that civilization is a comparatively new development, and nobody really knows how that's going to fare in the face of all this. The human cost is likely to be staggering.
If nobody knows than why do you assume the cost _likely_ staggering?
Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost
#190The setting makes for a good sci-fi movie where we will thaw out an Alien.
I loved that one! He can take the form of other people but is hive-like or something so if you heat his blood the host goes nuts? Something like that anyway. Kurt Russel. The claymation was excellent: cult classic.
That's mostly from John Carpenter's The Thing, the blood reacted to heat as our protagonist's test for detecting infected hosts, not causing the host that was tied up to react, that was just the thing transmogrifying. There's also a Pournelle novel where a research team lands on a green, human inhabitable planet and a native species looks something like a monitor lizard but can engage a hyper mode that speeds up it's metabolism so it generates a lot of heat, this is to enable it to run like a cheetah with the strength of a gorilla or something like that IIRC.