131–140 of 295 posts
I recently discovered that flowers didn't exist in most of the Jurassic era. Mind-blowing really.
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Electric and hydrogen fueled airplanes are progressing. There are also futuristic ideas about powering the planes with ground or space based lasers powered by solar. Zeppelins still scale really well, and ships can use sails again. I believe a lot of this stuff would have already been resolved if we had stopped propping up the fossil fuel industry by funding wars to maintain supply and allowing the industry to extern…
We need a president to declare transitioning of fossil fuels to be a national emergency and also a matter of national defense, and set the military industrial complex to work actually building a sustainable supply chain for energy and materials.
Apparently they looked something like this https://i.imgur.com/PcEixHo.png More https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&sa=1&q=Prototaxites
https://www.indefenseofplants.com/blog/2015/5/21/ancient-equ...
So, Vvardenfell from Morrowind?
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Not literally, but in style. They are clearly trees. But they exist in a large underground network of roots, and spawn trunks upwards over that large area, not unlike how many funguses do. Convergent evolution of an approach to life.
Thanks. I'm definitely a layman here, but I lived in Utah about 10 years ago and did some reading on Aspens, which is when I came across that comparison. I was hoping to find a direct citation to post here but haven't managed to do so yet. A fire (or clear cut) can take down the entire overstory of trees, but that living root system will survive & send up more "suckers" that become new trees. It's this "the real life…
What if Fungi were the key to our technological advancement? If we could make fungal computers we could become a bio-technical race like Species 8472 in Star Trek Voyager Season 3 Episode 26.
I watched a documentary that proposed eating mushrooms, and the ensuing hallucinations that happened, as the cause of our Neanderthal ancestors developing free thought and the underpinning of creativity that lead to tool development.
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> It will always be many orders of magnitude easier to terraform Earth, even after we screwed it up, than trying to terraform Mars. It's many orders of magnitude easier to afford a $100,000,000 home if you make $10,000 per year than if you only make $1 per year. But you're never going to afford that home either way.
We reversed the Chicago River 120 years ago, protected the Netherlands from flooding for centuries, blasted out the bed of the East River to make New York one of the most successful ports in history, laid at least one canal through every major ithsmus, and built dozens of reservoirs and irrigation systems into every hydrological ecosystem that touches a major population center. That's just water projects.
I had never heard that. More info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_River
Apparently they looked something like this https://i.imgur.com/PcEixHo.png More https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&sa=1&q=Prototaxites
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We have been agressively terraforming the earth into a form less accomodating of current complex life for some time now, and we show no signs of slowing. That's the whole problem
Agressively? We increased CO2 concentration by about 200 parts-per-million (a factor of about 2x), and increased the average temperature by about 1-2°C. Rain patterns are slightly different. Ocean PH levels dropped by about 0.04 . Sure, given how delicate the biosphere is, these small changes have a significant effect. However, if we look at Earth on the same scale as any other object in the solar system, the environ…
We also eat an extraordinary amount of the fish and seafood in the world from the ocean. “The global per capita consumption footprint in 2011 is estimated at 27 kg. Our estimate is higher than the 18.6 kg reported in FAO statistics for the same year, as it also takes into account the indirect use of capture fisheries production by the fishmeal sector.” “the conversion of wild-capture fish that would not be used for human consumption into fishmeal and subsequent use as aquafeed, results in an overall increase in human consumption of fish”. “31% of the world's wild fish stocks are estimated to be overfished, 58% fully exploited”.