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Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)

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181–190 of 295 posts

Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s taken me half a lifetime to even learn enough to start to appreciate her wisdom.

I might not have lived enough to appreciate it, how do I do so?

If you're being serious, it's more that within time you begin to realize both your fragility and lack of power over yourself and nature. And on top of that you realize the narrow perspectives you held as a child that came for your culture, like owning things or believing you have control over them, are far less real than we think. Here she points out, look, you can say you own something, but that's a cultural concept. Long after you are dead and gone that land will be there, you will not. Long after you said you can control nature, it will consume you in the grave. You are a part of it, and for a time you can exert some power over it, but in the long term, we are just waiting to be overrun by it. What may appear inferior, could, over a long time horizon, prove superior. Trees for example have survived 100's of millions of years, and humans are a mere 10's of thousands. We are young, ambitious and naive and we are cutting them down -- the thing that provides the very air we breath.

Its a broader perspective that come with age I'm guessing.

Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying it's right or useful, but I think a lot of people (especially young people) are just really sick of climate change denial-ism. I know I am. I'm nearly half a century old and the handwriting has been on the wall my whole life. I don't want to quash discussion (interesting and informative discussion is the main reason I use HN) but, yeah, it's not a bad thing to differentiate yourself from the climate de…

Being really sick of a certain group of people just because they hold different beliefs than you is exactly what causes the division. Why are you sick of them? That's a fairly strong emotion. Do you hold resentment because they are the ones who are going to bring the apocalypse to the world? Is it annoyance from hearing too many incorrect opinions? Or something else entirely? Honest question - why are you, personally…

1. Their existence is the political justification for inaction.

2. They form an unholy alliance with other anti-empiricist groups (e.g. anti-vaxxers, young earth creationists) to undermine reality-based policies, including in education.

3. Their denialist opinions are typically held in bad faith. That is, they are held because if they were true they would confirm some pre-existing belief (e.g. that scientists are tools of a global elite cabal), not because an independent evaluation of the facts has led them there. This reinforces their hostility towards whatever group they think is lying.

4. Denialists typically engage in a perverse form of virtue signaling. The greater and more well evidence a claim is, the greater the "cred" they get for denying it. This creates a fertile field for sham experts to sell lies to members.

Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying it's right or useful, but I think a lot of people (especially young people) are just really sick of climate change denial-ism. I know I am. I'm nearly half a century old and the handwriting has been on the wall my whole life. I don't want to quash discussion (interesting and informative discussion is the main reason I use HN) but, yeah, it's not a bad thing to differentiate yourself from the climate de…

Being really sick of a certain group of people just because they hold different beliefs than you is exactly what causes the division. Why are you sick of them? That's a fairly strong emotion. Do you hold resentment because they are the ones who are going to bring the apocalypse to the world? Is it annoyance from hearing too many incorrect opinions? Or something else entirely? Honest question - why are you, personally…

the existence of santa claus is a "belief"

climate change isn't

Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)

#184
post #103
post #98

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.

At least they unlocked the creativity of whoever produced that documentary.

Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adam Curtis’ “All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace” theorized that that emerging chaotic state mixed with our recent technological emergence has lead us to believe we can “contain the chaos” of this highly sophisticated system. He quite amazingly illustrates over 3 hours that we falsely believe that earth is an unchanging systematic snow globe rather than a chaotic system. And the more we try to control it, t…

He gives the example in (maybe my favorite content of the last decade) Can’t Get You Out Of My Head about how climate scientists looking to alter weather patterns to fight the Cold War discovered, accidentally, how even the tiniest of changes cause Earth’s climate system to spiral wildly out of control.

CGYOOMH was amazing. One of his best most sprawling works.

Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)

#186
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we want to make the temperature on Mars like the one on Earth, it’s not going to take 2C and a feedback loop. It’s going to take like 75C.

This is such a dangerous perspective. Why would we want to make the temperature on Mars like the one on Earth!?! We already have 7 Billion people here to take care of and we're already witnessing mass heat, flooding, and famine deaths from climate change. People focusing on colonizing Mars when we have such an immediate problem to address TODAY are delusional and actively endangering the most vulnerable people in the…

> People focusing on colonizing Mars when we have such an immediate problem to address TODAY are delusional and actively endangering the most vulnerable people in the world.

I don't agree with the logic that we cannot focus on two things at the same time. It's like saying, "People focusing on making movies when we have such an immediate problem to address TODAY are delusional and actively endangering the most vulnerable people in the world." or "People focusing on curing fibromyalgia when we have such an immediate problem to address TODAY are delusional and actively endangering the most vulnerable people in the world."

The bottleneck to reversing climate change is not money or manpower, it is politics. We cannot force other people (especially in other countries) to do the right thing for the environment. We can, however, do our best to improve things on our side and pressure others to do so as well. And while we are putting our best effort towards that, we shouldn't stop making art, researching medicine, or even, trying to colonize mars.

Also, the research and development needed to colonize Mars may very well yield scientific discoveries that allow us to reverse climate change. And even if it doesn't, and Earth is ruined despite our best efforts here, we won't have all our eggs in one basket.

My point is, I just do not believe that researching colonization of Mars will do anything to thwart our efforts to improve the Earth. Quite the contrary, it may help those efforts.

Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)

#187

Apparently they looked something like this https://i.imgur.com/PcEixHo.png More https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&sa=1&q=Prototaxites

I wonder though how plausible this "trunk only" appearance is. What would the biological function of that trunk in the life cycle of prototaxites supposed to be? Modern fungi have heads, I think to spread spores.

Temperature control maybe? The ground is a pretty good insulator all things considered, so if the organism is producing more heat than it can shed into the soil, protrusions into the air like this may help.

Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)

#188
post #111
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather than motivating environmental conservation out of some species-level nostalgia for "the biodiversity of our youth", there's another, forward-looking motivation for it: the species that evolved at the same time we did — our "evolutionary cohort" — are the species of our own Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness. While they may not share our ecological niche, they all share a dependency on the same air mix we…

The time scale for new species adapted to a completely new climate is many millions of years, not a few thousands. What we destroy today won’t be replaced while humans as a species as we know it today even exists. It will always be many orders of magnitude easier to terraform Earth, even after we screwed it up, than trying to terraform Mars.

> The time scale for new species adapted to a completely new climate is many millions of years, not a few thousands. What we destroy today won’t be replaced while humans as a species as we know it today even exists.

When it comes to changing climate (and some degree of pollution) instead of newly evolved adaptations you get migrations or selection for particular alleles. Adjust up and back down and you can end up with diversity constraints on both ends.

Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)

#189
post #170
post #6

> The largest organism on Earth, says ABC, is still a huge fungal mat, a single organism spread over 2,200 acres of forest in eastern Oregon. Largest by area. By mass you need to go a bit south, to the faint grove of Aspens in Utah known as "Pando". ofc, Aspens are weird enough that they may be thought of more like a fungus with tree-like fruiting bodies rather than trees per se.

Another super interesting fact that never occurred to me is that trees are not a taxonomic grouping of their own. Rather a broad set of characteristics that have separately evolved into a convergent set of traits. So, it's unnecessary to say Aspens are not like other trees because they aren't actually related to other trees. The MCRA of all trees would not remotely be a tree.

MRCA = Most recent common ancestor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor

Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)

#190
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real effect of cancel culture is the chilling effect it has even on relatively anonymous conversation. Humans are social beings and the spectre that someone could be outcast for sounding like they are from the wrong clan is an innate phobia.

What I find fascinating about the current debates about cancel culture is that it ignores, on both sides, the fact that it isn't new. The only thing that has changed is the balance of power. From a US perspective - In the past, social shunning and ostracizing was used as a way to norm the culture for the predominately white, christian culture. Cancel culture was literally being run out of your town, and/or excluded f…

What on earth are you talking about. 7 years ago a woman made a joke before she jumped on a flight and landed to see it make the world news.

Are you seriously suggesting that could happen before social media?

Perhaps you're quite young and don't realise quite how different the world has become over the past 10 years.

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