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

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

#201

Post by astrange »

drewm1980 wrote: post #89
drewm1980 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the opposite of how politics work. The median voter is near retirement age; their #1 issue is they hate change and their #2 issue is they hate gas prices going up. Anything which looks like either one of these will fail.

So instead of hyping up things you're going to do, you need to hype them down. Ideally, you'd just go around saying you're doing absolutely nothing. (Also, don't raise gas prices.)

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

#202

Post by astrange »

lovecg wrote: post #132
drewm1980 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s really up to China and, increasingly, India at this point. The Western countries are not emitting much anymore so the impact here is limited.

Reducing emissions means inventing new technology; once you've invented it, you can export it to those other countries emitting more than you are.

(This is not how most people sell it, but it's true.)

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

#203

Post by astrange »

comboy wrote: post #31
tsunamifury wrote: post #2

I think it’s wild and deeply inspiring to imagine how the surface of the earth had radically different forms over billions of years. Huge landscapes of unrotted dead plants. Then massive landscapes of fungus and decomposing bacteria breaking that down into dirt. And on and on. I think it is wise to understand that earth has been through many eras and is not as homeostatic as our narrowly imagined “natural” state we s…

> unrotted dead plants That happened with trees because cellulose was new, but I don't think there would be an issue with plants which cells have been around for a long time. But maybe I'm missing something in which case I'm happy to learn.

I was looking this up yesterday and apparently there's evidence against it.

https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/lack-fungi-did-not-lea...

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

#204

Post by astrange »

tootie wrote: post #170
finnh wrote: 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.

Neither are fish; whales are more related to salmon than sharks are. (So are we.)

And yet everyone complains when you say whales are fish.

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

#205

Post by carapace »

bheadmaster wrote: post #104
carapace wrote: post #75

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…

Honest answer (and thanks for asking):

First, I want to make it clear that I don't think of "climate deniers" as a group per se like a race, creed, or nation. There's a lot of detail and nuance in the world and I want to explore that, not abrogate it.

I just want to elucidate on that a little before I get to answering your question.

You have folks like the people in the oil companies who knew about the science of the greenhouse effect and still spent lots of money casting doubt on it in public to protect their profits.

You also have people who have honest doubts and questions. I'm even one of them. I've heard that global warming and climate change might have more to do with changes in the Sun's energy output than human chemical emissions, and I'd like to talk more about that, but ooo yeah not in public, eh? You would have to be all like "but I'm not a climate denial-ist" like OP.

So, just to repeat, I'm not being tribal here. (For instance the Chinese Communist Party creeps me out, but I still give them credit for e.g. fixing the Loess Plateau, etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20537409 ) I'm not against a group, I'm sick of certain behaviors.

To answer your question "why [am I], personally, sick of [certain behaviors]?" It's simple.

When I was a kid in high school I found my parents' copy of the Next Whole Earth Catalog which was a kind of hippie how-to guide from the 70's. I have no idea what happened to the people who made and bought and read this thing. My parents didn't talk about it or anything like that. But it became, for awhile, something like my bible. I left my textbooks in my locker and carried it around instead (it's like four feet wide and weighs six or seven hundred pounds!)

In it I learned about people like Christopher Alexander, Bucky Fuller, and Bill Mollison, and I began to see, or think that I saw, a better world. A world where humans and nature were in harmony, and "no one had to get nailed to anything."

That was about thirty-five years ago.

So, from my POV, everybody has been running around enacting "Idiocracy" instead and, yeah, I'm sick of it.

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

#206

Post by 8bitsrule »

tsunamifury wrote: post #2

I think it’s wild and deeply inspiring to imagine how the surface of the earth had radically different forms over billions of years. Huge landscapes of unrotted dead plants. Then massive landscapes of fungus and decomposing bacteria breaking that down into dirt. And on and on. I think it is wise to understand that earth has been through many eras and is not as homeostatic as our narrowly imagined “natural” state we s…

And Prototaxites happpened in just the most recent 10% of the Earth's history. (-Blinking incomprehension-) A lot of time for unfathomable stuff to arise, then disappear!

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

#207

Post by beginnings »

mcguire wrote: post #163
beginnings wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Some days I wish I could contemplate the possibility of roughly 80,000,000 deaths with such equanimity.

Sounds like a big number but thats just the nature of this reality, hundreds of thousands of people die every day. The virus that we were tricked into thinking was a significant event by global media is in the same category as the flu, which has been killing 0.01 forever with no fanfare.

Covid was statistically insignificant in the grand scheme of human health. The reality is we are mostly a herd species, the group experiments show that people will conform to false information against their better judgement to not go against the group.

Its not about intelligence, there are plenty of idiots who knew covid was a scam from day one and plenty of smart people who probably still think it was real to this day despite all the evidence showing it was massively overblown.

I think that it was overblown by design, as part of a bigger agenda, rather than incompetence. And the whole death thing doesnt get me anyway, I think death is relief in most cases and should be celebrated.

We are part of something far greater than these bodies, it seems like we come here as a game to pretend we dont know anything about reality. When you die you will see we know everything, but I wonder if you will remember I told you so.

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

#208

Post by tomrod »

derefr wrote: post #82
tsunamifury wrote: post #2

I think it’s wild and deeply inspiring to imagine how the surface of the earth had radically different forms over billions of years. Huge landscapes of unrotted dead plants. Then massive landscapes of fungus and decomposing bacteria breaking that down into dirt. And on and on. I think it is wise to understand that earth has been through many eras and is not as homeostatic as our narrowly imagined “natural” state we s…

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…

> Only the species we had conserved — keeping them in the dome-cities with us — would be able to be transplanted.

And thus Toxoplasma gondii, from our ever present felines, gains awareness and rules the universe as a hivemind protozoa.

I see some potential for a movie deal here.

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

#209

Post by rektide »

jvm___ wrote: post #195
ask_b123 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"You" in a geological and time sense are almost nothing. Fill the room your in with dead-body clones of yourself, it will probably take well over a hundred. Collect all the humans on the surface of the Earth, they'd all fit inside Rohde Island (thanks XKCD). Humanity is a tiny fraction of the mass and surface area of the world. You've been alive for less than 100 years and only seen, heard, touched or felt the smalle…

Shout out to Ballard's The Drowned World, a post-ecopocalypse story where the main character undergoes a (perceived) reconnection with larger biophysics, "neuronic time.

I feel like having Atwood, Ballard & Curtis in a thread deserves some kind of commendation.

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

#210

Post by mr_toad »

drewm1980 wrote: post #89
drewm1980 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> We need a president

The US is a little under 15% of the world economy, and a little over 15% of the worlds energy use. It’s going to take a lot more than just the actions of one President to solve climate change.

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