Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013) • Hacker News Board

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

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Post by mr_toad » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 1:43 AM UTC

louison11 wrote: post #44

bena wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's something George Carlin has touched on as well. Paraphrasing a bit: We're not really trying to save the planet. The planet has been here for billions of years, it'll be here for billions of years after we're all dead and gone. The planet will be fine. The people? The people are fucked. That's what we're trying to save. We're trying to keep the planet hospitable to us.

And the animals. There is more than planet and humans. If it was just us - to some extent - I’d say “we get what we deserve.” But animals vastly outnumber humans, feel pain just like us, and do not deserve any of it. At least that’s what I find myself experiencing when I think about the future of our planet. Edit: I looked it up. Estimate is 20,000,121,091,000,000,000 or 20 billion billion animals. “Vastly” was clear…

And most of those animals are livestock, and most would die along with us.

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

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Post by 8note » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 2:03 AM UTC

beginnings wrote: post #207

mcguire wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

> 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.

Specifically this included the CPP officials who downplayed the virus, and allowed it to wreck havoc on the globe rather than taking immediate action to stomp it out

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

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Post by maxerickson » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 2:05 AM UTC

RangerScience wrote: post #192

derefr wrote: 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…

> evolutionary cohort This is a very cool idea; I haven't heard of it before, and I'm not finding much on this concept on the 'web. Anything you can point me to? :)

Large land animals only really survive in Africa, where they evolved alongside early hominids. Everywhere else they got slaughtered.

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

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Post by mlyle » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 3:23 AM UTC

tarentel wrote: post #66

finnh wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think you're going to find a citation to the original post. I don't think they were saying aspen are a type of fungi just that they act like one in some ways.

He's the original commenter. He is saying that he was reading about aspens from experts and they made the comparison that the big clonal set of aspens have a lot of properties we'd normally associate with fungi. He wants to find that original source to share but can't.

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

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Post by xenadu02 » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 4:04 AM UTC

m4jor wrote: post #23

turnsout wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed! The Aspen page on Wikipedia doesn't mention fungi at all.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/pano-one-worlds-la... >Weighing 13 million pounds, Pando is the world’s largest organism by mass (Oregon’s “humungous fungus” spans a greater distance). Quaking aspens can reproduce by disseminating seeds, but more frequently, they send up sprouts from their roots and form a mass of trees aptly known as a “clone.” and I was able to find https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti…

IMHO that stretches the definition a bit. They're clones that happen to have an interconnected root system. Does that really make them the "same" organism? Not in any useful sense of "same".

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

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Post by csomar » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 4:52 AM UTC

user3939382 wrote: post #119

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

That scenery looks like something from a Rick and Morty episode.

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

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Post by bheadmaster » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 5:45 AM UTC

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #183

bheadmaster wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Knowledge is just a belief that turned out to be true.

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

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Post by carlmr » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 6:03 AM UTC

nunobrito wrote: post #178

carlmr wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The problem this time is twofold: the rise of conspiracy theorists in the Republican Party, who refuse to even acknowledge the problem, and the stranglehold that globalist neoliberal corporations have on the economy. Well this time it's a lot worse because not using CFCs had a comparatively small impact on the world economy, with a big payoff. There is currently no realistic path to keep somewhat decent living stand…

Wood was once used to power engines, then coal, then oil and in current days electricity. The sooner you move to the next stage of evolution, the more efficient you can become and better afford to preserve natural resources. What most people forget is that pollution comes from the basic need of survival and improving life quality. So you need efficiency and balance what matters for most humans. Instead of forcing eve…

>Instead of forcing everyone to become vegan and to stop flying, how about supporting the industries that create artificial meat cheaper than the real thing and airplanes that run on electricity?

I was saying everybody turning vegan and stopping flying entirely wouldn't be enough.

Flying on electricity and lab grown meat still use a lot of energy compared to not having those.

You're actually making my point really well. Extreme measures aren't enough, so why not do less than that? Nobody wants to give up their quality of life. Especially not sufficiently to stop climate change.

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

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Post by taneq » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 6:57 AM UTC

gizmo686 wrote: post #125

yummypaint wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah and we’ve done that in a couple of hundred years. On geological time scales that’s more or less instant.

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

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Post by bheadmaster » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 7:03 AM UTC

carapace wrote: post #205

bheadmaster wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you for the honest response. It reflects your perspective in a vivid and relatable way.

I understand you in some manner - I grew up watching Captain Planet and similar eco-oriented shows that have instilled in me some feeling of "importance" of the whole subject. And seeing other people trample upon what are some of our most sacret beliefs, developed for decades, can make us sick of them.

The only criticism of those beliefs I would have is that they come from sentiment, not (only) reason - so, in theory, if instead of eco-literature, you read, say, the Bible, you would most likely have equally strong beliefs towards Christianity, and they would be supported by more-or-less same number of arguments derived from years of studying.

Unfortunately (or fortunately?), it's really hard to separate ourselves from our sentiment. I guess that the world is doomed to stay a divisive place, because humans are, in their essence, emotional creatures with reason added.