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Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)
271–280 of 295 posts
Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)
#272[dead]
Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)
#273Earlier 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…
Don’t forget all the thousands of species we’ve created ourself through agriculture! (Artificial selection) That is another important source of aligned biodiversity
None. Zero.
We've created varieties, variants, races... no species. They can still interbreed.
Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)
#274[dead]
Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)
#275I 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…
I really like this comment & it has a lot going for it. At the same time I think it's also worth pointing out that earth has likely never had as diverse an ecosystem as it has this millennium. The tree of life has become incredibly wide & complex. The naturalist tendency doesn't have to be as static as portrayed here. Nature itself is such a dynamic & changing system death & population booms chasing each other around…
> earth has likely never had as diverse an ecosystem as it has this millennium.
[citation needed]
I suspect it was considerably more diverse pre-humans. This millennium (i.e. 1KY), no.
1000 millennia ago, 1MY ago, yes.
Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)
#276[dead]
Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)
#277Earlier 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…
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Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)
#278[dead]
Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)
#279Apparently they looked something like this https://i.imgur.com/PcEixHo.png More https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&sa=1&q=Prototaxites
Around the same era, there were giant horsetails too -- up to 30m tall! https://www.indefenseofplants.com/blog/2015/5/21/ancient-equ...
Not 'til much later, which is the point of the piece.
When prototaxites ruled, the next tallest thing was ~6cm.
Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some days I wish I could contemplate the possibility of roughly 80,000,000 deaths with such equanimity.
Right? We should consider the added worth of each life saved by slowing down the virus's spread, which allowed time to develop vaccines. Although the worldwide response was far from perfect, I'm truly thankful for the technology and measures that protected numerous people. While I value freedom and individual rights, it's challenging to compare those principles to the importance of preserving a life.
I mean, that's roughly 800,000,000 years of life lost.
"YLLs per death increased from 9.2 in the first year of the pandemic to 10.8 through the first 2 years." (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35640260/)