Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Myths about the Anthropocene

smithsonianmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 64 posts

Re: Myths about the Anthropocene

#41

Post by rob74 »

Vecr wrote: post #40
eimrine wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to have a word like Antropocrisis or Anthropoverflow which would be a collecting point for child-free arguments, because nowadays a declining of population is still considered as a negative event everywhere.

It is a negative event. I see the sign of the exponential, and it's the wrong one.

Did you take a look at all those positive exponentials in the article? They're all a byproduct of exponential population growth, so any sign that that growth might be slowing down is a positive one in my book...

Re: Myths about the Anthropocene

#42

Post by b33j0r »

heresie-dabord wrote: post #34
b33j0r wrote: post #26

Would anthropoch be better? Manflection point? Gympulse? If the problem being identified is that science is bad at PR, I agree. Science communication, I love you; please stop being a self-fulfilling prophesy. If the message is that human industrialization besides carbon emissions directly have obscured the discussion. Yes. But this article kinda… does not tell you the thesis, it gives you the evidence for us to come…

> anthropoch be better? Manflection point? Gympulse? How about the Idiocracene. ^_^

We don’t _have_ to succumb to idiocracy. Just a reminder.

Our (royal we) actions to dumb down our UIs was probably immoral in the middle-game; if we wanted anyone to not just smash money buttons, based on feelings.

I was here. I get it

Re: Myths about the Anthropocene

#43

Post by [deleted] »

kadoban wrote: post #33
Nevermark wrote: post #7

It does seem pointless to avoid naming a new era for dramatic irreversible changes that would have defined a new era if they happened millions of years ago. How many common assumptions about the Holocene are already broken? -- With much less at stake, I think it was out of touch and impractical to choose scientific terminology at odds with existing common language, when "dwarf planet" was defined as not a subcategory…

That doesn't really fix anything, because no matter what you call Pluto, it has to get demoted from the list of planet-like-things-whatever-we-call-them that school children learn. The issue is that there's hundreds of objects at least as planet-y as Pluto is, and nobody is going to remember all of those. So either we demote Pluto somehow, or we have to have some reason that it's more important than the rest. So, Plu…

[deleted]

Re: Myths about the Anthropocene

#44

Post by Vecr »

rob74 wrote: post #41
Vecr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a negative event. I see the sign of the exponential, and it's the wrong one.

Did you take a look at all those positive exponentials in the article? They're all a byproduct of exponential population growth, so any sign that that growth might be slowing down is a positive one in my book...

I know what a sigmoid curve is, but I don't want to see where it bottoms out.

Re: Myths about the Anthropocene

#45

Post by Nevermark »

kadoban wrote: post #33
Nevermark wrote: post #7

It does seem pointless to avoid naming a new era for dramatic irreversible changes that would have defined a new era if they happened millions of years ago. How many common assumptions about the Holocene are already broken? -- With much less at stake, I think it was out of touch and impractical to choose scientific terminology at odds with existing common language, when "dwarf planet" was defined as not a subcategory…

That doesn't really fix anything, because no matter what you call Pluto, it has to get demoted from the list of planet-like-things-whatever-we-call-them that school children learn. The issue is that there's hundreds of objects at least as planet-y as Pluto is, and nobody is going to remember all of those. So either we demote Pluto somehow, or we have to have some reason that it's more important than the rest. So, Plu…

I agree, distinguishing between the importance of things is helpful.

But changing “planet” to not include Pluto just created unending inconsistency.

There is nothing that screamed “not planet” about Pluto until some scientists preconceptions and emotional investment about the numbers of planets got challenged.

People now have to learn by rote that Pluto is not a planet. Because “scientists say so”, not because they are actually becoming sensitive to debris fields.

The link between orbital debris and planetary size isn’t even going to hold with future discoveries. So the new restrictive regular language-unfriendly definition isn’t even going to be stable.

Ridiculous.

Re: Myths about the Anthropocene

#46

Post by AdamN »

beloch wrote: post #18

Honestly, it is hubris to start the anthropocene in just the last human lifetime. Our species has been making an impact that will be evident in the geological record for longer than that. e.g. Geologists of some far-off future are going to notice that species that were isolated to one continent suddenly started popping up everywhere in the fossil record a few hundred years ago. Sea travel has united the continents in…

Agreed. Spain's old growth forests were denuded to build the Spanish Armada (or thereabouts) and you can go further back to catastrophic, anthropogenic, environmental shifts a few thousand years back in India, China and elsewhere in the world. Geology isn't focused on single year boundaries so maybe it's best to say that we entered the Anthropocene 6k-2k years ago (a 4k year range).

Re: Myths about the Anthropocene

#47

Post by 1oooqooq »

noduerme wrote: post #38

Suppose you want to graph negative responses to a survey over time. Let's say the business had been getting increasingly worse on all metrics over time. Grouped by day you might just see a couple huge spikes on days where there were a few negative responses. Grouped by year you'd notice that the volume of negative feedbacks was increasing. Grouped by milllenia it would be hard to notice that something had changed rad…

you will be detecting micro plastic with every single fossil for millennia to come.

Re: Myths about the Anthropocene

#48

Post by eimrine »

Vecr wrote: post #44
rob74 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you take a look at all those positive exponentials in the article? They're all a byproduct of exponential population growth, so any sign that that growth might be slowing down is a positive one in my book...

I know what a sigmoid curve is, but I don't want to see where it bottoms out.

Graphics in the article are clearly exponents and currently we can only hope they will turn into sigmoids before our death.

Re: Myths about the Anthropocene

#49

Post by Nevermark »

masklinn wrote: post #36
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The entire Pluto thing seemed like a pedantic waste of time. Or, at least grandfather it in. Now everyone still thinks of it as a planet, but we have to qualify it when talking : "Oh hey I read an interesting story about the 9th planet Pluto, ooops, sorry, I mean 'dwarf', don't crucify me".

The only waste of time is from emotionally charged reactions like yours. The IAU vote happened 18 years ago, yet you can’t let it go. The grandfathering idea makes a negative amount of sense. These are technical classifications on objective criteria.

> The IAU vote happened 18 years ago, yet you can’t let it go.

The IAU happened 18 years ago but the vast public hasn’t cottened on to the whole new “cleared orbital debris” concept tacked on to a word that already has widespread use and understanding.

Mistakes don’t become not mistakes because of 18 years. The mistake was that it’s predictable that two definitions for “planet” will still be jostling each other 50 years from now - for no good reason when distinctions could be made without attempts at universal redefinition by a minority of people who use the word for highly specialized reasons.

Instead of just coining a new phrase such as “major planets” for their brand new definition.

What are regular people supposed to say now when they want to say what planet meant which includes Mercury and Pluto? “Planetary like things?”??? It’s a completely avoidable mess.

Re: Myths about the Anthropocene

#50

Post by tgv »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #16

This seems like a reverse logic article. Here are 'myths', but really 'Not'. It isn't against naming this the Anthropocene, all of the myths are followed by reasons why they aren't myths and this is probably the Anthropocene. "From a certain point of view".

The use of the word "myth" implies that people who don't accept it are conspiracy nut jobs. But in reality it is only a semantic debate. It doesn't change reality, nor does it allow better understanding. We clearly have an impact on the planet, but it is up to whoever in the very far future to decide if it really was the start of an epoch, assuming they would still express themselves in such primitive concepts.
Post reply on HN