Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you're taking steps and not having children then?
Correct. I’m 46 years old, healthy, fertile, heterosexual and I don’t have any kids. How about you?
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Mount Everest is visible from Kathmandu for first time in living memory
71–80 of 283 posts
Re: Mount Everest is visible from Kathmandu for first time in living memory
#72This is why we need less humans on this planet. No one says that, because having as many kids as you like seems to be considered a basic human right. But imagine Earth with a stable 10% of our current population. Clean, abundant, and without the catastrophic extinction event already underway.
Whatever genes make it possible for you to say that, even if they are as strongly selected for as the ability to write, are going to go away...
Can you point to the studies which suggest that the ability to write is a strongly selected genetic ability? Because that doesn't seem right to me.
It's only been a few generations since we've had mass literacy.
Genghis Khan and Francisco Pizarro are the few two very famous people I could think of who were illiterate a few hundred years ago.
Even 100 years ago, I've read about successful businessmen who couldn't read.
Historically of course, the rich and powerful would hire scribes to do the reading and writing for them.
When I read "strongly selected" I expect something like lactase persistence, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence#Genetics , where there the genetic correlations, down even to the allele level, have been identified.
EDIT: I just remember. The Cherokee language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_language turned a completely illiterate culture into one with more per capita readers than the recently introduced English culture. That's seems like a clear indication that there's no need for evolutionary selection specifically for literacy.
Re: Mount Everest is visible from Kathmandu for first time in living memory
#73Re: Mount Everest is visible from Kathmandu for first time in living memory
#74It's amazing and wonderful how much environmental damage seems to be recovering. Air pollution is down, carbon emissions are down as much as 17%, fish and sharks are repopulating shorelines and beaches - and to think, all it took was the most severe public health crisis in 100 years, a catastrophic global recession, and an overpowering wave of human misery and death
Well, the day that humans manage to wipe themselves off the face of the planet will be a day of rejoicing for all species other than rats, raccoons, and cockroaches.
Care to explain why not for rats, raccoons and cockroaches?
Re: Mount Everest is visible from Kathmandu for first time in living memory
#75Perhaps I am being very skeptical, but I am failing to understand how three months of lockdown all the sudden eliminates decades of pollution. Something does not add uphere.
Pollution is not permanent - it has a half-life in the air/water/ground. (Assuming exponential decay, which is a decent heuristic.) "Permanent" forms of pollution are just those which have unreasonably long half-lives, like some radioactive waste in the millions of years.
So CO2, which is of course a big deal now, isn't actually permanent, but its half-life is on the order of a couple of decades (the decay model is one of the big open problems in climate modeling) - hence the talk about how even if we stop emitting today, the problem will still be around. Whereas methane, a stronger greenhouse gas, has a half-life of only around 5-10 years.
Particulates have a much shorter half life before they settle to the ground; and, because they are a local form of pollution, they have a very short half-life before being blown away and diluted. If you've been following California news, this is why the massive pollution caused by recent forest fires went away within a few days of the fires dying out. If you're in any big and polluted city, this is why air quality can vary wildly from day to day with weather conditions and economic activity, leading weather forecasts to include an air quality forecast.
Re: Mount Everest is visible from Kathmandu for first time in living memory
#76It's amazing and wonderful how much environmental damage seems to be recovering. Air pollution is down, carbon emissions are down as much as 17%, fish and sharks are repopulating shorelines and beaches - and to think, all it took was the most severe public health crisis in 100 years, a catastrophic global recession, and an overpowering wave of human misery and death
Well, the day that humans manage to wipe themselves off the face of the planet will be a day of rejoicing for all species other than rats, raccoons, and cockroaches.
It’s unlikely humans will wipe themselves off the face of the planet without taking most species with them. Cockroaches are a likely exception.
Re: Mount Everest is visible from Kathmandu for first time in living memory
#77I wonder how far back (if any) the lockdown pushed the doom clock around global climate change?
Re: Mount Everest is visible from Kathmandu for first time in living memory
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, the day that humans manage to wipe themselves off the face of the planet will be a day of rejoicing for all species other than rats, raccoons, and cockroaches.
Care to explain why not for rats, raccoons and cockroaches?
They’re hardy scavengers that benefit from human settlement and food waste.
Re: Mount Everest is visible from Kathmandu for first time in living memory
#79This is why we need less humans on this planet. No one says that, because having as many kids as you like seems to be considered a basic human right. But imagine Earth with a stable 10% of our current population. Clean, abundant, and without the catastrophic extinction event already underway.
I can definitely say that the statement 'Have as many kids as you want' is not considered a basic human right in a resource constrained place in India where a lot of discussions among educated public was the ill effects of population and the competition for scarce resources it generates. It is a privileged first world view where education, development and high standard of living led to falling birth rates. On a second level it is to do with religious ideologies like Catholicism, Mormonism and Islam where even educated people have 3+ kids many times. Also it was a norm in societies with high infant mortality rate and lack of education (Africa, India of the 50s to 80s etc.) I feel a replacement level fertility of 2 kids should be the norm personally and Govt should never provide any future assistance like UBI to people with more kids.
Any ways this assumes that the world resources (land, water, minerals, technology ) are divided fairly in the population. This is definitely not true and the people who managed to conquered distant lands have much more of this available per person. Simply compare per capita stats of Canada v Bangladesh and the answer becomes clear.
Re: Mount Everest is visible from Kathmandu for first time in living memory
#80I'm hoping this is a significantly sized piece of the puzzle in the proof against the 'us puny humans can't affect something as large as the earth's atmosphere' climate denial argument.
Since the lockdowns the horizon where I live has no brown haze smeared over, and it's not even a significantly sized city (population ~1.5 million), but the lack of haze is noticeable. The presence of the brown smear haze was actually one of the things that made real scale of the effect humanity has on the quality and content of the air that enters our lungs.