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Timeline of the Human Condition

southampton.ac.uk

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Re: Timeline of the Human Condition

#91

Post by erhk »

beachy wrote: post #59

Atmospheric CO2 has increased by almost a third since I was born. I can't imagine what my children and grandchildren will experience at this rate of destruction. "Agent Smith: Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment; but you humans do not. Instead you multiply, and multiply, until every resource is consumed. The only way for you to survive is to spread…

Yeah, and most plants and bacteria and any life that is capable really.

Adaption is not uniquely human, we are simply the first to accomplish it without speciation

Re: Timeline of the Human Condition

#92

Post by fit2rule »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #53

In an earlier discussion around early human technology and how we dismiss early human achievements, I pointed out that Australian Aborigines had advanced boats that enabled them to get to Australia 50,000 years ago. Yet, still, we see no mention of that here, and the technology achievements listed here for that period are needles and "advanced fire-making materials" (flints and special rocks). I'm not saying this tim…

The story is still being written about Australian pre-history.

The discoveries at Narwala Gabarnmang and Gobeke Tepli require a radical re-evaluaton of the spread and nature of human civilisation, in my opinion.

Re: Timeline of the Human Condition

#93

Post by lindseymysse »

DrStormyDaniels wrote: post #64
lindseymysse wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"but remember that for almost all of history, nothing happened" This seems like a anthropocentric view of the world. Planets moved immense distances, there were generation after generation of bacteria, mountains rose up and crumbled, seas were made and disappeared again. A lot happened before we showed up. A lot will happen after we're gone, also.

"This seems like an anthropocentric view of the world." - What else would you suggest? The world itself, taken on its own terms, has no history, no memory of itself, no experience of time, or change, it simply is, and in that sense, simply is not. It only has a history to us.

So, history is an illusion. Fair enough.

Re: Timeline of the Human Condition

#96

Post by robbedpeter »

lindseymysse wrote: post #93
DrStormyDaniels wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This seems like an anthropocentric view of the world." - What else would you suggest? The world itself, taken on its own terms, has no history, no memory of itself, no experience of time, or change, it simply is, and in that sense, simply is not. It only has a history to us.

So, history is an illusion. Fair enough.

History is a construct. It's a product of actual physical processes in the electrical and chemical networks of human minds resulting in the rearrangement of atoms elsewhere in the universe into patterns that self replicate, or spawn processes in other networks, using any interface available. History used the medium of vibrating air, then worked its way through different symbolic systems until we landed here, at the pinnacle of human achievement, arguing on the internet.

Humans are special because our constructs are orders of magnitude more complex than anything that came before. Opposable thumbs and large wrinkled brains and a lottery ticket combination of environmental factors allowed us to happen. We're a fundamentally different type of thing than anything that we know of that came before. It isn't an anthropomorphic conceit, it's a matter of physical evidence and computational theory. Nothing else does what human brains do. It's a little silly to dismiss it as somehow not real. It's as real as fusion producing light from the core of a sun, or pulsars blazing with energies that outshine entire galaxies.

Re: Timeline of the Human Condition

#97

Post by voz_ »

thangalin wrote: post #50

I wrote a shorter version and enlisted scientific illustrators to draw some pictures: https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf Here are the sources used to craft the book: https://impacts.to/bibliography.pdf

Thank you for sharing this. This reminded of an amazing exhibit I saw in Tokyo, at the National Museum of Nature and Science. I don't have much to add, I just wanted to thank you, it was a very enjoyable read.

Re: Timeline of the Human Condition

#99

Post by asiachick »

100s of millions of years apart but 5 mass extinctions.

* 445,000,000 mass extinction in two pulses across 1 million years, eliminating more than three-quarters of all species (Late Ordovician), linked to volcanic activity

* 375,000,000 mass extinction in a series of pulses across 20 million years, eliminating more than two-thirds of all species (Late Devonian), linked to climatic cooling

* 251,900,000 Earth’s largest mass extinction, eliminating nine tenths of all species during 61 thousand years (Permian-Triassic transition), caused by hot and acidifying volcanic CO₂ emissions

* 201,300,000 mass extinction event, eliminating more than two-thirds of all species (Triassic-Jurassic transition), linked to volcanic CO₂ equivalent to projections for CE 21ˢᵗ century anthropogenic emissions

* 66,000,000 abrupt mass extinction of non-avian dinosaurs, along with three-quarters of all species, following a 9-km wide asteroid impact at Chicxulub, Mexico (Cretaceous-Paleogene transition) → rapid diversification of flowering plants and mammals

Re: Timeline of the Human Condition

#100

Post by syntaxfree »

jabo wrote: post #10

The note at the end puts this timeline into calendar years, which is mind-blowing: > Rescaled to a calendar year, starting with the big bang at 00:00:00 on 1 January ( ), the Sun forms on 1 September ( ), the Earth on 2 September ( ), earliest signs of life appear on 13 September ( ), earliest true mammals on 26 December ( ), and humans just 2 hours before year’s end ( ). > For a year that starts with the earliest tr…

I had a beautiful poster of this as a child.
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