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Personally, and based on my admittedly sketchy knowledge of evolution, I do not see why humans need to do anything at all. Evolution will happen, regardless. It's just a theory regarding a stochastic time-dependent thermodynamic process after all. Change the initial conditions however you like, it just keeps doing its thang!
James.
This is what I'm saying! By actively TRYING to change the environment- for what we think is better, or what we think is worse, aren't we possibly hindering the earth?
"It's not nice to fool Mother Nature"
Remember that dumb commercial????
Face it nature kills anything that threatens her, and Humans by their shear numbers are threatening nature...
The population of the world has gone crazy !!!!
When Jesus walked the earth the population was about 200 million people
1000 years later it was 310 million...
At the start of the Industrial Revolution in 1750 the population was 791 miilion
In 100 years we almost doubled that to 1.262 Billion in 1850
100 more years bring us to 1950 and 2.519 Billion more than doubled...
In a short 40 years in 1990 we more then double again to 5.263 Billion last census in 2008 gave us over 6.7 Billion people
Now I don't care how you look at things, I am pretty sure you have seen the experiments with just about any species in a closed ecosystem and the outcome of it.... Guess what??? this big blue ball we live on is a closed ecosytem... and the eventual outcome is, we all die....
told ya "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature" :)
life often finds a way, but more often than not it finds a way to die. see all the barren planets and how much our scientists pee in their pants if they find a planet that could support microbes even if it's 9 million degrees hot.
But will they have an old fashioned shave?Quote:
Originally Posted by khaos
I agree with this line of thinking, I believe that mother nature is self correcting. When we are killing the environment we are not destroying ALL life on earth (to think we have that much power my be a bit arrogant). All we are doing is destroying the environment we are able to survive in. In the grand scheme of things, the damage that is our race, is probably no more than the equivalent of a boil on mother nature's ass that can be lanced at any time.Quote:
Originally Posted by gssixgun
Eventually we or mother nature will probably wipe us out but life will find a way to press on and maybe evolve into something better.
Dinosaurs were once top of the food chain, I'm sure their methane gas emissions where similar to a herd of cows and whether their asses cause their own global warming , mother nature wiped em out, or something from the heavens came down like the finger of God. Anyway you slice it, they are all fossils now and we live on the same planet they did.
So unless we find some way to colonize and spread to other planets like the cancer that we are, my best guess is not a hopeful one for the human race over all.
I heard an author on a radio program some months ago who wrote a book on what the earth will look like after homo sapiens are gone. I don't recall the title but I googled 'after we've gone' and came up with this here.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JimmyHAD
Looks like a bunch of pictures of downtown current day Detroit!
Well, to get somewhat zen about things, evolution simply "is". It doesn't really have positive or negative goals, and it doesn't necessarily make things better. "Survival of the fittest" doesn't mean the fastest, strongest or most handsome creature, but the one that can have the most babies that live. So if you're asking if were preventing the evolution of some superior species by our existence, who knows. I think that its more likely that if we survive we might become or create a superior species to our current incarnation, but that would be a while yet. Frankly, I wouldn't be suprised if we get killed off by some type of intelligence we create, making it superior, and us just a link in its evolution. Whether or not that intelligence will be environmentally conscious, I really can't say.
The "weird" aspect of this kind of thinking arises when we try to impose our everyday value-based judgments on concepts they aren't designed for. That is, strictly speaking, it's nonsensical to talk about "damage" we are doing to ecosystems, or to the planet itself. Fact is, outside of the (limited and, especially in this case, limiting) way our brains see the world, there really is no good/bad, right/wrong, etc.
If instead the line of questioning were phrased a little differently, one could ask whether or not our present course is more or less likely than some other course to lead to our long-term survival as a species.
In that case, I'd say that our rapid cultural/technological development has made it slightly more likely that we wipe ourselves out. Without the threat of genetically engineered superbugs, we certainly lasted quite a while in our previous incarnation as hunter-gatherers. On the other hand, if you take a longer view, Og the hunter would never have gotten us safely off of the planet, providing humans with a chance to survive the inevitable cosmic impact. In that sense, technological advancement (leading to space travel) is ultimately the sole hope for ensuring life as we know it.
Hey, if we can just get roaches safely established elsewhere in the cosmos, we'll have done our part, even if we kill off a few other species along the way. ;)
Edit: Just saw the post above mine.
Well, to get somewhat zen about things, evolution simply "is". It doesn't really have positive or negative goals, and it doesn't necessarily make things better. - Pete_S
Nicely nutshelled!