Not to be pedantic, but the planet doesn’t have that long; as the sun ages it grows hotter, so somewhere between 200 million and 1 billion years (depending on what info you read), life will become impossible (think Venus) for all but the hardiest microbes. (Still a long time though.)
I think you’re right though humans are largely biological creatures without regard to other life (even other life of the same species.) It’s a wonder things like morality and ethics ever took hold, but I’ve mentioned this stuff before and got ignored, so I’ll shut up now.
Matt_W
3340
And here comes a decision that seems to validate my reasoning:
A nice summary illustrating that insane derp isn’t limited to congressional Republicans.
Bravo. I particularly like that they put in the specific statement “This conduct, even though it may incidentally impact speech, is not speech.”
Clay
3344
Does this belong here? Probably not but… not sure where it belongs.
Timex
3346
Krauthammer has been one of the few wiling to call Trump out on his bullshit, so it’s sad to see him go. The guy led an amazing life… graduating medical school after being paralyzed, and the stuff he did to pull it off, is an amazing story.
Perfect, just enough time to finally finish my Steam backlog.
Wait, we may only have 200 million years left? Fuck, now I’m depressed.
Let’s build those spaceships and find a red dwarf eyeball planet to park on for the next trillion years!
As a side note, I don’t envy the last sentient lifeform in the universe, doomed to confront a heat death that can no longer be put off.
Timex
3349
Nah, 200M is a way shorter timeline for the earth than anything I’ve read, at least from the perspective of solar impact. He’s right though that it’s not Billion with an S though… but the high side has things lasting for potentially 1.2 billion more years.
The luminosity of the Sun will steadily increase, resulting in a rise in the solar radiation reaching the Earth. This will result in a higher rate of weathering of silicate minerals, which will cause a decrease in the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In about 600 million years from now, the level of CO2 will fall below the level needed to sustain C3 carbon fixation photosynthesis used by trees. Some plants use the C4 carbon fixation method, allowing them to persist at CO2 concentrations as low as 10 parts per million. However, the long-term trend is for plant life to die off altogether. The extinction of plants will be the demise of almost all animal life, since plants are the base of the food chain on Earth.[12]
In about one billion years, the solar luminosity will be 10% higher than at present. This will cause the atmosphere to become a “moist greenhouse”, resulting in a runaway evaporation of the oceans. As a likely consequence, plate tectonics will come to an end, and with them the entire carbon cycle.[13] Following this event, in about 2−3 billion years, the planet’s magnetic dynamo may cease, causing the magnetosphere to decay and leading to an accelerated loss of volatiles from the outer atmosphere. Four billion years from now, the increase in the Earth’s surface temperature will cause a runaway greenhouse effect, heating the surface enough to melt it. By that point, all life on the Earth will be extinct.[14][15] The most probable fate of the planet is absorption by the Sun in about 7.5 billion years, after the star has entered the red giant phase and expanded beyond the planet’s current orbit.
I skimmed through the paper. The paper itself to some degree, plus the misguided press coverage, will give creationists fodder for years to come. But I’m not going to spend too much time writing up an analysis here, buried in a QT3 political thread.
Their main (huge) mistake is in saying there are only two explanations for the patterns they find (selection, or every species having undergone a population bottleneck w/in the past 200,000 years. They missed the explanation obvious to anyone familiar with modern population genetics. In most cases, individuals within a species all share a common ancestor who lived more recently than the speciation event. Stoeckle & Thaler do say the words ‘lineage sorting’, but they miss the point - somehow thinking that there must have been a time in the last 200,000 years when all humans had identical mtDNA. Nope. You could go back to some time (which might or might not be ~200,000 years ago) and find one human female who happened to be the maternal ancestor of all (current day) living human mitochondria. Nothing remotely new here - see Cann, Stoneking and Wilson 1987. At the time “Mitochondrial Eve” lived, there would have been probably 10s of thousands of other human females, their mtDNA lineages just all died out. Go back 100,000 of the 200,000 years and you would also be able to trace all human mitochondria of that day back to a single ‘Eve’ - but she would have lived ~300,000 years before now.
Unfortunately, neither Stoeckle nor Thaler appear to be very well versed in population genetics. Stoeckle is an M.D., Thaler’s earlier work was genetics in a sense, but far removed from population genetics. It is also interesting that they’ve been peddling the same basic data for several years. The most recent post on Stoeckles’ blog is from 2014 touting a PLoS One paper of theirs and claiming a “new view of how evolution works” based on basically the identical observations as their new paper. Except back then they claimed those data prove there must be “extreme purifying selection and continuous adaptive evolution”.
Just enough time for Valve to finish the next Half-Life.
ShivaX
3353
I mean, it’s not likely to happen anytime remotely soon. But it probably will happen in the next 200k years at some point. Which on a geological scale is basically tomorrow. Of course, so is the entirety of the human species.
My point was these things happen fairly often.
I was bummed about Anthony Bourdain suicide. But losing Krauthammer is even worse. The number of conservative voices willing to stop Trump continues to dwindle rapidly. Fuck cancer.
WaPo has a lovely editorial.
FRIDAY HAS always been Charles’s day. Since long ago, before digital news, when space meant just a strip across the top of a printed page, we knew to save space on Friday’s page for Charles Krauthammer. Charles always filled the space, with just the right number of words, and the most acute words, too. Our copy editors knew to check any change with Charles, because he cared about every word. There was never much to change.
Now Charles has told us, along with all of you, his readers, to expect no more copy. After a final, months-long, unimaginably courageous battle, the columnist has been informed by his doctors that he won’t live much longer. A physician by training, Charles tells all of us, in a statement we publish today, that he accepts their verdict and will depart sadly but without regrets. He also asks us, and his friends at Fox News, not to embarrass him with flowery tributes. With difficulty, we will respect his request.
Clay
3356
Well… at any given point in time, life on Earth is simply recovering from the previous catastrophic disaster. Maybe humanity will be smart enough to determine how to avert the next one.
Too lazy to drop in the laughing puppets gif, but you get the idea :)
Placing my bets on: Humanity is the next one.
