Some simple facts about the future people would rather not face

[BabylonHoruv]

I haven't been keeping up on this particular theory for a while because "the day after tomorrow"  did such an atrocious job of portraying it, but does the theory that global warming could lead to a new ice age still have much credence?  I remember it was not the majority position but was reasonably credible when I was taking climate courses in college.

[Dysfunctional Cunt]

I'll be honest here.  Global Warming is extremely confusing for the lay person.  You here one group saying there is going to be another ice age, another is talking about the "greenhouse effect" and yet others are all about the melting of the polar ice caps.

Then you bring in the "it's all a lie" group, and the "end of the world" doomsayers and you just add to the chaos of the whole thing.

It's difficult to know what to believe or if you can believe any of it because it all seems so contradictory.

[BabylonHoruv]

I'll be honest here.  Global Warming is extremely confusing for the lay person.  You here one group saying there is going to be another ice age, another is talking about the "greenhouse effect" and yet others are all about the melting of the polar ice caps.

Then you bring in the "it's all a lie" group, and the "end of the world" doomsayers and you just add to the chaos of the whole thing.

It's difficult to know what to believe or if you can believe any of it because it all seems so contradictory.

The ice age theory is based on the greenhouse effect.  The basic idea is that warming will cause a migration of moisture to the polar regions which will lead to a sudden increase in ice pack, which will change the reflective properties of the earth.  The result being increased cold to the north and south and a hot arid band around the middle.

Melting of the polar ice caps is also connected with the greenhouse effect.

Diversion of the warm stream of water that flows from the Carribean to Northern Europe by melting water coming down from the arctic would also cause a much much colder Europe.

One of the issues of Climate change is that we really don't understand what effects an increase in global temperature will have, which, for me, adds to the scariness of it all.

[Cain]

I haven't been keeping up on this particular theory for a while because "the day after tomorrow"  did such an atrocious job of portraying it, but does the theory that global warming could lead to a new ice age still have much credence?  I remember it was not the majority position but was reasonably credible when I was taking climate courses in college.

I don't believe so.  While it could temporarily cause colder weather patterns (like the European "mini-Ice Age"), over the long term it is expected that ice caps and glaciers will melt until nothing is left.

[Cramulus]

Or more simply: How do I live forever?

1. Wake up tomorrow morning.

2. Repeat unto infinity. 

[P3nT4gR4m]

There's no way to prevent this because human beings will not allow anything that might fix it. Imagine for a minute that you had a solution that involved quarrying all the mountains on earth, totally flat and using the aggregate to build up landmass in order to grow more food and trees and provide habitation for more people. This is hypothetical and plucked out my ass so I don't expect it's really plausible but for sake of argument imagine it was the answer to everything. What do you think would happen? I'll tell you - 99.9% of the population of earth would bitch and whine cause it'd spoil the view and the eagles and mountain goats would be wiped out. Fine, enjoy the view while your eyeballs are melting in your head!

Real world example: Windfarms the length and breadth of scotland are being met with resistance, every step of the way by whining fucks who'd rather their great grandchildren died in their teens than have to look outside and suffer the sight of a couple of windmills.

I've been hearing for years about terraforming the moon or mars or some asteroid and going and living there. To fuck with that. Maybe we ought to look at terraforming earth first. I'm pretty sure if we put our collective minds to it we could design and rebuild this planet to be more suitable for sustaining billions of people than something that happened over a couple of billion years of random accidents. I dunno how you'd do it, I'm not a scientist but I'm pretty sure someone does. Do they stand a chance in hell of getting it done? Hell no. You gotta preserve this stupid fucking environment. The same one that's threatening to kill us all in our sleep.

All the stuff Cain just mentioned is caused by the way the ecosystem reacts to us being here. It's because we rely on a bunch of fucking stupid trees and fucking stupid plankton to take care of the shit that we breathe out. Is that really the best way to do it? if one lousey dutch elm disease epidemic could gas us all to death then maybe it's time to look at upgrading the system. We're so short sighted that even the people trying to create a liveable biosphere are modelling it on nature. Trying to recreate the most fragile delicate life support system that ever happened by accident. That strikes me as fucking retarded. 

[Bruno]

The problem is, as a species, no matter how much we let out our pants, we will always grow to fill them, resulting in the inevitable muffin-top of doom.

[BabylonHoruv]

There's no way to prevent this because human beings will not allow anything that might fix it. Imagine for a minute that you had a solution that involved quarrying all the mountains on earth, totally flat and using the aggregate to build up landmass in order to grow more food and trees and provide habitation for more people. This is hypothetical and plucked out my ass so I don't expect it's really plausible but for sake of argument imagine it was the answer to everything. What do you think would happen? I'll tell you - 99.9% of the population of earth would bitch and whine cause it'd spoil the view and the eagles and mountain goats would be wiped out. Fine, enjoy the view while your eyeballs are melting in your head!

Real world example: Windfarms the length and breadth of scotland are being met with resistance, every step of the way by whining fucks who'd rather their great grandchildren died in their teens than have to look outside and suffer the sight of a couple of windmills.

I've been hearing for years about terraforming the moon or mars or some asteroid and going and living there. To fuck with that. Maybe we ought to look at terraforming earth first. I'm pretty sure if we put our collective minds to it we could design and rebuild this planet to be more suitable for sustaining billions of people than something that happened over a couple of billion years of random accidents. I dunno how you'd do it, I'm not a scientist but I'm pretty sure someone does. Do they stand a chance in hell of getting it done? Hell no. You gotta preserve this stupid fucking environment. The same one that's threatening to kill us all in our sleep.

All the stuff Cain just mentioned is caused by the way the ecosystem reacts to us being here. It's because we rely on a bunch of fucking stupid trees and fucking stupid plankton to take care of the shit that we breathe out. Is that really the best way to do it? if one lousey dutch elm disease epidemic could gas us all to death then maybe it's time to look at upgrading the system. We're so short sighted that even the people trying to create a liveable biosphere are modelling it on nature. Trying to recreate the most fragile delicate life support system that ever happened by accident. That strikes me as fucking retarded. 

This sort of thinking is what has got us to where we are now.

Nature is generally way better at providing a system that we can live in than we are.

[Elder Iptuous]

well, yeah. it is.
until it isn't.

[The Wizard Joseph]

Tentacalium is my favorite mutant atom.

All these "mutant atoms" exist in nature somewhere, just not for very long. They don't last very long in the lab either.

We have produced compounds and even mutant atoms that nature would never have developed without humanity.

"Mutant atoms" (by which I'm assuming you mean the superheavy artificial elements) all have ridiculously short half-lives.  They aren't in our environment.

Actually talking about the uranium, plutonium, strontium, iodine, xenon, tritium, and other "daughter products" of nuclear fuel reactions.  Some of these DO have a short half life, but an atom does not become suddenly stable just because it's had a decay event happen.  It usually turns into another atom that is also unstable.

I'm not here to say I know a lot of Blah blah blah or not.

Here is IMHO a good homework reference if you want to know what's up in Japan and learn about nuclear fuel contamination.

http://www.fairewinds.com/

There are, of course, many other sources. These folks seem most sincere and competent to me out of the many, many I've looked into since March.

[BabylonHoruv]

well, yeah. it is.
until it isn't.

well sure, but working with nature is way more efficient than trying to fight against it.  Nature has a zillion feedback systems in place that help to keep things in balance.  we've made a lot of these less effective than they used to be, but even the most barren parts of the world currently are still teeming with life in all sorts of interesting and useful ways. 

[Disco Pickle]

A little surprised no one has mentioned the jellyfish population problem yet but that shit scares me more than most of the rest of this stuff.

[Elder Iptuous]

well, yeah. it is.
until it isn't.

well sure, but working with nature is way more efficient than trying to fight against it.  Nature has a zillion feedback systems in place that help to keep things in balance.  we've made a lot of these less effective than they used to be, but even the most barren parts of the world currently are still teeming with life in all sorts of interesting and useful ways. 

agreed.
But i can grok the sentiment that Pent presents that we should tailor the world we live in to accommodate us (trying our damnedest not to screw it up in the process), rather than viewing it as some museum piece that should be an untouchable item to be preserved in its current state for all time.  that doesn't even make sense, as it is a dynamic system that doesn't have a 'correct' state.  there's just states that will accommodate us, and states that won't.  we should proactively try to keep it one that will, even if that means doing something 'unnatural' to it.

[P3nT4gR4m]

well, yeah. it is.
until it isn't.

well sure, but working with nature is way more efficient than trying to fight against it.  Nature has a zillion feedback systems in place that help to keep things in balance.  we've made a lot of these less effective than they used to be, but even the most barren parts of the world currently are still teeming with life in all sorts of interesting and useful ways. 

You honestly expect me to believe that, after umpteen thousand years of scientific research we can't make a machine that will turn co2 into oxygen? One that takes even slightly less than a couple of hundred years to build a replacement? We're relying on fucking trees? If that's the case then we are so useless we deserve to die.

So we got this insect in scotland - the midge. maybe you already heard of it, if not let me paint a picture - it's basically a really fucking tiny mosquito-ish thing that bites you and it itches like fuck. nowhere near as sore as a mosquito bite but these bastards swarm in their millions so you end up covered in the little cunts. So some wiseguy comes up with a plan to release a bunch of neutered females into the wild and somehow this was going to wipe the bastards off the face of the planet. Don't ask me how, I'm not a scientists, but this dude was and apparently it was going to work until some stupid ecologist starts bitching on about how this would impact the bat and swallow populations cos they fed on them and then the things that fed on bats and swallows would suffer and all kinds of grievous shit would go down.

That's when I realised the ecosystem was a delicately balanced crock of complete shit. The problem is all the subsystems are interdependent. If one component fails the whole fucking shooting match comes crashing down. There's no failover, there's no way to isolate shit, there's no built in redundancy. Basically it's a crock of shit. even if we did manage to turn the tide of climate change or the greenhouse effect which, lets face it, aint going to happen, some spanky new kind of fish aids or grass cancer might pop up, entirely without our assistance and cause a catastrophic chain reaction that would wipe out humanity on it's own.

Sorry but nature is piss weak or, to be more accurate, natures ability to look after US is piss weak. For one thing it doesn't give a shit about us so it has no agenda to make sure we're okay. If we were entirely reliant on nature I'm pretty sure we'd already be extinct but fortunately we have technology. Things like agriculture and medicine and shit like that but we're still largely reliant on "harnessing" or "circumventing" nature. We need to get over that shit before it destroys us, like it did with the dinosaurs and all the other things that were consigned to natures scrapheap.

[BabylonHoruv]

well, yeah. it is.
until it isn't.

well sure, but working with nature is way more efficient than trying to fight against it.  Nature has a zillion feedback systems in place that help to keep things in balance.  we've made a lot of these less effective than they used to be, but even the most barren parts of the world currently are still teeming with life in all sorts of interesting and useful ways. 

You honestly expect me to believe that, after umpteen thousand years of scientific research we can't make a machine that will turn co2 into oxygen? One that takes even slightly less than a couple of hundred years to build a replacement? We're relying on fucking trees? If that's the case then we are so useless we deserve to die.

So we got this insect in scotland - the midge. maybe you already heard of it, if not let me paint a picture - it's basically a really fucking tiny mosquito-ish thing that bites you and it itches like fuck. nowhere near as sore as a mosquito bite but these bastards swarm in their millions so you end up covered in the little cunts. So some wiseguy comes up with a plan to release a bunch of neutered females into the wild and somehow this was going to wipe the bastards off the face of the planet. Don't ask me how, I'm not a scientists, but this dude was and apparently it was going to work until some stupid ecologist starts bitching on about how this would impact the bat and swallow populations cos they fed on them and then the things that fed on bats and swallows would suffer and all kinds of grievous shit would go down.

That's when I realised the ecosystem was a delicately balanced crock of complete shit. The problem is all the subsystems are interdependent. If one component fails the whole fucking shooting match comes crashing down. There's no failover, there's no way to isolate shit, there's no built in redundancy. Basically it's a crock of shit. even if we did manage to turn the tide of climate change or the greenhouse effect which, lets face it, aint going to happen, some spanky new kind of fish aids or grass cancer might pop up, entirely without our assistance and cause a catastrophic chain reaction that would wipe out humanity on it's own.

Sorry but nature is piss weak or, to be more accurate, natures ability to look after US is piss weak. For one thing it doesn't give a shit about us so it has no agenda to make sure we're okay. If we were entirely reliant on nature I'm pretty sure we'd already be extinct but fortunately we have technology. Things like agriculture and medicine and shit like that but we're still largely reliant on "harnessing" or "circumventing" nature. We need to get over that shit before it destroys us, like it did with the dinosaurs and all the other things that were consigned to natures scrapheap.

plants are an incredibly efficient way to turn CO2 into Oxygen.  They run on solar power and they grow really quickly if you use the right sort of plants.  The advantage of trees is that they produce useable lumber and sequester carbon in their trunks rather than re-releasing it upon decomposition.  If you need quicker air maintenance something fast growing is probably going to be a much better idea.

Yes, we should (and do) tailor the ecosystem to our own needs, however part of that is preserving those complex systems that you are bitching about because those provide for our needs far more efficiently than anything that we are capable of building.