We were there as our pre-primate ancestors. They (our ancestors) continued to live, procreate, and evolve, while the dinosaurs died out. We are their direct descendants.
Questions about evolution (and such)
- Thread starter YoYoPapaya
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We were there as our pre-primate ancestors. They (our ancestors) continued to live, procreate, and evolve, while the dinosaurs died out. We are their direct descendants.
we have only one planet, but we have had rather a lot of species - a great deal of which have had a lot more time to sort out the technological culture thing than we did - that suggests to me that the development beyond mere intelligence and tool use (plenty of animals are smart, have complex communication and use tools - even mollucs) and on to "extelligence" is vanishingly rare - I guess we'll never find out in our lifetimes though
Why must a species be social to minipulate the environment and develop technologies?
What exactly about that makes you feel so secure? Sure the resource management might go a little more smoothly, but for things like law-making, don't you agree that regional government work a lot better than large, centralised governments? Or is it that you fear the hypothetical results of a nuclear war? I doubt that a single government would do much to eliminate the risk of that or any other calamity. There'd still be criminal organizations, para-military, and I'm sure some type of revolutionary factions would rise up just because there is only a single government.
I've never seen a non-social species that was able expand it's knowledge and pass it on to others of it's species. Without building on what others have done we wouldn't have any technology at all including the use of fire.
It's not that I personally would feel more secure. But a single world government would be able to focus the resources of the whole world in order to solve some of the big problems we are having trouble with right now. We are losing the battle with our own worlds biosphere (never mind Terraforming Mars). This planet is where all our eggs are and time is running out for us to remedy that problem. If we have a major setback and have to recover, we won't have the same resources to do it with as we are using them up.
Observation seems like it could work as an alternative. That's how a leopard learns to hunt(successfully). No one said that the tech had to be very advanced. Also, our eggs have always been in one basket, and it's worked well this long, what's the need to go to Mars?
Humans are not particularly well adapted for survival without social structure, and I for one don't want to live like a grubbing animal in the wild.
Yes that's true, but until we as a species become a multi-world species we are doomed to go the way of the dinosaurs and as they say it's only a matter of time.
Realistic concerns?
We're having problems...and our entire population is in one gravity well...one big enough rock and we're all dead.
Damn good reasons to go?
Because as a species, we seem to be psychologically set up to explore, roam, branch out.
Because we're crowded down here.
Because it seems the logical next step-out into the solar system.
Because learning how to live in very hostile alien environments, long-term, is going to be a challenge...particularly how are we going to deal with skeletal erosion? And the way to figure it out, as the Russians found with Mir...is just to do it.
Because it seems like such a waste...to accept one planet alone as humanity's fate, and accept the eventual collapse and extinction that that infers...
While humanity makes me want to beat my head against things...I see our potential.
Besides...having a trans-terrestrial society could make us all fabulously wealthy in material culture.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
More specifically, we need a frontier. In the past, if someone decided that he couldn't stand civilization, he could head off for the Wild West, or Australia, or the Amazon, or several other places. There he could live by his wits in solitude, or perhaps be accepted by one of the surviving Paleolithic or Neolithic tribes and live their much simpler life, or even just live with the rugged frontiersmen in their little villages with log cabins and country stores, never bathing or going to church.
Today that's effectively impossible. The few remaining areas that are out of reach of the cities are so hostile that they would challenge a seasoned outdoorsman, much less a disgruntled office worker. (One of them even has Sarah Palin!) My point is that today no one has to put his money where his mouth is, make the decision, and live with it. So the cities are full of people who (in many cases honestly) believe that they'd be better of on the frontier, but they can't test that hypothesis, even in the abstract as a logic problem.
I've met several of those people, I'm sure you all have too.
I'm sure most of the fed-up city folk in Dickens's era spent a couple of weeks contemplating the very real possibility of relocating to Alberta and learning how to survive by trapping beavers, and before they actually bought their steamer ticket they just said, "No, that's not really what I want."
Today no one ever gets to that step in his argument with himself.
Colonies in space will give us at least some semblance of a frontier, although it will just be the "stinky guys in log cabins" kind, not the "trapping beavers" kind or the "living with the last Stone Age tribe" kind.
The cost of transporting anything, including humans, between here and Mars, much less any of the more distant planets, will make the exchange of material goods a very rare event. Fortunately culture is becoming digital as we speak, so there will be plenty of bandwidth to exchange videos, art, music, poetry... and, I suppose, tweets.
As the Earth slowly dies of the poisons, pollutants and other hazardous stuff we humans put into the environment beside killing everything that lives by our own consumption feasts. We should fix the problems here on this planet and figure out better ways to be more prudent with natural resources than we have been before going to another planet and fucking its environment up. By using the money here on Earth to improve the ecological balance that we have destroyed would be the primary goal of the human race in order to insure at least one place that they can survive without any extra equipment to protect them from radiation, minus 200 degree temps and a host of other problems they face elsewhere in the universe.
Well, keep in mind that one of the reasons we're here and the dinosaurs aren't is that we are more adaptable; our ancestors were able to survive the event that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Being completely warm blooded, having fur etc turned out to be pretty advantageous.
I don't think that's true. Fly over Canada, or South America, and what you see is mostly empty forests. (Or, nowadays, Google Earth it.) You don't need to go to Alaska to find remote wilderness.
And when you look at what brought people to the frontiers in the past, it wasn't the remoteness - it was the people and resources there. Gold miners wouldn't have gone West if not for the gold in the hills and the people to sell it to. Farmers wouldn't have come to the Midwest if not for the fertile fields and the markets.
More adaptable, maybe, but I think being small and still able to find food a more likely reason. But from my current point of view if survival means living from one grubbing meal to the next without any of the comforts of life I'm used to, I'd rather die, so please don't include me as being very adaptable.
We aren't necessarily taking about humans, are we? Have an open mind.
Are you implying that we'll learn how to fly or that we'll start living in the mud and become ambush predators? That'd be awesome. Or do you mean the kinds that weren't so lucky? What would be interesting is if something happened that caused the complete extinction of humans, another intelligent race evolved, and what they would think of the artifacts the found. Granted, if it was millilons of years in the future, there probably wouldn't be much left to find.
I was, since humans are the only known technological species we know of.
I believe I was saying if humans had to start over, meaning that we just missed being extinct. Build up again from close to losing everything. Would it be possible that a new and improved human species could evolve from the survivors? Some scientists believe humans are not evolving anymore. I think if we needed a new niche to grow into, that might force us to evolve to fill it.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Well sure, that's what attracted the throngs of people who simply built new towns and made the "frontier" a cheap copy of the cities they came from. But there were always a few men (almost invariably men) who went out into the wilderness to literally "get away from it all." They built a cabin far from the nearest settlement and trapped their own food. A few others went through whatever interviews, battles and rituals were needed to join an Indian tribe, which in western North America were still Paleolithic.
These guys proved that it could be done by someone who really wanted to do it. Thus every disgruntled office worker had a reality to contemplate. "Should I leave the city and this job behind and go live like those guys? Or will I miss the comforts of civilization so badly that I'd rather put up with its annoyances?"
Today everyone can safely fantasize about life in the wilderness and not have to do the emotional algebra to make an honest choice.
Yes, I know there is lots of virgin wilderness in Canada, but the frigid winters make it particularly difficult for someone who is not an expert outdoorsman to survive. There's nearly virgin wilderness on this side of the border in Montana, and they even have cellphone service, satellite TV and hospitals, yet very few people choose to uproot themselves and go live there because of the dire winters.
My wife has a cousin there who is trapped in her house for weeks on end because the snowdrifts almost bury the roof.
Not really. The dinosaurs did not die out only the large ones did. Some form of mammal did not die out and dinosaurs in the form of at least one type of bird did not die out. So both classes of animals survived. Saying that since some form of mammal survived the K-T event then that means that a certains species (humans) would survive a K-T type event is a bit of a reach.
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Yes really. there are no dinosaurs, or direct descendants of the dinosaurs that died out during that 'event' of some 65 MYA that are around today. They all went extinct about that same time. Some (if not most) of the birds (which were flying around in the skies back then in nearly modern form), and some (if not most) of the mammals, and some of the amphibians, and some of the reptiles, and many worms, mollusks, onychophores, etc., did not die out, and we see their direct descendants around us today.
While it is true that the survival of so many types of animals, including one species of our direct-ancestor mammal, does not 'prove' that modern humans could survive such an event today, it sure as heck is a good argument that we would survive, since we are far more adaptable to our surroundings now as humans than we were then as primitive progenitor-primates.
That sounds like a good topic of debate. I'm not convinced humans are as adaptable as you seem to think we are. But then it's hard to say not knowing what the conditions were like after the extinction event took place. However I wouldn't place any bets on humans making it.
Aw, you're such a pessimist and killjoy!
Well it's job and somebodies got to do it. However it doesn't pay very well so I can't recommend it.