Earth's Period of Habitability Is Nearly Over 756
xp65 writes "Scientists at this year's XXVIIth General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil agree that we do not yet know how ubiquitous or how fragile life is, but that: 'The Earth's period of habitability is nearly over on a cosmological timescale. In a half to one billion years the Sun will start to be too luminous and warm for water to exist in liquid form on Earth, leading to a runaway greenhouse effect in less than 2 billion years.' Other surprising claims from this conference: that the Sun may not be the ideal kind of star to nurture life, and that the Earth may not be the ideal size."
Dang! Things were just getting fun (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Dang! Things were just getting fun (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Dang! Things were just getting fun (Score:4, Funny)
With the Sun getting too hot, we won't need cold fusion. We will just need to shade the tropics with highly inefficient PV cells.
And the employment situation will be improved with all the post-hurricane repair workers required... Future Earth, you can thank me for this contribution to your survival by building a statue in my honor. It should be made of gilded marble and be large enough to be seen from space. You're welcome.
Re:Dang! Things were just getting fun (Score:5, Funny)
It should be made of gilded marble and be large enough to be seen from space. You're welcome.
Ok, we did that, but it melted and crumbled under the blazing heat. We live underground now. - The Future People.
Re:Dang! Things were just getting fun (Score:5, Funny)
*Not the sound of the atmosphere evaporating.
And now (Score:4, Insightful)
With only 10 billion left on the clock, maybe you'll learn to take a little time. Stop and smell the roses, while yet we have noses!
Re:Dang! Things were just getting fun (Score:5, Insightful)
You may be a troll and have hopeless grammar, but nevertheless as a "hippy treehugger" myself, I absolutely agree with you. Being a greenie and being OPPOSED to nuclear energy has always struck me as complete madness.
Save the planet, use clean nuclear energy!
Re:Dang! Things were just getting fun (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm in the same mindset as you.
Up here in Canada, the Green Party used to have a wiki for their policy that intended to foster debate. On one of their pages, they decried fission. I posted a comment (not an edit, a comment), asking, basically that if the looming problem is global warming, and the waste products of nuclear fission are manageable, how is replacing coal plants with nuclear plants a bad thing. My comment was deleted.
Kinda stunning.
There are elements of the Green movement that are irrational, all you have to say is "we must/mustn't do X because it's good/bad for the environment", I consider myself a Green, and I find this behaviour abhorrent. While GP paints with too broad a stroke, imo, the colour is just right.
Re:Dang! Things were just getting fun (Score:4, Insightful)
Man, nuclear energy is bad.
With the privatization of energy companies, nuclear energy is a disaster waiting to happen.
It's a matter of how the core-values of for-profit organisations manifest themselves in the market, which is essentially to maximize profits.
All companies attempting to maximize profits will reduce costs as much as possible. The only way a company is able to reduce their costs as much as possible when dealing with nuclear waste, is to overstep the line and then adjust their cost-cutting techniques so that it borders on that line.
Government regulation won't work, since governments core values are to maximize their own survival, and this is primarily faciliated by aligning themselves with profit-maximizing legislation for for-profit organizations.
You could argue that they don't have to walk the line, and can avoid mistakes, but considering what a wonderful service I'm getting from British Gas right now, I definitely do not want nuclear energy in their "competent" hands.
Re:Dang! Things were just getting fun (Score:5, Informative)
and we still haven't found a method to either safely store it away or make it less hazardous.
Even though it's been said 1e6 times before on /. and I'm sure someone will say it elsewhere, bullshit [wikipedia.org].
Re:Dang! Things were just getting fun (Score:5, Informative)
You realize that nuclear power is the opposite of clean energy? It creates highly dangerous/toxic waste that's dangerous for thousands
Please stop spreading this dangerous misinformation. Do you even know how much waste you're talking about? Imagine a cylinder 10mm in diameter. A 5mm slice of that cylinder will supply your energy needs for a year. The rest of the world stores the byproducts safely on site, and there's no reason we can't do the same. Future reactor designs will burn the fuel more completely resulting in less (and safer) remaining waste.
Burning coal (the only practical alternative to nuclear) releases far more radiation into the atmosphere than nuclear power ever has or will. And don't even get me started on the mercury poisoning of lakes, etc.
Re:Dang! Things were just getting fun (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you even know how much waste you're talking about? Imagine a cylinder 10mm in diameter. A 5mm slice of that cylinder will supply your energy needs for a year.
Do *you* even know how much waste *you* are talking about? The US alone has accumulated over 60,000 metric tons of nuclear waste from fission reactors. Your figure of a 5mm by 10mm cylinder per year of waste is ridiculous.
Yes, of course coal releases more radioactive material into the atmosphere. Since we have to store the nuclear waste, *none* of it ends up in the atmosphere.
Now I'm not saying coal is good, or that nuclear isn't necessarily worth it...but if you want to advocate nuclear power, then stop damaging its credibility with arguments like these.
Re:Dang! Things were just getting fun (Score:5, Interesting)
As for waste, a large coal power plant (under full load) requires about 10,000 tons of coal per day. This doesn't include the energy needed to transport the coal to the plant (via a big ass train).
And that nuclear "waste" that we've got 60,000 metric tons of? Were it legal to actually build breeder reactors, we could use it to generate more power, and be left with hardly any radioactive waste in the end.
Re:Dang! Things were just getting fun (Score:5, Informative)
The US has accumulated that much waste because it is illegal in the US to reprocess that waste into more uranium pellets. Other countries with active nuclear programs recycle their waste, drastically reducing the volume and half-life of the net waste output.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The US has accumulated that much waste because it is illegal in the US to reprocess that waste into more uranium pellets. Other countries with active nuclear programs recycle their waste, drastically reducing the volume and half-life of the net waste output.
Actually it's not. President Reagan rescinded President Carter's Presidential Order to forbid reprocessing.
The reason reprocessing isn't done in the United States is because, quite frankly, it isn't needed. We have plenty of raw uranium for the foreseeable future, an this lauded amount of Nuclear Waste (I'll just assume the parents declaration of 60,000 tons is correct) wouldn't even come close to filling a single football field (where it stacked in a square).
For going on 70 years of Nuclear Operations, a
Re:Dang! Things were just getting fun (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Dang! Things were just getting fun (Score:5, Informative)
Nuclear energy is not clean.
The main reason nuclear energy hasn't been clean is that the ones we have had up to now have by and large been optimized for one single primary concern: producing weapons-grade fissionable materials. Manufacturing energy has been a welcome by-product of that and the waste an accepted cost.
If we were to instead design nuclear plants optimized for green energy production we could make them almost arbitrarily clean. We would use efficient breeder reactors that burn up almost all their fuel, and we'd sequester any remaining waste for proper disposal rather than spew the radioactive waste into the air for all to enjoy like our coal plants are doing today.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
(...) The biggest objection to breeder reactors is that they produce or "breed" fissionable material under normal operating conditions. Ideally in a breeder reactor this material would then be used as fuel to produce more energy and less highly-radioactive waste, but objectors like to note that it could be extracted and used in weapons instead.
This is only really a problem because we have married ourselves to uranium and plutonium based reactor designs, again as a consequence of wanting to build nukes. The civilian offshoots of this technology are quite unpleasant as you say earlier. Had we had purely commercial motives from the start we would have developed thorium breeder reactors at an early point to largely avoid the whole nuclear proliferation issue.
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Nuclear Fission is the energy of right now. Problem is too many DIPSHITS are in the way of plentiful cheap energy.
With a few small localized exceptions, there have been no laws preventing building nuclear plants. We stopped building nuclear power plants because they weren't cheap. Little to do with the dipshits (ok, some lawsuits); mainly to do with the bean-counters. Coal is just cheaper.
Now, maybe if we institute a carbon tax on fossil fuels and level the playing field, nuclear power might look more attra
Re:Dang! Things were just getting fun (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Dang! Things were just getting fun (Score:5, Funny)
Yep, me too. So long, and thanks for all the fish ...
Re:Dang! Things were just getting fun (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm out of here!
Yes, long before the earthe becomes uninhabitable. I'll likley be gone before you; my life is more than half over. Half a billion years is a damned long time. Humans will be extinct long before that, evolved to become some other species. Only sixty fife million years ago the birds were dinasaurs and we were small mouselike creatures.
By the time the earth is uninhabitable, we will have terraformed Mars and Europa.
I find the speculation that "Sun may not be the ideal kind of star to nurture life, and that the Earth may not be the ideal size" ludicrous. Life is here and we've yet to find any sign of it anywhere else. It doesn't have to be "ideal", obviously it's good enough.
By the time this happens we will have reached the other stars. So you can stop worrying about it.
Re:Dang! Things were just getting fun (Score:5, Insightful)
Humans will be extinct long before that, evolved to become some other species.
Why do you say that? Species tend to evolve because the new form offers advantages/adaptions that enable them to better survive in the current environment. In the absence of this pressure there isn't much incentive to evolve. Sharks and crocodiles are two examples that come to mind -- they haven't changed much in the last hundred million years or so. You could go back to the time of the dinosaurs and they would still be recognizable.
What pressure does homo sapiens to evolve, given that our technological abilities largely shield us from the pressures of our environment?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
In our case it won't be pressures, but lack of them. If my ex-wife had been norn a hundred years earlier, she would not have survived childbirth, as she only weighed two pounds. My girlfriend's vagina is so tight that there's no way she could give birth naturally, but she's a mother, having given birth by C-section.
We are at the point of self-selecting, and we are evolving to be taller. There is no environmental reason for that. In just six thousand years we have evolved to take pleasure in a cat's purr. Ev
Re:Dang! Things were just getting fun (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Dang! Things were just getting fun (Score:5, Funny)
That will all change after she goes through puberty.
Re:Dang! Things were just getting fun (Score:5, Funny)
What pressure does homo sapiens to evolve, given that our technological abilities largely shield us from the pressures of our environment?
Our technology itself. Hopefully. If we haven't figured out cybernetic immortality in a half a billion years, I'll be... well, dead, but disappointed.
Re:Dang! Things were just getting fun (Score:4, Funny)
>By the time the earth is uninhabitable, we will have terraformed Mars and Europa.
I don't think so somehow. I'd give us all 100 years tops:
* 2030 - Major/Vast global wars over resources
* 2035 - All the infrastructure that we take for granted today will be but a dream.... referred to as the golden years. Mad Max 1.
* 2045 - Mad Max 2 (lets not talk about Mad Max 3) lifestyle. Nomadic, barbaric and feudal fiefdoms circled around the last few remaining energy resources.
* 2100 - humans loose ability to read/write
* 2200 - I, for one, welcome out xyz overlords...
Its already too late as no effort is being made to find alternative resources... one days we'll just wake up with, "ZMG!!11oneone... no fuel!"
Humanity as a whole is less interesting in scientific endeavour and natural selection is no longer at work as we actively encourage our stupid/lazy/selfish behaviour via socialism and x-factor (pop star type show).
Re:Dang! Things were just getting fun (Score:5, Insightful)
* 2100 - humans loose ability to read/write
Mod +5 Ironic
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Just when we were about to figure out free energy!
G(T,p) = U + pV â' TS
A(T,V) = U â' TS
What else is there to figure out?
Re:Dang! Things were just getting fun (Score:5, Funny)
What else is there to figure out?
How to make unicode work on slashdot...
Re:Dang! Things were just getting fun (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been laughing my ass off about a friend telling me he bought a house in Italy. Italy! That idiot! In less than half a million years Africa will be all over Italy!
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's assuming we can build sufficient transport to offload folks faster than we breed - otherwise a large group of folks will be left to feel the heat....
I'm sure we'll develop something that can shift us around the universe - even if it's just building a generation-ship, but will it be big enough to take *everyone*?
Re:So we still have... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So we still have... (Score:4, Insightful)
If we don't try, it won't just happen.
Re:So we still have... (Score:4, Insightful)
See, we rush to take this as an inevitable conclusion, but we could still be here arguing over illiegal immigration, voting on American Idol, and crying over Soap Opera weddings.
If we don't try, it won't just happen.
Just to put some perspective, the low-end side of the date is Five hundred million or:
500,000,000
The human civilization has only been around for about 6000 years (from say,bronze age [wikipedia.org] to Today [wikipedia.org]).
This means that, when the sun starts getting unsuitable to life, civilization will have advanced for 499,994,000 years.
Somehow I think that, at that time either humanity has destroyed itself (or the planet, while playing their "nuclear energy" toys) or has matured enough to migrate to whatever other planet is suitable for life.
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Pfft, why nukes when we have stuff like the Large Hadron Collider. An elegant weapon, for a more civilized age.
Re:So we still have... (Score:5, Interesting)
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The sexagesimal (base 60) numbering system was around for more than a thousand years before the greeks. (approx 2000 BC). It is an odd system but one fully capable of supporting quadratic equations, algeba, roots, powers, multiplication, division and reciprocals.
http://it.stlawu.edu/~dmelvill/mesomath/index.html [stlawu.edu]
As a species we have gradually transitioned from hunter-gatherer societies to fixed agrarian settlements and animal husbandry around 10,000 years ago. Essentially the capability of human intellect ha
Re:So we still have... (Score:4, Informative)
They also drew pictures of wheels: http://www.shields-research.org/Graphics/Wheel/P192p1.jpg [shields-research.org]
They even made larger wheel-type objects that might have been use on carts: http://www.shields-research.org/Graphics/Wheel/P195p1.jpg [shields-research.org]
American Indians built most of their structures and tools out of wood. They used a lot of stone but most things were made out of wood. Wood objects do not last very well over time.
It's true, we don't have a lot of evidence that American Indians used the wheel, although many of them certainly knew what they were. I'll not go into the reasons people give for them not using the wheel but basically it boils down to: we don't know very much about the Indians.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So we still have... (Score:4, Funny)
I'm sure we'll develop something that can shift us around the universe - even if it's just building a generation-ship, but will it be big enough to take *everyone*?
Then it should be a lot bigger than the previous one.
According to ancient sources, it only had space for one family and one pair of each animal species (or seven pairs for clean beasts and fowl)
See Genesis 7...
Re:So we still have... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So we still have... (Score:4, Insightful)
Blowing ourselves up won't make the Earth uninhabitable. Contrary to common belief, we are just not that good, not even at being destructive.
Re:So we still have... (Score:4, Insightful)
We've invented fire and someone said:
"Surely we will burn all the tress and kill us all.
We've invented the wheel and someone said:
"Surely we will crush our toes and it will kill us all."
We've invented agriculture and someone said:
"Surely all the grain will rot, and we will kill us all"
We've invented ships and someone said:
"Surely man will anger the ocean, and it will rise up and kill us all"
We've invented forks and someone said:
"Surely, we will poke out out tongues and eyes"
We've invented the automobile and someone said:
"Surely going this fast will destroy us all/"
We've invented atomic and someone said:
"Surely we will blow ourselves up and create giant ants."
I suspect we will be fine. We will still be around in 100 million years in one form or another.
If not, they can raise me from the dead and give me a stern talking to.
This might be what Earth needs. (Score:5, Funny)
Just think--an end to war, violence, depravity, poverty, oppression. Everyone will TRULY become equal then. Who knew the sun could be so... so... progressive?
so little time left (Score:3, Funny)
I guess we should party til the last days then since we have so little left
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
No obviously we should spend the last days figuring out how to blame this on Bush. After all that's what the MSM will be doing.
Linux on the desktop (Score:5, Funny)
So Linux on the desktop will really never happen! Pity.
Repent sinners for the end is nigh (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Repent sinners for the end is nigh (Score:5, Funny)
For a second, I thought you'd made that name up, then I RTFA. His name really is Manfred Cuntz.
Man Bear Pig, I give you, Man Fred Cuntz.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There are a lot of people with embarrisingly silly names like that. For example, Michael Anthony "Mike" Hunt is a former professional American football player who played linebacker for three seasons for the Green Bay Packers, appearing in a total of 22 games. [wikipedia.org] I was looking for a Michigan Attorney General with that name, Google lists a whole lot of them.
Cuntz is probably pronounced "Koonce" rather than "cunts".
Sci-Am May 2009 (Score:5, Informative)
Ideally... (Score:5, Insightful)
Homo sapiens may not be the ideal kind of advanced life form either. Otherwise it wouldn't destroy its own habitat on a global scale, nor cause avoidable mass extinction of other species. The good news? We don't really need to start worrying about the sun quitting on us. We'll be long gone before that, and I don't mean on another planet. I mean gone in a dinosaurial kind of way...
Re:Ideally... (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean gone in a dinosaurial kind of way
We'll evolve into birds?
Re:Ideally... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not everyone has the same balance of these desires, and hence not everyone is as concerned about protecting the environment as they are about having shiny toys. They may like the taste of fishes a bit more than seeing them swim. This leads to some inevitable conflict, and the large debates, and a lot of hair pulling from the people who have strong opinions (probably because of strong desires) on each side who find it unbelievable that everyone doesn't prioritise things in the same way they do.
The attitude that we have some 'higher purpose' or that everything else is somehow more sacred than us is a strange to me. It's like people feel guilty about their own existence. I think that is has some of the same overtones of religion - that you are imperfect, you are inferior, you are sinful and therefore you should feel bad, and worship this, and promise not to do this list of things, promise to do this other list of things. The original sin becomes the carbon footprint. The objects of worship are trees and rocks and animals. You should forgo warmth and meat and convenience because they are an affront to your belief. And if you really get upset you should forget all respect for your fellow men and go and cause destruction in the name of your beliefs. Like all religions there are great benefits for many involved. And there is also the way it is used to control people, and to justify actions against fellow human beings, and often against everything you claim to stand for. The attitude of 'humans are the nastiest bunch of bastards on the planet, we should hate ourselves' is the first step of the crazy thinking towards things starting to get blown up (and peoples grandparents being exhumed). Destroy the infidel, for he does not share our beliefs as we are told to believe them.
Back to the original point though - humans are just one more example of life. Another species. Another part of the universe. We are not here for some higher purpose. We exist, like all life, simply to exist. That we are conscious of this, that we can analyse it in this way makes us one the most fascinating creatures on the planet. But we are what we are, and if we fuck it up and destroy ourselves, we will know who to blame. It would be a great shame, but you're not going to get me to start hating myself because I accept my own and others fallibility. We may be able to achieve much more, but we may not. What will be will be, so live your life because you can, simply live, that is all.
Re:Ideally... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why are we _supposed_ to care about other species?
Maybe because we _know_ we can't live without them?
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Hmm, I'm in the tough position of defending something that I believe in, but know is ultimately arbitrary at a fundamental level.
That which is natural isn't necessarily right. You, me, we all live to survive, and propagate our genes. That's what evolution has programmed us to do. It's natural to work together and protect each other from dangers, which helps us to survive. It's also natural to rape, consume resources, and destroy competitors, as long as it satisfies our programming. Whatever we do, Nature do
Ultraviolet and X rays bad? Maybe not (Score:3, Insightful)
They talk about drawrf stars being better because of the lower amount of high energy EM coming off them (as well as they're longer life). But I wonder if they've stopped to consider that perhaps high energies were required to kick start life as we know it. If the early earth had just been an ocean of soup sitting under a benign, dull, low power star radiating mostly in the IR part of the spectrum its possible that chemically nothing very exciting would have ever happened.
On a serious note (Score:5, Insightful)
If true, our existence is quite incredible. Life on earth is thought to have taken between 2 and 3 billion years to evolve to the current biosphere extant today. Obviously, that means it took the process of evolution all this time to design creatures as complex as humans, as well as the other sophisticated life on this planet.
More than likely, humans will develop technology that will allow humans (or more likely, human creations) to spread beyond this star to the broader universe beyond. Yet, had evolution been a mere billion years too slow, or had random accidents meant that intelligent life was never evolved, then this would have never happened.
Rubbish, of course it is. (Score:5, Insightful)
Since life evolved to suit the conditions, this statement is silly. The Sun and the Earth are perfect for life as it is found in the Sun/Earth system.
Re:Rubbish, of course it is. (Score:4, Informative)
...and that the Earth may not be the ideal size ...
I think your missing the point that they are making in that of course the Earth was able to develop life given it's sun and size. But that if they were to make the ideal star/planet combo that they would tweak some things to make it perfect. /. car analogy: I can get to work every day in a Yugo. But ideally I'd like to be driven in a stretch limo with strippers and an open bar. In fact, forget driving to work...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Not neccesarily. The fact that life evolved just means that conditions are good enough. Maybe our solar system/planet is the Windows of the universe; good enough to function but still crap compared to others.
Its not a problem.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Lets put it this way, by that time, technology has advanced a lot. And we probably have colonized rest of the planet system.
You can put a huge mirror slightly closer to sun than lagrange point (to compensate by gravity the idea of having huge solar sail) Then target that somewhere where extra solar radiation would be useful, outside of earth. Perhaps even, targeting small portion if to its shadow on earth, so that the darkness wouldn't come to its shadow in day light, but simply day being less bright. Anyway There are thousands of different ways of doing that thing. Only thing that could prevent us surviving this would be some other catastrophe for instance a nuclear war, that takes all the options of making such things impossible. By the time its a problem IF modern human civilization is still around then we can pretty much block it, and probably with better method than could be imagine from current technology. With modern technology we COULD make a sun screen should we pool earths resources to that project so that it would be finished within 100 years.
Possible answer to the Fermi paradox (Score:5, Interesting)
From TFA:
Maybe nobody has visited us because, from interstellar distances, Earth doesn't look like a place that could harbour life?
Would it help if I drove a Prius? (Score:5, Funny)
Joke (Score:5, Funny)
World Ends Tomorrow: Women, Minorities Hardest Hit (old journalism joke)
Move Earth (Score:3, Interesting)
Ice age? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
We don't know that we should be heading for a long-term cooling now. We could remain in an interglacial for 50,000 years (e.g. here [sciencemag.org]).
You can do something (Score:4, Interesting)
Source: PopulationConnection.org [populationconnection.org]
You can something positive about this without feeling guilty or giving up having children of your own:
Source: Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
That means if most people limit themselves to just 2 children the global population will stabilize if not slightly shrink. You can also help by telling other people these facts so when it comes time to plan their families they can make a decision that will contribute to a better world for their children.
Guess that means... (Score:3, Funny)
'The Earth's period of habitability is nearly over on a cosmological timescale...
Last call.
too little carbon dioxide will end complex life (Score:3, Informative)
Where does the CO2 go? It dissolves in the ocean and turns into carbonate rock where its pretty well locked up, unless a volcano burns it back into gas. Sea creature skeletons add to this process. 99.98% of Earth's carbon is currently locked in limestone. The rest is in the biosphere and petroleum deposits.
Fair simple global environmental engineering could reverse the process. Just burn limestone to release CO2. Thats how people make lime for cement. But do this on a gloabl scale.
P.S. The Medea Hypothesis is a pun on the Gaia Hypothesis. Porfessor Ward suggests ecology is not stable and friendly to life. But it goes bserk and causes mass extinctions now and then. Read the rest of his book.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The presentation was made in power point.
It was a large file.
Which was in the lecturer's usb drive.
He copied it to the projector's hd...
Depending on who you believe, the Earth will be inhabitable for a billion more years or so, or a couple hundred years
Re:Depending on who you believe (Score:5, Funny)
I expect this basement to stay nice and cool (read: inhabitable) so long as my parents keep paying the rent.
Re:Depending on who you believe (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Depending on who you believe (Score:5, Funny)
If I was God here's how I'd do things
The Bible would have performance targets - e.g. colonise the moon and so on. Once those were achieved I'd just change them retroactively so humans thought they had to do say the moon and mars. Basically every time anyone picked the book up it would tell them that God thinks that as a species we're a day late and a dollar short and he's sick of it. I'd also explain that the dinosaurs didn't meet their targets either and even humans should be able to deduce the consequences of that.
Oh and by the way, FORE!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I though it was the Book of Gore.
Dammit, I get all my books of the bible wrong.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Ringo, Paul, Gore, George, and Bono followed by revaluations right?
Re:Depending on who you believe (Score:4, Informative)
Oh wait, we can ignore it all! Based on the fact that it is just one of many creation/destruction myths, none with any more validity then the next....
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That's not true. There is the greased axle of the wheel of fortune.
The universe rotates around a TV studio in Hollywood?
No wonder movie stars are so vain.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Gorism
Re:Depending on who you believe (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't worry, the Earth will remain inhabitable even in the most dark of the global warming scenarios.
Just not by humans.
Re:Depending on who you believe (Score:4, Informative)
Don't worry, the Earth will remain inhabitable even in the most dark of the global warming scenarios.
Just not by humans.
What global warming scenario says the planet won't be habitable for humans? I've seen scenarios where the carrying capacity is drastically reduced (due to serious declines in agricultural output) but I've never seen one where it's eliminated entirely.
Humans have survived serious climate changes [wikipedia.org] before -- without the benefit of modern knowledge and technology. Do you really think we have the ability to do more damage to the climate than the Toba event?
Re:Sooner than that... (Score:5, Insightful)
According to christian doomsday lore, several things which need to happen have not, including the mark of the beast, the universal persecution of the christian faith, the single currency system... the anti-christ...
And even then, the rapture is supposed to occur seven years before the destruction of this world... basically under christian theology, the rapture happens, then seven years of absolute devestation occurs.
Where in the world did you get the idea that the Christian faith even hints at something near 2012?
Re:Sooner than that... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm confused... how can 2012 be attributed to Christian myth even by the most loose of interpretations?
It isn't. It's attributed to Mayan myth (and its a fundamental change in the world, not necessarily the end of the world). But you get some confused people who think that's "another sign" of the last days, and that Jesus/the Apacalypse/what have you is coming then.
Totally illogical, not to mention heretical by their own belief system, but that doesn't seem to slow them down any.
Re:Sooner than that... (Score:5, Interesting)
Religon making sense, doesn't that destroy the need for faith?
Not necessarily. An airplane's principle of flight makes sense (air pressure difference provides lift), but you still need to have faith that it your specific plane will be fine and that the pilot is good. It also doesn't prevent people from not putting their faith in airplanes, regardless of them being an incredibly safe form of travel.
I'd liken religious faith to quantum mechanics. Quantum makes sense, but not according to our normal methods of understanding. It has different rules very different from classical mechanics (secular worldviews), but taken as a whole is consistent.
Re:Sooner than that... (Score:4, Informative)
Just because you use the word "faith" to mean two different things doesn't mean those two things are the same.
No one has "faith in airplanes" (well some idiots probably do. I don't "have faith" in the plane when I fly. I see the evidence that crashes are reasonably rare and in a commercial jet require a number of things to go wrong in succession in most cases. I also see that crashes do happen and people do die. I don't "have faith" that my specific plane will be ok and have a good pilot. I expect it to since in the vast majority of cases that is true. I'm not shocked and surprised when a plane crashes though.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Most people are confused by what "faith" is. It's not as in "believe despite all evidence", it's more like your being faithful to your wife. It means being faithful to God, and worshiping him rather than Baal or money or other such trivialities.
If God has shown you that he is real, [kuro5hin.org] why would you need to take it on faith? Once you have seeen an elephant you don't have to take anybody's word that elephants exists.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sooner than that... (Score:5, Informative)
None of these are universal christian doctrines.
Luther, amongst many others, pointed to the papal system as the antichrist (literally meaning "in the stead of Christ").
Mark of the beast (on the right hand and forehead) is interpreted to symbolise a certain way of thinking and acting - indoctrination that salvation is attained through "the church" and not through Christ, with all the accompanying abuses of power. (Also keep in mind that the church organisations of today descend from that first church organisation, and although they claim to have reformed to leave behind some doctrines, they have maintained others.)
Persecution of christians under the Roman empire pales in comparison to persecution under the Roman church.
Single currency? Not sure, never heard of that one.
Rapture: I understand it's big in the US in certain circles, as it goes hand-in-hand with the aforementioned views, but it's not universal. When one investigates history and sees that many of these signs (many that you haven't even mentioned), that these people claim go hand-in-hand with the "end times", have been in effect from the days of the apostles, one realises that many christians in modern times have it incredibly good. I often ask proponents of the Rapture doctrine: what makes you better than the millions of early christians that where rounded up and fed to lions and burnt at stakes - why should you avoid persecution by being raptured, and they not?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"I'm confused... how can 2012 be attributed to Christian myth even by the most loose of interpretations?"
It's the Mormons who believe Jesus hopped over to the Americas after the crucifixion and chatted up the Maya, isn't it?
Re:Shield against cosmic rays ?? (Score:4, Informative)
Cosmic Rays are electromagnetic radiation, they have no charge.
Untrue. Cosmic rays [wikipedia.org] are mostly high energy protons.
Re:Shield against cosmic rays ?? (Score:5, Informative)
Cosmic Rays are high energy particles, not electromagnetic radiation. They're mostly protons.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Cosmic rays include many kinds of charged particles -- protons, electrons, alpha particles etc -- streaming out from the sun (and arriving from other places). Electromagnetic radiation is also known as sunlight, and is, as you said, not deflected by magnetic fields.
Re:This just in from the IPCC (Score:4, Informative)
troll, I'll take your bait. The IPCC doesn't advise paying more taxes, but using our resources better : more insulation, more energy-efficiency ... which leads to : you needing to buy less energy. see for example : http://www.naima.org/pages/about/releases/2001/ase.html [naima.org]
Re:I'm not convinced by a couple of points (Score:4, Insightful)
There could be life somewhere else... but how would it be better? It's like saying life conditions in a particular continent are better than on another continent, so life is more in danger/ is better off there
Australia vs Antarctica, you do the math.
How do we know the dna mutations occuring (which according to the articles may have influenced life, endangered it)... didnt actually foster the right mutations for life as we know it... we dont have a recipy for life, let alone ideal life.
Lets see, the kangaroo, the ostrich or the platypus seem pretty specialized, which means there were probably TONS of mutations that didn't make it. Basic Darwinism. We may not have a recipe for life, but if you throw the same ingredients together in various proportions (flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, water, egg, oil and chocolate chips) you will eventually get some damned good cookies. The recipies that don't get eaten are in danger (endangered) of being thrown out.
I'll go even further and say that supposing we had an orange dwarf which according to the article lasts 10 or 20 times more... we may never be encouraged to leave our solar system... sometimes, knowing we're doomed if we dont do anything about it is actually a motivator to save our necks by working more. So the fact that we are doomed - in a long term - will force us to find other habitable places.
This one I actually agree with, it is like lighting a long term fire under our collective asses. Judging by Humans' propensity towards procrastination, by the time it is hot enough to make us move, they may be some very tan asses.
HALF A BILLION YEARS (Score:5, Insightful)
They aren't saying we've "only" got 500,000 years they are saying that we've only got 500,000,000 years. Given that mankind in its present form have only been around for 100-50,000 years and that we've only had civilisations for around 10,000 years then even 500,000 years is a mind bogglingly staggering amount of time.
Sure we could do propulsion systems, space drives, kill ourselves directly, die from a meteor strike or new virus. What these people are saying is that in 500,000,000 years or more that the earth as it currently stands won't be a great place to live. This doesn't mean panic. It doesn't mean say "who are they to say we aren't going to have technology to fix this problem" its a piece of science that helps us understand more about our planet and solar system and the potential for life elsewhere in the universe.
Half a billion years ago was the Cambrian explosion when life really got going on this planet. So the odds on humans existing in our present form is pretty much zero given the amount of evolution that has happened in the previous 500 million years.
Clever technology is one thing, but half a billion years is another. Evolution works wonders on those sorts of timescales.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The question is how does it take for terraforming a planet?
Big Job. Takes decades.