@Dave Allen,
Dave Allen wrote:
Chumly wrote:
You clearly have a very weak ability to note present and future implications, let alone a solid basis in the hard sciences.
But absolutely nothing you have presented is hard science, and some of it is outright science fiction. You are talking about something you say "will" happen - but when pressed for details say "it might be this, or perhaps this, or perhaps this, or maybe a combination".
The implications of our present situation is that there are billions of humans on the planet, and they spend a fair bit of time producing more humans. Whilst this isn't sustainable as far as I see, it certainly doesn't set a precedent for humans to vanish. We're pretty successful as far as large complex organisms go. For us to vanish or be usurped there has to be a fundamental alteration to the ecological niches we currently exploit (most of the ones on dry land) and the scenarios you provide either will not do that or are unlikely to occur.
I think we would cope a lot better, and minimise a lot of pain, if we learned to live more harmoniously with the environment. But if the seas rise and go acidic and hundreds more species perish and deserts spread there will still be pockets of human life. Wouldn't want it myself really, but I think it'll be there.
You seem to have a fair grasp of the scenario that appears likely to play out. Yet, I feel you may have missed something here.
The possibility of isolated groups of humans surviving seems plausible on first inspection, but, in reality is very unlikely to occur.
All of the scientific evidence, to this point, makes a clear case for this scenario: Our entire universe ( all known and unknown things) is relative, from the tiniest microbe on our planet to the pinnacle of evolutionary development, all things are interdependent.
It is possible to remove the element at the pinnacle of that evolution without too great an effect on the whole, the whole will produce another pinnacle, different yet fully functional.
The real problem , though, is that the pinnacle is destroying the base. Basic systems are being affected that we know little about, and likely some we know nothing about. We are even affecting the microbes in the soil.
Great faith has been placed in the adaptability of the human species ( for good enough reason) and the standard for a least the last century has been that technology will develop to solve the problems it creates.
The great fallacy of this belief lies in the inevitability that technology must be prepared to take over every function performed by an ecosystem so complex that we have only just begun to understand it's existence, let alone how it all works. Every repair technology makes, requires another multiple of repairs to mend broken connections, exponentially.
The greater likely hood is that at some point the ecosystem will begin to collapse ( may have begun to collapse) and the rate of this collapse will increase exponentially beyond the capacity of evolution or the great adaptability of man to keep up. This collapse will continue to the level where life becomes sustainable and evolution will then move forward again.
The likely hood of higher forms of life surviving this collapse is nil, due to the complexities of interdependence. Those pockets of humanity will probably occur as a part of the process but don't count on them lasting for too long. The survivors will be far less complex than we.
This may seem an absurd fiction to many, but the possibility may be greater than we know. This description is in the extreme, we have survived certain isolated collapses of ecosystems before, a case in point might be the dust bowl. But the fact remains, we know very little about the severity of our impact on these basic systems at this time. Who can state with any degree of certainty the minority or majority of our disruption.
He missed the point completely.
