QuoteThe world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystemsâ€, according to the first global scientific review.
More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.
Quote“The main cause of the decline is agricultural intensification,†Sánchez-Bayo said. “That means the elimination of all trees and shrubs that normally surround the fields, so there are plain, bare fields that are treated with synthetic fertilisers and pesticides.†He said the demise of insects appears to have started at the dawn of the 20th century, accelerated during the 1950s and 1960s and reached “alarming proportions†over the last two decades.
He thinks new classes of insecticides introduced in the last 20 years, including neonicotinoids and fipronil, have been particularly damaging as they are used routinely and persist in the environment: “They sterilise the soil, killing all the grubs.†This has effects even in nature reserves nearby; the 75% insect losses recorded in Germany were in protected areas.
QuoteIn the tropics, where industrial agriculture is often not yet present, the rising temperatures due to climate change are thought to be a significant factor in the decline. The species there have adapted to very stable conditions and have little ability to change, as seen in Puerto Rico.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeting-insect-numbers-threaten-collapse-of-nature
The root cause of the problem appears to be land use (industrial agriculture, intensive use of pesticides, fields stripped of trees/shrubs) working in tandem with climate change and light pollution (https://phys.org/news/2018-06-pollution-insect-decline.html).
This is looking more and more like a serious ecological problem that could work its way up the food web and affect plant/animal species that humans rely on.
Adapt or die is the stark choice faced by insects and whatever species rely on them (including us)
I think a lot of people would say "good riddance" to the bugs, not realizing how important they are as a food source for so many birds and mammals, and wouldn't care even if they did know.
Bugs might even be used as a future food source for people, as they already are in some parts of the world.
Quote from: Unbeliever on February 11, 2019, 04:32:44 PM
I think a lot of people would say "good riddance" to the bugs, not realizing how important they are as a food source for so many birds and mammals, and wouldn't care even if they did know.
Butterflies and moths are among the worst hit, so I dunno if people would cheer that. Maybe if it were mosquitoes and flies, that'd be viewed more favorably.
Interestingly, flies stand out as the least affected. Coincidentally (or maybe not coincidentally), flies are very adaptable to living among humans and their garbage. This is contrasted with stoneflies, which tend to live near water and are sensitive to water pollution and temperature changes and are used as indicator of water quality. The fact that stoneflies are declining much more precipitously than flies in general is very telling.
I'm guessing it will probably snowball as well, as other climate change effects have done.
I know quite a few optimists, but I have to be honest... I think the world is pretty much fucked at this point, or at least as we know it. We have lived an unsustainable life for awhile now, and it's going to bite us in the ass sooner rather than later. Not just environmentally... economically, politically, socially we as a species are living on borrowed time.
I feel sorry for future generations, but there is something liberating about it as well. Not much use being stressed in the face of the inevitable. I try to take care of the Earth as best I can because it's what I feel is right to do, but I don't pretend it is actually going to help anything outside my little sphere so the idea of going full vegan, spending an extra $40,000 in debt for an electric car, or whatever seems a bit silly to me. If I am going to live on borrowed time... I will do what's right, but I'm also going to enjoy myself while I can.
Don't forget honey bees and tree frogs ...
In population and industrial pollution, we probably overshot about 100 years ago.
Waste Land by T S Elliot 1922 ... but it is religious.
Quote from: Hydra009 on February 11, 2019, 06:17:00 PM
Butterflies and moths are among the worst hit,
well thats good...it'll stop the hurricanes...........get it?
Quote from: Shiranu on February 11, 2019, 08:33:53 PMI try to take care of the Earth as best I can because it's what I feel is right to do, but I don't pretend it is actually going to help anything outside my little sphere so the idea of going full vegan, spending an extra $40,000 in debt for an electric car, or whatever seems a bit silly to me.
Neither one of those would realistically help much or at all. These are large-scale problems driven in a large part by business practices and governmental regulations (or lack thereof) far above anyone here's pay grade. You can't bring a bucket of water to Valyria to quench The Doom. Not even if everyone brought a bucket.
Quote from: Hydra009 on February 11, 2019, 09:33:56 PM
Neither one of those would realistically help much or at all. These are large-scale problems driven in a large part by business practices and governmental regulations (or lack thereof) far above anyone here's pay grade. You can't bring a bucket of water to Valyria to quench The Doom. Not even if everyone brought a bucket.
True enough, and yet plenty of people give up the pleasure of meat just because they think it's saving the planet. I have no problem with abandoning meat for ethical reasons, or driving an electric because you think it's cool, but this idea that it's helping anything is just... silly to me.
As you said, it's not going to mean much in the end anyways without a complete societal and political shift that holds the true culprits responsible... so I don't intend to deny myself those pleasures just because I'm suppose to be "doing my part".
Quote from: Shiranu on February 11, 2019, 09:59:22 PM
True enough, and yet plenty of people give up the pleasure of meat just because they think it's saving the planet. I have no problem with abandoning meat for ethical reasons, or driving an electric because you think it's cool, but this idea that it's helping anything is just... silly to me.
As you said, it's not going to mean much in the end anyways without a complete societal and political shift that holds the true culprits responsible... so I don't intend to deny myself those pleasures just because I'm suppose to be "doing my part".
Just decide what is right for you. Then do that. Why do you care if anyone else notices your virtue signaling. Why be Al Gore complaining about global warming, while using his private jet?
I don't see the necessary paradigm shift happening anytime soon. I'm glad I don't have kids to inherit this clusterf*ck.
Way I see it, an ecological disaster so bad that it wipes out a greater portion of mankind, and allowing other species to thrive and regrow, would be the best outcome.
Humankind's just gone to far, no simple way about it. Overpopulation, mass depletion of all natural resources accelerated by more and more people. And no clever solutions to counter what that mass overpopulation does.
This is why I would never want kids. This is why I'm sad knowing my nephews and the generation their bring has to face this.
Insects. Land lords and ladies of the planet. We practically borrowed it from them.
When the insects go, we go. Its not like they are here for a "reason". They aren't and neither are we. But I'm pretty sure that if they disappear, we won't be long behind them. We sure need them more than they need us...
Hopefully we figure out how to digitize our brains fairly soon. The world's ecology may be fucked, but robo-humans don't have to be fucked with it! >:D
Quote from: Hijiri Byakuren on February 20, 2019, 09:44:58 PM
Hopefully we figure out how to digitize our brains fairly soon. The world's ecology may be fucked, but robo-humans don't have to be fucked with it! >:D
If you did, I would mischievously pull the plug after you uploaded yourselves ;-) No need to keep bad software.
Downloading our minds to computers would make us very dependent on energy, even more so than we already are. If everyone were in that state how could we ensure we'd have no power failures that would wipe us all out?
I've began to look at a train of thought that considers intelligence as a net "bad" in the grand scheme of things, and I have to be honest... I'm prone to agree with it.
With greater intelligence comes better problem solving, but it also leads to greater and greater problems... a constant push and pull with increasingly drastic consequences.
In Texas there is a phrase, "Too smart for your own britches", and I think that describes humanity very well... at least down the particular path of intelligence we have, consciously, chosen to cultivate.
Simplicity and internal, emotional and moral intelligence I believe would be just as useful to mankind than increasingly complex empirical and mechanical intelligence.
Machines are only as good as the mind that uses them, and yet we almost exclusively train our minds to think like machines (either scientifically or at a social level with traits like greed, ambition, status being the goal we all chase) without cultivating the moral and philosophical foundations to ensure we use those traits properly.
It isn't the smart people of the world that are the problem creators, but the unintelligent, greedy, and just plain selfish. Humanity's role on the planet could be to decrease the effects of the sun growing hotter, just as life has been doing for billions of years. At the very least we could spread Earth's biosphere out to large distances so that no single disaster could wipe it all out in one stroke.
But it's the stupid, greedy, selfish people who are in charge.
The "stupid" did not get to where they are by themselves; their empires, be it political or corporate, are predominately run at a day-to-day level by people far smarter than themselves at their given field of expertise. They vastly outnumber the greedy and power-hungry.
But without the emotional and moral intelligence to realise this and act on it, it is utterly irrelevant. This is why I said that it is just as important, if not more so, to cultivate emotional and moral intelligence alongside empirical intelligence.
You are talking about spreading our habitation, but that's exactly what I am talking about... in doing so we just create more problems. We will require yet more resources, have yet more people who will inevitably suffer under a system that values resources over individuals, and we will cause more damage to the universe around us.
When our time comes, it comes... mathematicians for over a hundred years have estimated humanity's chance of surviving past our current state is next to none... we should focus on becoming the best humans we can be rather than futility fighting a system that, when it shakes us off, won't even have the slightest idea it has done so given how insignificant we are.
We should focus on reducing suffering rather than spreading our suffering out and hoping it lasts just a little bit longer. And, if in the progress we find a way to exist longer than expected... awesome! But clinging to a hopeless desire will never end happily.
There has been a concerted campaign to dumb down the voting populace, and it's been successful to an extent no one could have predicted.
The universe, as you say, won't even notice when we're gone, since it doesn't notice that we're here now. We are the eyes and mind of the universe, such as we are, and without us the universe will again be blind and oblivious.
Quote from: Unbeliever on February 21, 2019, 02:45:26 PM
There has been a concerted campaign to dumb down the voting populace, and it's been successful to an extent no one could have predicted.
The universe, as you say, won't even notice when we're gone, since it doesn't notice that we're here now. We are the eyes and mind of the universe, such as we are, and without us the universe will again be blind and oblivious.
I promise I'm not trying to write in super-long paragraphs, just struggling to keep it short :p...
I don't think there have been too many points in history where a holistic intelligence has been promoted. The overwhelming majority of history the population has been expected to be both scientifically and philosophically dumbed down.
I would also argue that it is at the peak of human scientific intelligence that we began to do, and continue to do, the most harm to the world around us.
As for being the eyes of the universe... only if we are the only life that exists will it be blind again, which I highly doubt is the case.
I guess most people don't doubt it, but I do. I subscribe to the rare Earth hypothesis (http://btc.montana.edu/ceres/astrobiology/files/rareearth.htm), and believe there may well be no other life at all in the observable universe. I'll continue to believe that until I see evidence of life elsewhere. If we are the only life in the universe, then life is even more precious than we had already believed it to be.
Quote from: Unbeliever on February 21, 2019, 03:38:36 PM
I guess most people don't doubt it, but I do. I subscribe to the rare Earth hypothesis (http://btc.montana.edu/ceres/astrobiology/files/rareearth.htm), and believe there may well be no other life at all in the observable universe. I'll continue to believe that until I see evidence of life elsewhere. If we are the only life in the universe, then life is even more precious than we had already believed it to be.
Fair enough, but given the size of the universe... even if life is extremely, and I mean EXTREMELY, rare... the odds of us being it is still just too astronomically low to me. And that's not taking into account that planets, and planets in the habitual zones of stars, are extremely more common than we previously thought.
To each their own on that one, though, since there is no way either can prove themselves correct at this point. And likely... not at any point.
On the topic of the preciousness of life... then shouldn't we focus on improving the quality of it rather than the quantity of it? I don't think the two are mutually exclusive, of course, but at least on a thinking level (if not so much a "taking action" level) humanity is far more concerned about surviving than improving.
Nothingburgers ... not Bilderburgers? Debating space colonies that don't exist, or post-human computer bodies that don't exist?
The anti-humanist always hates the fact he/she has a body. They always want to be an NPC in someone else's VR.
Quote from: Shiranu on February 21, 2019, 06:29:32 PM
Fair enough, but given the size of the universe... even if life is extremely, and I mean EXTREMELY, rare... the odds of us being it is still just too astronomically low to me. And that's not taking into account that planets, and planets in the habitual zones of stars, are extremely more common than we previously thought.
To each their own on that one, though, since there is no way either can prove themselves correct at this point. And likely... not at any point.
On the topic of the preciousness of life... then shouldn't we focus on improving the quality of it rather than the quantity of it? I don't think the two are mutually exclusive, of course, but at least on a thinking level (if not so much a "taking action" level) humanity is far more concerned about surviving than improving.
We still don't know nearly enough about how life got started on Earth, so it's impossible to be sure whether it might exist elsewhere. We don't know just exactly how "earthlike" a planet must be to have self-reproducing molecules for natural selection to work with. I do still think SETI is worthwhile, since if we don't look we certainly won't find anything.
I think life for humans, at least, has slowly been improving, though not so much for most of the other animals on the planet. That improvement may not continue, though, since we aren't really a rational species at all - we only pretend to be rational.
QuoteI think life for humans, at least, has slowly been improving, though not so much for most of the other animals on the planet. That improvement may not continue, though, since we aren't really a rational species at all - we only pretend to be rational.
On this we completely agree, and I guess another way of wording my argument is that we should both spend as much time teaching rationality as we do scientific intellect but also prioritizing and exalting philosophical rationality as much as we do scientific intellect. My fear, for a lack of a better word, though is that intellect by it's very nature evolved to be largely about improving our own conditions with little consideration of others... that the "human" brain has become too powerful to be controlled by the social monkey brain.
While their reputation has undoubtedly decreased... the ability to be a super-star scientist still exists, our culture (or parts of it) do still value science to an extent that you can be a cultural icon as a scientist and our schools reward those who are scientifically proficient.
Being a super-star philosopher or moralist though? That is nigh on impossible. The closest you can get really is being a megachurch preacher, and I think a large part of that is we have let fringe groups take the lead on teaching morality rather than making it something we as a society value, something we teach in schools and have conversations with our friends about.
I think a large part of the reason comedians like Colbert, Stewart, Noah, Carlin, etc. are and were so successful is that, to a large extent, they are a voice for philosophical and moral expression that, as a society, we have lost and yet ultimately crave. Even historically comedy has been a major tool of expressing philosophy. But particularly for those first three it is far more political philosophy rather than moral philosophy like you got from comedians like Carlin.
Quote from: Hijiri Byakuren on February 20, 2019, 09:44:58 PM
Hopefully we figure out how to digitize our brains fairly soon. The world's ecology may be fucked, but robo-humans don't have to be fucked with it! >:D
Your solution to messing up the planet is to become robots?
Quote from: Cavebear on February 22, 2019, 08:54:51 AM
Your solution to messing up the planet is to become robots?
Yes.
Quote from: Hijiri Byakuren on February 22, 2019, 10:45:42 AM
Yes.
Well, I sure appreciate the honesty! And I wouldn't mind not dying. Is there a plan for that?
Quote from: Cavebear on February 22, 2019, 04:10:44 PM
Well, I sure appreciate the honesty! And I wouldn't mind not dying. Is there a plan for that?
You are my next Roomba. See previous post ;-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_L-ZoCvMAI
Huh, I had a post in reply to Hijiri Byakuren that didn't show up. I assume I'm at fault. But I agreed with Hijiri Byakuren in general...