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323 comments on DrumBeat: August 1, 2006

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crazypat on August 1, 2006 - 7:03pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
PARTY DOWN! WE WIN!

yep, not much to celebrate, is there?

I was brushing up on my evolution last night. It's fascinating how the in the last stages of human evolution, the successor species exterminated its still-living ancestor species.

Also, I love how we are the most successful predator of all time. WE CAN EAT ROCKS!!! Literally! And like all extremely successful species, we will be destroyed by our own success. It is the natural order of things: an organism always modifies its environment just by existing, and its excretions are autotoxic. We can dominate, but not control.

Industrial civilization is as doomed as yeast in a wine cask.

The burning question on my mind is this:
Do humans have the power to destroy ALL life on earth?
Will nuclear armageddon do it? Persistent bio-accumulating organic toxins? Radical climate changes? I am still undecided, but I'm studying up on molecular biology. I'm sure we'll manage to cause another mass extinction--but I don't think we can actually destroy all life. Prokaryotes are some damn hardy organisms.

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Agric on August 1, 2006 - 8:06pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
"Do humans have the power to destroy ALL life on earth?"

Yes, but probably with great difficulty as well as great(seemingly innate) stupidity.

Life is pretty resilient and could always re-evolve, though wasting a few million or hundreds of millions of years may be sad. I did a first pass of collapse levels a few years back:
http://theslide.blogspot.com/2006/01/levels-of-collapse-warning-may-be.html

Being humans we are more interested in our own and our economic systems survival, I have bad news: lots die and the economic systems break.

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Dragonfly41 on August 1, 2006 - 8:53pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
"Do humans have the power to destroy ALL life on earth?"

Naahhh...the cockroaches will always survive.  Heck, you can microwave those critters and they just laugh at you.

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Asebius on August 1, 2006 - 9:24pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
"Do humans have the power to destroy ALL life on earth?"

Not a chance.  There are creatures that require temperatures close to the boiling point of water in order to survive. They prefer temperatures above boiling. Some of the latest thinking is that they are very closely related to the first life forms on earth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthermophiles

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Asebius on August 1, 2006 - 9:35pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
from the wikipedia article
The most hardy hyperthermophiles thus known live on the superheated walls of deep-sea hydrothermal vents, requiring temperatures of at least 90 °C for survival.

Many hyperthermophiles are also able to withstand other environmental extremes such as high acidity or radiation levels.

Note also that they do not even depend on current energy from the sun as almost all lifeforms do. As long as those deepsea vents remain hot, they have what they need.
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