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How much longer will Earth support Intelligent Life?

How much longer will Earth support Intelligent Life?

100 years
5
21%
500 years
3
13%
1,000 years
2
8%
2,000 years
1
4%
3,500 years
0
No votes
5,000 years
1
4%
7,500 years
0
No votes
10,000 years
0
No votes
More than 10,000 years
12
50%
 
Total votes : 24

Re: How much longer will Earth support Intelligent Life?

Unread postby Newfie » Sun 02 Jun 2019, 11:49:43

That is apparently true even for viruses. Sometimes they are very lethal, so lethal they risk killing off the host population. So they tend to mutate to reduce their lethality. They really don’t want to kill the host just live in it.

Humans could learn something there.
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Re: How much longer will Earth support Intelligent Life?

Unread postby dohboi » Sun 02 Jun 2019, 12:41:04

Sooo, it's not just that we're dumber than yeast...we're even dumber than viruses! :o
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Re: How much longer will Earth support Intelligent Life?

Unread postby Newfie » Sun 02 Jun 2019, 17:45:10

Pretty much.
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Re: How much longer will Earth support Intelligent Life?

Unread postby dohboi » Thu 20 Jun 2019, 01:39:15

I don't know whether bees are considered intelligent life or not, though they can accurately communicate precise locations of food sources (flowers) in pretty amazing ways.

Anyways, again, things aren't looking too good for them (again, apologies and trigger warnings for those who can't handle negative news):

Survey Sees Biggest US Honeybee Winter Die-Off Yet


https://phys.org/news/2019-06-survey-bi ... e-off.html

The annual nationwide survey by the Bee Informed Partnership found 37.7% of honeybee colonies died this past winter, nearly 9 percentage points higher than the average winter loss.

The survey of nearly 4,700 beekeepers managing more than 300,000 colonies goes back 13 years and is conducted by bee experts at the University of Maryland, Auburn University and several other colleges.

... Year-to-year bee colony losses, which include calculations for summer, were 40.7%, higher than normal, but not a record high, the survey found.

"The beekeepers are working harder than ever to manage colonies but we still lose 40-50% each year... unacceptable," Swiss bee expert Jeff Pettis, who wasn't part of the survey, said in an email...
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Re: How much longer will Earth support Intelligent Life?

Unread postby Ibon » Thu 20 Jun 2019, 08:29:06

Newfie wrote:That is apparently true even for viruses. Sometimes they are very lethal, so lethal they risk killing off the host population. So they tend to mutate to reduce their lethality. They really don’t want to kill the host just live in it.

Humans could learn something there.


The common cold virus a case in point was speculated to have started as a lethal virus and eventually through selection established itself as just a nuisance. This tendency to mutate to reduce lethality is the process that happens after they initially cause potentially massive die-offs of their host. It is the survivors that get through the bottleneck that are the results of selection of less lethal forms.

This is a good allegory for Kudzu Apes moving through the grist mill of consequences. The possible cultural evolution that can result will rest on the dead bodies of billions.......
Patiently awaiting the pathogens. Our resiliency resembles an invasive weed. We are the Kudzu Ape
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Re: How much longer will Earth support Intelligent Life?

Unread postby GHung » Thu 20 Jun 2019, 10:22:00

Ibon wrote:
Newfie wrote:That is apparently true even for viruses. Sometimes they are very lethal, so lethal they risk killing off the host population. So they tend to mutate to reduce their lethality. They really don’t want to kill the host just live in it.

Humans could learn something there.


The common cold virus a case in point was speculated to have started as a lethal virus and eventually through selection established itself as just a nuisance. This tendency to mutate to reduce lethality is the process that happens after they initially cause potentially massive die-offs of their host. It is the survivors that get through the bottleneck that are the results of selection of less lethal forms.

This is a good allegory for Kudzu Apes moving through the grist mill of consequences. The possible cultural evolution that can result will rest on the dead bodies of billions.......


Confusing evolution with adaptation. Viruses can evolve in a matter of days/weeks. Humans, with their slow reproduction cycles, evolve slowly, but their adaptations can revert to self-destructive patterns in a short period. One is a fundamental DNA change. The other is purely behavioral (or, as Ibon said, cultural). One need only look at human cultural changes over the last hundred years to know how temporary these changes are. Joseph Campbell posited that this is why humans need religion; as a foundational behavioral check.
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Re: How much longer will Earth support Intelligent Life?

Unread postby Yonnipun » Thu 20 Jun 2019, 11:05:34

Confusing evolution with adaptation. Viruses can evolve in a matter of days/weeks. Humans, with their slow reproduction cycles, evolve slowly, but their adaptations can revert to self-destructive patterns in a short period. One is a fundamental DNA change. The other is purely behavioral (or, as Ibon said, cultural). One need only look at human cultural changes over the last hundred years to know how temporary these changes are. Joseph Campbell posited that this is why humans need religion; as a foundational behavioral check.


Are you sure about that. The only thing I myself am sure about is that I am not sure about anything. I think we do not know that much about staff as we think we do. For example a rabbies is a deadly virus that kills its host eventually. It is basically like a zombie virus-you get infected then go crazy and want to bite anyone who is around you. Why then it is so marginal these days? Millions of homeless cats and dogs around the world should die left and right each day because of it but I have not heard about that. Millions of people should get infected every day and eventually die because of it but there are only 2-3 cases around the world we hear about usually in a year.
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Re: How much longer will Earth support Intelligent Life?

Unread postby diemos » Thu 20 Jun 2019, 19:37:05

Did it ever?
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Re: How much longer will Earth support Intelligent Life?

Unread postby Ibon » Thu 20 Jun 2019, 20:11:05

GHung wrote:One need only look at human cultural changes over the last hundred years to know how temporary these changes are. Joseph Campbell posited that this is why humans need religion; as a foundational behavioral check.


It may be the case that we are all freaks, an anomaly, too temporary to really contribute anything in the way of our biological or cultural evolution.

I am with Joseph Campbell, being a sentient mortal brought about religion. The existential threats that are around the corner will only reinforce the need for some spiritual basis to be nurtured in order to bring meaning to upcoming consequences. Hopefully that will be framed within the ecological reality of events so that this can embed reverence for our mother earth.

That we embrace science does not negate the need for a major spiritual renaissance. Not needed though before the consequences since it is actually the consequences themselves which will germinate a spiritual renaissance of sorts, by my estimation anyway. \
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Re: How much longer will Earth support Intelligent Life?

Unread postby GHung » Fri 21 Jun 2019, 13:21:24

Ibon wrote: .........

I am with Joseph Campbell, being a sentient mortal brought about religion. The existential threats that are around the corner will only reinforce the need for some spiritual basis to be nurtured in order to bring meaning to upcoming consequences. Hopefully that will be framed within the ecological reality of events so that this can embed reverence for our mother earth.

That we embrace science does not negate the need for a major spiritual renaissance. Not needed though before the consequences since it is actually the consequences themselves which will germinate a spiritual renaissance of sorts, by my estimation anyway. \


Greer seems to agree, and appears to be positioning himself as a prophet/teacher or guru, built on a Mother Earth based sense of what he terms "magic". Who knows? He has a large body of work that could attract many who are lost in a spiritually confusing and problematic world.

Campbell also suggested that mainstream religions are outliving their usefulness. He posited that that process began early on when "scripture" was written down and locked in time, inhibiting natural evolution of belief systems as cultures evolved. While the universal truths may remain valid, the stories that reinforce those truths (narratives) needed to adapt relative to each age's realities.

Humanity is going to need some really good stories going forward, but I have little hope these days because of the high-frequency shallow nature of our high-tech world. Short attention spans and lack of situational awareness on any meaningful level seem to preclude understanding things. It's about what is (and isn't) important to people.

Reminds me of an old guy I knew, here in Southern Appalachia, who told me about how they used to walk several miles to and from church; the talks they would have. They kept doing this, rain or shine, well after their family managed to buy an old truck. There's value in that sort of thing.
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Re: How much longer will Earth support Intelligent Life?

Unread postby Newfie » Fri 21 Jun 2019, 14:11:54

Back when what drew me to Ethical Humanism was that it fully embraced science but also embraced the cultural aspects of religion. For example l, even though we are mostly atheists and agnostics we still have various ceremonies (e.g. “naming” vs baptism) and celebrations (e.g. “winter solstice” vs Christmas.)

I think there is something very attractive in that concept, to embrace both the logical and spiritual side of our selves. Unfortunately the bright lights seemed to have winked out and the group has gone full on radical Left. Which to me is just another form of extreme religion, blind faith without rational support.

Oh well, sigh.
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Re: How much longer will Earth support Intelligent Life?

Unread postby diemos » Fri 21 Jun 2019, 14:31:07

Religion is a human universal. There's not an example of a single culture in history that didn't have a religion. I don't expect religion to be going anywhere as long as human beings are mortal, face a vast and daunting universe that is beyond their comprehension, and need a set of principles to organize their life around.

But the endless churn of religions dying out, new ones taking their place, and the current ones changing won't stop either.
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Re: How much longer will Earth support Intelligent Life?

Unread postby ozcad » Fri 21 Jun 2019, 18:30:04

As the human mind abhors a vacuum, we invented religion to explain things.
So religion is "Science Mk1".
Then we invented microscopes and telescopes. Our observations invalidated our previous religious theories one by one.
We now had "Science Mk2", an ever-expanding pool of knowledge.
We began to see religion as a software virus for meat-based computers.

But the old knowledge had the advantage of taking as little as hours to teach (or seconds at the point of a sword) and you could not be proven wrong.
The new knowledge takes several years to teach and the universe requires rigorous conformity at every step or the #$%^ing thing won't work. And you CAN be proven wrong.

It is not surprising that people are drifting away from science and back to Science Mk1, as Mk2. is hard work. And unnecessary. You don't need to know anything much so long as your doctor does know, and you have money.
If we are not careful we might elect ignorant rulers and lock in this trend.
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Re: How much longer will Earth support Intelligent Life?

Unread postby onlooker » Fri 21 Jun 2019, 19:13:26

I see the role of Religion as mainly moral. Laws tell you what you cannot do. But Religion ideally will inform one of what adherents should hold sacred and of paramount importance. A set of guiding principles.
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Re: How much longer will Earth support Intelligent Life?

Unread postby jedrider » Fri 21 Jun 2019, 20:13:10

Reply from Voyager:

"You F'king A-holes, if you want intelligent life, figure it out yourself!"

"But, send more Chuck Berry and keep the rest."
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Re: How much longer will Earth support Intelligent Life?

Unread postby dohboi » Sat 29 Jun 2019, 09:05:05

Language is generally seen as prerequisite for intelligence. But we are rapidly losing languages. Yes, like species, languages have gone extinct in the past. But again, like species, all indications are that the current rate of loss of languages is far faster than in earlier times.

https://www.lenaherzog.com/moma-silencio-talk
"this extinction is no accident. Rather, it is the outcome of a human history in which concentrated hegemonic powers required the erasure of any form of communication that precluded their understanding and, crucially, their control."

"Humanity is losing the knowledge, the variety of worldviews, and the cosmologies that indigenous communities have for centuries encoded in these languages and cultures. Let there be no doubt: This is a mass extinction,”

"if you tune out their language … you’re denying that they had a history. If you deny they had a history, you’re denying their humanity. If you deny their humanity, you can imprison them, you can kill them, you can drown them—it doesn’t matter, because they are not significant."

"in country after country, the dominant culture tries to wipe out the language"

"there’s something inherently subversive or threatening about these different languages, because they define life differently ... it’s not an accident that these languages get crushed"

"you have a cultural imperialism that seems like it’s not engineered and mindless, but has all the power of massive armies to change people, to deny any rebellion they might have, to convince them that they’re happy being dominated"

" even the Old Testament, what’s the first sentence there? “In the beginning was the Word.” But what is the second sentence? “And the Word was with God.” ... a very radical notion that before the world was the Word ... the second sentence is introducing hierarchy. It’s introducing authority, immediately. So empires have always done that, and they’ve always took specific care that they were in charge of stories."

"One of the things that was done to the slave population was to strip it of the protection of language, and strip it of any connection with Africa."

"its essential mechanism of freedom is to be able to define the language you want to use, express yourself in your own language, and state power that wants to control completely has to own language. That was the message of Orwell, of Huxley: the ultimate power requires controlling language"

"what happens when language disappears? You know, what takes its place? And it’s really a scary, solitary world when you can’t communicate "

"Rosetta Stone is a piece of granite with three scripts in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in demotic, and in Greek. What is it? ... what is the monument to? It’s essentially a monument to an extinction of languages, the extinction that is of a profound cultural nature. Because it needed translation. There were very few Egyptian priests that could understand the hieroglyphs anymore, because that was already an extinct language. So they had to be translated into also a language that was demotic, and then the language of power, which was Greek ... if we want to have some kind of record of the variousness, actually, of our human mind ... we are not monolithic. That our human creativity has all these various ways to be."

"I sometimes see this kind of blanking out by people who really would rather not hear anything of what goes on in the places where they go to bomb, where they go to conquer, or of the people that they silence. "

"if we’re not aware of it, the beauty of the language, the complexity, or if we get angry because we can’t immediately understand it, we doom ourselves to ignorance "

"We have become provincial"

" they contain an inconvenient truth. They force us to see the limits of our own culture, our own arrogance."

"we are actually wired to want to know others; as much as we are brainwashed to deny them by power structures, actually, in us, we have also a very profound communal sense. And we want to know what the world is made up of, and other voices"

" it’s a fatally boring construction, actually, the idea of melting us all into one. It’s a denial of what makes life worth living, which is alternatives, and differences, and different perceptions "

"when we’re so narrow, when we block it out. Whether we do it institutionally, we do it through our mega-cultural, massive, you know, cultural enterprises, and commercialized culture. But we become tone-deaf "

Read and listen:

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-m ... ing-about/
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Re: How much longer will Earth support Intelligent Life?

Unread postby asg70 » Sat 29 Jun 2019, 12:51:40

ozcad wrote:If we are not careful we might elect ignorant rulers


That ship has already sailed.

BOLD PREDICTIONS
-Billions are on the verge of starvation as the lockdown continues. (yoshua, 5/20/20)

HALL OF SHAME:
-Short welched on a bet and should be shunned.
-Frequent-flyers should not cry crocodile-tears over climate-change.
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Re: How much longer will Earth support Intelligent Life?

Unread postby Ibon » Sat 29 Jun 2019, 22:29:11

dohboi wrote:Language is generally seen as prerequisite for intelligence. But we are rapidly losing languages. Yes, like species, languages have gone extinct in the past. But again, like species, all indications are that the current rate of loss of languages is far faster than in earlier times.



You know, globalization and modern consumption culture and the addition of digital cyberworld has turned the vast majority of humanity into a vast monoculture. Languages lost and cultural diversity lost. Regardless of race, politics, religion, language, history or culture, almost all countries around the planet have merged into consumption Kudzu Apes. This vast monoculturalization of Homo sapiens is another one of those vulnerabilities I often allude to that make humans disproportionately vulnerable to external stresses moving forward.
Patiently awaiting the pathogens. Our resiliency resembles an invasive weed. We are the Kudzu Ape
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Re: How much longer will Earth support Intelligent Life?

Unread postby dohboi » Mon 01 Jul 2019, 16:42:27

All I can say is yes, indeed!
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Re: How much longer will Earth support Intelligent Life?

Unread postby Revi » Tue 02 Jul 2019, 14:13:41

Does this planet support intelligent life now?
Deep in the mud and slime of things, even there, something sings.
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