It was numerous examples of matching fossils, geological formations, and deformations which played a key role in validating the theory of plate tectonics (originally "continental drift").
Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science, details this in her book Plate Tectonics: An insider's history of the modern theory of the Earth (2001), which is one of the most powerful narratives of how a hypothesis can go from wild-eyed fringe to the absolute foundation of an entire scientific discipline, one whose own origins date to the earliest recorded history, in only 50 years.
This focuses strongly on mid-Atlantic rift magnetic polarisation, which was key in confirming the drift theory, though it briefly mentions other evidence which helped prompt and support it earlier.
There was an article recently about how it was the discovery of dinosaur bones that really began the shift away from organized religion.
There had been theoretical arguments against religion before that made some headway - but this was a paradigm change. It was actually seeing dinosaur bones, and having to reconcile that with the idea of a 4,000 year old earth, that really changed hearts and minds. Suddenly the thought of being an atheist clicked with a lot more people. For the first time people credited the idea that Noah may have never had an ark. There was a distinct 'before' and 'after'.
Note: I'd love to annotate this with a link but unfortunately the results on this topic have been SEO-poisoned.
Catholic Church has no official teaching on the age of earth.
Atheism has always existed, it just may have been more or less visible depending on the political climate.
Even long ago when people worshiped ideas like Thagwag the rain god[0], there were probably non believers - are we so arrogant as to assume they didn’t exist?
“Hm we pray every day, sometime rain sometime not. Maybe no Thagwag?”
Like the Catholic Church Thagwagism also has no official teaching on the age of the earth.
These nuggets have little bearing on the proposition:
> There was an article recently about how it was the discovery of dinosaur bones that really began the shift away from organized religion.
which may or may not be true.
There was a general belief that Biblical interpretations gave a limited age to the earth, famously "calculated" in various ways by Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, James Ussher and John Lightfoot.
Deep geological time ran counter to that common belief.
Ancient Greeks are famous for more than their mythology, e.g. their natural philosophy that laid the foundations of modern science. Greek philosophers challenged theistic explanations of nature early on.
The roots of Western philosophy began in the Greek world in the sixth century BCE. The first Hellenic philosophers were not atheists, but they attempted to explain the world in terms of the processes of nature instead of by mythological accounts. Thus lightning was the result of "wind breaking out and parting the clouds",[49] and earthquakes occurred when "the earth is considerably altered by heating and cooling".[50] The early philosophers often criticized traditional religious notions. Xenophanes (6th century BCE) famously said that if cows and horses had hands, "then horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, and cows like cows".[51] Another philosopher, Anaxagoras (5th century BCE), claimed that the Sun was "a fiery mass, larger than the Peloponnese"; a charge of impiety was brought against him, and he was forced to flee Athens.[52]
Greek thinkers had many different interpretations of the mythology.
For example Euhemerus believed gods and myths originated from normal humans and historical events which through retellings and embellishments over time became more and more fantastical.
Lucretius wrote a natural history where the world and life is created through natural processes (like natural selection) rather than throug a deliberate act of design by gods. So the idea is older than Jesus and does not require dinosaur bones.
Dinosaur bones just shows that species can go extinct which does not contradict religion AFAIK. More important was the discovery of geological layers which showed the world was much older than suggested in the Bible.
Honestly I don’t think the rise of Atheism have that much to do with natural history anyway. The French revolution happened before Darwin. It is about questioning and overthrowing religious authority - you can do that without a theory of evolution. We still don’t know life started but this does not prevent people from becoming atheist.
Specifically it was the development of geology as a science, as the context in which to place dinosaur fossils.
Dinos by themselves were taken by many religious people to be the abominable creatures destroyed by the flood, which Noah was not able to save in his ark.
Geology is what discredited the 6000-year-old-Earth idea. Even before radioisotope dating, it was clear that there was sedimentary landscapes that would’ve taken tens or hundreds of millions of years to form. And then there was fossils of megafauna right in the middle of these rocks? That, plus Darwin’s alternative explanation for the origin of life, is what broke the creationist narrative.
Thinking about just how long the earth has been around fascinates me. I read (or listened to, rather) The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen, which was captivating. The audiobook is well-narrated too. We humans tend to think that the planet just "is" the way it is, but this is just how it exists in this moment in which we find ourselves observing it. The earth has worn many faces over the ages.
Earth has been around for so long that it's exhausted most of the Sun's life-supporting resource. We have barely a billion years to figure out where to go next before Sun overheats earth beyond any habitability; more realistically, just a few hundred million years. No time to waste.
And a few more billion to figure out where to go next after the heat death of the universe.
I think we have more urgent problems.
I very much doubt humanity will be around in a few million years time. We will have died out, or evolved significantly, or altered ourselves. In a billion years there will be nothing even remotely resembling us.
Except evolution does not work that way. It does not optimize for cognitive skills improvement. Not necessarily at least. Different traits may be more important for different species.
2100 seems highly optimistic. We haven't landed a person on the moon in over 50 years. Space travel is really, really hard, and you're talking about sending probes light years away...
Imagine that for the first 50 years of aviation all airplanes had been single use, and then in the 1960s someone figured out how to make them reusable. Thats what’s happening with space flight. The next 75 years are going to be interesting.
I do think 2100 is a stretch, space is hard, but we’ll likely have all the basic elements of that proved out by then.
I think the biological difficulties of human space travel, and its unprofitably so far, have given us a very poor perspective on how fast thing progress from here.
Old bottlenecks are evaporating.
Reusable systems, cheaper faster rocket production, & the loss of dependency on traditional pilots are just three profound bottlenecks we have passed in the last few years.
Machines are getting smarter (not even talking about general AI) and smaller, launch costs are collapsing, demand for resources accelerating, and systems for refueling, communication, etc. are bifurcating.
The last & only BIG bottleneck left now, is simple recognition of relative economic profitability. Just as there has been an explosion of satellites, there will be an explosion of resource extraction the moment it becomes relative net profitable, on a forward predictive basis.
(I.e. shareholder returns for demonstrated viability relentlessly accelerate investment, long before positive cash flow is required.)
Human lunar & Martian bases are just a distraction, however intriguing and likely. They are not a brake on the Solar System resource economic loop, any more than the continued inefficiencies of biologically manned orbital stations held back the explosion of communication satellites.
That’s only 75 years away, same time since the first work on developing orbital rockets.
But by 2500 sure. And likely by 2500 some form of self sustaining asteroid with propulsion will leave the solar system.
I used to think ince that happens for a few thousand trips, humanity will survive enough that our descendants will last billions of years. Not the same biology, certainly not a single culture, but once the technology exists nothing can stop the spread.
It really does feel like this is 'The Great Filter century'. Either we make it through to a Star Trek society, or the gravity of our externalisations catch up with us.
While I am more on the side of decline and fall (not absolute doom!), I do not rrule out that we overcome a lot of our issues.
> Barring a major disaster, by 2100 we will have a vibrant Earth + off-Earth resource ecosystem via machines/AI.
Except that we have thought similar things before.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union people (in the west) thought that we had been through the great danger of nuclear war, and were set for a peaceful and prosperous future. SO much so that the idea of "the end of history" became extremely influential.
IMO that is why the west is finding it so hard to cope with the world turning out to be a dangerous place.
> The best starting point would be what does interest him and what is he most likely to focus on.
I am not convinced we are seeing compounding acceleration. I think that era is past.
We are still advancing technologically, but I think it is questionable whether we are doing so at an accelerating pace:
Interstellar space travel and two way communication between them is the largest barrier. So multi system is going to mean multi planet in our solar system probably for a very very long time. Otherwise it’s just sending cryo pods out into the nether without ever knowing if they made it anywhere for the centuries it takes something to (successfully) come back.
We won’t ever send physically natural humans to other systems.
Not because we could never do it, but there won’t be any motivation to.
We will send relatively tiny ships, initially as probes, then as resource extraction & reproduction systems.
With laser acceleration & fusion deceleration (potentially fed by hydrogen collected collected from the target system), travel between systems can happen within 1-10% of the speed of light.
So only ten or so years to the closest systems.
That (propulsion) technology is not far off now. The bottlenecks are the need for further miniaturization, and our economy could not yet support the cost of, nor is it ready to benefit from, that scale of investment.
Whatever “format” our technology/lifeform has evolved to, we will be able to be sent it in extremely compact form, given any thing large can be recreated at the destination.
—-
Ironically though, despite a decade or so sounding very fast to us now, with time deflation (I.e. absolute time translating to higher & higher subjective time as “we” and our ability to process information & act speed up), decades between systems will subjectively Become be aeons of time.
But resource needs will also accelerate, so the necessity will be there.
So space will be deflationary, along with time. A meter & a second today will have much more relative meaning in the future as everything becomes more compact and faster.
Think about how the digital latency around the planet remains a constant, but as computing centers increasingly compactly, and grow in processing power, by orders of magnitudes, distributed computing with any serial or regular merging component will have to become ever more & more local.
Mars is big latency today. In 50 years, cross planet communication will be a relatively big latency.
Where's "10 or so years" come from? Proxima Centauri is over 4 light years away. At 10% light speed, that's ~40 years minimum. At 1%, over 400 years. We'll ignore any time needed to accelerate and decelerate. It's a long time. I hope someone still remembers the project exists.
I don’t think they are solved, but not bottlenecks for beyond Earth, post biological life.
They still matter.
How long intelligent life depends or cares about a “natural” Earth biosphere is impossible to predict. “We” will for a while. But for how long?
Wars and any destructive conflict will always matter. They increase existential risk for individuals and collectives, and waste resources.
We are used to casually equating the future of the Earth, the biosphere, intelligence, civilization, humanity, our systems & communities, and each of us as individuals.
But they are all different things, whose trajectories are increasingly separating.
Well that's my definition of a "vibrant Earth" -- namely, having those problems solved first, before we go out and start wrecking the rest of the universe.
"A basically fucked Earth, but with the surviving elites continuing to party on as usual" by 2100 is where we seem to be headed on our current trajectory.
Love the optimism but unless we master ourselves first, WE will be the major disaster.
Right now, all we seem to be doing is putting ever more powerful tools in the hands of the same, barely evolved ape minds. Not a recipe for long term success AFAICT.
I agree, our communal lack of wisdom and recklessness is the only real risk. But maybe not as much as we think.
Ironically many of our biggest worries, like climate collapses, extreme pollution, inequality, huge regional wars (Taiwan), population collapses, pandemics, don’t present much risk for expansion into space.
Only a full civilization collapse or extinction event would do it.
So definitely a long term optimistic outlook for “life”.
But the specific ways things play out could still be catastrophic from individuals perspectives. The rate and nature of changes these next decades will be profoundly disruptive & challenging to every aspect of our existence, all at once.
—
If we don’t reflect the universes non-human created resources as a joint inheritance, in a legally and economically explicit way, there is going to be a great culling of some kind - there is no way around that.
We need formal recognition and a societal structure supporting that, for a shared ownership of raw natural resources in some way, to have a soft transition.
I don’t see this as a violation of capitalism, but as a completion of property rights under capitalism.
It accomplishes what communism tries to do by mistakenly socializing production, instead by joint shareholding of nature’s original undeveloped resources as a gifted asset nobody created. And allowing capitalism to do its job of maximizing that value for all of us.
Bidding to extract resources, rental of limited shared resources (land) etc can continue unchanged. But everyone will be compensated for their part of raw resources as they are privatized or used exclusively.
I can imagine a billion dollars or a billion bits. Working with computers we deal with units of a billion pretty often. I also know how long a year is and as I get older they feel pretty short. Obviously we won’t personally be around to see it but it does feel like the clock is ticking.
The Roman Empire took 250 years to collapse, yet in hindsight we still consider it to have just stopped at one point. Likewise, we look at mass extinction events in the geologic histories as if they were one off blips, but e.g. this Hangenberg Event I just googled spanned 100K to several hundred thousand years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangenberg_event
But we're living a mass extinction event if you consider biodiversity and populations in non-human species has plummeted; bug populations have halved in a decade, with that bird populations have taken a hit, ten billion crabs starved because of a heat wave (https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/research-confir...), etc.
No, 8 billion people won't drop dead, and life will continue in many ways, but in our lifetimes we'll see worsening food scarcity because of climate change (already happening), consequent famines, mass migrations, wars, etc.
But for a lot of people it mainly means food gets more expensive and the relative wealth of food choice we've had will be reduced, and houses will be built differently depending on the new climate trends.
That or the gulf stream will stop and the northern hemisphere gets covered in a mile of ice again. But that too won't happen overnight.
A thousand years after the fall of the western Roman Empire, the eastern empire fell. Five hundred years after that, a rocket named for the Roman god of renewal helped put men on the moon. I wouldn’t write us off.
Which will have a direct impact on the price of food as the pollinators disappear. Professional pollinator might be a high growth career in the coming decades.
It’s extremely difficult to reconcile posts like this with the clear historical examples of silly supply chain issues due to minor disruptions.
I don’t believe “civilization” is as resilient as you think. The late bronze age collapse, and all the mystery surrounding that event, did indeed take place over hundreds of years in a vast “global” society.
I very much doubt anyone in that society could have predicted such a spectacular collapse. It’s not really a disputable fact that civilization has collapsed many times before and probably will again before we have to worry about these silly “billion year” concerns - maybe let’s just focus on the next 200 years?
For those who missed the point of this concise note;
There are 8 billion people alive today. A few handfuls of whom will be alive 100 years from now.
Everyone dies.
Will the birthrate drop? Likely yes. Will resources become more scarce? Some, definitely yes. Will life be easier or harder 100 years from now? That's harder to predict.
Improved technology + greater demand = more resources become economical to mine. (Our deepest mines are ~5km and have actual humans toiling away in them. Heavier - and more valuable - metals tend to be deeper.)
This planet has a ridiculous amount of water, most of it just needs energy to be treated or desalinized.
We get more energy from the sun than we could even think to use, not even mentioning the gargantuan stores of uranium and thorium.
We have enough space to give every human (not just every family - every individual human person) a large house on a big yard. This wouldn't even cover the earth - we could fit all that in just Ontario.
>We have enough space to give every human (not just every family - every individual human person) a large house on a big yard. This wouldn't even cover the earth - we could fit all that in just Ontario.
These kinds of calculations aren't very useful IMO, because they ignore the massive amount of overhead space needed to support a human life in a modern society: roads, train stations, airports (I guess not necessary if everyone lives in Ontario...), schools, water treatment plants, electric power generation facilities, farmland, commercial buildings, office buildings, warehouses, factories, landfills/garbage processing, the list goes on. Look at any modern city, including the dense & walkable ones: the amount of total space for housing, while significant, isn't that much of the total land area of the city, and that's ignoring all the stuff outside the city needed to make the city work (especially agricultural land, but also power generation, and other dirty industries that are either well outside cities, or on their periphery).
Also, at a very minimum, humans need food and water to survive. You're not going to grow enough food for your family in your yard (and certainly not year-round). And freshwater resources are scarce in many places. Ontario cannot grow crops year-round, and only has so much water.
I allowed for some overhead, but even ifyou double or quadruple the space requirement, it's abundantly clear that space isn't an issue.
> Ontario cannot grow crops year-round,
It can, and it does. There are greenhouses and hydroponics - we would never spontaneously concentrate ourselves like this but if we did mass hydroponics and vertical farming would suddenly become much more economical.
Also, in this scenario we're free to move our ultra-dense spot anywhere on the planet, I just like Ontario.
> and only has so much water.
Ontario happens to have an absolute crapton of water - 20% of the world total. But that doesn't matter. Water goes in a cycle. If you have a large starting volume, the only limiting factors are energy and money to purify used water.
>I allowed for some overhead, but even ifyou double or quadruple the space requirement, it's abundantly clear that space isn't an issue.
I think you'd have to more than quadruple the space, but sure, I do agree humans don't absolutely need to be spread across the world. Still, I think you're discounting things like resource extraction (mines), but I guess since people don't normally live in such places we can ignore those.
Personally I have wondered sometimes what the world would look like if almost everyone concentrated into cities laid out like Tokyo (i.e. very dense, and not very car-friendly). There'd probably be a lot of abandoned places.
>There are greenhouses and hydroponics - we would never spontaneously concentrate ourselves like this but if we did mass hydroponics and vertical farming would suddenly become much more economical.
Forgive me for not knowing that much about agriculture, but are greenhouses and hydroponics really viable for growing enough food for all of humanity? (Of course, they wouldn't be much help for growing livestock or seafood.) And has anyone really shown vertical farming to be viable? It looks like a nice idea in theory but seems to require advances in robotics to be economically feasible.
>Ontario happens to have an absolute crapton of water - 20% of the world total. But that doesn't matter. Water goes in a cycle.
Ontario might be OK here, but a lot of cities really do face freshwater shortages, for instance in the American southwest and Los Angeles. Of course, it'd help if people didn't use so much water for their lawns...
>>We have enough space to give every human (not just every family - every individual human person) a large house on a big yard. This wouldn't even cover the earth - we could fit all that in just Ontario.
Not to be nit picky but it would be a subjectivity pretty small house if you wanted a yard of any useful size. My quick math said you’d have about 1446 sq ft per person (not including the niceties like roads, stores and fast food joints)
In all honesty though I was surprised it was that close.
Do you actually think they literally meant 8 billion people are going to drop dead? because the meaning was fairly obvious as written - after 200 years of industrial revolution we are left in a situation where the planet we live on may not be inhabitable in a relatively short period of time
Let's talk about it in a hundred years when we struggle to grow food and have to deal with hundred millions/billions of climate refugees.
You don't need 8b deaths to see we're clearly not on a positive trajectory, ocean acidification, wild weather patterns, climate feedback loops, famines, &c. will be problems we have to tackle by the end of the century and will absolutely destroy our capabilities to develop. All it takes is a major event and we're fucked, something that sets us back even 150 years, and it's game over, we wouldn't have the means to go through another industrial revolution because we used all the easily accessible sources of energy
Come on... mammals exist for a mere 300m years... if you worry about the death of our sun in a BILLION years but not about climate change you're an absolute clown, we'll face a couple of near (or full) extinction events by then
> Again, that's a crazy thing to conclude from even the most pessimistic global warming predictions.
Not really considering the "most pessimistic" predictions have the Atlantic current completely shutting down within the next 100 years (wipes out food supply), tons of countries like bangladesh becoming actually inhospitable from heat/humidity index (billion+ people dead), sea levels rising several meters (massive percentage of humanity lives near a coast), etc. - could go on for a while. Frankly, I don't think you really understand what you are talking about and suspect you're going to turn this into a pedantic "well that won't completely annhilate all human life so you are wrong" kind of back and forth that I don't feel like engaging in so I'll just wish you a good day and move on.
Tragic as it would be, that worst case global warming scenario is still more of a "set human population levels & quality of life back 200 years" situation, rather than a literal extinction event though. I see a lot of hyperbole & doomerism around these topics online & I think pushback is fair.
We should be doing more to prevent the worse global warming outcomes. The stakes are billions dying or having miserable lives, which should be motivating enough. I don't think it helps to spin a dark fantasy about it being too late & humans actually going extinct. In the long run, an 8x reduction in human population & a few centuries of bad weather isn't really even a close call, let alone a legitimate extinction risk.
Humanity is immensely capable of large-scale adaptation.
10k years ago we were getting chased around by sabre-toothed tigers.
1k years ago we were still dying of hunger and lack of hygiene.
100 years ago the first biplanes took to the sky.
Now look where we are. Human progress is exponential. There's every reason to believe that we'll be capable of dealing with our problems as they come. Malthus was wrong 200 years ago, and you are wrong now.
We have clean energy options in solar, nuclear, and battery storage. These are getting better, cheaper, and safer every day. We've got people working on geo-engineering solutions. We've got remote work. We're automating and localizing manufacturing.
They're complaining about a rise in the absolute number of hungry people, not the rate of hunger.
I hope you're not arguing that the rate of hunger has done anything but gone down drastically in the past 1000 years.
That there are short-term oscillations change nothing about the very obvious long-term trend. Keep in mind also that most economies are still recovering from Covid. Heck, the EU is a rich area and is still recovering from 2008.
Now, 1000 years ago, there were ~0.3B people. [0]
The daily calorie supply is hard to get, but in 1200 it looks to have been about 2000kCal in the UK. [1]
Now we're up to 3000kCal per person per day, for 27x the population. [2] And honestly, we're not even trying to maximize this number at all; farmers are optimizing for profit, not for maximum calories. Absolutely enormous tracts of land go uncultivated. Hydroponic farming is used for minuscule percentage of our food supply. We're nowhere close to maxing out the food supply.
When I see complaints like yours I can only conclude one of these:
1) The people involved truly don't get the idea of rates, or long-term trends in rates, or the impact of technology on our lives
2) They aren't arguing in good faith and simply want me to be sad.
Rates are irrelevant. I don't see a scenario where 2 children dying of hunger is better than 1. My original statement is absolutely true: there are more people affected by hunger today than 1k years ago.
Our example community used to have ten children total, and one died of hunger. The the industrial revolution happened. Now we have 300 children, and two died of hunger.
That's 288 children living materially much more abundant lives. 288 lives that wouldn't have existed. One of them might be a key scientist / entrepreneur that launches us to 1000000 kids and zero dying of anything.
Please don't sensationalize your example, it doesn't help your argument and others can play that game too *.
While it's true that the industrial revolution has led to significant economic growth, I don't think that justifies the fact that two children died of hunger in your example community. Every child deserves to live a life free from hunger and poverty, regardless of the overall economic situation. It's not a zero-sum game where we have to choose between economic growth and the well-being of the most vulnerable members of society. And I'm not convinced by the argument that the potential benefits of economic growth outweigh the cost of individual lives. We should be working to create a world where every child has access to the resources they need to thrive, not justifying the deaths of children as a necessary cost of progress.
* In your example, one of the two kids that dies is your son. The other one is the kid who's death is going to launch his best friend in a downward spiral that will eventually lead him to push the button and start global nuclear war that kills everyone and everything on the planet.
You're ignoring the fact that modern technological society unlocked hundreds of lives that wouldn't otherwise have existed. Turning our backs on the industrial revolution would, in effect, "kill" these people by preventing their chance at life.
> We should be working to create a world where every child has access to the resources they need to thrive, not justifying the deaths of children as a necessary cost of progress.
> It's not a zero-sum game where we have to choose between economic growth and the well-being of the most vulnerable members of society.
The deaths of the two children aren't "justified" and neither is the "death" of the hundreds who didn't get to live in the first place. We have to minimize deaths and maximize life.
You're right that it's not a zero-sum game. The best thing for everybody is maximum growth. In the year 1800 there was approximately zero concern for the welfare of the poor, and yet the breakneck growth in that century gave the poor vastly higher wages and made left-wing, pro-worker ideas like workplace safety and the weekend practical for the first time.
Sacrificing growth for a softer approach to life gives you neither.
The best way to ensure every kid has the resources they need is to first become a rich society. The second step is to ensure your society stays rich by focusing on getting richer. When you're tapping an exponentially growing system to feed the poor, your first priority is to keep that system growing as fast as possible, not to throw a wrench into it.
I never supported the idea that we should turn our backs on modern technological advances. Of course these have improved our lives.
But going back to your example, why are you trying to rationalize the fact that now two children are dead from hunger? If anything, the overall economic growth in your example and all the additional available resources should have made certain that not even a single child died.
And yet, here we are, with more that 8 billion people on the planet, all our technological advances and all the resources that we have and still, 1 out of every 10 people on the planet faces hunger. There is no sugar coating this. It is a tragedy.
They're only dead because they got to be born first. It's not like modern agriculture reached out and killed them on purpose.
Richer mothers are better able to plan their families and tend to restrict it to a number of kids they can feed. The answer is, and always will be, exponential growth.
How can you claim that famine has been "largely eradicated" when I just posted a reference that says that more than 800 million people are affected by hunger?
800M is straight up wrong. I don’t know what methods are used in the link you’re talking about, but it is inaccurate. Here’s an assessment of the current famine conditions:
The 800 million number is straight from the World Health Organization. The one you are linking to is a third party that says that the World Food Programme organization reports 330 million in 78 countries.
Here are two things to consider:
* the world has more than 78 countries. There are people affected by hunger even in first world countries. "Hunger in the United States of America affects millions of Americans, including some who are middle class, or who are in households where all adults are in work." [1]
* While 330 million is lower than 800 million, it is still immensely bad.
People are hungry not because the civilization fails to produce enough food. It fails to produce enough order to let this food reach the hungry.
The causes of any prolonged famine are political: local overlords and thugs grab the food and keep it under their control, so that they would stay on top of their local social pyramid and / or profit from reselling.
Isn't order a part of civilization though? Aren't local thugs and overlords part of our civilization? I'm not sure what your argument is. Our civilization cannot secure enough food for everyone.
What does an "uninhabitable" Earth mean? Do you mean less habitable than the Sahara or Antartica, or the Himalayas? Because some people do inhabit those places, and more could if they needed to. There's no scientific evidence whatsoever that all of Earth will become uninhabitable for humans. That's just doomerism.
I think it was a poor taste piece of pedantry: in 100 years, almost everyone currently alive, 8 billion people, will be dead. It's just that new people will have been born in the meantime.
We are now but if humans go back to the stone age because of a world war or something, we may not have a second chance. The people after us will have none of the same advantages since we extracted all the easily accessible fossil fuels that made the industrial revolution possible.
If you aren't worried about humans per se, a billion years is probably enough time to regenerate fossil fuels and evolve another technological species from scratch. Probably quite unlikely, but still. It's a very long time.
>The Gombe Chimpanzee War, also known as the Four-Year War,[3][4] was a violent conflict between two communities of chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park in the Kigoma region of Tanzania between 1974 and 1978. The two groups were once unified in the Kasakela community. By 1974, researcher Jane Goodall noticed the community splintering.[5] Over a span of eight months, a large party of chimpanzees separated themselves into the southern area of Kasakela and were renamed the Kahama community. The separatists consisted of six adult males, three adult females and their young.[5] The Kasakela was left with eight adult males, twelve adult females and their young.
There are also some cool animations out there that show the drifting, smashing, and more drifting of the plates. I like ones like these that provide some modern landmarks, or showing it in reverse, so you can track individual places through it all:
Bit of a straw man. The ecologists I know of are interested in cultivating biodiversity and preserving habitats from the corrosive influence of development, pollution, and climate change. "Pristine" isn't a term I've heard used much in this context. The language of "virgin" land belongs to the lexicon of settler colonialism, not environmentalism.
yeah, they expand faster at first and slow down afterwards until something else happens.
I was looking at the ocean floor and using smooth ocean floor as 'fast moving' and rough ocean floor as 'slow moving'.
South America is moving 3 cm / year. using that with the ocean floors and some guestimation,,, between 120 and 113 m years ago SA moved about 12 cm / year and slowed down to 3 betwen 113 m years ago and now. Assuming no movement from Africa
Watching the Nasa sim, and others I've seen multiple times before, thought occurs that by re-liquifying much of the Earth after its initial formation, heavier elements which had otherwise been trapped in the crust / upper mantle might have re-mobilised and sunk deeper into the core.
I'm not sure of relative abundance of elements in the crusts of other rocky worlds, though at least generally Mars seems to have a greater prevalence of iron, and fewer of the lighter metals, in its own crust.
Arya Udry, Esteban Gazel, and Harry Y. McSween Jr., "Formation of Evolved Rocks at Gale Crater by Crystal Fractionation and Implications for Mars Crustal Composition", Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets 123 (2018), Issue 6, pp. 1525-1540. <https://doi.org/10.1029/2018JE005602>
Harry Y. McSween Jr.1,G. Jeffrey Taylor, and Michael B. Wyatt, "Elemental Composition of the Martian Crust", Science 324 (2009), Issue 5928, pp. 736-739. <https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5928/736>
(The fact that we now have geological studies of multiple specific regions of Mars delights me.)
I was so excited for a sec thinking that the matched the prints somehow to one individual dinosaur! It's not exactly news that the fossil record matches on either side of the Atlantic, though still cool
The story's potentially neat and interesting, but for how many times it's been republished in mearly identical
fashion across many mainstream outlets, there's doesn't seem to be a reference to a DOI or first-party source? I'm fine with having "matching" footprints have a different level of standard for geological time contexts, but give me something to read pls.
Of course the footprints look the same, the dinosaurs all used the same replicators to make their space boots before jet-packing over the proto-atlantic
Life is a mystery.
So much things to learn and discover that require unified efforts from all people around the world.
Yet, we prefer to kill each others instead.
It's always interesting to watch programs about paleontology and cosmology, and see them tossing around "millions" and "billions," like "minutes" and "seconds."
My mother[0] was a geologist, and our family vacations were often extremely educational. Every time we'd go through a roadcut on the highway, she would point out the layers, and tell me about the ages and whatnot.
Every time we'd go through a roadcut on the highway, she would point out the layers, and tell me about the ages and whatnot.
One of the colleges I went to was in a mountainous area, and my geology class had weekly trips on Fridays to random road cuts around the region. We'd all pile out of the vans, and have to dig through the rocks and debris and write short reports about what we'd found, and present them the following Monday.
Great class. Except if it rained on a Friday. That sucked.
Why? Did they ask you to send them pictures of dinosaur footprints or something?
Leave them be, you're not going to convince them of anything (if they are set in their beliefs) any more than they will convince you, no matter how much you'll claim "well I believe them if they show me proof". You wouldn't, as they can just point all around you for proof but you're not accepting it, and neither would they if shown proof of dinosaurs on different continents from millions of years ago.
Their beliefs don't affect you, or, only as much as you let them. It really doesn't matter that you're right. What do you think you look like if you send them "proof" without them asking for it?
It's absolutely impossible to reason with people like that, and I have to imagine you're already well aware. Evidence means nothing when "belief" can replace it.
I was having a discussion about the creation story in the Bible with my aunt one time and my dad walked in and said what are y'all talking about? Whether the creation story is literal.
He said, and it amuses me to this day, no one takes the creation story literally!
So there he was, in a strong relationship with a sister who he had known his entire life and didn't know that she took the creation story literally whereas he took it more poetically. And they grew up in the same household.
I've never heard this line from a real creationist, only ever as a strawman. Anyway, as far as I recall they don't (officially) have any problems with fossils like this. They'll just say the split happened during the Flood, like everything else.
The amount of energy it takes to split two continents and send them thousands of miles away from each other would be enough to boil off the oceans. Just think of the incredible amount of rock that has to be melted and resolidified (all of the rock in the rock floor between the two continents, or that was previously elsewhere). And resolidifying means releasing heat.
Yeah, this simply can't happen in just hundreds of years.
If the initial premise is that an all powerful being created, well, everything. I am not sure that arguing the specifics of how manipulating continents is physically demanding is going to sway hearts and minds.
Creation scientists actually do go pretty far, though, in trying to make things as physically plausible as they can. I think they're aiming for a theory where God makes specific events happen, like creation itself, or unleashing water in the ground and air to generate the Flood, but aside from that physics pretty much runs as designed. And to their credit, this would be sort of a local minimum in divine interference required for the theory... if the rest of the physics worked.
Ed: though I suppose that implies less than it ideally would about the attitudes of random believers on the street, who might well be a lot less principled about where they let divine interference into their model...
I subscribe to Bertrand Russell's hypothesis that the earth was created five minutes ago. Events that you remember do not necessarily have to have happened; memories were put in our minds. Impossible to prove wrong.
Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science, details this in her book Plate Tectonics: An insider's history of the modern theory of the Earth (2001), which is one of the most powerful narratives of how a hypothesis can go from wild-eyed fringe to the absolute foundation of an entire scientific discipline, one whose own origins date to the earliest recorded history, in only 50 years.
<https://archive.org/details/platetectonicsin0000unse>
Kirkus review: <https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/naomi-oreskes/pla...>
And a shorter more recent article-length treatment from Oreskes:
<https://www.nature.com/articles/501027a> (2013)
This focuses strongly on mid-Atlantic rift magnetic polarisation, which was key in confirming the drift theory, though it briefly mentions other evidence which helped prompt and support it earlier.