Bern IN 7 HRS
//////////////////////////////SHOULD SURVIVE TO A HUNDRED AND FIVE
/////////////////////////////////////There are good reasons for any species to think darkly of its own extinction
///////////////////Simple, single-celled life appeared early in Earth’s history. A few hundred million whirls around the newborn Sun were all it took to cool our planet and give it oceans, liquid laboratories that run trillions of chemical experiments per second. Somewhere in those primordial seas, energy flashed through a chemical cocktail, transforming it into a replicator, a combination of molecules that could send versions of itself into the future.
///////////////////////BOSTROM=For a long time, the descendants of that replicator stayed single-celled. They also stayed busy, preparing the planet for the emergence of land animals, by filling its atmosphere with breathable oxygen, and sheathing it in the ozone layer that protects us from ultraviolet light. Multicellular life didn’t begin to thrive until 600 million years ago, but thrive it did. In the space of two hundred million years, life leapt onto land, greened the continents, and lit the fuse on the Cambrian explosion, a spike in biological creativity that is without peer in the geological record. The Cambrian explosion spawned most of the broad categories of complex animal life. It formed phyla so quickly, in such tight strata of rock, that Charles Darwin worried its existence disproved the theory of natural selection.
//////////////////////////‘By racing through Earth’s hydrocarbons, we might be depleting our planet’s civilisation startup-kit. But, even if it took us 100,000 years to bounce back, that would be a brief pause on cosmic time scales
/////////////////////////‘Human brains are really good at the kinds of cognition you need to run around the savannah throwing spears’
//////////////////Perhaps future humans will duck into a more habitable, longer-lived universe, and then another, and another, ad infinitum
///////////////////////DINO, DODO, MAN
/////////////////If life is a cosmic fluke, then we’ve already beaten the odds, and our future is undetermined — the galaxy is there for the taking
////////////////////ALL
1960 1 IN 10 CHILDREN SURVIVED
TODAY 8 IN 10 CHLDRN SURVIVE
//////////////////Catastophic, yes. But not an existential threat to the whole species. Some humans will continue to survive even if there's a 10 degree rise. It'll be a very different world but still habitable with the technology we have now.
/////////////////// assumes that a universe with humans is somehow desirable, better than a universe without humans. That is, that human extinction is something we should avoid.
////////////////////are late-comers: we appeared on a planet that is 4.5 billion years old. Before the Earth existed, the universe was already around for 8.5 billion years. Any intelligence that was created before the Earth existed would have had billions of years to do whatever it wants. It would have had time to "terraform" the universe many times over (and our very speculative current theories of cosmology are almost surely not complete enough to rule out this situation). In that case everything we see when we look at the sky is artificial, i.e., the result of intelligence. If we are scared of the Singularity happening in 2050, how much more should we be scared of a Singularity that happened billions of years ago? We are very possibly already living in a post-Singularity universe.
/////////////////"Intelligence" is a manifestly artifactual construct. It is an emergent property of our sensory and cognitive systems. Simply put, humanity presently lacks the means by which to objectively reflect on intelligence, artificial or otherwise. Concerns regarding the risks humanity faces from AI are so overly optimistic (or pessimistic, depending upon your affiliation) that it better serves to illustrate our hubristic view of human intelligence.
//////////////////But complaining, which, to me, encompasses the spreading of negativity,rumination and gossip, carries some heavy drawbacks that I'd like to get rid of:
- Complaining keeps you stuck in 'problem mode' and inaction.
- Complaining can be a form of rumination, which carried many negative consequences.
- Complaining spreads negativity to others.
- Complaining can magnify problems, making frustrations seem more intense and chronic than they perhaps are.
- Complaining isn't a very effective route to feeling better or solving problems.
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//////////////////////////////The survival of the fittest is still in operation in the developing world where access to medicine is scarce.
/////////////////////////////////Nature shaped our evolution, but for the past 100,000 years we have been shaping our planet to suit our own needs – with critical consequences. Natural selection – which winnows out all those members of a species that are not best adapted to their environment – has been blunted, thanks to the development of tools such as those harpoon heads and a myriad subsequent inventions. These now sustain 7 billion people on Earth so that more and more men and women are living long past the age of reproduction. As a result, many scientists speculate that humanity has freed itself from the forces of natural selection and has stopped evolving.
/////////////////////////////So, yes, say scientists like Stringer, we are still evolving. And our genes continue to mutate (it's estimated we each carry 50 new mutations compared to our parents). The question is: what are we evolving into? How is our species being shaped?
////////////////////////////The brains of domesticated animals are invariably smaller than those of the wild versions. This is due to the process of domestication. The animal does not need its full repertoire of behaviours for survival. Humans provide that for them. As a result the energetically expensive brains of these animals get smaller. And that is now true for Homo sapiens. We have effectively domesticated ourselves and so don't need such big brains. These may well continue to get smaller and smaller. Smaller brains do not mean we will become stupider, however. We store a lot of information externally now and our thought processing could become quicker and sharper if the electric signals in our brain have less distance to travel along synapses."
///////////////////////////////A ring species is a situation in which two populations which do not interbreed are living in the same region and connected by a geographic ring of populations that can interbreed. Famous examples of ring species are the herring and lesser black-backed gulls in northern Europe the Ensatina salamanders of the West Coast of the USA.
/////////////////////////////////////Ancient Egypt stood as one of the world’s most advanced civilizations for nearly 3,000 years and created a culture so rich that it has spawned its own field of study
////////////////////////LION MAN, GERMANY, 40 KYA
////////////////////////VULCANISATION OF RUBBER- SULFUR IN RUBBER AND HEATED
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