Lovelock says we can't save the planet

[Feck]

DOOMED... we are all doomed!

I think the earth will survive ok until the Sun dies or some other event occurs. We may screw the planet until it is unfit for our form of life, but I think DNA will be ok... after all, it formed in the early days of the earth when humans would not have been able to live in the conditions that existed. Cockroaches are widely quoted as being able to survive almost anything and there are exrtemophiles that live in some pretty harsh conditions.

Hell, it may give a chance to a new form of intelligent species to arise from the ashes of our extinction.

+1 shame about all the life we are going to take with us but "the planet" will be fine without us .....

...and better off, by and large.

Let's hope the next 'intelligent' species is a little less selfish and messy .

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Let's hope the next 'intelligent' species is a little less selfish and messy .

We should put up a sign.

"Do better than us, or follow us."

[Feck]

Let's hope the next 'intelligent' species is a little less selfish and messy .

We should put up a sign.

"Do better than us, or follow us."

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

[charlou]

Let's hope the next 'intelligent' species is a little less selfish and messy .

We should put up a sign.

"Do better than us, or follow us."

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Perfect. Unfortunately.

[llanitedave]

I'm still not sure what "saving the planet" means. Saving from what? Saving it for what?

What we really need to save is ourselves from ourselves. And not just our species. I'm relatively confident that even with an economic and ecological collapse there'd still be a few hundred million of us remaining in the aftermath. But civilization would be ended. Those remaining would be poor, superstitious, and ignorant. And it would be very difficult, if at all possible, to re-acquire the technology required to get us past a 19th century-level industrial status. And even that would take far longer than the recovery from any dark age civilizations has yet known.

So what's threatened, essentially, is the continuity of our society: our cultural memory, our historical memory, our technological capability, our scientific knowledge -- everything that we think of as "progress". Nuclear power by itself isn't the answer. Nothing else by itself is the answer. Climate change isn't the problem.

The only common ingredient to any plan to save civilization from itself is a drastic reduction in population. That will happen one way or the other. If we let nature do it for us, it will mean the end of civilization. If not, then we can carry on with a high, sustainable standard of living, and continued scientific and technological progress, at a much lower population level, and with a much more geriatric demographic.

[kraut]

To me, Lovelock's only major craziness is his somewhat mystical identification of the whole Earth as a living organism

There is nothing mystical about Ll - what he says is that organic live has developed feedback mechanisms that help to sustain live on earth.
The environment is mainly controlled by actions of single cell organisms.
It was those after all who started to enrich the atmosphere with oxygen.

As to the rest - who really says that fission is a sustainable option?
What about the resources of fissile material? I have read that those resources are even more limited than oil resources. And breeder technology...that was a joke that was abandoned in Germany over ten years ago after billions of deutschmarks.
And what about nuclear waste disposal - any safe storage out there?

[Tigger]

I am uninformed, I suppose, and I really should look into the global warming issue

Yes you are and following the links
http://www.macmagic.ca/ubbthreads.php?u ... #Post45753
will correct that providing you bring a modicum of science understanding to the table

Thanks for the quote mine. Always a good approach to a discussion. I wonder if I can understand this thing you call science.

[Pappa]

Gaia hypothesis derail split to here: http://rationalia.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=11532