faetal on 9/11/2016 at 11:07

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Read through the whole thread Pyrian.

faetal on 9/11/2016 at 12:33

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To my mind, we always were. I was genuinely worried that my stipulations about the probability of the outcome I was describing were dinging off people's blind spots.

faetal on 9/11/2016 at 12:44

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There are also too many unknowns for you to say it is improbable. But that's neither here nor there, since I stated ages ago that I agree that it is improbable, just that it is possible.

I still think that. I've certainly been given some interesting other things to think about (almost entirely by Vivian), but the various teleological arguments whizzing through this thread for why humans won't ever go extinct don't really carry much weight from a scientific perspective. Grand statements about what other people imagine isn't nearly as convincing as examinations of the fossil records, logical insertions about reproductive fitness, metabolism, niche sensitivity etc...

My only worry is that if I haven't convinced anyone of the validity of the idea (other than Vivian it seems), then perhaps either I'm not explaining it well enough, or I was right about most people having a cognitive blind spot for allowing for humans to ultimately fail.

Also, was the P-T extinction event not an extraordinary set of circumstances? Jeez, what does it take to impress you?

faetal on 9/11/2016 at 13:07

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I've said it is possible and I've stated why. Perhaps you don't understand how competition works in ecology? It's how most species go extinct outside of major events. Humans aren't exempt and we've never had a mass extinction event to contend with. Again, I worry about contending with what people who don't understand ecology "imagine" can happen, because it seems that you aren't even going to the effort of imagining how equilibria function over very long periods of time. It's super easy to just imagine humans dusting themselves off after a big event and starting to re-form shit, much harder to picture a fundamental ecological shift pushing us to the edges over a few thousand years because of selection pressures massively favouring something like basic fecundity, which is one of our weaker spots.

[EDIT] I think my problem is that I haven't built my argument using terms people without a biology degree might not understand. I've stated repeatedly that weedier species with a better capacity to adapt to a low abundance ecosystem which human adaptation is no longer able to thrive from (do I need explain that? think about all of the living material on earth that we don't eat, simply because we can't get enough nutrition from it) but other species can. Over a thousand or so years (maybe more, maybe less), without the abundance on which our iterative advancement as a species depends, we may not have enough of an edge via our tech / ingenuity to outpace the basic, more ecological energy and fecundity gradients (I even drafted a broad equation for this point). The idea that I haven't built my argument past vague ideas is unfounded. I've been as specific and detailed as is possible in a forum discussion - any more detail and I'd have to apply for a grant!

Also, I don't get your last point about it being bound to happen in my scenario because it's the losing one. Is that purposely tautological? It's like saying that my thinking is flawed because I'm saying that 5% of the time something happens 100% of the time which is just identical to saying it happens 5% of the time. I'm going to call this the Ron Burgandy fallacy.

Here's a thinking point (unrelated to this discussion with Starker and probably best answered by Vivian) - the things that we tend to eat, are they the super-hardy things, which are very abundant? Or have we historically had to target high yield foods which we've then, over time had to cultivate in order to multiply like we have?

faetal on 9/11/2016 at 13:42

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It's not to do with being dumb - was I dumb before I did my degree? It is difficult to always find layman terms when your head is filled with the specific ones. Bear with me.

The basic measure of success of any species is reproduction. In order to successfully do this, you need enough energy to survive and a bit extra to find a mate and raise young. We do this very efficiently because there is a vast abundance of things we can eat and we have techniques for cultivating them (plus fertile land to do it on), which gives us plenty of head room to do things like develop advanced technology, chief of which in the survival game is medicine, infant mortality increase etc... NOT because we reproduce efficiently in terms of reproductive mechanisms.

We take a lot of that tech for granted, because it is there. It is there because we have this headroom. If you collapse global food webs, this means millions of species dying off left, right and centre as their niches evaporate and their adaptations become meaningless. Things like humans would certainly be among the last to fall (hence I consider it a low probability event) due to our adaptations fitting a wide variety of niches, however, past a point, we may not have access to as many food sources which give us the same level of nutrition to allow headroom for either tech, or even optimal reproductive rates. This in itself would be something we could bounce back from, but the leeway on that bounce back is dependent on what your energy sources are (if the weedy species which fill the niches left by the mass extinction are not things we get optimal nutrition from, then the effort we need to invest just to basically reproduce is significantly higher, meaning that the equation used to describe how fit we are looks less strong), and the time you have to do it in (determined by competition and any other environmental pressures). This could even be that the most abundant food source is something we can eat, but which gives us indigestion or rots our teeth or affects liver function etc etc... It needn't even be toxic or even that bad, just bad enough that we don't have access to reliable excess of food versus needs and increased nutritional deficiencies etc... Note that I think our biggest issue of vulnerability is our VERY expensive reproductive process. I've stated this pretty firmly throughout the thread, so I'm guessing I don't need to repeat specifics.

Enter competition. Could be another mammal, could be insects or birds or even microbiota - whatever. If we are in a weakened state and don't have the headroom to reproduce decently and accumulate tech advancement, AND something else is able to thrive on the nutrients we scrape by on, we just reproduce less quickly than the competition does. Might be so slow you barely even notice, but fast forward a few hundred or thousand years and suddenly humans are more scarce, the niche is now comfortably inhabited by the competition while we continue to try to find ways to eke something else out, and eventually, no more humans.

I can only imagine something like this being possible if we see pre P-T extinction levels of warming in a far shorter time frame (this IS currently projected, even if we extrapolate in a straight line, which almost certainly won't be the case given that positive feedback mechanisms will set us on an exponent before too much longer) and the roll of the dice happens to land on "fuck you humanity", which it well could, nature doesn't give a shit.

TL;DR - if the event is big enough to scramble the rule set, humans may find themselves fucked by a quasi-Roguelike's RNG.