faetal on 11/11/2016 at 00:00
Decades is nothing. I'm talking about thousands of years.
Starker on 11/11/2016 at 00:02
I agree that it might be possible, I just don't fully agree with the scenarios you are painting -- that is, with specific assumptions about how things would turn out.
faetal on 11/11/2016 at 00:21
I don't understand why though. You aren't coming back with anything specific, you just keep asking "yeah but tech", which isn't really meaningful if there is no excess of nutrition to allow for tech to happen. Again, look to poverty stricken regions and tell me what kinds of animal husbandry, crop cultivation and antibiotic development they are into. In a scenario where food webs collapse, ecosystems get trashed and stay trashed (that one's for you Renz) over thousands of years, humans may be in a continual cycle to simply stay alive on insufficient food sources. You really need to look at how human history worked in synch with the environment. We didn't start in a barren dust bowl and invent food, there was loads of it already there, and our metabolism is completely shaped around this. If you fundamentally alter that landscape, the relationship we have with it also fundamentally alters. If we are fighting a losing battle to stay nourished for the energy expenditure to forage, we simply won't have the stable position to build from. The reason we were able to develop technology at all past the stone tools phase is because we developed a way to turn our excess resources into exponential sources of food, which we could then store, convert into higher energy release foods (hi bread!) and then start using some spare time and effort to devise bigger and better things.
Without that stable position, our capacity to develop anything other than different approaches at trying to maximise what we are getting from this hypothetically inhospitable ecosystem is next to nothing. Maybe one or two populations find brief spurts of luck and get inventive, but over thousands of years, and with competition in the mix, it's possible humans just die out. Like 99% of all of the other species which at some point have inhabited earth, many of which were around a lot longer than we have been. If you want to describe a scenario where we do have enough to eat and thus have surplus energy for invention, then that would be one of the other scenarios where humans make it.
Which specific part / parts of what I just said does / do not make sense?
faetal on 11/11/2016 at 00:28
You need to try to step outside of your own humanity and see us as just an animal for a moment. Because to any sufficiently advanced alien observer, the difference between us and horses to them might be the difference between dogs and scorpions to us. Our cities, no more interesting than weaver bird nests or beaver dams. Our tech is obviously incredible from our point of view because we're the only species on the planet doing it to such an extent, but that doesn't mean we can wriggle our way out of any situation, just any situation where our basic needs are being met.
TL;DR - no matter how cool the species or how resilient, if the dice roll is bad, nature may well slip us the dick
faetal on 11/11/2016 at 00:33
Here's an idea - if you believe humanity could die out, why not describe how you imagine it. Might help me see where our relative blind spots are.
Pyrian on 11/11/2016 at 01:10
I think you have to have something horrible befall civilization as we know it early on. We're prone to warring over scarce resources, so that's not that difficult a hurdle, IMO. Temperatures rise to the point where relatively few places are suitable for food production, which are then wracked by wars and shortly thereafter isolated from each other. The industrial base is literally underwater and almost entirely unusable. Some niches are wiped out and become home to wildlife, but humanity survives in some others. Temperatures keep rising, and the places where humanity still lives slowly become no longer tenable. Expeditions are sent out, but either don't make it in the first place, or are unable to adapt quickly enough to new environments. (Basically, the way you have humanity go extinct and other large land animals survive is by not being together at all.)
...And then, an ancient spaceship is discovered in the middle of the great desert...
So, what's the flip side of this? How do we make humanity functionally immune to extinction (or at least until the sun truly effs us over)? Hydroponics is a good start, but modern hydroponics, while startlingly efficient, require a lot of power and finely tuned LED's, both of which typically require industrial bases to produce. How small can that industrial base be? Put another way, how do we get a self-sufficient colony on Mars?
Starker on 11/11/2016 at 05:26
I agree. There would have to be multiple factors. We would have to lose all nutritious food sources, so that nobody would be able to cultivate anything or raise anything. It's hard to imagine how this could happen when we have greenhouses and hydroponics, but maybe there are diseases that wipe out all our crops faster than we can protect them. Even so I don't think everyone will be starving or constantly foraging. There will always be people who crack the whip to have other people forage for them. Or offer protection in exchange or something like that. And even outside of that, there are good reasons why there would be some sort of division of labour.
Wars can be a pretty big disruptors of stability and could destroy a lot of our technological capabilities and industrial bases. They could also keep us from uniting and cooperating, isolating us from each other. Like I said, I don't think that we lose all our technological capabilities, but this could limit it significantly. Environment will play a part, certainly, but I think humans themselves have to play a big role too in order for this to happen.
Oh, and faetal, we sort of did invent food, though, by selecting the best bits and cultivating them over hundreds and thousands of years. Almost all of the food we eat today is a product of artificial selection.
faetal on 11/11/2016 at 11:37
Quote Posted by Starker
Oh, and faetal, we sort of did invent food, though, by selecting the best bits and cultivating them over hundreds and thousands of years. Almost all of the food we eat today is a product of artificial selection.
No we didn't, we refined what was there. We didn't evolve in an environment without an excess of edible food, we just turned the excess into more excess. So putting us into a situation without excess food doesn't provide us with the same head start.
Ok, so Pyrian just described the situation I've been referring to the whole time. Just minus the inclusion of competitor species, which is odd since it's a gigantic facet of ecological pressure. Except it isn't the sun which effs us over. I think I may have identified why people are finding this scenario so hard to understand anyway - it isn't the heat which kills most of life on earth
per se, at least not directly, it is the extant and rate of change which disrupts species interrelationships to the point where food webs collapse. My hypothesis is that when this happens, the first response of humans will likely be massive wars for resources followed by widespread social unrest and the collapse of civilisation - starvation will tend to do that. I imagine there'll be a lot of asymmetry as the wealthier pockets will have hoarded a lot assuming there was warning, but even cans of beans only last so long. So it's not about the sun drying up soil so we can't plant stuff, it's about the stuff which exists shifting drastically in its relative abundance, which over time, pushes species out and brings other ones to the fore. I can vastly change the landscape too.
Being able to survive in certain temperatures is as simple as just moving to somewhere cooler. Even in a 10 degree rise, I'd imagine humans could find somewhere habitable. Trouble is what would be left to share it with. If you lose a significant number of plant species, or ones which are key players in a large food web, you get chaos. In food webs, plants are known as primary producers, as they convert energy from the sun into mineral energy - it is the beginning of food basically. Barring a few very rare biomes where bacteria are able to produce biomolecules from chemical energy or heat energy (thermal vents and the like), sunlight is basically where life starts. No plants = no things which eat plants = no things at all. Pretty much everything living on earth right now evolved around the ecological landscape we have. Re-rolling that landscape basically brings a new ruleset and everything cascades from those rules. Humans are not infinitely adaptable, just highly adaptable (such that I've repeatedly stated how I think is a very unlikely scenario dependent on an extremely unlucky rule change).
What happens when ecological systems decompensate is that fragile species (over-specialised ones essentially) end up adapted to something which no longer exists and they die off quickly, weedy species (species which can subsist in variety of conditions, things like daphnea, cockroaches, knotweed, humans to an extent, though we're bigger so need much more resources) have a chance to exploit the niches which were left. This gets offset by a lot of things though, such as species
expense, which is a measure of how much energy you need to reproduce.
For humans, that expense is a lot, which hasn't been a problem since we came to exist because of an abundance of things we are adapted to eat. We still can't eat the majority of biological things on earth, much of it is poisonous, not nutritious enough to offset the cost of finding and digesting it (turning food into energy costs energy - this is why e.g. raw celery is such a great diet food) or simply not palatable, or irritant enough that eating it just causes vomiting and / or diarrhoea. This is why we hunt and gather, we tend to have to go and find the things which are edible - we can't just grab the nearest thing.
Also, humans have one of the most arduous and inefficient reproductive processes in the animal kingdom. We produce 1 offspring (barring rare exceptions) at approx 1 year intervals at best and the infant is born not-fully developed (fontanelle is basically the only way we can have our brain size and not have female pelvises be so wide that they're no longer fit for load-bearing / locomotion). The bonus we have is a big brain, quite a payoff, but again, possibly only in this period of abundance.
Ecological fitness is like a big old equation with many factors. If after a warming-induced mass extinction event, the environment was configured such that humans did not have access to an excess of metabolically compatible food (entirely possible, though probably a bit of a disastrous dice roll), then other species with better adaptation to available nutrients would thrive while we faltered. Extrapolate this scenario over thousands or tens of thousands of years, and humans just die. It could be like if you imagine the worst parts of African famine and just apply that to humans everywhere over lots of time. Things you might not even think about are pathogens, notably parasites making things harder (taxing nutrient intake).
As a biologist, I think is a possible scenario. A very unlikely one, but a possible one. No species on this planet is guaranteed to survive a large enough ME event, even the wiki from some of the larger species which survived the last one postulate that they possibly just survived by luck. Not enough is known. The fact that I can't detail exactly how it would happen isn't important, since I doubt anyone can, but in my educated opinion, this is one way. Based on what I've learned about ecology, metabolism and human history.
If any of this iffy to you, please quote it and tell me the problem, which I'll attempt to explain or refine if it's a little opaque. Again, I've been a scientist for over 10 years, so I can't necessarily always remember what would have made sense to me before I did the learning, and hence to people without higher education in science.
Starker on 11/11/2016 at 15:10
Frankly, I don't understand why there has to be a competitor species to begin with. If we are left with no food sources that would sustain us, surely we will starve with or without a competitor species.
Also, I didn't mean that we literally invented food. That's why I said "sort of". It's just an example that we are able to change our circumstances to our liking to a large degree.
faetal on 11/11/2016 at 17:59
Not really, we could eke out an existence sub-optimally if there is nothing to compete with. I can't imagine an event bad enough to leave us immediately starving which wouldn't just kill us outright (still possible though I guess).
I'm trying to describe something a bit more appropriate to climate change where an extinction event goes awry (relative to the possible outcomes where we'd do a lot better) alters the environment to one we're no longer really well adapted to. Not one where there is literally nothing to eat.
There is always a competitor - it's pretty much been the case since life began. It's postulated that competition between molecules existed before cellular life began.
