Study: Sixth Extinction Event Is Underway 294
garyisabusyguy writes: We've heard proposals in the past that a new extinction event is underway. However, a new study takes into consideration many other factors that may be tilting the data, and still comes to the inevitable conclusion that we have triggered a large die-off, and that we may become victims of it as well.
From the paper's abstract: "Even under our assumptions, which would tend to minimize evidence of an incipient mass extinction, the average rate of vertebrate species loss over the last century is up to 114 times higher than the background rate. Under the 2 E/MSY background rate, the number of species that have gone extinct in the last century would have taken, depending on the vertebrate taxon, between 800 and 10,000 years to disappear. These estimates reveal an exceptionally rapid loss of biodiversity over the last few centuries, indicating that a sixth mass extinction is already under way."
The authors suggest that rapid work to avert the worst of the die-off is still possible. The question may really be whether we can get past paid trolls, FUD, and finger pointing in order to act wisely in a timely manner.
From the paper's abstract: "Even under our assumptions, which would tend to minimize evidence of an incipient mass extinction, the average rate of vertebrate species loss over the last century is up to 114 times higher than the background rate. Under the 2 E/MSY background rate, the number of species that have gone extinct in the last century would have taken, depending on the vertebrate taxon, between 800 and 10,000 years to disappear. These estimates reveal an exceptionally rapid loss of biodiversity over the last few centuries, indicating that a sixth mass extinction is already under way."
The authors suggest that rapid work to avert the worst of the die-off is still possible. The question may really be whether we can get past paid trolls, FUD, and finger pointing in order to act wisely in a timely manner.
The irony (Score:2, Insightful)
Funny you should mention FUD in the summary, considering the entire premise is a textbook demonstration.
We can have an intelligent and productive movement towards a clean, ecologically healthy world without the fear mongering bullshit.
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Funny you should mention FUD in the summary, considering the entire premise is a textbook demonstration.
We can have an intelligent and productive movement towards a clean, ecologically healthy world without the fear mongering bullshit.
LOL the problem is that has been exactly what has been happening for the past 3000 years. We have been making progress towards a much better world. The problem is that it doesn't leave room for doomsayers and scaremongers
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We have been making progress towards a much better world. The problem is that it doesn't leave room for doomsayers and scaremongers
Also doesn't leave room for millions of other species.
Evolution runs on death.
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Cambrian explosion would like to have a word with you.
Re:The irony (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you justify your claim of it being BS with no evidence?
Give some evidence, better than the one in the paper (note: several studies have shown that this is a massive extinction event and we're probably the ones doing it). Or just make shit up and stick your head up your ass and go "All I see is bull shit!".
Your call.
Re:The irony (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: The irony (Score:4, Insightful)
Absolutely. And the more money you make (or think maybe you'll make someday with all the great ideas you haven't implemented), the better equipped you are to pass judgment on complex technical fields you aren't even familiar with. It has to be "clean" money, though, made from enriching shareholders... none of this working for the public good nonsense.
Re:The irony (Score:5, Interesting)
The Holocene extinction is a well known phenomenon; you can read about it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The paper doesn't present any new evidence; it's a biased interpretation of existing, known data.
Ehrlich is simply wrong when he says "[the study] shows without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event"; that would require 75% or more of all species to disappear; the paper only looks at a small subset of species, those most affected by humans. The paper also incorrectly extrapolates from the past into the future, but 19th and 20th century trends simply aren't relevant to the 21st century or beyond. Growth is entirely different in the 21st century, and the high extinction rates in past centuries were due to particularly susceptible species and pristine ecosystems being affected. Think of it this way: if we were actively trying to kill species, we are now reaching the point where we have killed off all the ones that are easy to kill, and if we wanted to continue, it would be a lot harder and we would have to slow down.
Finally, the paper presents no evidence that an anthropogenic extinction or mass extinction event would be harmful to humans. Gibbons, bison, manatee, oryxes, tapirs, and all those other endangered species are wonderful to have around, and I think everybody should donate and volunteer trying to provide habitat for them. But misrepresenting their significance doesn't help: Bartel's Rat going extinct is no more a threat to human survival than the Mona Lisa going up in flames would be.
The paper is bullshit, and if you knew anything about the subject, you would recognize it as such.
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I wondered if the extinction record could be used as evidence of past intelligent species on Earth. If there were any kind of prior top-shelf minds spreading across the globe one unmistakable evidence would be in how
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Any intelligent civilization populous and large enough to cause a detectable extinction event would leave lots of fossils. None of the fossils in the fossil record that we have found could plausibly have been intelligent even if they didn't leave any artifacts.
In addition, there is little indication that humans will actually cause a significant extinction event. Sure, in the space of 1000 years, we cleared off the same number of species that might normally go extinct in 100000 years, but that's a blip that
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if you dare mention that the greenhouse effect is logarithmically challenged.
I like the way you phrase that. You should be a writer.
Re: Wallpaper or papercuts (Score:2)
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they say that humans will be the first to go.
they do not offer any reasoning whatsoever for why humans would go extinct before cows or seagulls, yet humans can hunt seagulls to extinction.
that is - the published part of the 'study' just is 100% scaremongering without any rationale whatsoever... I'm not disputing their findings (the data), but the conclusion they come with from that data is highly suspect. and they made it just to get headlines. they made the study just for that reason.
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Man is still alive and doing better than ever before.
Famous last words. I'm feeling great! I'm poking this lion with a stick. Obviously poking a lion with a stick is not bad for my health.
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The present growth rate permits us about 400 years...
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Funny that he should mention finger-pointing, too, only to point fingers at "paid trolls" and FUD as well. Physician, heal thyself.
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Any species that doesn't feel a very strong need to reproduce will eventually die out. Wanting "Babies, BABIES, BABIES!" is a required long term survival trait.
The answer is (Score:5, Informative)
And between the pecuniary interests, the people who cannot imagine anything beyond 3 months, and the folks who actually want the world to end, via either religion outcome, or just wanting to see the world burn - I suspect we're going to drive the bus off that extinction cliff while singing happy days are here again.
NOT naysayers. (Score:2, Insightful)
Cause... umm... you know... extinct is extinct.
You can't say "no it isn't" if all you have to show for as evidence of existence it is... you know... nothing.
This ain't a religious but a question of biology and of ability to count up to more than "one animal".
E.g. You can't go around claiming that T. Rex is actually hiding. And no, Bill Legend's T. Rex is not THE T. Rex.
The summary warns of "paid trolls", "FUD-ers" and finger pointers going around acting holier than thou, trying to "solve the problem" by pla
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Not anymore, it isn't. We now have the ability to snag the DNA of these animals and recreate them by injecting it into fertilized donor eggs from a similar species, and then release them into a habitat that is better suited to their continued existence, assuming that we choose to do so. Before the rise of technology, extinct was extinct. Now, extinct is more like "resource temporarily unavailable". :-)
Re:NOT naysayers. (Score:4, Insightful)
They're still not the same species. There's things like the mitochondrial DNA that is lost as well as other things like the intestinal fauna and even the cultural parts that get passed on by example from parent to child may be important.
A Mammoth born to an African Elephant is not going to the same as a Mammoth born to a Mammoth on the Arctic steppes.
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A Mammoth born to an African Elephant is not going to the same as a Mammoth born to a Mammoth on the Arctic steppes.
Not to mention, speniding millions to make an ersatz species is how smart compared to allowing them to do it the old fashioned way.
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The intestinal fauna is going to change over time anyway, and there's a nonzero chance that it contributed to the species' extinction by being incompatible with changing food sources, so replacing it would probably make the species more viable. With regards to cultural issu
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The dodo has been extinct for over 300 years. I'm talking about species that become extinct now or in the future.
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Besides, this isn't sci-fi anymore. Cross-species cloning using genetic material from one species in the ova of another was done sucessfully more than a decade ago [nih.gov] (and I'm not sure if that linked study was even the first one). There really isn't much question about whether it is possible anymore. The only real question is whether we care about a species enough to bother to bring it back from extinction....
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Cause... umm... you know... extinct is extinct. You can't say "no it isn't" if all you have to show for as evidence of existence it is... you know... nothing.
So what you are saying is it is not possible to make conjecture, until we go extinct? Cuz yea, extinct is extinct.
You see, extinction does not require everyone to sign on to it. I imagine a shit fit between a few of the major players might do the job even if 90 percent of humanity are peaceful people never to commit a violent act.
People generalizing the entire humanity as being "people who cannot imagine anything beyond 3 months" and "folks who actually want the world to end" and assuming that "we're going to drive the bus off that extinction cliff while singing happy days are here again."
Nice argument, but you'll notice that I never said everyone was like that.
But humans in general are an extremely violent and aggressive species, unless you want to make the
Re:The answer is (Score:4, Insightful)
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... and on the way down, we'd be sued for an unauthorised public performance.
Maybe it really is time to let the ants have a go.
Re: The answer is (Score:2)
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I *love* that song. And boy, look at that wonderful view!
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I *love* that song. And boy, look at that wonderful view!
It's morning again in America.....
Paul Ehrlich? (Score:5, Informative)
Is this the same Paul Ehrlich who became famous for predicting that overpopulation would kill off humanity long before we would see the 21st Century? Of course environmentalists, in bestowing upon us their latest set of apocalyptic "predictions" would pick someone who has been spectacularly wrong so often in the past.
Re:Paul Ehrlich? (Score:5, Informative)
“By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people ... If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." Ehrlich, Speech at British Institute For Biology, September 1971.
"In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish." Ehrlich, speech during Earth Day, 1970
http://reason.com/blog/2010/12/30/cracked-crystal-ball-environme
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Was this back when everyone was whinging that hunting was evil and shouldn't be allowed?
Note that hunting seasons pretty much eliminate that sort of problem, unless of course you make owning firearms illegal....
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Note that hunting seasons pretty much eliminate that sort of problem, unless of course you make owning firearms illegal....
So coming back full circle to our topic, you're advocating hunting season on our excess human population? What a fine (if modest) proposal.
Re:Paul Ehrlich? (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, that was an impressive leap!
so, got any evidence of overpopulation among humans? Other than a number that frightens you badly?
Since I was a kid, population has more than doubled, but people are living longer, there are fewer famines (other than those engineered by governments to get rid of undesired minorities), fewer plagues, fewer wars. Basically, double-triple the population but living better than any time in history....
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And when we don't have enough oil for everybody, we'll have a huge fucking problem.
Climate change and peak oil wouldn't be a problem at all with less than 1 billion humans on the planet.
Re:Paul Ehrlich? (Score:4, Informative)
How much of our problems stem from overpopulation?
Almost none. Human indicators have improved markedly over the last forty years while world population doubled.
I think he was right about the dangers of overpopulation,
He was particularly wrong about this, just like other Malthusians, and just like all of them 200 years of wrong predictions have made no difference in their opinions.
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Re:Paul Ehrlich? (Score:4, Insightful)
I understand the term perfectly well, and the carrying capacity of the earth is at least 15 perhaps 20 billion. Currently we produce more food that we can consume. The problem is we distribute it rather badly.
In terms of water, we wast so much of it, that this is not really a problem. Call me back when we have ripped out our lawns, moved to high efficiency European washing machines, 1 gallon toilets, drip irrigation, etc. Then I'll believe your claims of water shortages.
Just because Ehrlich was wrong doesn't mean we aren't facing a crisis.
Ah crisis, the most over used word of the environmental movement. Everything is a crisis. Ebola is a crisis of a million dead with an actual final tally of thousands, rape on campus (which happens at lower rates than elsewhere) is a crisis, water "shortages" are a crisis even though Israel seems to manage fine (though not without trouble and ingenuity), population is a crisis even though most countries are moving rapidly towards below replacement fertility levels .
Re: Paul Ehrlich?qq (Score:2)
Re:Paul Ehrlich? (Score:4, Informative)
We have plenty of oil, or did you miss the current drop in price? and if that wasn't enough solar continues to drop in price along an exponential curve.
As for the Israeli situation, here's the reality:
A major national effort to desalinate Mediterranean seawater and to recycle wastewater has provided the country with enough water for all its needs, even during severe droughts. More than 50 percent of the water for Israeli households, agriculture and industry is now artificially produced. [New York Times]
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No. (Score:4, Interesting)
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I have learned most people prefer fear to reason and this is just proving my point.
So any predictions for the future that seem too negative are deemed FUD, even without real hard evidence to counter it, because you once read some FUD? Your logic has some holes in it.
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we have triggered a large die-off, and that we may become victims of it as well.
How are they lying about the effects, the author only suggests it's a possibility it would be our demise. It isn't proposed to a certainty. But keep burying your head in the sand, nothing we do could possibly hurt us on a large scale! More CAFOs, more intensive agriculture, more deforestation, more overfishing, and hey, more bush meat while we're at it! We're improving the planet for future generations by doing those things actually!
Scorpions will stay (Score:2)
I've been trying to trigger the extinction of scorpions out of my desert mountain yard for four years now. These things won't go anyway and they love the hot weather.
Lets say that we'll probably survive eating bugs.
Slashdot UI faces extinction (Score:4, Informative)
Served just fine nearing on 20 years, slowly pushed to extinction by the rise of soulless, repulsive Dice Holdings now known as DHI.
uh huh (Score:2, Insightful)
The question may really be whether we can get past paid trolls, FUD, and finger pointing in order to act wisely in a timely manner
In other words, "the question is whether we can get past people who don't agree instantly with me. We just need to put aside our differences and agree with me. "
Re: uh huh (Score:3)
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Humans are fine, just not all of them. (Score:2)
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The rich survive, we all die.
I think it's reasonable to believe that if the system fails to collapse soon, that may be a possibility; the machines will advance to the point that they can mine materials, refine them, build more machines, and so on. But we're very much not there yet. If something goes wrong, it will just go on going wrong, and the system will fail without humans to set it right. The rich, for the most part, know fuck-all about practical matters. The wealthier you are the less you have to know about anything other than ho
background extinction rate (Score:5, Insightful)
So, last time I checked (a couple of days back, when this first appeared in the news), "background extinction rate" is a great deal of SWAG (Scientific Wild-Ass Guess).
We don't know the total number of species alive now or at any particular time in the past. We never have, and it's likely we never will (until that number is 1). Which makes any estimate of the rate of extinction now or in the past more guess than science.
Without an accurate guesstimate of number of species at any given time, "background extinction rate" is an even less accurate guesstimate.
And with the denominator of (current extinction rate/background extinction rate) a guesstimate, the number produced (114 in this case) is another guesstimate (we don't even know the number of species going extinct now, much less the average number - what we know is the number of species that we notice going extinct).
So, I'm less than excited by this particular prediction. Maybe in a century or two we'll know enough to make this a major concern (note that 114x background rate translates to ~225 species going extinct per million years - it's hardly going to be a swift extinction, except in geological terms).
Or not....
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So, last time I checked (a couple of days back, when this first appeared in the news), "background extinction rate" is a great deal of SWAG (Scientific Wild-Ass Guess).
Well I guess that settles the question, then.
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No. You don't seem to understand this E/MSY unit.
If you consider that there are 10 million species on earth (I agree with you, this number is a guesstimate, it could be off by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude), 225E/MSY would imply approximately 2250 extinctions per *year*.
If you consider just one species, it would go extinct 225 times over in a million years. In other words, its survival expectancy would be about 4500 years.
Golden Age of Discovery (Score:2)
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Still Don't Get Geologic Time (Score:5, Interesting)
This paper talks about the background rate, averaged over 350 million (with an M) years, since the Cambrian Explosion. In the middle of that "background" we have had tidal shield volcanism, planet-killer asteroid strikes, the utter destruction of the global ecology by graminoids, and the nearly complete extinction of all anerobic life by cyanobacteria.
Now, compare this against the "current time frame" -- 100 years. 100 Years! That's insanely short. The analogy is comparing the overall murder rate of people attending church, averaged since we had statistics, to the single two hours in Charleston and then making the claim that "Church Murders are 500 Time Higher."
Comparing rates is tricky stuff. The data curve is hugely noisy, with one event causing a spike, other times things average out. In mathematical terms using the derivative of a function over short periods to extrapolate a long term event is suspect at best, and an exercise in blithering ignorance at worst. 100 years sounds like a long time to humans, but in geological time it's not even a clock tick.
It's not a "die off" -- it's "crowding out" (Score:2)
We're not in the middle of an "extinction event" -- we're simply crowding out other species and consuming their habitats.
There is a world of difference between an asteroid strike and bulldozing the rain forest.
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Re:It's not a "die off" -- it's "crowding out" (Score:5, Insightful)
With one key difference. The crowding out is being caused by humans and humans alone; die-offs as a result of "extinction events" are unavoidable natural catastrophes. There is absolutely nothing "unavoidable" or "natural" about the way mankind is butchering this planet.
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There is absolutely nothing "unavoidable" or "natural" about the way mankind is butchering this planet.
It's natural because humans are natural. Unavoidable.....you are absolutely correct.
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It's natural because humans are natural.
The current contemporary meaning of "natural" seems to be "whatever would happen if we weren't here". But really, if some other species evolved to be more complicated, they'd probably shit up their environment too.
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But really, if some other species evolved to be more complicated, they'd probably shit up their environment too.
Indeed they do, even as less complicated animals. Have you ever seen bat guano? Or, more destructively, the damage caused by a locust swarm? Nature isn't nice or good, and 'natural' isn't categorically better than 'unnatural.'
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> The crowding out is being caused by humans and humans alone;
Do you count goats, rabbits, and cane toads? Goats are a core part of the expansion of the Sahara: they graze the grass too short. Australia has numerous examples of ecological disaster from humans importing other animals, especially rabbits and cane toads.
"rate of vertebrate species loss..." (Score:5, Insightful)
So sad to see cute, cuddly and some magnificent animals die off. But they are of little significance compared to small and microscopic life forms. When they die, we die. Poison the ocean, the air and the soil and we are killing vast, unimaginable numbers of critical life forms that make our planet livable. Who is measuring our losses of algae and bacteria, the providers of oxygen that made all the rest of life possible?
You've heard about the dying honeybees, now consider the rest. You may not care for cockroaches, amoeba, bacteria or fruit flies; but they matter. And it's not just the external ones. Inside our bodies are critical critters that digest our food and symbiotically live with us. They too are at risk as we experiment with chemicals, radiation, genetics, nanotech and other fun stuff.
We all love lions, tigers and bears. Who can resist adoring a panda, koala or even an ordinary baby kitten? But are these things critical to human survival? Human emotions are fascinating but they often lead us astray.
if we run out of food to eat (Score:3)
Aibo (Score:2)
Yes, this topic at the same time as Sony is killing of the Aibo.
Paul Ehrlich, always wrong. (Score:2)
PaulEhrlich, the author of the Population Bomb! You really don't want to put stock in anything he has to say? This man has been so wrong so many times it's amazing he can keep a job.
From the Population Bomb “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines–hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
These studies are based on drake's equation (Score:2)
Not all of them... but a lot of them... and the overall synthesis of them tends to work that way.
It works something like this usually "lets study how many species have gone extinct in this acre of land". And that acre could be a place that someone build a parking lot. The acre in question is often cherry picked to give apocalyptic results. And a big thing you have to pay attention to in these studies is that "extinct" doesn't mean the species is gone from wherever in the world... just "that spot" A deer cou
Duration (Score:2)
One of the tricky things about these great extinctions is they call them "Events" which makes people think the extinctions happened quickly over short periods of time but often they were over tens of thousands or even millions of years. How that relates to our current one is an interesting point.
Re:Does it matter? (Score:5, Informative)
Considering that most of Earth is overrun by humans and that many species are in minority and located to small shrinking areas it's a cause for concern. Only species that benefits humans or live in areas inhospitable for humans have a better chance of survival.
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Big whoop. Nobody lives in the desert or in arctic tundra.
tra la lalala la tra la la laa la.. (Score:5, Funny)
Horses do. The ones with no names.
Re:Does it matter? (Score:5, Interesting)
Big whoop. Nobody lives in the desert or in arctic tundra.
Also, very few people live in the rain forests, the taiga, the steppes, etc. The population is becoming more concentrated, as the world is becoming more urban. Big areas of Siberia have been emptying out. Many small towns on the American prairie are dying, as young people head off to the cities. If you want to preserve wild habitat, the best thing to do is to encourage even faster urbanization, especially in the third world. Urban people have a smaller ecological footprint, and also have fewer children.
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Citation needed.
There's an ecological optimum somewhere between a hamlet and a megalopolis. If you live in a remote place, you need to take the car for many basic needs. If you live in a huge city, you need to import all your food, and export all your waste.
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Nobody lives in the desert
Tens of millions of people in Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, and southern California disagree with you. And that doesn't count all the people living in the Middle East and northern Africa.
Re:Does it matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
Barely populated but still heavily manipulated by humans.
It only takes a couple of people to run a 3,000 acre farm but the entirety of that 3,000 acres is strictly for human purposes and quite hostile to most animals (a monoculture alone will cause numerous issues).
Re:Does it matter? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Does it matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Overrun" can mean more than just someone having a house covering a spot. In that 3/4 of the world that is ocean, look at how several of the commercially important fisheries have collapsed. And the big whales? They had all those oceans to live in and it didn't do them any good once technological humans decided they had useful oil and parts. Just because an area is big and no one has a house there doesn't mean it hasn't been effectively "overrun". As it is now, we need a lot of open land, water, and air to provide the resources we want and to take back the trash we create. Those areas are "overrun".
Surge in people failing at English (Score:2)
Slashdot has always (at least since the five-digit days, which is when I started reading) been a refuge for people for whom English (or even simple logic) is simply too complicated, but what is it lately with people insisting that words have just one meaning? I've noticed a significant upward trend in it here on Slashdot. People want words to mean the one thing they want them to mean, and they want any other use of the same word to be invalid. You can start a flamewar most days just by using the word decima
Re:Does it matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Does it matter? (Score:5, Interesting)
So there you are. I'm willing to trust the XKCD guy, he's always been pretty diligent, but you can go hunting for the original document if you'd like.
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Re: Does it matter? (Score:2)
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For example, if it's a random type of tree frog in the amazon because of logging, that's one thing. If it's something that will cause the massive collapse of society because I can't get a steak... That's another thing entirely.
Actually, the best way to make sure something doesn't go extinct is to make it taste good.
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If most of earth's animal species die off, as long as the food chain is preserved for the plants/animals that directly benefit us, then most people will not care.
The "food chain" is actually a complex food web, and the more we prune it back, the less resilient it becomes. If it actually turns into a chain, we are one broken link away from disaster. That is one of the reason why diversity is good. Another is that plants and animals provide an enormous amounts of services, many of which we don't even understand. We know about mangroves protecting coasts and filtering water, trees reducing soil erosion and landslides, earthworms improving soil quality, legumes (or rath
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You do realize that "race" is merely an accident of melanin levels and sun exposure?
Nah, of course not. When it was time to learn grade school biology, you took that as your cue to fuck your cousin.
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Re:Paid Trolls? (Score:4, Interesting)
Paul Ehrlich is a famous doomspeaker known for his predictions of imminent doom and gloom.
He's not famous for being right though.
He may not believe in the easter bunny but he certainly believes in The Great Demise despite its consistent failure to materialize in any shape or form.
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Paul Ehrlich is a famous doomspeaker known for his predictions of imminent doom and gloom.
He's not famous for being right though.
He may not believe in the easter bunny but he certainly believes in The Great Demise despite its consistent failure to materialize in any shape or form.
You are right about Erlich (and Malthus and others) in as much as thier predictions of doom and gloom are highly exagerated in terms of time-scale. However I would question the intelligence of anyone who doesn't understand the basic thermodynamic argument against infinitely sustained growth. The question is when do we reap what we've sown; 100 years? 1,000 years? 100,000 years?
That we are in the midst of a great extinction event is not news. Might there be a significant reduction in the size of human popula
Re: The extinction of Linux thanks to systemd. (Score:2)
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Have faith in Slashdoters ! ;)
I suspect that there are less of us around here on Saturdays and Sundays, and what you're seeing is concerted shilling by some conservative group outnumbering us.
Well, that's for the nonsense. I didn't see the racist posts, they're probably by ACs and probably have been modded down by now, as they ought to be.