On Fri, Oct 24, 2014 at 10:03 AM, Cathal Garvey:

Will the earth burn? No, that's an unlikely outcome. Venus is Venus because it never developed life. Will the Earth burn *us*? Maybe. Totally plausible possibility, though still unlikely. Will the Earth burn the ecosystems that civilisation (rather than humanity, per se) depends on? At this rate, probably.

None of the above. As rate of population, resource consumption and toxification is faster than restoration, and war is still easier in DNA than cooperation... humanity will burn the ecosystems humanity depends on, or burn itself. And likely far sooner than the Earth gets around to the next of any of its own human belching cycles [1]. [1] You know, on the scale of 10k to millions of years or more... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_catastrophic_risks

We have fallbacks; go all-in on solar & nuclear for energy and biotech for efficient, lower impact food/med production, and use nuclear/biotech to cook up some hyperefficient carbon-capture system to try and roll back as much as we can.

All mere delay tactics without fixing this and other things to replacement-rate first... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth

Anyways, just to say doom and gloom is rarely useful, but ostrich-heads are worse than useless.

Rarely useful? But it's so much gnarly fun ;) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_time#See_also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_the_Earth#See_also

As to on/off topic-ness, it's off topic. But this list has seen people bitching about who is and isn't a real native American, so I find this at least engaging and interesting.

cpunks are offtopic, engaging and interesting.

On 24/10/14 14:40, dan@geer.org wrote:

...

is reasonable to imagine that some excursions have a phase where the feedback is positive and thus if the temp heads either north or south its velociity will, for natural reasons, accelerate as the excursion grows more extreme. That implies that the present time is an unstable equilibrium, thus our imapct, whatever it is, seems likely to be an initiator or a potentiator but not a cause in the classical sense of, say, a dose-response curve.

Put differently, I don't believe that we (humans) can push the climate to a place it has not been before, but we can change the clock.

The only clock that matters is the time till you're off the rock. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_drive#External_links http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potential_cultural_impact_of_extraterrestrial_c... Yes, I'm a whore, beam me up some btc: 1NE2jK3emijdBf9jhtjMadRH9MJiCzo61L