🚀 go-pugleaf

Actually I agree with just everything you say. It's simply that there is a
really big difference between the destruction of a worldwide industrial
civilization and extinction. We can cut down the rain forests, deplete ore
deposits, over-fish the oceans, raise the ambient world temperature by six
degrees (and flood all our coastal cities), detonate tactical fission and
fusion weapons, release chemical and biological agents, and continue to
plunge forward through habitat destruction into another Great Extinction of
many, many species, but this doesn't necessarily mean that homo sapiens as a
species will become extinct. Extinction generally results from a species'
inability to adapt to rapidly (that is, geologically rapidly) changing
environmental pressures (and early humans, in the case of the Pleistocene
magafauna may have been one of those pressures). Our intelligence and our
self-awareness gives us a tremendous advantage in adaptability.

But I will give you this -- if we make the environment so hostile that large
mammals (say above 120 Kg) cannot hang on for a few tens of millennia (until
the Earth's natural processes renew the biosphere) then extinction may be
the final result. Even Sagan's nuclear winter scenario and Kahn's
speculations on thermonuclear war did not posit the ultimate extinction of
mankind as a species. I don't want to go too far into this, I have a follow
up book to Beyond Humanity coming out, and pat of the book addresses these
very issues (as well as issues about re-terraforming the earth itself!)

Earl


--


Earl Cox
Founder and President
Scianta Intelligence, LLC
Turn Knowledge Into Intelligence
www.scianta.com

AUTHOR:
"The Fuzzy Systems Handbook" (1994)
"Fuzzy Logic for Business and Industry" (1995)

"Beyond Humanity: CyberEvolution and Future Minds"
(1996, with Greg Paul, Paleontologist/Artist)

"The Fuzzy Systems Handbook, 2nd Ed." (1998)
"Machine Intelligence Tools for Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery"
(due Early Summer 2004)


"Don H" <donlhumphries@bigpond.com> wrote in message
news:OIwlc.10069$TT.3538@news-server.bigpond.net.au...
> I commend you for your optimism, but I take a pessimistic (realistic?)
view
> of things.  The "mutant cavemen" would be survivors (if any) of a nuclear
> holocaust.  As to survivors of other causes, I remember reading that
another
> *conventional* World War would not enable us to rebuild - there wouldn't
be
> enough raw materials left with which to do so.  Our current use of raw
> materials is only possible due to their concentration in ore deposits,
> fossil fuels, etc.  Once dispersal by usage has occurred, then technology,
> esp. primitive "technology", would be unable to retrieve the needed
> materials.  What to do?  Try delving through the world's garbage dumps?
No,
> we've only got one chance, and that is NOW.  If we mess it up, then that's
> it. The human race has had it.
> Even now, the clear-felling of forests, then replanting, leaves out all
> those minor, refined, aspects of the old-growth forest.  The human brain
is
> clever, but not quite clever enough; clever enough, however, to accelerate
> our own extinction.  (Why we survived till now is more due to absence of
> technology, rather than lack of the killer instinct which is now coupled
> with it.)
> ========================
> "EarlCox" <earlcox@earlcoxreports.com> wrote in message
> news:n5Zkc.77096$yv.2698684@twister.southeast.rr.com...
> > Perhaps.
> >
> > I don't understand why the survivors would be "mutant cavemen". On the
> > whole, given the sheer size of the earth, the fact that a very small
> > population of hominids actually did survive diseases, predators, and
> natural
> > disasters over the past several million years and then managed to spread
> > over the planet, and, finally,  the basic territorial survival edge that
> > intelligence invests with humanity as a species, I suspect that homo
> sapiens
> > would probably do quite well as scattered tribes or pre-industrial age
> > settlements for another ten to twenty millennia or so until the earth
> began
> > to repair itself. In line with  recent evolutionary benefit assessments,
I
> > note that our particular kind of intelligence is probably a terrific
> > evolutionary "select for" advantage at the village level but becomes a
> > significant survival detriment at our level of planetary occupation and
> > population density.
> >
> > Earl
> >
> > --
> >
> >
> > Earl Cox
> > Founder and President
> > Scianta Intelligence, LLC
> > Turn Knowledge Into Intelligence
> > www.scianta.com
> >
> >
> > AUTHOR:
> > "The Fuzzy Systems Handbook" (1994)
> > "Fuzzy Logic for Business and Industry" (1995)
> >
> > "Beyond Humanity: CyberEvolution and Future Minds"
> > (1996, with Greg Paul, Paleontologist/Artist)
> >
> > "The Fuzzy Systems Handbook, 2nd Ed." (1998)
> > "Machine Intelligence Tools for Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery"
> > (due Early Summer 2004)
> >
> > ........
>
>