Fucking baffles me.

The entire point of trying to save the climate and environment is to keep the world a nice place for our kids.

I hated that goddamn news cycle. Conservatives poisoned the well so much that you couldn’t argue against that dumb, pointless policy without being labeled a Heritage Foundation shill.

With the release of this much methane this fast, we might as well be out of equation at this piont. And by this fast, I mean on a earth’s climate timescale, not a human one. How could we possibly stop what is already snowballing? We HAD our chance to stop this and we did nothing. It is too late now to do anything but survive the new world we have made.

Horizontal gene transfer is a thing amongst bacteria, so yeah, possibly (except in no way whatsoever like a wolf dog hybrid, entirely different mechanism).

There’s also ancient viruses, which are much more terrifying and probably have a better chance at having been preserved.

That’s not how bacteria multiply. There is horizontal gene-transfer, but that would be a very slim chance.

No ancient bacteria aren’t the problem, multi-resistant strains that have already evolved and are evolving in our clinics are the real problem, some bacteria that haven’t been an issue for quite some time, because our antibiotics simply killed them, have now developed resistances and are suddenly becoming deadly again.

E. Coli, Staphylococcus aureus and Salmonella, some of the most prevalent bacteria in humans are rapidly becoming multi-drug-resistant and resistant to desinfectants like chlorine. These superbugs already account for a shockingly high number of deaths in healthcare facilities and the situation is only getting worse as more and more countries use increasing amounts of antimicrobials, kickstarting microbial evolution into overdrive.

If that was all there was to it, no bacteria would be affected by antibiotics anymore. And yes, they’re less effective, but it’s far from an obsolete tool. We just have to be smarter about using them.

i’m not familiar with Buddhism so if there is something i’m missing here, that would be why lol.

this is a good question, amusingly enough there is no answer, philosophy sucks.

Just because you can’t recall it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. As a spermatozoon, you eagerly swam towards that egg, then that egg could have chosen to abort at any time. Yet here you are alive. You chose to be here. Deal with it, accept it and move on with your life.

does a delusional person choose to have delusions?

Things that are outside of our psychological realm, and physical control are quite literally something we have no control over.

Water also disappears. At some point water is being pumped by a power source. I suppose that’s more when people get driven out, by hunger and thirst than by just curiosity or a plan. So much easier to leave before things go bad, but like Katrina showed, mobility is a class thing, some people can’t leave like that.

Do you not live in the USA? Do you not realize how many people are driving around old beaters that can absolutely get overheated in such an environment?

In my hometown more than half the driveways are filled with multiple beater-ass cars, most of which don’t work and are just sort of rotting. They just keep adding new ones by buying more shitty vehicles that die quickly and doing the same cycle over again.

This assumes a car with a working cooling system. How many people have old cars with bad head gaskets or a radiator leak and “just fill it with water” and not fix the problem, only to find that pure water isn’t enough, as modern cars will walk up and down from 185-235F, which will blow steam before the fans kick on. They never noticed because they only drove a few miles a day, not long or hard enough to find out there is a real problem and not a nuisance.

I gues convenience is more important than waste, to most people.

The problem is that there a major, major shortage of one of the isotopes needed to re-enrich weapons grade uranium (pu 238). Thats before you get to the vast energy inefficiency of doing it which isn’t a problem, if you’re just decommissioning them anyway and you don’t care about energy consumption. However, in this instance, you would need to worry about energy consumption as well as the isotope there won’t be enough of to convert even a fraction of it.

Again, even if you had 100 years, there aren’t enough of the specialist minerals needed for hydro storage and renewables.

Essentially theres" a hole in our bucket."

The only answer is degrowth.

Sure, I’m all for getting rid of them but it really seems to be the only option. It really won’t be that bad. It’ll just mean we can’t all take the piss with energy, lose the super rich, eat less meat and do a lot less work.

Its that we’ve all been made to see the idea of degrowth as something terrible because the rich would be the first thing to go. You just can’t have the rich without a vast amounts of excess production.

Please think about this: why shouldnt working less and polluting less be the first thing we should try, if we really wanted to save the planet etc.?

Since when do you need either of those to build a wind turbine? We are talking about very simple machines here, plenty of ways to build one.

What? What do you think a government is?

That makes sense. Thank you for responding.

For carbon sequestration, which also needs to happen.

Agree, but I think virtually all methods typically talked about are nonsense. Using massive fossil resources to design, build, and maintain giant machines or many smaller machines will ultimately do little to slow ecological collapse even if it does reduce carbon somewhat after some years needed to break even on production. The only sequestration method I’ve ever heard about that makes any sense to me is neighborhood scale production and use of biochar (and avoiding buying any sort of purpose made biochar device that required fossil resources to produce and ship to you). I make biochar in my backyard fire pit (which is a low smoke design) with used coffee tins (i.e. trash) and use the resulting biochar and ash in my compost.

Harm reduction is valid.

Agree, Any and all scientifically backed methods to allow us time for degrowth should be considered. I’m not convinced nuclear energy should be a significant part of this though, too many downsides and risks.

Unless you are legitimately an alien or a cat or something that somehow got on Lemmy (and I apologize if this is the case), then you are a human. You can’t identify your way out of being a member of this species.

The fact my fellow autistic people are disidentifying from humanity is extremely concerning. Even worse I can understand why given the behaviour of so many humans being what it is. Plus constantly being marginalized in human societies doesn’t help.

The solution though isn’t to stop identifying as being human and pretend to be something else. The solution is to re-evaluate what being human is. Too much emphasis in popular culture is placed on humanity or being human as some positive thing where someone who is truly human couldn’t be the villain or the mass murderer. The reality is the human race is broad and doing a genocide is just as human as inventing the vaccine for TB. Those things we can do because we are human, with human capabilities. Another animal wouldn’t think to make a vaccine, or to do a genocide, they do what they because of instincts, learned behavior, and survival.

Autistic people identify as non-, or other-than- human in other ways than furry, e.g. Machinekin or Alienkin.

Me? I just don’t want the label of human, because I don’t respect human society.

gotta love extinction science

Bacteria, viruses, insects all way more likely to survive.

The bigger and more complex generally means more likely to run out of something.

No, we aren’t

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458

This planetary boundaries framework update finds that six of the nine boundaries are transgressed, suggesting that Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity.

The planetary boundaries framework (1, 2) draws upon Earth system science (3). It identifies nine processes that are critical for maintaining the stability and resilience of Earth system as a whole. All are presently heavily perturbed by human activities. The framework aims to delineate and quantify levels of anthropogenic perturbation that, if respected, would allow Earth to remain in a “Holocene-like” interglacial state. In such a state, global environmental functions and life-support systems remain similar to those experienced over the past ~10,000 years rather than changing into a state without analog in human history. This Holocene period, which began with the end of the last ice age and during which agriculture and modern civilizations evolved, was characterized by relatively stable and warm planetary conditions. Human activities have now brought Earth outside of the Holocene’s window of environmental variability, giving rise to the proposed Anthropocene epoch.

well its probably cockroaches and bacterium, or some weird bullshit species that exists.

Humans are famously good at surviving in the desert. That’s why so much of human civilization exists at the center of large land masses in arid climates.

I hope humans are not very survivable, because then we wouldn’t have humans like you around.

It’s one of their biggest moments since multicellular life evolved

Great question, I glad you asked. When I said both multicellular and microbial life would be fine, what I meant is it’s unlikely either would be wiped totally out.

As highlighted in the article you linked, only about 90% of [multicellular] species died out during the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event, specifically the “things have been worse before” situation I was thinking about. Also noted in the article is that the conditions we’re experiencing now are not to the same degree although we’re observing events similar to what we understand may have happened during the Permian-Triassic Extinction, again to a much lesser degree.

Keep in mind atmospheric CO2 levels were estimated to be around 2500 ppm, about 6 times greater than our current levels of around 420 ppm. Preindustrial CO2 levels were 270 ppm, so we’ve added about 150 ppm. It’s not all that much but it’s enough to start changing things for the worse for many of the planet’s current inhabitants.

As to microbial life, I’m a microbiologist so I know my microbes. They as a whole are far more resilient and will outlast all multicellular life. Some thrive in conditions where no multicellular life on Earth could survive. Even if conditions were so hostile than no microbes could survive, some form endospores. These are incredibly resilient little escape pods that can remain viable for millions of years, then reactivate when conditions are better, reconstituting back to bacteria.

While extinctions are frankly depressing, they do open ecological niches into which other species with suitable traits can expand and, given time and selective pressure, differentiate. For example, all we’d need is mice and a suitable food source to survive and, a few million years later, the earth will be covered with various species decended from both of them.

Humans aren’t selfish, greedy, parasites. We just get brainwashed into being that way by our culture

What are you basing this on? Like what scientific knowledge exactly? That life will find a way? You realize the “scientist” in Jurassic Park who said that wasn’t a real scientist???

Look at every other planet. Do any of them have life? What makes you so blindingly confident this planet won’t join them? We are in a mass extinction right now due to unprecedented rapid climate change. The only life left might just be extremophiles and they may never be able to evolve to be multicellular. And not even extremopjiles can survive everything.

That people are so casual about this shows a profound lack of scientific knowledge.

Our carcasses could end up being petrochemicals of the emerging life forms.

No, by definition of what’s alive, which is already scientifically described. That’s my entire point, is that the people commenting on this are laypeople without scientific understanding or basis. I’m trying to correct that because our scientific ignorance is literally killing us.

A rock is not alive. A volcano is not alive. This is grade school science. This is what “biology” is.

https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/intro-to-biology/what-is-biology/a/what-is-life

Properties of life

Biologists have identified various traits common to all the living organisms we know of. Although nonliving things may show some of these characteristic traits, only living things show all of them.

1. Organization Living things are highly organized, meaning they contain specialized, coordinated parts. All living organisms are made up of one or more cells, which are considered the fundamental units of life.

2. Metabolism Life depends on an enormous number of interlocking chemical reactions. These reactions make it possible for organisms to do work—such as moving around or catching prey—as well as growing, reproducing, and maintaining the structure of their bodies. Living things must use energy and consume nutrients to carry out the chemical reactions that sustain life. The sum total of the biochemical reactions occurring in an organism is called its metabolism.

3. Homeostasis Living organisms regulate their internal environment to maintain the relatively narrow range of conditions needed for cell function. For instance, your body temperature needs to be kept relatively close to 98.6 [^\circ]F (37 [^\circ]C). This maintenance of a stable internal environment, even in the face of a changing external environment, is known as homeostasis.

4. Growth Living organisms undergo regulated growth. Individual cells become larger in size, and multicellular organisms accumulate many cells through cell division. You yourself started out as a single cell and now have tens of trillions of cells in your body [^1]! Growth depends on anabolic pathways that build large, complex molecules such as proteins and DNA, the genetic material.

5. Reproduction Living organisms can reproduce themselves to create new organisms. Reproduction can be either asexual, involving a single parent organism, or sexual, requiring two parents. Single-celled organisms, like the dividing bacterium shown in the left panel of the image at right, can reproduce themselves simply by splitting in two!

6. Response Living organisms show “irritability,” meaning that they respond to stimuli or changes in their environment. For instance, people pull their hand away—fast!—from a flame; many plants turn toward the sun; and unicellular organisms may migrate toward a source of nutrients or away from a noxious chemical.

7. Evolution Populations of living organisms can undergo evolution, meaning that the genetic makeup of a population may change over time. In some cases, evolution involves natural selection, in which a heritable trait, such as darker fur color or narrower beak shape, lets organisms survive and reproduce better in a particular environment. Over generations, a heritable trait that provides a fitness advantage may become more and more common in a population, making the population better suited to its environment. This process is called adaptation.

We can see how earth as a planet doesn’t qualify as a living organism based on these 7 parameters. Metaphorically calling earth “living” to describe the various interacting systems and ecologies is common but not in this context with climate change and insisting the earth will actually repair itself like a living organism.

I’m all for philosophically wondering about stuff, but we need to have an agreement on terms and what they mean. And in this case, these terms are already defined amd we know the planet isn’t able to heal itself to address climate change. That’s just a cope.