Posted by David Sherman on Saturday, October 21, 2006 at 3:34PM :
In Reply to: Re: Ahhhhhhhhhhh.... posted by Michael Fanoni on Saturday, October 21, 2006 at 2:52PM :
It is rather strange to see the climate change noticeably (like major glaciers completely melting away) within one preson's lifetime, but that's still a long way from saying one bad hurricane is the result of global warming or a cluster of earthquakes means the second coming is at hand. It may well be that people have messed up the earth. We've been messing with the earth ever since the first clever cave man figured out that setting fire to the forest means easy deer hunting next year. Everybody knows that it's hotter in the cities than in the country, so the more of the earth gets covered with cities, the hotter it's going to get. But civilization is only a couple thousand years old, and even the shortest ice-age cycles last tens of thousands of years, while the major cycles last 100,000 years. What do you think the chances are of human civilization continuing the way it's going for another 1000 years? I'd say pretty near zero. Something will give eventually. Maybe there will be a brief blip in the geologic record showing a few centuries when human civilization peaked, but in the long run, the earth is still really big and it'll settle down to its regular chaotic routine once the people are either extinct or have moved to Rigel 4 or have gone back to being a few scattered groups of naked apes living in the jungle somewhere. We might destroy our civilization or our economy, and we might even make a big, but temporary, mess of some spots here and there on the earth, but we won't destroy the earth. I'd love to see how it all turns out, but I don't think I'll live that long.
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