Muck’s Minute #46 Future of Mankind, Part I

Future of Mankind, Part I

My thoughts on where we’ll end up – the long view.

I am of the opinion – born of what I feel is a long, productive existence and a life that has been one extended study-hall of immense satisfaction – that unless the developed countries of this world and those people who live therein rapidly modify their priorities, we humans are doomed to be yet another Earth dweller that will sooner than later vanish in a like manner of the dinosaurs, dodos and hundreds of thousands of other species that have dominated or lived upon and disappeared from the face of this Earth.

We will very likely be extinct in a much shorter time frame than the dinosaurs because of our own extraordinary technical skills and intelligence and the equally extraordinary stupidity of our beliefs and behavior.

Dinosaurs lived for many millions of years before they just happened to be in the way of a not-so-big asteroid that put 99% of them out of business along with about 90% of all life on Earth and in its seas. I feel it will not be long, by any measure of time, much less cosmically speaking, before the last poisoned or diseased band of nomadic humans fall, one at a time; until the last man, woman or child dies.

That lonely, painful and pitiful ending of the human race will occur on this Earth relatively soon, almost no matter what we do. How sad it is.

As long as mankind relies more on superstition, wishful thinking and short term selfish personal gain than fact and science and an awareness of species survival, humans are simply dead and don’t know it yet. Unfortunately, capitalism is too successful at generating wealth and growth and scientific progress than it is at focusing on the long term survival requirements of those who make capitalism work.

I think John Maynard Keynes statement that “In the long term we are all dead.”, should be interpreted in a different way than he intended.

There are several areas where general modification of human behavior is required sooner than later to merely slow down the death of the human race. Not keep us alive here on Earth, you understand, but to slow down the process of killing ourselves while we can take action to prevent racial extinction.

First on the list of things to try and slow down is that infamous bugaboo “global warming”.

The subject of global warming is guaranteed to either bring yawns from those who have heard the arguments before and are bored to tears by the mention of it or screams from those who are passionate in their desire to have us all ride horses (which produce methane – another greenhouse gas) or walk everywhere we go and burn supper over a renewable energy source. It seems that the subject is too big for consensus by those knowledgeable enough to study at the data – much less achieve any understanding by the great masses of people in the world who are not literate nor think with any critical ability and rely on “god” or “government” to do their thinking for them and to determine their fate.

Scientists have proven (and I personally know for a fact – which I will get into later) that global warming is a reality. What is happening is not in question. Why it is happening is being debated (to death) and is of no consequence..

From temperature records recovered from Arctic and Antarctic ice cores, tree rings, ocean bottom cores, permafrost and other sources, science has proved beyond any doubt whatsoever that the current warming trend we are experiencing is not unique in our Earth’s experience. Earth has heated up and cooled off relatively rapidly many times before, the last ice age terminating a mere 11,000 years ago – less than a blink of the eye as far as geological time is concerned. Barely time, in fact, for the ice to melt from between the toes of the last Neanderthal (which was another failed experiment on the branching tree of evolution).

Science has also proven that at least a partial reason why our atmosphere and oceans are heating up this time is because human beings are burning fossil fuels at a furious rate.

Those fossil fuels have accumulated in the Earth’s crust over thousands of millennia. It took millions and millions of years for natural evolution, climate change, decay and huge pressures to form and store these hydrocarbon deposits. We are burning them up millions of times faster that it took to create and store them in the first place.

Fossil fuels are literally giant storehouses of carbon which is a component of hydrocarbon fuels that results in carbon dioxides and monoxides when it’s burned. These hydrocarbons are locked into safe forms such as carbonates in rock and soil and sea bottom, oil and natural gas, methane in solid deposits on the floor of the oceans and they were all placed there by natural processes that happen to lock up the carbon far from Earth’ surface in such a way that it can’t cause trouble. Too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (along with other more esoteric gasses both naturally occurring and of human creation) and we get the overused and abused “greenhouse effect”. More solar energy is absorbed by the atmosphere and sea than can be radiated back into space.  When water absorbs carbon dioxide, it turns acidic which, in turns, makes the ocean habitat unlivable for aquatic creatures.

It is also a demonstrable fact that in the past, rising temperatures of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are very capable of tipping Earth’ climate into a cooling phase that will eventually end up with an ice age. This transition into a cold phase can happen in as small a span of time as a decade.

The observable fact that Earth atmosphere and ecology is a dynamic one, versus a static one, makes it very probable (barring the poisoning of those organisms that transform carbon dioxide into oxygen) that we will never attain or even approach the status now existing on Venus. Venus is an example of a static environment and the “greenhouse” effect taken to extremes but it is very likely that Venus also never had the ecological opportunities of a closed oxygen/carbon cycle in the first place.

Mars may have had such a cycle millions of years ago. We know there are vast quantities of water ice mere feet below the surface of Mars and at the poles and it had to come from somewhere. Methane has been detected in the atmosphere – and methane must be renewed in some fashion or it oxidizes and  vanishes over time. Most likely this water ice came from comet impacts and other infall from space over time (as it did on Earth) and was possibly (though not proven) maintained by an oxygen/carbon cycle such as we have. Over time, the cycle was broken and the atmosphere leaked away into space.

However, on Earth, should those organisms that convert carbon dioxide to oxygen fail in their job, the ever greater buildup of carbon dioxide would indeed turn the Earth into a static, blistering no-life world.

End Part I

Author: MuckAbout

Retired Engineer and Scientist (electronic, optics, mechanical) lives in a pleasant retirement community in Central Florida. He is interested in almost everything and comments on most of it. A pragmatic libertarian at heart he welcomes comments on all that he writes. View all posts by MuckAbout