Timeline for Area denial organism for pre-industrial human beings on Earth
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
12 events
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| Nov 23 at 6:00 | comment | added | Kirt | Re: 'The intent of your response', I think your answer is fine, and I agree with its argument: Whatever natural barriers there are to exploration / colonization, humans are indeed clever and inventive and they will surely overcome those barriers if properly motivated. I don't have a problem with your answer; I just think you fundamentally misunderstand how evolution works, if you think that there is some sort of pre-ordained purpose to make and preserve humans as dominant. To the extent that I have an "ideology" it is that of our current, mainstream understanding of evolutionary biology. | |
| Nov 23 at 4:47 | comment | added | JBH | @Kirt I believe you lost the intent of my response in the depths of your ideology. Don't worry too much about it, humanity has been successfully finding ways to avert doom for a long time and if we're fortunate to make that million-year mark you mention, the magic of our technology will be breathtaking - both the power to save and the power to destroy, as all tools are. | |
| Nov 22 at 23:37 | comment | added | Kirt | The current dominance of humans has very little to do with evolution and almost everything to do with cultural transmission. Our species at its 'pinnacle', for the same reasons we are good at problem-solving, are currently making it entirely possible to disrupt this cultural transmission with nuclear war or a climate disaster. | |
| Nov 22 at 23:34 | comment | added | Kirt | "The truth is that humanity is incredibly adept at overcoming problems." Yes "That's the entire point of evolution and becoming the pinnacle of that evolution:" No. There is no "point" of evolution, and certainly no drive toward any one species becoming it's 'pinnacle'. The average mammalian species lasts about a million years from speciation to extinction; no one 'wins' evolution. | |
| Nov 20 at 15:42 | comment | added | gerrit | @JBH If it's even smaller, at some point it ceases to be a continent. | |
| Nov 20 at 9:42 | comment | added | JBH | @gerrit New Zealand isn't a continent... but that's the idea, although probably something more like half the distance to the ice shelf. | |
| Nov 20 at 9:41 | comment | added | JBH | @kutschkem That isn't hard to imagine at all, per my link viz-a-viz isolation, diet and time (c.f. when the Europeans first visited South America). The problem is that we don't have a new planet filled with alien diseases. We have the same planet all those disease and the people evolved on. Hence my frame challenge. | |
| Nov 20 at 8:26 | comment | added | kutschkem | That quote in the beginning... Given what happens IRL whenever a slightly new, highly infectious disease appears, imagine what happens when you encounter a planet worth of new diseases all at once, that are somehow able to infect you and spread, and that no one in your population has any kind of immunity to. | |
| Nov 20 at 7:30 | comment | added | gerrit | let's make the continent a little smaller and push it a little further toward the pole — you mean like New Zealand? | |
| Nov 20 at 3:57 | comment | added | JBH | @MontyWild But you asked for something that would delay until industrialization. We need only look at evolution to know that the only way to guarantee that would be a technological dependency. | |
| Nov 20 at 3:37 | comment | added | Monty Wild♦ |
Of course we're going to be able to overcome pretty much any problem we encounter on our home planet... eventually. That was the point of the before the start of the industrial era part of the question.
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| Nov 19 at 18:12 | history | answered | JBH | CC BY-SA 4.0 |