In a message dated 5/16/01 2:24:05 PM, rhanson@gmu.edu writes:
>The following futurist discussion seems completely
>clueless to me. Humanity and its descendants will change
>so fast that they will completely dominate changes in the
>biosphere. Within a thousand years, there probably won't
>be a substantial biosphere that we would recognize.
Looks like procedings from a conference I attended last year.
They're not clueless, given that you reject a singularity
and anticipate human expansion will follow a sigmoid curve.
While we all agree the sigmoid is unlikely until we bump
the limits of nature, others disagree. A lot genuinely
believe we'll knock ourselves off soon.
Some actually kind of agree with you. Jeremy Jackson
predicted in his presentation that within a century or
so there would be no creature left in the oceans larger
than a minnow and most of the coastal ocean would be
choked with various kinds of algae overgrowth. Earth
-as-neglected-swimming-pool. Rosenzweig and Western
have observed that the dominant ecologies are
really already those of human-dominated areas - which
do indeed have ecologies beyond our intent; cockroaches,
mice, coyotes, house finches, dust mites, agricultural
nematodes, etc.
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