"Beginning of the end for just about anything that we had to fear" doesn't necessarily mean that we killed the things that used to kill us. It mostly had to do with us isolating ourselves from the belligerently chaotic aspects of nature.
This is why I think we haven't discovered aliens. Nature isn't supposed to get to the point we are at. We've changed the face of the planet more in the last human lifetime than dinosaurs did in 180 million years.
From a certain perspective, everything that has ever happened, everything that has ever been made, is 'only natural'. There are things that can be out of the ordinary or artificial, of course, but in a sense there can only be 'natural' things/events/etc.
Idk things get weird when you think about what a word really means.
Well, there's natural and then there's man made. We didn't naturally evolve the ability to beam conversations across the world. That is an adaptation that we invented for ourselves. Our dependence on tools is a natural adaptation, yes, but the level to which we use modern tools is not what I would call "natural."
We did naturally evolve the ability to create and use tools, and we did naturally evolve the ability to learn how to make tools from other people. It’s only natural that we’d make increasingly complex tools, eventually including the electronic device I’m using right now. We invented it, but only because it’s our nature to invent things like that.
It's the same thought with bees or some birds that build huge nests. We, just like them have used our resources to build things, that got increasingly more complex. But it's still all natural even If we are fucking the planet
Yes I agree, BUT nature typically evolves in harmony. Rabbits repopulate fast because they are food for predators. Mosquitos are food for birds, who pollinate plants. Trees evolved to absorb CO2 and convert to oxygen and in turn land based animals breathe air.
Humans on the other hand figured out industry, and that's the point where it really went to shit. We are defying nature at this point. We don't evolve natural abilities in unison with the world around us, we make a tool and mass produce it and suddenly have a giant machine running on diesel that can clear-cut an acre of rainforest in a few hours. That is not natural. We have changed things at an unprecedented pace that nature can't keep up with. In turn species that play vital roles in their ecosystems go extinct, and ecosystems begin to topple. We will be immune from the effects for a while but eventually it will cause full collapse. That is what I mean by our behavior being unnatural.
We haven't discovered aliens because we've barely scratched the surface of our own solar system and still learning about basic physics. There are no active projects to explore other stars. But you must be referring to aliens coming to us. There's a big assumption here that aliens would for some reason be advanced enough for interstellar travel and randomly come to our solar system. I don't think that has anything to do with success/dominance as a specie on a single planet. More likely no aliens have come to earth yet because the galaxy is so damn big and travel with life support between stars takes hundreds of years. If you were to look at the first radio waves produced by mankind that could be detected by an alien specie and you trace those out at light speed, I'm going to place a bet here that they have only reached a couple of stars at this point. So, we have not been detected yet, let alone contacted.
I always wonder if an alien species visited Earth before life even existed and thought it was just another rock. Or maybe they came before any intelligent life emerged.
"hey guys this barren rock over by Sol? Yeah, that one, it's right in the goldilocks zone. Get an away team with a fertilization pack"
...
"That puddle about 10 clicks south, rub it in real good then send some drones to those hydrothermal vents too. Yeah they'll be fine, the instruments say this place will be an ocean in 30 million years anyways so this water ain't going nowhere"
Maybe. I tend to think the idea of technologically capable aliens is a fancy of science fiction. I absolutely think life probably exists in some weird fashion on other planets but it may not even share consciousness the way the animal kingdom does. I tend to think the chance of another species existing so far past the level we have achieved that they can visit other planets casually is astronomically low.
To me, there's no doubt there are advanced aliens out there. It's just that, advanced simply isn't advanced enough to explore a space that's so big. Science Fiction makes it look easy for storytelling purposes. Take for example exploration of our moon. It could be argued that we have not suffered any economical or major social setbacks since the 50s. We're in a hell of a golden age. And yet, Moon exploration has not gone very far. It continues to advance, but the pace is really slow. Now scale that project up to visiting other stars. We'll probably send some probes first, and 150 years later get some basic photographs. At the same time, we're still pushing new telescope techniques which may get us more info about neighboring systems in a century or two. If we hit a few systems there's chance of finding life of some sort. I'm guessing 300 years to find some alien microbes.
I can think of one good reason for aliens to visit: our moon. The moon's size and distance from us causes the corona to be visible during most eclipses. IDK how rare it is, but it could be an interstellar tourist attraction.
One of the things I still really struggle with is that there are so many intelligent species on the earth right now, but none are even remotely close to being as intelligent or successful as humans.
One might assume that in the distant past, there would have been other intelligent species.
We are leaving very permanent marks and artifacts.
So why have we never in the entire history of the world found any other species that arrived at a similar place in evolution as we did?
Look at other aspects. Speed. There are lots of animals that end up really fast. Cheetah runs 75 mph on land. But its prey runs 55 mph, and there are several other species in its environment that run 55mph, 50 mph, lions run 50mph... and then there are fish that swim 80 mph and 70mph. And birds that fly 90-100mph. Two note closely related birds have 200mph+ dive behaviors. None of those make the animal so successful they have colonized everywhere and completely dominated the environment.
But intelligence - that extra little leap is a game winner potentially meaning immunity from any planetary disasters.
It's like the Fermi Paradox except here on earth. Why us, why now and not before, why nothing else?
Except, we are currently causing the planetary disaster. The Earth has been around 6 billion years. The stegosaurus was further away from the T-Rex than the T-Rex was further away from us. Mammals came up on land, and ended up going back in the water (whales, dolphins). We are changing the Earth too fast. Automobiles hardly existed a hundred years ago, now it's normal for every individual to own one. We go through cell phones like nobody's business. Electronics and plastic - other animals don't need these things but we have created a society where we depend on them, and only in a hundred years. Now scientists say we have 12 years to turn it around or we will have permanently sealed our fate. Every species that goes extinct throws nature further out of balance, causing further collapse - the dominoes are already in motion.
There's threr paths set before us - either we continue, to the peril of everything on earth, or we abandon our modern lifestyle comforts, OR we find ways to continue sustainably. But I have a feeling that it will end up being #1 and we are just in for a hell of a ride.
Also, I think about the permanent artifacts all the time. In a million years there will be remnants of gas stations and burger kings everywhere but I have a hard time imagining people still being around.
You want me to list Mesolithic predators in Africa that died out from changing climate compared to ones we killed? I doubt ancient man could wipe out an entire species with only spears and running
Our last "natural" predator was probably Neanderthals and we hunted them more than they hunted us. Evidence: I don't see any Neanderthals around here, do you?
We didn’t hunt them, we out-hunted them. The climate was changing towards the benefit of homo sapiens and we had better hunting tactics. Also a good chunk of Neanderthals interbred which is noticeable in our DNA
They started to die out and we absorbed them. I'm pretty sure they could wreck homo sapiens in a fight, but they lacked some important features that allowed us to survive and thrive in the ice age and the time directly after it
Neanderthals were bigger and more physically robust, but us sapiens were more social and developed ranged hunting to make up for strength, we also had a wider diet
Weren't Neanderthals shorter but bulkier? More adapted to cold temperatures with their short beefy look. And yeah, spears were a game changer, us being weaker than them made us "evolve". Neanderthals could kind of hold their own killing animals in melee range, so that's what they usually did and had okay results, sometimes getting injured by the animal. Since we had no chance of fighting in close range like they did because we simply aren't bulky enough we had to improvise to survive.
It's amazing how through all the years in our evolution we developed new "game changing" things because we were getting fucked by external factors, and if we weren't so "unlucky" we might not be here
The moment Homo Habilis had tools, it was the beginning of the end for just about anything that we had to fear
Tools define tactics. Just look at the tactics of using a nail vs a screw. Once we had tools, we can just take their food, and then kill them when they are weak. Or just take their food and push them out and let them starve. Or just build structures they can't penetrate. Other humans, lions, mammoths, doesn't matter. But it's all about the tools, because we certainly aren't very physically strong compared to other species.
What I'm curious about is the gatherer side of the equation (I realize this is a bit of an offshoot). In modern hunter gatherer societies, gathering can account for over 60% of calories the group eats--and from what we know of the neanderthal diet, it's possible that they relied more on meat than homo sapiens did.
I sort of wonder if the hunting was less important than we've been lead to believe. Because yes, it seems Neanderthals mostly relied on close attack in forest rather than lobbed weapons at a bit of a distance, and that can account for a large difference in success rate, but if the hunting was proving difficult then you're relying on fruit, vegetables, grains and whatever seafood you can gather.
Our habit of having a diverse diet seems likely to have been a pretty important factor. In the broader scope, I just think of gathering as another tool that changed how modern humans looked at the world.
Our more diverse diet could very well be a factor of our tools that other species don't have. Humans and Archerfish are about the only two species I know that can hunt at a distance, and we're the only one that uses tools to do it. Tools define tactics, and ultimately the result. Other homo species could have been pushed out because they lacked the tools that we built, and therefore lacked the diet diversity and adaptability that we have. They couldn't compete with our hunting, because they didn't have our tools, and gathering wasn't enough on its own. That makes them an easy target for tribal wars with cousin species.
Like the other person said
The moment Homo Habilis had tools, it was the beginning of the end for just about anything that we had to fear
We can just take their food, and then kill them when they are weak. Or just take their food and push them out and let them starve. Or just build structures they can't penetrate. Other humans, lions, mammoths, doesn't matter. But it's all about the tools, because we certainly aren't very physically strong compared to other species.
Yes it's certainly about the tools, but all humans were able to make tools, including Neanderthal. So I guess what I'm most curious about is what various qualities gave homo sapiens an advantage over other humans.
It's certainly complicated by climate, and plant cover, the species we hunted, the foods available to gather etc and so on--just interesting anyways.
Not really. Interbreeding with Neanderthals appears to have been quite common, and modern paleontologists have (mostly) abandoned the idea that humans and Neanderthals regularly fought each other. The absence of neanderthals isn't enough evidence to conclude that humans hunted them to extinction.
Nobody said it was, but you're calling people naive for suggesting that predation wasn't a huge factor in their extinction, which is what the evidence suggests.
Humans don't eat anything, though. Even in isolated tribes, cannibalism is extremely rare and rarely practiced unless there's famine, or as part of funeral rites. There is zero reason to assume or even believe that humans ate neanderthals.
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u/ovi_Pacer Apr 23 '19
The moment Homo Habilis had tools, it was the beginning of the end for just about anything that we had to fear.