4 replies to this topic

[F.Tnioli]

I just realized!

See, when human body gets an infection - well in most cases at least, like flu, - one of 1st things done by the body is raising body temperature.

Why?

To kill the infection, of course, - many viruses and bacteria cannot survive prolonged exposure to 40 degrees celcius or higher, while most tissues of human body - can.

So we have global warming on Earth; James Lovelock, one of interviews of his i just linked in nearby topic, - he said that Earth is "sort of living" super-organism.

And we now know that quite modest warming - something at or above +6 degrees celcius average annual surface temperature - would pretty much kill most of us humans.

In a sense, we humans are a flu of the Earth. Ironically, we even are similar in size - i mean, a single human is relatively as little to Earth, as flu virus to a human body.

On a much more serious note, flu viruses do to human body exactly what we humans do to Earth: in both cases, smaller organisms feed on the larger organism, multiply, and if not treated, endanger the larger organism's life itself. Flu can kill a human; we humans are definitely capable of (and currently in the middle of the process of) killing the Earth.


Based on the above, i hereby propose to rename our species from "Human Sapiens Sapiens" to "Flu-man Sapiens Sapiens".


Vote? Vote? :D :D


P.S. I wonder, may be it was just a mistake or incorrect writing which made our species to be now known as "Human"? You see, "Fl" looks quite similar to "H", and in middle ages, they were doing all the writing by hand; easy to do a single mistake, you know - and also easy to have that upper horizontal line of "F" to be lost to time or to some drop of ink, whatever. Eh? Eh? :D

[Shortpoet-GTD]

A good description of us would be Necrotizing fasciitis.

The Earth will survive long after humans demise from it's surface. Or at least until a black hole swallows us.

But your analogy is a good one. We are a pox on the planet; a virus. Ironically, big pharma isn't helping.

[F.Tnioli]

Well when i said that humans are capable of killing the Earth, i didn't mean we will nesessarily do it. Just like Flu, most likely we'll cause some significant yet temporary illness (up to wiping out most or all multi-cellular life). But we are already able to kill whole biosphere, should we want to. Eevn nuclear winter is not powerful enough to kill _all_ life on Earth - however we still have means even more destructive. Such as colliding 50.000.000.000 tons of rock to the Earth at a relative speed of some 10 km/s, which can be done by a very tiny but sufficiently precise correction of this 5km-long asteroid's orbit during its normal approach to Earth in 2016. Then, in 2020 or 2024 it'd hit, ejecting billions tons of magma and in general melting Earth's surface everywhere as the Earth's crust breaks apart around the globe like it's toilet paper. And if the size of this one is not enough to destroy all life, mankind would surely be able to find something yet bigger instead, few hundreds kilometers in diameter - up to thousand times more massive - in an orbit close enough to Earth for us to be able to shift it into eventual collision course.

P.S. the asteroid i gave the link to passed very close to Earth in december 2012... Good thing all those doomsayers do not have the tech to affect orbits of such bodies... yet. Otherwise some nuts would do so in 2008 just to see their faith fulfilled. But leading corporations / states already have such a power, and by the looks of it, we are not guaranteed they won't do anything stupid. What a wonderful perspective, eh?

[Shortpoet-GTD]

Humans can be nuts but I seriously doubt we would throw rocks at ourselves to destroy the planet.
(Maybe too much coffee and not enough naps Tnioli?)

[F.Tnioli]

Oh, man, you genuinely underestimate the degree of madness of some of our brothers and sisters. Some of us are willing to take literally everyone else into the grave, and at least one system which does exactly that was built and still is, quite likely, fully operational: http://en.wikipedia....d_(nuclear_war) .

It's not TOO far from this to what i described above... However, i did not mean we _are_ going to do it. I barely meant we are _able_ to do it, if for some unimaginable reason we'd want to. Flu viruses also do not benefit from the death of the host none - it is in their best interest to maintain the host alive as long as possible, multiply and infect other humans; nonetheless, sometimes it happens - sometimes people are killed by flu, if not very often.