I hadn't heard about that, but it does fit. (Great movie, but a little too cliche-ey.) Of course, if the Marine had been black, I'm sure a different but related trope would have covered it, something to do with Will Smith, maybe. Ah, well, you can't win for losing.
On Avatar: I thought the cinematography was fabulous, and the engineering of the story to have the audience cheer when the Americans were killed to be tiresome.
A great film for the visual effects, though. And the amateur biology and systematics person in me was looking for patterns among the various life forms. The Na'vi seem rather freakish, and not fitting many of the patterns established by other life.
(Note: By "freakish" I don't mean unattractive, just that they do not follow the body plan established by the other neck-breathing hexapods shown. Even the "primate" analog visible when Na'vi Jake first sets foot in the jungle is a hexapod.
On Avatar: I thought the cinematography was fabulous, and the engineering of the story to have the audience cheer when the Americans were killed to be tiresome.
Technically, it was a gorgeous movie, but peoplewise, Avatar left a lot to be desired. And there really wasn't anything absolutely identifying the terrestrials as Americans or anything else. The Corporation could have been multinational, and in fact, given the trouble Earth was in (implied in the movie), it probably was. I did cheer when that odious mercenary bastard leading the military side of things got his, but besides him, the only other terri I really didn't like was the slimy little Corporation executive, and, unfortunately, he lived to go back to Earth.
A great film for the visual effects, though. And the amateur biology and systematics person in me was looking for patterns among the various life forms. The Na'vi seem rather freakish, and not fitting many of the patterns established by other life. (Note: By "freakish" I don't mean unattractive, just that they do
( ... )
They communicated, and had a Universal Socketed Biology (USB), but were they really more interdependent than is the case here?
Of course something like 99.999999% of all species that have ever existed are gone now; this is a regular feature of evolution. The impacts spike this from time to time.
And Man has an effect as well; this will be the first year in a while that Man has caused more oil leaks than naturally occur. (The usual man-caused contribution is something like 10%, but I'd guess that this year will be more than ten times that.) It's certainly unfortunate, but the doomsayers are a bit hasty to announce the collapse of all life.
They communicated, and had a Universal Socketed Biology (USB), but were they really more interdependent than is the case here?
The socketing couldn't have been natural -- you wouldn't get such a thing evolving in so many lineages that clearly had to have been widely divergent originally, genetically speaking. And the way that all organisms participated in the one biosphere, and that the biosphere responded directly to them, shows strong interdependence of a sort that flatly goes against the natural trends of Darwinian selection, which is pretty much an "every man for himself!" affair. You could force such strong interdependence, but it wouldn't arise naturally. But that also opens up fascinating possibilities. Who did the bioengineering, and when, and why?
Of course something like 99.999999% of all species that have ever existed are gone now; this is a regular feature of evolution. The impacts spike this from time to time.
Yes, but gigantic mass extinctions don't happen very often. Individual species go extinct constantly.
( ... )
Estimates of current extinction rates are highly suspect, in my opinion. We are aware of something like 1.25 million species in existence now (though the estimates are all over the map) and this is orders of magnitude more than the individual species we can document for past times. Yet no one thinks (so far as I know) that we have a thousand times as many species now as, say, at the end of the Cretaceous
( ... )
Estimates of current extinction rates are highly suspect, in my opinion. We are aware of something like 1.25 million species in existence now (though the estimates are all over the map) and this is orders of magnitude more than the individual species we can document for past times. Yet no one thinks (so far as I know) that we have a thousand times as many species now as, say, at the end of the Cretaceous.
No one was around to document individual species extinctions, or multiply them by modeled factors over actual observations. The work I've read on this seems bent on making things look as bad as possible, and the assumptions I've seen look unwarranted to me.Actually, we can make intelligent estimates of species levels and species extinction rates based on such things as the normal ratios of carnivores to herbivores in an ecosystem vs. ratios of fossils of carnivores to herbivores in given periods in the past. We can also make such estimates in the present based on destruction of habitats known to be essential to various types of
( ... )
"5 million year" -- Are you suggesting that our roughly 100 kiloyear glaciation cycle is over? It's possible, but doesn't seem likely to me. The current cycle was apparently triggered by the volcanic construction of a land bridge between North and South America, rerouting the ocean
No. The current cycle of glaciation is the result of, among other things, the closing of the Tethys Seaway after the end of the Mesozoic. That Seaway allowed warm water to circulate around the globe and keep temperatures warm everywhere save at extreme north and south latitudes. Other factors came into play, too, but once that global circulation of warm water was gone, the Cretaceous Greenhouse was definitely over.
And it seems to me that CO2 concentrations are finally, at long last, beginning to creep up to something approaching normal.There is no such thing as "normal" in the long haul, geologically speaking. Carbon dioxide levels have fluctuated widely over geological time. Another good book by Dr. Ward that goes
( ... )
For one thing, we're already outstripping our need for safe, clean water,
We can make fresh water from seawater, abundantly. The only requirement is energy. Eventually, space solar power will supply this without limit.
and eventually, between disease and water wars, our numbers are going to go way down
That's a guess, isn't it? It assumes that jihadists are not a problem, and killing billions of people will happen as a result of water.
Disease is not doing it. As much as AIDS is a massive killer in Africa, Africa remains the fastest population growth center on the planet.
-- and so will anthropogenic burning of all kinds,
It would certainly be nice to see a shift toward fossil fuels in countries currently clearing and burning rainforest, wouldn't it?
along with atmospheric CO2 levels.
Atmospheric CO2 levels are going to kill billions? (i.e. bring population levels way down?) It hardly seems likely. It is not clear that this has killed anyone to date, and I don't see a
( ... )
Please read the books by the authors I've cited. As I said, they're experts in their fields, and they also cite more experts in the bibliographies to their books. Until you read those, you'll have no idea of which models and data-bases I'm working from.
Please read those books I've cited.Pick the best one. I've read many dozens of books and hundreds of papers in this general area over the past several decades, and the net synthesis of all of these is not compelling. The current craze about "acidification" of the oceans is a good example of poor modeling showing a gigantic effect when the reality is not only smaller, it appears to be in the opposite direction
( ... )
You should read all those by Dr. Ward I've cited. And also Stephen J. Pyne's Cycle of Fire series of books on the natural history of fire, including anthropogenic fire (after all, we are just as natural as any other creature Earth has given rise to). Pyne is our premier fire-scientist, fire-historian, and fire-anthropologist. His book Fire: A Brief History gives a concise and very informative overview of the subject. For observations by Dr. Pyne on fire and our long love-affair with it, go hereThese subjects aren't nearly as simple as many think they are, and they are worth learning about in depth, because only then do many of the answers to questions like yours start to come to light in a dependable fashion. Ward and Pyne are hard scientists who work with models that can be objectively tested, and reject those models that don't stand up to the tests. Both also have had extensive field experience, Pyne in forestry (he fought fires with fire crews at the Grand Canyon when he was young, traveled to Antarctica
( ... )
I mentioned his Out of Thin Air. It goes into great detail about the way in which the chemistry and other aspects of Earth's atmosphere has changed over the last 600 million years, the extinctions associated with its more radical, rapid changes, and the way life has adapted and evolved in response to its evolution. The Life and Death of Planet Earth: How the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of our World, by Ward and Donald Brownlee, who is a professional astronomer, as the title says, how Earth's various systems -- hydrological and lithic as well as atmospheric will change in the future, and how life will be forced to adapt to those changes. Ward's Amazon.com: Rivers in Time: The Search for Clues to Earth's Mass Extinctions discusses the mass extinctions that have occurred on our world since the Neoproterozoic Era, and their likely causes, including, in some cases, changes in the atmosphere that made for too much or too little oxygen or carbon dioxide for then-existing forms of life. Each book goes into great
( ... )
I wonder why he didn't include a very famous recent example: Avatar. in which white US Marine Jake Sully arrives to save the blue native people.
The film has been nicknamed "Dances with Smurfs"--but "Pocohontas on Pandora" is probably closer.
===|==============/ Level Head
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A great film for the visual effects, though. And the amateur biology and systematics person in me was looking for patterns among the various life forms. The Na'vi seem rather freakish, and not fitting many of the patterns established by other life.
(Note: By "freakish" I don't mean unattractive, just that they do not follow the body plan established by the other neck-breathing hexapods shown. Even the "primate" analog visible when Na'vi Jake first sets foot in the jungle is a hexapod.
Perhaps forewarned is four-armed, after all.
===|==============/ Level Head
Reply
Technically, it was a gorgeous movie, but peoplewise, Avatar left a lot to be desired. And there really wasn't anything absolutely identifying the terrestrials as Americans or anything else. The Corporation could have been multinational, and in fact, given the trouble Earth was in (implied in the movie), it probably was. I did cheer when that odious mercenary bastard leading the military side of things got his, but besides him, the only other terri I really didn't like was the slimy little Corporation executive, and, unfortunately, he lived to go back to Earth.
A great film for the visual effects, though. And the amateur biology and systematics person in me was looking for patterns among the various life forms. The Na'vi seem rather freakish, and not fitting many of the patterns established by other life. (Note: By "freakish" I don't mean unattractive, just that they do ( ... )
Reply
Of course something like 99.999999% of all species that have ever existed are gone now; this is a regular feature of evolution. The impacts spike this from time to time.
And Man has an effect as well; this will be the first year in a while that Man has caused more oil leaks than naturally occur. (The usual man-caused contribution is something like 10%, but I'd guess that this year will be more than ten times that.) It's certainly unfortunate, but the doomsayers are a bit hasty to announce the collapse of all life.
===|==============/ Level Head
Reply
The socketing couldn't have been natural -- you wouldn't get such a thing evolving in so many lineages that clearly had to have been widely divergent originally, genetically speaking. And the way that all organisms participated in the one biosphere, and that the biosphere responded directly to them, shows strong interdependence of a sort that flatly goes against the natural trends of Darwinian selection, which is pretty much an "every man for himself!"
affair. You could force such strong interdependence, but it wouldn't arise naturally. But that also opens up fascinating possibilities. Who did the bioengineering, and when, and why?
Of course something like 99.999999% of all species that have ever existed are gone now; this is a regular feature of evolution. The impacts spike this from time to time.
Yes, but gigantic mass extinctions don't happen very often. Individual species go extinct constantly. ( ... )
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Reply
No one was around to document individual species extinctions, or multiply them by modeled factors over actual observations. The work I've read on this seems bent on making things look as bad as possible, and the assumptions I've seen look unwarranted to me.Actually, we can make intelligent estimates of species levels and species extinction rates based on such things as the normal ratios of carnivores to herbivores in an ecosystem vs. ratios of fossils of carnivores to herbivores in given periods in the past. We can also make such estimates in the present based on destruction of habitats known to be essential to various types of ( ... )
Reply
"5 million year" -- Are you suggesting that our roughly 100 kiloyear glaciation cycle is over? It's possible, but doesn't seem likely to me. The current cycle was apparently triggered by the volcanic construction of a land bridge between North and South America, rerouting the ocean
No. The current cycle of glaciation is the result of, among other things, the closing of the Tethys Seaway after the end of the Mesozoic. That Seaway allowed warm water to circulate around the globe and keep temperatures warm everywhere save at extreme north and south latitudes. Other factors came into play, too, but once that global circulation of warm water was gone, the Cretaceous Greenhouse was definitely over.
And it seems to me that CO2 concentrations are finally, at long last, beginning to creep up to something approaching normal.There is no such thing as "normal" in the long haul, geologically speaking. Carbon dioxide levels have fluctuated widely over geological time. Another good book by Dr. Ward that goes ( ... )
Reply
No? Who says?
For one thing, we're already outstripping our need for safe, clean water,
We can make fresh water from seawater, abundantly. The only requirement is energy. Eventually, space solar power will supply this without limit.
and eventually, between disease and water wars, our numbers are going to go way down
That's a guess, isn't it? It assumes that jihadists are not a problem, and killing billions of people will happen as a result of water.
Disease is not doing it. As much as AIDS is a massive killer in Africa, Africa remains the fastest population growth center on the planet.
-- and so will anthropogenic burning of all kinds,
It would certainly be nice to see a shift toward fossil fuels in countries currently clearing and burning rainforest, wouldn't it?
along with atmospheric CO2 levels.
Atmospheric CO2 levels are going to kill billions? (i.e. bring population levels way down?) It hardly seems likely. It is not clear that this has killed anyone to date, and I don't see a ( ... )
Reply
Reply
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You should read all those by Dr. Ward I've cited. And also Stephen J. Pyne's Cycle of Fire series of books on the natural history of fire, including anthropogenic fire (after all, we are just as natural as any other creature Earth has given rise to). Pyne is our premier fire-scientist, fire-historian, and fire-anthropologist. His book Fire: A Brief History gives a concise and very informative overview of the subject. For observations by Dr. Pyne on fire and our long love-affair with it, go hereThese subjects aren't nearly as simple as many think they are, and they are worth learning about in depth, because only then do many of the answers to questions like yours start to come to light in a dependable fashion. Ward and Pyne are hard scientists who work with models that can be objectively tested, and reject those models that don't stand up to the tests. Both also have had extensive field experience, Pyne in forestry (he fought fires with fire crews at the Grand Canyon when he was young, traveled to Antarctica ( ... )
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