@u crank human accomplishments can be admired by humans, but after all it is one ape giving a stick to another. All accomplishments done by humans have been done for humans (if at all, mostly for personal gain), seldomly for other life on this planet.
But as August said, if we kill mother nature first, it cannot kill us :D

@Rockstar Bingo. The inanimate planet with crust and all will not be so easy to destroy, at least not by humanity. But where's a will..

Nothing but a weird theory.
(some of you may think biblical)

Earth knew some had to take care of the animals(Fauna and Flora)
so human was created-but human turned out to be cruel.

Earth decided to increase humans IQ-hoping this would help
More IQ, gave more cruelty

Earth increased humans IQ once more-now with such a high IQ maybe human will be nice to its creation
No-More IQ=Even more evilness.

Now Earth(Mother Nature) is tired of her creation=Human

Of course I can't prove this weird theory.

Markus

^ i would not take this literally :03:

If planets could talk, earth would say "i have a disease named humanity", and Mars would answer "don't worry, it will be over soon".

Which makes me wonder, there is not even an english translation for "das geht vorbei" ? :o "That will pass" is not quite right, in this case may "you will get over it" ?
You really cannot translate some things properly.

I don't disagree but then again that is what humans do. We have evolved to do this. After all you wouldn't jump into a swamp and then complain if you are eaten by an crocodile. That's what they evolved to do.

Personally I think that human accompishments are quite remarkable. 12,000 years ago we had just learned to farm and herd animals. In a universe and on a planet as old as ours that is almost unexplainable. Our tendancy for self destruction is tempered by our marvels of invention and thought.

And we invented rock and roll. :rock:

There used to be a game called Sim Earth. The secret to getting a nicely balanced and successful earth was that as soon as any species started exhibiting a certain amount of intelligence, make it extinct.



I don't know if that was what the designers intended though

I never said kill it, just control it, dominate it, own and manipulate it to our selfish advantage. :03:
I guess i'm just a species first guy. I refuse to feel guilty for being human like some self haters are wont to do.

Evolution measures success as continuance.

cyanobacteria: 2,7 bn years
cockroaches: 330 m years
dinosaurs: 170 m years
H.sapiens: 300.000 years

Once our planet has become stardust again humankind and their vanity and hubris will not be worth a footnote.

Maybe but unlike the dinosaurs our hand is still in the game.

The universe does not take risks, nor does it decide. It is.



The overwhelming, unimaginable large part of the universe, seems to be as dead as "dead" can mean.



What we call nature, we refer to as the living biom on this planet that we depend on for existing, in clduing its processes and interdependecies and ingredients it is made of and formed by.


To imagine that man could "dominate", "rule" or "master" nature, the universe, is just expression of the pathological self-exaggeration that more and more threatens to become man's hubris and self-destruction. Christian mythology has brought incredible damage into the world in this regard by putting man above what it calls creation.



In the end, man will be nothign more than just a corn of dust flashing up in the sky for a split of second, and then wikll be forgotten again already. The universe will not even take care of that we ever existed. But we with our lifespan exist in just this short split of a cosmic second, and relatively this is what adds the meaning and importance to it - from our point of view, not the universe's.



Prisoners that we are in our relative percpetion of time, we arwe not the oinly prisoner,s but other life coexist with us in this split of a second. For them, this nsplit fo a cosmis seciond is as relevant as it is for us, and if we ruin this brief timespan we all exist, then we ruin it for the other lifeforms out there as well. And that is the stiunling mess we create. From a unbiverse'S pooiunt of view, it will hardly be taken niote of by anyone ever. From planet Earth'S pojutn of view and plants and animals point of view, it is all the difference between existince and non-existence.



Man cannot excuse his destructive effect ion thisnpnate by relatiovising it when arguing that "from the universe's perspective" it all does not matter anyway. That is no excuse. We must stay in the scaling we got born into. And in this scaling our effect for all themlife coexisting with us is an utmost besaster. We do like lethal virusses: we overwhelm the host that keeps us alive and feds us, we kill it by excessively continuing wioth overwhelming it, and by killinjg this host we kill ourselves.


The host here is that environmental and most fragile, lucky balance of variables that enable life of the form we are, and life of the form as we define it mostly in and for the biome around us.



The vanshing of ther human race would be a desaster only for one: for man. For all and everything else, it would be a great relief. Hardly a compliment for our species, even less so when considering our unique traits (unique on this planet at least) and potentials. Obviously we fail in realising them.



It must be hoped we do not reach the stars. We should not reach them. All we bring to any new place, is destruction. Fortunately I think that all this talking about leaving Earth and resettling to space colonies and planets, is naive daydreaming only anyway. It will not happen, we will not make it. We simnpyl are too self-destruiciove, and too stupid, and we have run out of too much time already. Having a dozen people living ion a metal spohere on planet Mars is not what I would call a realistic alternative for our species' survival. The harsh truth is: we either get along on this planet, or we will not get along anymore anywhere.



I liked and like classic Science Fiction from the late 50s to the early 90s, a lot. But I always was aware of the word "fiction" in it.

I doubt we last 170 mio years, also the successors of the dinosaurs are still among us, and i do not mean your democrat reptilian overlords

The universe is not aware that it exists. This is one of the human species most noteable charateristics. We are aware of our existence and make a feeble attempt to explain it. We know our past and are charting our future. Until we come in contact with a similar species, we are, to our knowledge, the crowning achievement of the evolutionary process.

Humans tend to be moralistic but the universe has no morals. And we should treat it as such.

Lol, well i'm betting that our species not only survives a couple hundred million years but by then has figured out how to travel to the four corners of the universe.



Human are number one!

Nope. Evolution doesn't produce achievements, that perspective is completely wrong. The process of "making copies" that are slightly different from the last copy uses different kinds of replication machines, that is, different kind of phenotypes. If you wanted to classify these machines (which is a very anthropocentric and limited approach) in terms of fitness (the term Darwin used, because he knew nothing about genes and their selfishness) the only reasonable feature usable for classification is how long they have been part of the process.

"A monkey is a machine that preserves genes up trees, a fish is a machine that preserves genes in the water; there is even a small worm that preserves genes in German beer mats. DNA works in mysterious ways.”
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene"

I think you are misunderstanding my point. I am not a scientist, but it would seem to me that the natural evolutionary process of the human species ended a long time ago. Unlike all the other forms of life on this planet we are directing (for better or worse) our own future. Once that started we began an evolution not solely directed by the former process that we and all other species have been subject to. Maybe achievment is the wrong word. Perhaps 'development' would be better suited to describe that fact.

Evolution

I believe it's not in its nature to overcome itself, but to improve its creation.

Like us human...in the beginning we were like apes and today with hundreds of mutation have developed and are now Homo Sapiens Sapiens(I think it is)

The question then is

Why haven't the evolution done the same with other animals ?

Now you may say
Look at some art of our monkeys-they have learned to use tools.

Is it because of a mutation in their genes or is it something
they have learned ?

August wrote
" by then has figured out how to travel to the four corners of the universe."

No doubt we one day will master such a thing.

I think however this is something that first will come true hundreds of years from now.

If mother nature/evolution decide to erase us from this planet, long before this can be done, then we are truly doomed.

I have hope we will survive as species

Markus

:har:

No, such processes may slow down (sharks for exmaple), but if such process ever comes to an end, the species has gone extinct. It would mean that the surrounding variables have come to an end and do not change anymore, and that is practically unimaginable. These variables, too, if they would appear to not change anymore, would have stopped to exist.



Heraklit: Panta rei! Even mountains, ocean seabeds, continents.

Germans have nothing to laugh about when it comes to submitting to tyrants.

Evolution does not create anything. Its just a model for us poor handicapped unimaginery brain dwarfs by which we create a system with places in it to which we appoint our own subjective observations - hopefully as best as we could to help us mastering our future challenges better than without this system project, and that is what we call science. If we sort them according to our wishes or preset worldviews, then it is called ideology or religion instead.


So, evoltuion does not exist and does not create. It is just a name for our own sorting work trying to make sense of what we see. A model. But the map of a city is neither the city nor the greater world it is build in. And it is up to us to decide what we paint into that plan and what not, and we never know whether our knowledge about the city is complete and so whether or not our plan is complete. We just try to make sens eof it all. But it is our brain'S wheelchair, not a existing entity in itself.

^ What would you call our development from Neanderthal to what we are today

Isn't it some kind of evolution

From Danish Wiki

Evolution is a process whereby the composition of inheritance in a population changes over generations. [1] Evolutionary processes give rise to the diversity of life at all levels of biological organization, including the level of species, individual organisms, and the level of molecular evolution.

Is there another word who should be used instead of this evolution ?

Markus