Santalum

When phyicists say that their laser is firing single photons, how do they know that? How do you verify that it is firing a single photon and not a small cluster of photons?

Agreed. But all those other species have one thing in common with humans - consciousness.

Decomposition occurs rapidly in warm wet environments when oxygen is available. Ever heard of the necessity to aerate your compost heap? When oxygen is not available decomposition occurs slowly or barely at all which is why intact human bodies, centuries old, have been pulled out peat bogs in Britain etc.And why you don't produce good compost if you dont aerate your heap.

I see. That much was a bit of an educated extrapolation from what I do remember of genetics 201 and biochemistry 201 as the precise details about DNA structure have gotten a bit rusty over the years.

What you are talking about is the ability of one brain to comprehend the full layout of neural connections and the complexity of the millions of nerve impulses moving through them that generate an individual. And you are right in that no one person could possibly do that any more than one individual could full comprehend the full complexity of the flow of , say, carbon through the entire global ecosystem. But in both cases science makes it unecessary for one individual to comprehend the full cimplexity of any one system. Various individuals may specialise is one small piece of the complex system and may then comunicate with each other in the universal language of science and together figure out how a bigger chunk of the complex system works.......and so on until you can describe aspects of the entire system. That is how it will be with the brain. Consider this........ What blows my mind with modern Intel CPUs is that some individuals can look at the unintelligable (to us) microscopic circuit layouts of the CPU and decide, in consultation with other system experts, if they put an extra transistor there or a bigger buffer their they will increase the efficiency and speed of the entire CPU. So through scientific methods our brains have an astounding ability to comprehend unbelievable complexity. It may take a very long time for scientists to unravel the working of a human brain, since it it orders of magnitude more complex, but it is hypothetically possible assuming we don't become extinct. What is more likely in the foreseeable future is that we will understand the human brain to the level of a flow chart that details the major neural pathways rather than a complete circuit diagram detailing every neurone and every synapse. I sometimes wonder if our cities and our economic systems are becoming so large and complex that it is becoming impossible for individuals, who we put in charge of various large chunks of them e.g. treasurer, to comprehend them and to respond rationally and calmly to the various crises that arise. Hence our cities and economies are just become increasingly dysfunctional as they have grown beyond an optimal level that one individual can easily comprehend as a whole.

I thought they preferred to play hide the sausage with little girls and boys.

Bias of the individual and bias of the brain are one and the same Tres! An individual is the brain inside its head! Again the scientific process potentially gives us the necessary tools to look beyond any 'blind spot' that our brains posess regarding the working of the brain. And once again we have done pretty well with unraveling its mysteries thus far.

The scientific peer review process is designed to reveal and over come bias even if individual scientists can't see that they are biased. Thus far it is worked extremely well given our level of technology and knowledge about life and the cosmos. If it was a failure or only partially successful then I guess we would still be living in the dark ages.

I seem to remember reading or hearing about studies on nuns etc where by they were found to be more prone to breast cancer because of the continuous exposure of their breast tissue to oestrogen due in turn to them never becoming pregnant nor lactating.

Is it that the histones are of a fixed length and there are many of them per chromosme? The combination of one histone chain and that part of the chromosome that is coiled around it is refered to as a nucleosome and that there are many nucleosomes per chromosome? And the nucleosomes collectively form the chromosome?

From Wikipedia It seems clear to me from this definition that consciousness is a pre-requisit of intelligence. Does this help us folks?

You can't assume that increased stadard of living will universally reduce fertility. That is a cop out. 1) Western countries have undergone periods of population expansion regardless of high standard of living, most noteably the post WW2 baby boom and in the last decade or so in Australia with another baby boom albeit much smaller so far. 2) Orthodox Jews in Israel currently have high fertility levels. Fertility levels a driven by culture and politics as much as they are by standard of living. Apart from the fact that global resources are already severely stretched and pressure on the global ecosystem already close to breaking point with our current collective consumption. It is unlikely to be possible to further raise consumption levels and standard of living in the developing world in the hope that it will reduce their fertility significantly. Sooner or later we will need to deploy far more certain and decisive ways of reducing population. All the evidence thus far is that 'development' increases our carbon foot print. I do not buy the notion that we can miraculously pursue 'development' in a way that reduces our collective carbon foot print. Sounds to much like the prverbial 'magic puding' to me. The best that can be hoped for is that it is possible to pursue forms of development that do not increase our carbon foot print to the same extent as has been the case. Everything humans do, no matter what they do, takes something from the global ecosystem that is then not available to other species. The more of us there are the more we take regardless of the fact that one individual may be taking a little less than what they have been in the past.

As long as population reduction is a central plank of the above. It makes little sense to improve the efficiency of you house hold spending if your wage is falling and you are adding more members toi the household.

Even if all this was true and inevitable, please explain why it is in our long term interests to continue delaying paying back our ecological debt as you put it. That fact STILL remains that there must be vastly less of us sooner or later. Why continue puting off our obligations and the coming crash even worse for future generations? Why not face up to the fact that we must and should reduce our numbers rather than avoiding this because it is too hard? Why wont the scientific community in particular face up to this rather than continuing to provide transient quick fixes thus perpetuating the delusion of the masses that they don't really have to do anything drastic.

Our apparent vulnerbility when living in western civilised society is an illusion that you are very mistaken to assume that is the true nature of all humans. You only have to view human behaviour, including that of us 'vulnerable' westerners, during warfare or spend some time with african masai warriors to realise how savage human beings truly are and what extremely effective and dangerous predators we make.

Medieval farming was essentially organic, they did not have a choice because oil derived chemical fertilisers were not available to them. And still agricultural output was vastly less than it has been during the oil age. Oil consists of a huge amount of accumulated photosynthesis derived energy concentrated into a very small volume of liquid. As a fuel it is extremely efficient with a high usable energy output and easily portable. Chemical fertilisers, derived from oil, are similarly extremely dense in minerals easily available to plants and therefore easily portable. To obtain the same amount of available minerals through organic sources would require orders of magnitude greater volumes or those organic sources to be transported without the benefit of oil derived energy. For our current farming, systems that are long distances from the areas where their out put is consumed and where large amounts of organic waste are available, organic farming is impractical. No matter which way you look at it, agricultural output will fall dramatically in the post oil age and technological pipe dreams like the above will never happen nor solve the crisis humanity is facing. We need to bravely face this crisis, no matter how distressing it seems to us, no matter how desperately we do not want to acknowledge it and no matter how desperately we want to believe that technology will provide for us. There is simply no avoiding the fact that there will be vastly less of us living on Earth in the post oil age. The only choice we have is how this massive reduction in humans will occur: in an orderly and as humane as possible manor by our own hands or at the hands of an indifferent mother nature.

There are vastly more humans living in urbanised areas than could ever be employed prductively on farms. And we have had such non-industrial labour intensive farming systems for thousands of years before the oil age. And for all that time agricultural output was wastly smaller than what has been possible with oil and the population level that it could sustain was vastly smaller.

There is abundant evidence to support this. I will give you two well documented cases. 1) The US, Australia and Britain are dependant upon middle east oil and they are in turn dependant on steady supply of oil energy and fertilisers to sustain its current agricultural out put.....apart from their other industrial outputs. If the middle east stops selling oil to them then their agricultural out puts would alone plummet and they would not be able to feed their large over consuming populations. Which is clearly why all three countries are prepared to go to extraordinary military lenghts to maintain their oil supply lines from the middle east. 2) Don't know about the US and Britain, but recent figures in Australia show that we are now net importers of fresh produce and other non-grain and non-animal foods: http://en.wikipedia....re_in_Australia for starters. Climate change and peak oil/peak fertiliser is expected to further diminish our agriculutral output and we may well become a net importer of grains as well at some point in the near future.

1) The older the fossils the less variety that is generally recovered and the broader the brush strokes of their reconstruction of paleo-ecosystems. 2) One thing you need to remember is that pollen grains preserve quite well and last for a very long time. So they can reconstruct a fair amount of details about the plant communities that existed at the time. And from that you can extrapolate to the animals present at the time based upon precedences in modern ecosystems. 3) Remember that the younger the fossil deposit the more biodiversity is preserved and the better that it is preserved. Consider the megafauna deposits at Riversleigh in QLD Australia for example. And extraordinary amount of biodiversity has been preserved in these and is still being recovered. Also given that the megafauna is, in evolutionary terms, very close to current fauna a very large amount of detail about past ecosystems can be accurately reconstructed.

I am not at all suggesting that humans consciously make a decision to expand their population to take up all available food. I am merely pointing out that, like all other animal populations, humans behave in excatly the same way at a collective population level. If times are good then more humans survive and individuals are more likely to precreate at a higher level. If you are starving to death and fleeing a conflict then it is less likely that you will take the time out to precreate, sustain a pregnancy or that many or any of your children will survive. X that 100s of 1000s and you have downward pressure on population levels. Only because the west has cheap contraception. If we did not then our populations would have continued expanding exponentially. That is the trouble with emergency food and medical aid providers. They reduce the death rate but do not meanifully compensate for it by also providing them with adequate contracpetion. Hence in places like africa all they have ever succeeded in doing is providing a temporary pin prick solutions to hunger only to have the region plunged back into human misery when the next drought or war comes along. But as they faciltate the populations to grow they create an ever larger aid burdon for future generations to deal with. Sadly aid providers are largely fixated on short term quick fixes that will never eliminate poverty in the long term for future generations. And we should also keep in mind that the only way that most western countries can sustain their current populations is by taking various resources, including food, from less developed parts of the world. If western countries were forced to sustain their current populations on the resources remaining within their current borders then the populations of most if not all of them would crash.

Yes, that is what I am suggesting. And yes I am suggesting that humans, collectively, are much like bacteria in always expanding their population to take up available food until they exhaust supplies and then the population crashes. The oil age has dramatically increased the supply of food available to humans, our population has expanded exponentially to take up that food supply and now the end of the oil age is upon us. Food supplies will be dramatically cut and the human population must inevitably crash and there will be little that anyone can do about it unless reproduction is banned for a few decades or there is a major deadly epidemic or global conflict to slash our numbers.

I believe that in Euclidian geometry (of flat spaces) then yes, the shortest distance between to points is a straight line. But in non-Euclidian geometry (e.g. of a curved surface such as that of the earth) the shortest distance between to points is effectively an arc rather than a straight line. So 4 dimensional space-time is defined by non-Euclidian geometry I presume, in which case your above assumption is false.

Yes I am aware of that hypothesis. The ultimate paradox - a brief period of global warming triggers another ice age. If it happened ot would be far more deadly for much of human civilisation in the higher latitudes.

I believe that it is AGW deniers and the media that have over emphasized the problem as global warming.......because it is then easier for them to argue to the poorly science educated that any cold days any where in the world are evidence disproving climate change. But those with reasonable science and maths education know very well that some cold days prove nothing about climate change either way.

All those energy sources require massive amounts of energy intensive infrastructure and we return to the same problem of there being no cheap energy source. The africans cannot build and maintain these things with their beasts of burdon or with man power alone. And nor can you run heavy earth moving machinery etc on geothermal and solar power. The only way the west can currently build such massive infrastructure on a wide scale is with oil power. Once cheap oil is gone even our ability to exploit renewable energy sources on a large scale will be severely handicaped. The reason why renewable energy sources require massive infrastructure is that they are all very diffuse energy sources compared to oil. Hence you need to harvest them over a very wide area to obtain economically viable amounts of energy. But then you need to spend rather large amounts of energy on building an maintaining the infrastructure. In the end the energy profit you make is very much smaller than is the case with oil at present. So the bottom line is that renewable energy sources cannot and will not replace oil on the current scale required for the current number of people on earth at their current energy consumption habits.