from the we-are-all-one-big-happy-family dept.
Add all of us up, all 7 billion human beings on earth, and clumped together we weigh roughly 750 billion pounds. That, says Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, is more than 100 times the biomass of any large animal that's ever walked the Earth. And we're still multiplying. Most demographers say we will hit 9 billion before we peak, and what happens then?
Well, we've waxed. So we can wane. Let's just hope we wane gently. Because once in our history, the world-wide population of human beings skidded so sharply we were down to roughly a thousand reproductive adults. One study says we hit as low as 40.
Forty? Come on, that can't be right. Well, the technical term is 40 "breeding pairs" (children not included). More likely there was a drastic dip and then 5,000 to 10,000 bedraggled Homo sapiens struggled together in pitiful little clumps hunting and gathering for thousands of years until, in the late Stone Age, we humans began to recover. But for a time there, says science writer Sam Kean, "We damn near went extinct."
Some of the survivors must have coupled with lizards. How else could there be so many lawyers today?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Saturday November 04 2017, @10:26AM (11 children)
I've heard this before, that there was a time when we were down to less than a few thousand.
There's probably no way to find out, but I'd love to know the human race was like before that bottleneck. How big was the population? Did the decline in population coincide with a decline in technology and society? Maybe there was some great pre-bottleneck lost civilisation. What genetic traits were lost? Maybe 75000 years ago, half the human population was walking around with striped skin or infrared vision or prehensile feet or something...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @10:47AM (3 children)
Lost or gained? From what is known, the largest evolutionary changes happen when there is pressure on the population. A large decline in population sounds like there was some external pressure on the old humans and the ones that were either lucky or were able to adapt to the new normal survived. Those that were unlucky, or were unable to cope with the new reality, well, they didn't. This is how evolution works. It works through selection bias.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @12:47PM
An disease could wipe out 99.9% of the population. The 0.1% that survived could be "worse" in every single way except for immunity to that one disease. A lot of gene variations can be lost in an event like that.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @01:26PM (1 child)
Tell that to the Tasmanian devil. Loss of genetic diversity does not make for a more fit population.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by t-3 on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:30PM
There are always losers in the game of life, nature doesn't hand out consolation prizes.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by legont on Saturday November 04 2017, @05:06PM (5 children)
There definitely was no great technological civilization. In fact if we are to loose just one generation of educated adults, intelligent life on earth will probably never recover.
The reason is that we used up all the easily accessible resources such as surface copper and iron. Yes, there is no shortage of resources, but to get them requires a significant level of technology that can't be rebuild without access to the resources.
Yes, in time geological processes will reshuffle the surface but it will be a long time during which we'll be hit by space rocks, changing magnetics, or whatever and finally collide with Andromeda. The humanity is fragile. The probability of getting to this point was extremely low; the probability of recovery is way lower still.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @06:36PM (1 child)
hold on. the copper and iron that was used is still easily accessible in car graveyards and transformer boxes (the electricity thing with a lot of copper).
couple that with the burning of wood, and you can easily recover technology at the middle age level.
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Saturday November 04 2017, @06:49PM
Well, the middle ages level requires access to iron, and that's pretty much gone. What there is access to is steel. You might get to something pretty much equivalent based on reusing steel, but that would be very different in detail. But from that you could develop glass in ways that our ancestral civilization didn't, though we probably have. Also ceramics. But a lot of the things that we depend on are based on accessible ores that are just gone. Even the accessible coal is of such poor quality that wood is probably a better choice. Perhaps optically based smelters could be devised. (I've heard of one being built, but it must not have been economic, because that was a decade ago, and I haven't heard of it since.) After you get enough heat, you can do most anything, even fractional distillation of metals. (Zinc comes off fairly readily if it's part of an alloy. If it's the oxide you may need to wait for electro-chemistry.)
So it's not clear that there's no way forwards, but the way our ancestral civilization used is blocked.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 05 2017, @12:44AM
I think you lost your train of thoughts—i. e., the reasoning of your assertion:
As insightful (not: interesting) as your argument goes, this lost reasoning is not necessarily true. It depends on whether some civilization has reached the point of no return. Has it today? I'd think so. When was it for our civilization? Maybe at the end of the 19th century, maybe a little earlier, maybe a little later. I think there's some space left for some (relatively) highly developed ancient civilization which broke down.
Not that this was my firm belief/agenda to be pushed, but I'd not exclude it definitely, as you did.
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Sunday November 05 2017, @02:52AM
I drove from Colorado to California a few days back and saw plenty of easily accessible resources such as surface copper and iron. The stuff is just sitting out in the open ready for mining.
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Monday November 06 2017, @02:38AM
I wouldn't worry about copper and iron so much. If civilization ended tomorrow, they'd be plenty of metal around, already mined and highly refined.
The stuff I'd worry about is fossil fuels. Our civilization was bootstrapped by plenty of easily accessible coal and oil. That stuff is gone, and what remains in the Earth would be pretty much impossible for an early industrial society to get access to, and that assumes that they'd even know where to find it in the first place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @08:48PM
Lemuria/Mu? Hyperborea? Atlantis?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @11:03AM
Frost brain damage?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @01:32PM (8 children)
Phylogenetic tree showing the weight of biomass per species over time.
Humans may be the big animal winner, but I'd bet something like trees, algae, ants, or termites might win.
Plotting these over time might provide clues for the bio feedback part of climate change?
(Using the big words today.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetic_tree [wikipedia.org]
And if you are going to do a lawyer joke, seems like they are a species all to themselves?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by srobert on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:09PM (1 child)
"I'd bet something like trees, algae, ants, or termites might win."
Nope. single celled organisms, half the biomass of the Earth is bacteria.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @06:11PM
Cyanobacteria are enough like algae that we used to call them algae.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:45PM (1 child)
https://xkcd.com/1338/ [xkcd.com]
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150211-whats-the-most-dominant-life-form [bbc.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @06:13PM
Damned desktop links! Here's a mobile page for those of us who don't have huge screens. https://m.xkcd.com/1338/ [xkcd.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:07PM (1 child)
"per species"... makes hell of a difference here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @05:11PM
Indeed, considering how much food it takes to feed a human, there's no way that we would have more mass than just the food needed to feed us alone. Not to mention the food needed to sustain other species.
But, if we restrict it on a per species basis it's very different.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 05 2017, @12:26AM (1 child)
You mean the ants or termites from the plant, err, fungus kingdom?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday November 05 2017, @05:21PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2, Informative) by SpockLogic on Saturday November 04 2017, @01:39PM (3 children)
Ahhh .... At last an explanation for Florida Gov. Rick Scott.
Overreacting is one thing, sticking your head up your ass hoping the problem goes away is another - edIII
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:38PM
I dunno, I think Rick Scott looks more like a snake, so there may be more than one breeding vector.
Another supporting piece of evidence for multiple vectors is that Mitch McConnel is obviously a turtle.
But, for the love of Odin, what the hell is Ted Cruz?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:39PM (1 child)
Didn't a divorce lawyer offer Eve the apple?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday November 04 2017, @04:58PM
No, that was an investment banker: Eve was convinced by being told about the great payoff she would get.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @01:47PM (6 children)
From TFS:
> all 7 billion human beings on earth, and clumped together we weigh roughly 750 billion pounds
Wait -- is the average weight of a human 750 pounds? Seems like it should be ~150 pounds (~70Kg), for a total mass of 150 billion pounds. Probably doesn't change the conclusions...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:09PM (1 child)
I haven't had my coffee yet, but it sure looks like your calculator is broken.
> all 7 billion human beings on earth, and clumped together we weigh roughly 750 billion pounds
> Wait -- is the average weight of a human 750 pounds?
750 divided by 7 = 107. Where did you get 750 pounds per human from?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:33PM
This it's why wake and bake is a bad idea.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:43PM (3 children)
If 1/3 the population of the world is now overweight is the average weight still about 70-80kg? Have about 2/3 of the pop been starving themselves so equal out the numbers?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:59PM (2 children)
A human can only starve themselves down to 0 kg or above from 75 kg.
A human can engorge themselves up from 75 kg until they reach 635 kg.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @05:14PM (1 child)
0kg? I assume that's a typo, but yes, this is very much a skewed distribution. Every person has a minimum possible weight before they completely starve to death. But, the maximum possible weight is much, much further away from the mean weight. And if you can convince people to bring you food while you swell up so large that you can't leave the house without removing a wall, it's possible to be many times the mean weight.
Well, until the person has some sort of massive heart attack, stroke or just can't breath because the lungs can't lift the folds of fat.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @06:19PM
> 0kg?
"between 0.00177 mg and 0.0042 mg" by another netizen's calculation [answers.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Saturday November 04 2017, @09:50PM (2 children)
Surprised the summary didn't mention the massive eruption from the Toba supervolcano about 75000 years ago that may have pushed humans to the brink of extinction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory [wikipedia.org] I figured that with the 70000 years ago point in time, the article had to be about that eruption.
Some think Yellowstone might blow in the near future, with devastating, civilization ending consequences. I'm hopeful we can defuse it with geothermal energy generation, suck enough energy out of it to prevent it from ever erupting again.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Sunday November 05 2017, @03:07AM
One of the big proponents of Toba being the cause of the bottleneck is Stan Ambrose at the University of Illinois Anthropology Department. He's an interesting sort. I've repaired a number of pieces of lab gear for him over the years. His main research is about the human diet in ancient times.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 05 2017, @12:41PM
The summary didn't but the article did mention it: http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/how-human-beings-almost-vanished-from-earth-in-70-000-b-c [npr.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 05 2017, @12:37PM
Not convinced that we were reduced to 40 pairs 70000 years ago:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/02/humans-mated-neandertals-much-earlier-and-more-frequently-thought [sciencemag.org]
See also: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/20/science/a-new-theory-on-how-neanderthal-dna-spread-in-asia.html [nytimes.com]
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982216302470 [sciencedirect.com]
It's more likely that there were more but not all of their descendants succeeded in having their genes contributed to/kept in the surveyed gene pool.