If we attempt to divorce ourselves from our human points-of-view and look on dispassionately, it can be seen that 99%+ of existence is simply working its way towards what is called the ‘heat-death’ of existence. Which can also be expressed as the end-game of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
But there is a much, much smaller part of existence which is moving the other way. I.e. towards amassing greater complexity and concentration of energy and organization. I’m referring to life. Life can arises in goldilocks zones of excess energy through processes we don’t fully understand. But, arise it does. Life on Earth is the proof.
Indeed, I once expressed this in a cryptic bit of writing a few years ago:
“Energy evaporates down gradients and little creatures arise in the backwash.”
So, do we and the backwash arising of life have a purpose? If so, I cannot see it implied anywhere. But, in spite of that, it is a truly amazing thing that natural processes within existence should be able to create and evolve bits of itself (us) which are aware of itself.
Are we, the pinnacle creatures on this planet, likely to be the pinnacle creatures throughout existence? Given the size of existence, that seems an extremely dubious notion.
I like your idea about what a next intelligent species might be like:
“Maybe the next intelligent species won’t even care about tech. They’ll just float around, eat fish, sing songs, have sex, and raise their babies, happy to be alive on this planet.“
There’s nothing impossible about it. All it requires is the manifested intent of the new species be to live within the limits of the biosphere around it.
We humans could do that now and live on this planet for many hundreds of thousands of years more. Evolving our intelligence up and up and patiently enjoying our lives and seeing what awaits us.
But I strongly doubt we will change and follow that path. I think we are taking the current biosphere into a big reset. After that, life will slowly build again and maybe those who come after will outgrow this inherent self-destructiveness that we seem to have.
Archive for the ‘Pandemics’ Category
U.S. sees first case of bacteria resistant to all antibiotics
Friday, May 27th, 2016- This story has been on its way for a very long time. I recall the possibility being discussed when I was in University studying Microbiology in the 1970’s. We are our own worst enemies. We don’t use antibiotics intelligently and this is the result – bugs that become immune to the best weapons we have against them.
dennis
- Update on this story here. It’s not as bad as it first sounded. Thx Alan T. for the research.
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U.S. health officials on Thursday reported the first case in the country of a patient with an infection resistant to all known antibiotics, and expressed grave concern that the superbug could pose serious danger for routine infections if it spreads.
“We risk being in a post-antibiotic world,” said Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, referring to the urinary tract infection of a 49-year-old Pennsylvania woman who had not traveled within the prior five months.
Frieden, speaking at a National Press Club luncheon in Washington, D.C., said the infection was not controlled even by colistin, an antibiotic that is reserved for use against “nightmare bacteria.”
The infection was reported Thursday in a study appearing in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology. It said the superbug itself had first been infected with a tiny piece of DNA called a plasmid, which passed along a gene called mcr-1 that confers resistance to colistin.
“(This) heralds the emergence of truly pan-drug resistant bacteria,” said the study, which was conducted by the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of mcr-1 in the USA.”
The study said continued surveillance to determine the true frequency of the gene in the United States is critical.
“It is dangerous and we would assume it can be spread quickly, even in a hospital environment if it is not well contained,” said Dr. Gail Cassell, a microbiologist and senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School.
But she said the potential speed of its spread will not be known until more is learned about how the Pennsylvania patient was infected, and how present the colistin-resistant superbug is in the United States and globally.
The colistin-resistant gene was found last year in people and pigs in China. That discovery followed a different superbug gene that emerged in India in 2010.
In the meantime, Cassell said people can best protect themselves from the superbug and from other bacteria resistant to antibiotics by thoroughly washing their hands, washing fruits and vegetables thoroughly and preparing foods appropriately.
She said experts have warned since the 1990s that especially bad superbugs could be on the horizon, but few drugmakers have attempted to develop drugs against them.
“The medicine cabinet is threadbare because not enough has been done.”
- To the original article: ➡
‘Uncomfortable’ climates to devastate cities within a decade, study says
Monday, November 4th, 2013– This is what John Roach of NBC News has to say on October 9th, 2013
– But this has all been coming, writ large, for a long time.
-It’s been coming since:
Lyndon Johnson discussed the CO2 we were putting into the atmosphere in 1965.
Since the Club of Rome discussions and their paper on “The Limits to Growth” in 1972.
Since the World Scientists issued their warning to Humanity in 1992.
– But it is only just now beginning to reach the evening news as plausible news.
– We have just a few greedy, self-centered people and corporations to thank for the fact that their misinformation has been instrumental in delaying humanities waking up on these threats until it is virtually too late.
Most recently, Naomi Oreskes showed us this in her book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.
– Some of us remember how Mussolini ended up. I wonder, when the damages are finally appreciated, if these folks may fare the same. I won’t cry any crocodile tears for them; that’s for sure.
-By their actions many, many millions will die, cities and nations will fall, species innumerable will go extinct and most of our descendants will have less than optimal lives to look forward to; if they manage to live through the changes that are coming.
– dennis
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The world is hurtling toward a stark future where the web of life unravels, human cultures are uprooted, and millions of species go extinct, according to a new study. This doomsday scenario isn’t far off, either: It may start within a decade in parts of Indonesia, and begin playing out over most of the world — including cities across the United States — by mid-century.
What’s more, even a serious effort to stabilize spiraling greenhouse gas emissions will only stave off these changes until around 2069, notes the study from the University of Hawaii, Manoa, published online Wednesday in the journal Nature. The authors warn that the time is now to prepare for a world where even the coldest of years will be warmer than the hottest years of the past century and a half.
“We are used to the climate that we live in. With this climate change, what is going to happen is we’re going to be moving outside this comfort zone,” biologist Camilo Mora, the study’s lead author, told NBC News. “It is going to be uncomfortable for us as humans and it will be very uncomfortable for species as well.”
– To Read More of this article: ➡
– Still with the doubts, Sweetpea? Then please read this: ➡
End of an Era
Tuesday, June 26th, 2012– Parents, it is time to think about where your children are going to be when the sh** hits the fan. I don’t think we’re going to avoid this mess but you could shift them to a place where another generation or two might have reasonable lives. If you think that might be in a big city in the U.S., I think you are missing the point.
– Dennis
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By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 25th June 2012
It is, perhaps, the greatest failure of collective leadership since the first world war. The Earth’s living systems are collapsing, and the leaders of some of the most powerful nations – the US, the UK, Germany, Russia – could not even be bothered to turn up and discuss it. Those who did attend the Earth summit last week solemnly agreed to keep stoking the destructive fires: sixteen times in their text they pledged to pursue “sustained growth”, the primary cause of the biosphere’s losses(1).
The future
The efforts of governments are concentrated not on defending the living Earth from destruction, but on defending the machine that is destroying it. Whenever consumer capitalism becomes snarled up by its own contradictions, governments scramble to mend the machine, to ensure – though it consumes the conditions that sustain our lives – that it runs faster than ever before.
The thought that it might be the wrong machine, pursuing the wrong task, cannot even be voiced in mainstream politics. The machine greatly enriches the economic elite, while insulating the political elite from the mass movements it might otherwise confront. We have our bread; now we are wandering, in spellbound reverie, among the circuses.
We have used our unprecedented freedoms, secured at such cost by our forebears, not to agitate for justice, for redistribution, for the defence of our common interests, but to pursue the dopamine hits triggered by the purchase of products we do not need. The world’s most inventive minds are deployed not to improve the lot of humankind but to devise ever more effective means of stimulation, to counteract the diminishing satisfactions of consumption. The mutual dependencies of consumer capitalism ensure that we all unwittingly conspire in the trashing of what may be the only living planet. The failure at Rio de Janeiro belongs to us all.
– More… ➡
Health chief warns: age of safe medicine is ending
Thursday, March 29th, 2012– This story has been building for decades. From nearly the time when the first antibiotic, penicillin, was put into use.
– I’ve commented before that I believe one of the answers to the general question:
“What is wrong with we Human beings that we are so dysfunctional and self-destructive?“
involves an inborn bias.
– I.e., in acting out our evolutionarily derived nature, we tend to over value things that are concrete, now and near.
– And, correspondingly, we tend to under value things that are abstract, then and far.
– Hence, I use the word ‘bias‘ because rationally and logically, all of these things should have equal value.
– That we’d have a bias makes good sense because while we were evolving, in a survival of the fittest world, those of us that tended to favor the concrete, now and near aspects of their environment, probably survived better than those who did not.
– But, this is a new world now and the threats to ourselves and our futures are much more dependent on the abstract, then and far aspects of our world.
– So, our inborn short-shortsightedness is shown clearly in the problems we’re having now with antibiotics and the growing bacterial resistance to them.
– Most of us don’t understand why bacterial resistance to antibiotics arises (too abstract). And when the problem does arise (which it will, whether we understand it or not), it will arise in some future time and place (then and far). So, all of these factors tend to cause us to devalue the problem’s potential.
– But abstract, then and far as the issue of bacterial antibiotic resistance might have seemed in the past, it is manifesting now and we will unavoidably reap what we’ve sown.
– Personally, I find the idea that we might start dying again from diseases we’d already largely conquered like Tuberculosis, completely repugnant.
– Dennis
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The world is entering an era where injuries as common as a child’s scratched knee could kill, where patients entering hospital gamble with their lives and where routine operations such as a hip replacement become too dangerous to carry out, the head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned.
There is a global crisis in antibiotics caused by rapidly evolving resistance among microbes responsible for common infections that threatens to turn them into untreatable diseases, said Margaret Chan, director-general of the WHO.
Addressing a meeting of infectious disease experts in Copenhagen, she said that every antibiotic ever developed was at risk of becoming useless.
“A post-antibiotic era means, in effect, an end to modern medicine as we know it. Things as common as strep throat or a child’s scratched knee could once again kill.”
She continued: “Antimicrobial resistance is on the rise in Europe, and elsewhere in the world. We are losing our first-line antimicrobials.
“Replacement treatments are more costly, more toxic, need much longer durations of treatment, and may require treatment in intensive care units.
“For patients infected with some drug-resistant pathogens, mortality has been shown to increase by around 50 per cent …”
Britain has seen a 30 per cent rise in cases of blood poisoning caused by E. coli bacteria between 2005 and 2009, from 18,000 to more than 25,000 cases.
Those resistant to antibiotics have risen from 1 per cent at the beginning of the century to 10 per cent.
The most powerful antibiotics are carbapenems, which are used as a last line of defence for the treatment of resistant infections.
In 2009, carbapenem-resistant K. pneumoniae, a bug present in the gut, were first detected in Greece but by the following year had spread to Italy, Austria, Cyprus and Hungary.
The European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the percentage of carbapenem-resistant K. pneumoniae had doubled from 7 per cent to 15 per cent. An estimated 25,000 people die each year in the European Union from antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections.
– More… ➡
Nature’s sting: The real cost of damaging Planet Earth
Wednesday, October 27th, 2010You don’t have to be an environmentalist to care about protecting the Earth’s wildlife.
Just ask a Chinese fruit farmer who now has to pay people to pollinate apple trees because there are no longer enough bees to do the job for free.
And it’s not just the number of bees that is dwindling rapidly – as a direct result of human activity, species are becoming extinct at a rate 1,000 times greater than the natural average.
The Earth’s natural environment is also suffering.
In the past few decades alone, 20% of the oceans’ coral reefs have been destroyed, with a further 20% badly degraded or under serious threat of collapse, while tropical forests equivalent in size to the UK are cut down every two years.
These statistics, and the many more just like them, impact on everyone, for the very simple reason that we will all end up footing the bill.
Costing nature
For the first time in history, we can now begin to quantify just how expensive degradation of nature really is.
A recent, two-year study for the United Nations Environment Programme, entitled The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (Teeb), put the damage done to the natural world by human activity in 2008 at between $2tn (£1.3tn) and $4.5tn.
At the lower estimate, that is roughly equivalent to the entire annual economic output of the UK or Italy.
A second study, for the UN-backed Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), puts the cost considerably higher. Taking what research lead Dr Richard Mattison calls a more “hard-nosed, economic approach”, corporate environmental research group Trucost estimates the figure at $6.6tn, or 11% of global economic output.
This, says Trucost, compares with a $5.4tn fall in the value of pension funds in developed countries caused by the global financial crisis in 2007 and 2008.
Of course these figures are just estimates – there is no exact science to measuring humans’ impact on the natural world – but they show that the risks to the global economy of large-scale environmental destruction are huge.
– More… ➡
Rust never sleeps
Friday, September 17th, 2010– Recognizing patterns in the vast river of data that passes us by each day is one way to see the future. But, unfortunately, our attention span is generally too short and we’ve not trained ourselves to be observant in this way,
– You may have seen a story like this a year or two ago and noted it and forgotten it. It’s easily done.
– When I searched this, my own, site for “wheat rust“, I was surprised how many stories I’d already reported on this subject.
– It’s a bit scary how much passes us unseen in the river. But I believe most of our futures are there if we just look….
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A new flare-up in an age-old battle between wheat and a fungal killer
Scientists everywhere have taken up arms against the rust. Tens of thousands of wheat varieties and wild relatives have been screened for anti-rust genes that can be incorporated into future arsenals. This spring, more than 500 researchers from 77 wheat-growing nations gathered for two major wheat conferences in St. Petersburg, Russia, to share strategies and discuss progress on various fronts. And in August, a team of British scientists released a very rough sketch of wheat’s genetic blueprint, which in a more complete form could simplify and speed up the breeding of rust-resistant varieties.
“There is a lot happening,” says wheat geneticist Jorge Dubcovsky of the University of California, Davis. “We are trying to develop better technologies, better breeding approaches.… I think at some point we will defeat the bastard.”
But scientists also lament a lack of funding, coordinated action and basic knowledge about wheat and its pathogens. A great deal more effort is needed to turn the first crack at wheat’s genome into information that’s meaningful for fighting the rust.
Worldwide, only a handful of labs do hard-core rust-related research, and many will accept samples of the fungus only during the winter months, when it’s too cold for potential escapees to survive. The rust is so feared that some trigger-happy researchers frantically deploy plants bred with single resistance genes — even though most scientists agree that a well-constructed genetic cocktail offers the best hope for staving rust off.
Rust’s reemergence
Wheat rust’s current rampage began more than a decade ago. In October of 1998, a plant breeder noticed a stem rust infection on wheat growing in his nursery at Kalengyere Research Station in Uganda. The discovery was perplexing because the wheat contained a gene called Sr31, which, along with a handful of others, had provided protection against the rust for more than a quarter century. A rust virulent enough to defeat Sr31 triggered alarm in the wheat community.
“Should the Sr31-virulent pathotype migrate out of Uganda, it poses a major threat to wheat production in countries where the leading cultivars have resistance based on this gene,” scientists from Africa and CIMMYT, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico, wrote in Plant Disease in 2000.
SPREAD OF A KILLERStem rust strains that can overcome key resistance genes have recently spread across Africa and beyond. Some scientists worry that prevailing winds may soon carry spores to major wheat-growing areas of the Middle East and Asia.Redmal/iStockphoto, adapted by E. Feliciano
Those fears have since been realized. This extremely aggressive strain of the fungus, called Ug99 (for the place of discovery and the year that the samples were analyzed), spread to most of the wheat-growing areas of Kenya and Ethiopia by 2003. The fungus’ spores, easily windborne, reached Sudan in 2006. Ug99 then crossed the Red Sea into Yemen, the doorway to major wheat-growing areas in the Middle East and southwest Asia. Ug99 has now been sighted in Iran. And not only is the rust still on the move, but it is also mutating: Within the Ug99 lineage, scientists have identified seven variants that can overcome additional important resistance genes in wheat. One Ug99 variant that overpowers Sr31 and the gene Sr24 caused epidemics in Kenya’s crops in 2007. Another Ug99 relative has turned up in Ethiopia and South Africa, and Kenya reported in June rust infestations in 80 percent of inspected fields.
Ug99 has yet to rear its ugly spores in the Americas. But that doesn’t mean U.S. wheat farmers are rust- or worry-free. In North America, Australia and Europe, as well as in Asia and Africa, a sibling of stem rust — the stripe or yellow rust — is taking a toll. In 2003, yellow rust wiped out a quarter of California’s wheat crop. Last year, it devastated crops in China. This year, farmers in the United States, the Middle East and northern Africa have already reported serious yellow rust infestations.
“The presence of two virulent and highly aggressive yellow rust strains … at high frequencies at epidemic sites on five continents (including Europe) may represent the most rapid and expansive spread ever of an important crop pathogen,” researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark wrote in an editorial in the July 23Science.
– More… ➡