I think it’s wild and deeply inspiring to imagine how the surface of the earth had radically different forms over billions of years. Huge landscapes of unrotted dead plants. Then massive landscapes of fungus and decomposing bacteria breaking that down into dirt. And on and on.
I think it is wise to understand that earth has been through many eras and is not as homeostatic as our narrowly imagined “natural” state we seek today. And I am not trying to build an anti climate change argument, just that static “naturalism” is a human construct.
Rather than motivating environmental conservation out of some species-level nostalgia for "the biodiversity of our youth", there's another, forward-looking motivation for it: the species that evolved at the same time we did — our "evolutionary cohort" — are the species of our own Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness. While they may not share our ecological niche, they all share a dependency on the same air mix we do, the same temperature ranges, the same water osmolarity and pH, etc.
This implies two things:
- Insofar as we want to keep the Earth a good place for us to live, we can measure our success by the number of our evolutionary cohort of species that stick around;
- Insofar as we plan to live in space, terraform other worlds, etc., it's only animals of our evolutionary cohort that will be able to comfortably survive in the places we optimize for our own well-being. If we increase global CO2 levels here on Earth to such a point that species on Earth that like our current air mix begin dying off, and we see an evolution of replacement species that prefer higher CO2 levels (and we ourselves retreat to dome cities or something to avoid that fate); but then we later terraform Mars to have the environment of Earth ca 5000BCE; then the species that inhabit Earth by that point, won't be able to be transplanted to Mars. Only the species we had conserved — keeping them in the dome-cities with us — would be able to be transplanted.
(Another way to say that second one, is that if we screw up the Earth's environment, but later fix it, we'll lose biodiversity twice — we'll have killed off our evolutionary cohort with the screw-up, and we'll kill off the newer-evolved species with our "fix.")
I really like this comment & it has a lot going for it.
At the same time I think it's also worth pointing out that earth has likely never had as diverse an ecosystem as it has this millennium. The tree of life has become incredibly wide & complex.
The naturalist tendency doesn't have to be as static as portrayed here. Nature itself is such a dynamic & changing system death & population booms chasing each other around wildly. What, I think, is so scary about right now is how in jeapordy so much life seems. Insects & birds are disappearing at mass scale. Large life is hunted to breaking points. Many animals lack for habitat and access to essential food & water.
We see strictly worse coming & that has built a fervor for the worlds we are actively losing/destroying.
Also, Darwin wrote a lot about the extreme variations that we see in the 'balanced' ecosystem. He tallied up the birds near him and found that ~4/5ths of all the birds would die every winter. He remarked that a 10% death rate illness in humans would be considered a huge event, but that every year, nearly all the birds near him just up and die. This was in a passage on how the 'balance' that we see is really just a lot of species furiously competing with each other and trying to eek out minuscule improvements in the deadly chaos.
It's something George Carlin has touched on as well. Paraphrasing a bit: We're not really trying to save the planet. The planet has been here for billions of years, it'll be here for billions of years after we're all dead and gone. The planet will be fine. The people? The people are fucked. That's what we're trying to save. We're trying to keep the planet hospitable to us.
Changes are static or not depending on the scale of time you consider.
In a time span of billions (even millions) of years, our planet indeed went through different eras.
For a duration of one human life, the state of nature is expected to remain quite static. The problem with climate change is that we started to witness the planet entering in a new era in such a small time frame - roughly 200 years.
And then after millions of years and all of the biological matter turning into oil we will eventually use it all up within ~300-400 years. The era that humans will utilize this kind of gasoline combustion is such a tiny blip of the whole human history, but today it seems like civilization can't possibly exist without it.
I don't see how airplanes are even going to exist for mass transit and cargo 200 years from now or how we will ever escape Earths gravity again without building some kind of space elevator before we run out.
On the blip of the radar that is Human Civilization, it is abssolutely appropriate to be “naturalistic” since the organisms on this current Earth are very sensitive to sudden changes one way or the other.
But philosophically speaking or as hypothetical interestellar gods who live for millions of years then yes, worrying about what’s “natural” as we currently conceive it is narrow-minded.
I read that book and watched the later documentary about what happens when the earth takes over, about how nature just over-runs human endeavors ... it was pretty depressing (though the writing was sophomoric)
but I am always amazed at how much 'nature' has been interrupted by humans laying concrete (streets and buildings etc)
Manhatten Island was once a sanctuary and now is a concrete cemetary.
Concern about climate change is about its effects on us. Most of our great cities are coastal. We thrive in a temperate climate. We are dependent on fisheries and a whole food chain of other Holocene organisms. Having all that change would be incredibly disruptive to us. We’d survive (as a species) all but the most extreme scenarios but our quality of life could take a huge dive and many people could die.
Obviously life will just keep evolving. There have been times in the geological record when there has been little to no polar ice and times of “snowball Earth.” Life existed during all these times but both these extremes would be more hostile to humans than the current epoch.
Totally agree. And beyond that human life assumes it’s own sentience through an incredibly narrow view. Isn’t it fair/logical to assume that if giant mushrooms did over the earth that given the passing of considerable time they’ve likely evolved to a far more considerable state of intelligence/harmony than humans have. Their survivability/adaptability being an illustration.
Likewise, one ends up sounding like an anti climate nut, but the existential fear for the planet seems arrogant at best and massively over emphasises our place in the universe. See, I sound like an anti climate nut.
> just that static “naturalism” is a human construct.
I think you are somewhat strawmanning environmentalism and climate-change concerns here (not with malicious intention or anything) because I don't think that many argue that things are or should be static - though they mostly appear to be static from our short viewpoint.
Instead the concern is that the changes are too fast. It's more akin to consciously bringing a meteor down on the planet than it is to "the world is changing and always have and humans are a tiny blip in the existence of the world".
A similarly wild thing to think about is that Pangaea was just the most recent supercontinent. The landmass on earth has split and merged several times.
It’s saddening that a comment like this needs to disclaim that it’s not anti climate change. I get it, I’ve posted things in the past that were attacked as anti climate change and I was perplexed. My gut tells me there are just people that like to stir up trouble and will post “enraging” things on anything really. It’s unfortunately discouraging and makes me not want to engage in social media.
It's somewhat odd that one has to explicitly say they're not "anti-climate change" when presenting any kind of perspective that could be perceived as such. As if they're afraid of the somebody punishing them for daring to think such "problematic" and "destructive" thoughts...
The phase shifts in huge dynamic systems are fascinating. The Earth can look more or less the same for millions of years (with minor variations), then an extreme event happens and the world is completely transformed, never to return to a previous state again. We humans sure like to play with fire.
Eh, I think lots of living things "presume" today's state of things --and involuntarily evolve and try to adapt when things change from what is now to what will be then. But otherwise, I agree.
Thank you! People don't realize how much of a blip we are in Earth's long history, and trying to hold on to what we are used to i.e. conservatism, is actually the most unnatural thing to do.
That happened with trees because cellulose was new, but I don't think there would be an issue with plants which cells have been around for a long time.
But maybe I'm missing something in which case I'm happy to learn.
And Prototaxites happpened in just the most recent 10% of the Earth's history. (-Blinking incomprehension-) A lot of time for unfathomable stuff to arise, then disappear!
Another super interesting fact that never occurred to me is that trees are not a taxonomic grouping of their own. Rather a broad set of characteristics that have separately evolved into a convergent set of traits. So, it's unnecessary to say Aspens are not like other trees because they aren't actually related to other trees. The MCRA of all trees would not remotely be a tree.
The title is misleading, the article is more honest in admitting that it is thought that these things named prototaxites are a fungus, but we are not sure.
Ok, we've replaced giant mushrooms with prototaxites in the title above. Thanks!
Related: I dreaded looking into this thread because titles like that (I mean the original one) almost always provoke shallow-sensational-reflexive responses. There are a few such subthreads here but for the most part the hivemind didn't derange itself this time. Well done hivemind!
The HN headline edit obscures the point of the article, which amounts to an argument that prototaxites were basically fungus.
It's like taking an article that says "dinosaurs are related to birds" and changing it to read "the ancestors of birds are related to birds." It reduces a new, interesting claim to a tautology which is not, in any way, what the article concerns itself with.
Also, while I'm going off, this is a great example of how the clickbait-reduction policy at HN ends up selecting for titles which obfuscate or mislead.
Here, the descriptive, sensible word 'mushroom' is replaced with 'prototaxite', a word that is meaningless to (let's be honest) most casual visitors to this site.
Accessibility and meaningfulness are casualties in the war on interestingness.
A fascinating read, including the Nat Geo article OG link; but couldn't help chuckling at one of the quotes in it .... ..Sucking up carbon from microbial crusts would [make large fruiting bodies] possible. fnar, fnar. But seriously though, Mind. Blown.
I think over time we will eventually set the beginning of “agriculture” to be in the age of fungi. The more we learn about trees the more they resemble an evolutionary step up from lichen.
Lichen is a symbiosis between fungi and single celled chlorophyll owners. Forests are multicellular lichen. Like the cyanobacteria, trees can often function without their host, but they do better things with them.
Do you have any more information on what led you to this idea? I'm not an expert by any means, but when I look at trees I see 100% plant, with some fungus in the soil and roots and what not, somewhat akin to animals' gut bacteria.
What if Fungi were the key to our technological advancement? If we could make fungal computers we could become a bio-technical race like Species 8472 in Star Trek Voyager Season 3 Episode 26.
> “A 6-metre fungus would be odd enough in the modern world, but at least we are used to trees quite a bit bigger,” says [geophysicist Kevin] Boyce. “Plants at that time were a few feet tall, invertebrate animals were small, and there were no terrestrial vertebrates. This fossil would have been all the more striking in such a diminutive landscape.”
Throw in a turtle invasion and a time traveling plumber, and you've got yourself a movie.
[+] [-] tsunamifury|2 years ago|reply
I think it is wise to understand that earth has been through many eras and is not as homeostatic as our narrowly imagined “natural” state we seek today. And I am not trying to build an anti climate change argument, just that static “naturalism” is a human construct.
[+] [-] derefr|2 years ago|reply
This implies two things:
- Insofar as we want to keep the Earth a good place for us to live, we can measure our success by the number of our evolutionary cohort of species that stick around;
- Insofar as we plan to live in space, terraform other worlds, etc., it's only animals of our evolutionary cohort that will be able to comfortably survive in the places we optimize for our own well-being. If we increase global CO2 levels here on Earth to such a point that species on Earth that like our current air mix begin dying off, and we see an evolution of replacement species that prefer higher CO2 levels (and we ourselves retreat to dome cities or something to avoid that fate); but then we later terraform Mars to have the environment of Earth ca 5000BCE; then the species that inhabit Earth by that point, won't be able to be transplanted to Mars. Only the species we had conserved — keeping them in the dome-cities with us — would be able to be transplanted.
(Another way to say that second one, is that if we screw up the Earth's environment, but later fix it, we'll lose biodiversity twice — we'll have killed off our evolutionary cohort with the screw-up, and we'll kill off the newer-evolved species with our "fix.")
[+] [-] rektide|2 years ago|reply
At the same time I think it's also worth pointing out that earth has likely never had as diverse an ecosystem as it has this millennium. The tree of life has become incredibly wide & complex.
The naturalist tendency doesn't have to be as static as portrayed here. Nature itself is such a dynamic & changing system death & population booms chasing each other around wildly. What, I think, is so scary about right now is how in jeapordy so much life seems. Insects & birds are disappearing at mass scale. Large life is hunted to breaking points. Many animals lack for habitat and access to essential food & water.
We see strictly worse coming & that has built a fervor for the worlds we are actively losing/destroying.
[+] [-] Balgair|2 years ago|reply
Also, Darwin wrote a lot about the extreme variations that we see in the 'balanced' ecosystem. He tallied up the birds near him and found that ~4/5ths of all the birds would die every winter. He remarked that a 10% death rate illness in humans would be considered a huge event, but that every year, nearly all the birds near him just up and die. This was in a passage on how the 'balance' that we see is really just a lot of species furiously competing with each other and trying to eek out minuscule improvements in the deadly chaos.
[+] [-] bena|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pil0u|2 years ago|reply
In a time span of billions (even millions) of years, our planet indeed went through different eras.
For a duration of one human life, the state of nature is expected to remain quite static. The problem with climate change is that we started to witness the planet entering in a new era in such a small time frame - roughly 200 years.
[+] [-] izzydata|2 years ago|reply
I don't see how airplanes are even going to exist for mass transit and cargo 200 years from now or how we will ever escape Earths gravity again without building some kind of space elevator before we run out.
[+] [-] avgcorrection|2 years ago|reply
But philosophically speaking or as hypothetical interestellar gods who live for millions of years then yes, worrying about what’s “natural” as we currently conceive it is narrow-minded.
[+] [-] flerchin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samstave|2 years ago|reply
but I am always amazed at how much 'nature' has been interrupted by humans laying concrete (streets and buildings etc)
Manhatten Island was once a sanctuary and now is a concrete cemetary.
[+] [-] api|2 years ago|reply
Obviously life will just keep evolving. There have been times in the geological record when there has been little to no polar ice and times of “snowball Earth.” Life existed during all these times but both these extremes would be more hostile to humans than the current epoch.
[+] [-] shisisms|2 years ago|reply
Likewise, one ends up sounding like an anti climate nut, but the existential fear for the planet seems arrogant at best and massively over emphasises our place in the universe. See, I sound like an anti climate nut.
[+] [-] ericmay|2 years ago|reply
I think you are somewhat strawmanning environmentalism and climate-change concerns here (not with malicious intention or anything) because I don't think that many argue that things are or should be static - though they mostly appear to be static from our short viewpoint.
Instead the concern is that the changes are too fast. It's more akin to consciously bringing a meteor down on the planet than it is to "the world is changing and always have and humans are a tiny blip in the existence of the world".
[+] [-] __MatrixMan__|2 years ago|reply
Time. It's deep.
[+] [-] theGnuMe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bodhi_mind|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bheadmaster|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lovecg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|2 years ago|reply
Eh, I think lots of living things "presume" today's state of things --and involuntarily evolve and try to adapt when things change from what is now to what will be then. But otherwise, I agree.
[+] [-] glitchc|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] comboy|2 years ago|reply
That happened with trees because cellulose was new, but I don't think there would be an issue with plants which cells have been around for a long time.
But maybe I'm missing something in which case I'm happy to learn.
[+] [-] 8bitsrule|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daniel-cussen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] otabdeveloper4|2 years ago|reply
Oh definitely, Sagan forbid someone cast doubt on the Consensus and the Science!
[+] [-] finnh|2 years ago|reply
Largest by area. By mass you need to go a bit south, to the faint grove of Aspens in Utah known as "Pando".
ofc, Aspens are weird enough that they may be thought of more like a fungus with tree-like fruiting bodies rather than trees per se.
[+] [-] tootie|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] turnsout|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user3939382|2 years ago|reply
More https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&sa=1&q=Prototaxites
[+] [-] _a_a_a_|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|2 years ago|reply
Related: I dreaded looking into this thread because titles like that (I mean the original one) almost always provoke shallow-sensational-reflexive responses. There are a few such subthreads here but for the most part the hivemind didn't derange itself this time. Well done hivemind!
[+] [-] 1attice|2 years ago|reply
It's like taking an article that says "dinosaurs are related to birds" and changing it to read "the ancestors of birds are related to birds." It reduces a new, interesting claim to a tautology which is not, in any way, what the article concerns itself with.
[+] [-] 1attice|2 years ago|reply
Here, the descriptive, sensible word 'mushroom' is replaced with 'prototaxite', a word that is meaningless to (let's be honest) most casual visitors to this site.
Accessibility and meaningfulness are casualties in the war on interestingness.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vlod|2 years ago|reply
[0]: https://techraptor.net/sites/default/files/styles/herobanner...
[+] [-] yazzku|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Logans_Run|2 years ago|reply
That is all :)
[+] [-] notlisted|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lisasays|2 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matango
[+] [-] hinkley|2 years ago|reply
Lichen is a symbiosis between fungi and single celled chlorophyll owners. Forests are multicellular lichen. Like the cyanobacteria, trees can often function without their host, but they do better things with them.
[+] [-] friend_and_foe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Thaxll|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] francisofascii|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nologic01|2 years ago|reply
Which might be interesting but not exactly as evocative as implied.
[+] [-] drewfis|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilovecurl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dm319|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rqtwteye|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simongray|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] excalibur|2 years ago|reply
Throw in a turtle invasion and a time traveling plumber, and you've got yourself a movie.