Exploring the Unbeaten Path did a great series on it, they visit Fukushima I think two different times, but here’s one of their more popular video from that series, well worth a watch:
it would be quite nice if humans disappeared from the planet…
“Nice” is a human concept so if all human beings are gone, is it really “nice” and does it matter?
Because Mother Earth don’t give a F. Most of what we say about saving the Earth is in the sense of making it sustainably habitable for us humans and not to f up the economy too badly.
Mother Earth don’t care if it gets 30 degrees hotter and if the atmosphere turns into sulfuric acid because for the vast majority of its lifetime, it’s been human free anyways.
I always say this when people start harping about mother earth and climate change.
Before I go further and get downvoted. I BELIEVE IN CLIMATE CHANGE AND I WANT TO SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT.
There is literally nothing humans could do currently to actually destroy the planet, even if we set off all the nukes at the same time in the worst places. There’s nothing we could do to truly eradicate all life either. Plenty of places bacteria and small animals could survive until it’s chill again to evolve. What we can do is make it unlivable for ourselves and our offspring. Not that I personally care much since I don’t want kids and neither do my siblings but we still do our parts to at least minimize our impact.
I always find it arrogant that humans right now always say that we are destroying earth. We cannot destroy earth. Even if we detonate all our WMDs at the same time earth will endure.
I don’t think anyone uses the “we are destroying the earth” in a litteral sense. Common acception is more along the lines of “we are destroying the ecosystem we live in”.
That’s an interesting question though. How much WMDs do we need to destroy earth. Like really fuck it up. I suppose if we concentrate enough explosions on one side of the earth we may be able to alter the mass of the earth. This might change its path temporarily this leading to collision with either the moon or other planets.
Kurzgast (or however you spell it) did a video on this. In short, not enough fissible material on earth (well, I guess technically it’d be “in the earth”) to completely destroy the planet. Which is kinda remarkable cos that’s equivalent to 10 billion of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima.
Since you’re being pedantic, I will be too. According to the Cambridge dictionary, the word destroy can mean “to damage something so badly it cannot be used”. I’d argue making the planet incompatible for life is a pretty fucking good example of it being damaged so badly that it cannot be used. And we are doing that, it’s predicted we could lose up to 70% of all plant and animal species by the end of this century if we continue the way we are. Dunno how long after that it’d take to kill 100%, but I’d say taking out 70% is giving it a red hot crack…
Well, the earth as a geologic entity doesn’t care about what we do or wether we exist, but it makes a hell of a difference for the living species we have as roomates. So for the earth as an ecosystem, it does matter whether we exist or not - and it’s better if we don’t.
Well that’s what I mean. OP says it’s kinda nice if we’d be all gone, and my response was what’s the point of things being “nice” if there are no humans to observe or affirm it? The only thing that is meaningful for us is if we find a way to sustainably coexist with everything, and not self-loathe our species into oblivion.
I wish i could also move more people with me on the bicycle
Depending on the size of those people: bike child seat, bike trailer, or they can ride their own bicycle. Cargo bikes can easily carry two kids or one adult without even using a trailer.
It would also be great if there was some sort of heater/AC in it as well
That is called “dress for the weather”. Even snowflake pinko commies like me can do it.
I ride from -20 to +35C in basically any weather and since jackets and shorts exist that’s all that’s needed. My friends have their own bikes they can ride…
People be growing up knowing nothing but absolute car dependency and the infrastructure that comes with it. They cannot fathom any other way of existing.
I should have been more verbose. We as a society (in North America especially but also elsewhere) have suffered through decades of redlining that has resulted in racial and economic divides.
The wealthiest suburbs are being subsidized by the poorest neighbourhoods with all the money being funneled into infrastructure that directly supports car dependency.
In order to participate in society, you are now required to own, maintain and insure your own vehicle(s).
I am suggesting that we’ve been robbed of a way of life where cars are not necessary to survive. Where your kids can hop on their own bikes and safely take themselves to where they need to go without worrying about if they’ll be struck by a car.
I’m talking about active transport not as a hobby for the privileged, but as a normality for all.
Where I am there are hills everywhere. You know that old joke about walking five miles uphill to school in the snow, and ten miles uphill to get home? That’s here. Plus, it’s the UK, so when it snows, the roads and pavements are lethal.
Plus, some people have kids under 5 😉
More seriously though, because of the amount of hills, and the fact that most people work all day, bikes are not the best option here. The nearest supermarket is several miles away with a lot of hills in between. If you’ve got plenty of free time, riding to the shops with the kids could be fun, but for most people public transport is the answer. It’s just a shame that it’s terrible here .
I’d love to get an ebike, but at the moment the price is too high, from what I’ve seen. The cheapest ones seem to be over £1,000, unless you get the little fold up bikes, but they don’t look like they’d be comfortable for a long ride where you’re pedaling lots.
A gravel bike style would be better here too, simply because we’re in the valleys, and lots of the trails are a bit rough.
Back to the point though, getting to the shops and carrying a week’s worth of shopping on a bike with young kids is impractical here. It would be great if it was practical, but other than the hills, we don’t have the infrastructure for the most part. The roads have to be shared, even if it’s just for now, and there are lots of stretches here where there’s not the room for bikes with motor vehicles, and especially not on the pavements. This time of year is even worse - it’s dark in the morning and night, and the weather is usually crap. All of it increases the risk of accidents, and that’s the last thing any of us want.
Well I live in Sweden and we have snow here too buddy. Lousy public transport sucks though, but that’s what you get in a carcentric society, no options…
Exactly, you live in a country that doesn’t shut down because of half a millimetre of snow. We genuinely get public transport shutting down if there’s snow, and we’ve infamously had trains stop running because of the wrong type of leaves on the line. For a country that mostly has adverse weather conditions, we’re absolutely useless if the weather’s anything but dry and sunny.
I honestly don’t know what we can do here to get better public transport and encourage people away from cars. Once you’re further down the valley, there’s enough room to build other transport methods alongside the roads to allow a transition, but further up, there’s barely enough room for cars to pass each other in some places, which means that buses would struggle too, and there’s no room to make a one way loop to free up space either.
Jacket doesn’t do shit for rain. Believe me, I’m an Aspie and I have too much sensory issues for getting out of home in bad weather. The day it rains is the day i WFH. All the problems stem from the fact that the jacket is too close to the body, generating sweat (and I already sweat too much without it), not to mention it’s not watertight. An enclosed velomobile would probably solve the problem, but I don’t think this sort of vehicle is legal in Poland and can guarantee getting to the office as fast as I’d on a motorcycle or even a moped.
Same. And that includes snow and ice, for those at the back that think that riding a bike in winter is only possible in LA. If people can walk in that weather, people can ride a bike even more easily as the exercise keeps you warmer.
And a small distance to my destination. When my previous job was 8 km from home, I could do the journey in half an hour on a Xiaomi M365 e-scooter, very popular in Poland. But unfortunately our company was absorbed by another one, with office 16 km away, which means prohibitively long (for my sleep-deprived ass) 55 minute commute. And no, public transit doesn’t make it shorter. So a motorcycle driving license it is.
It’s even more comprehensive than that. They don’t even want you to have it, even though it’s data about your use of your vehicle. If you want to use a third party telematics system or just hook up a laptop with software to pull the data, the manufacturers ironically cite data privacy risks as the reason they want to lock down the data so nobody but them can provide access.
The first casualties would be the billions of animals that are dependent on humans. Pets, zoo animals, farm animals in stables or enclosed meadows, animals in laboratories and research centers.
Some would go extinct, those who are dependent on breeding programs, like rhinos and some primates. Of course the extinction rate will immediately start to level off to almost normal rates. Once the forests and other nature grow back it will be back to normal and new species can evolve to fill the niches left behind by now extinct species.
It would depend on what the cause of human disappearance was and how quick it was.
The truth is pretty much anything capable of actually rendering humans extinct would probably render most animals extinct humans are far better surviving than most animals are. You talking asteroid impact, solar flare, nuclear war, massive climate change.
Humans can go into shelters, or build mitigation technology. The animals would just die if we didn’t help them.
The only possible way I can imagine that humans would go extinct quickly and not any other life form would be some kind of viral disease outbreak either natural or artificial, but I realistically can’t see something like that wiping out the whole species. You could have a death toll of 10 million people and it wouldn’t even equal 1% of the global population. Especially considering it wouldn’t be 10 million people all from the same area.
Think about all of the things humans have survived and with far inferior technology then anything we have now, ice ages, super volcanoes, global pandemics that keep coming back, hell in the 19th century one of the largest asteroids to hit the world since the extinction of the dinosaurs hit earth and literally no one died or even noticed.
Agreed. Interestingly the English canal tunnel would be among the last human made structures left after everything else is gone. That and the faces on Mount Rushmore. Old steel bridges would last for pretty long too as they are extremely overbuilt. Back then they really didn’t have ways to calculate how strong they need to be so they just made everything way beefier than necessary.
One thing I frequently think about is just how toxic everything would turn if humans suddenly disappeared. There’s a hell of a lot of waste and fuel that would go unmanaged and seep into the ecosystem. Nuclear reactors across the earth would a irradiate almost the entire water supply on the planet. Life might survive but not before a lot more species went extinct. Huge tracts of land would be no longer able to support life for possibly thousands of years
yeah exactly my reaction, I’d worry the world would be messy - at least near any nuclear plant that doesn’t self shut down… I agree it would irradiate an enormous amount of water and soil but 1000 years later? most of the hot stuff will be long gone and nature will just adapt around the dead zones. see the results @ Pripyat.
Most of the radiation won’t go away for tens of thousands of years actually, We also don’t know the long-term effects on the animals and life in those zones, extreme cancer occurrence is likely for one
In the US they keep getting bigger and bigger to. I was less scared of cars while riding my bike decades ago than I am now and we had less bike infrastructure then.
Well yeah. If it was separate paths from traffic then the size of the vehicles wouldn’t really be as big of a problem. It’s just how we have to “share” with people who have no ability so share.
“Connected” e-scooters and e-bikes that use apps to control their functions also have the ability to collect data (including location) for use in ways that could be abused/sold/stolen.
Thanks! It’s a really interesting topic and I was excited to learn more. But I’m not sure the writer offered much to support their explanation for why these tropical spices are so closely associated with winter time in the north.
For example, I was underwhelmed by the “cinnamon is an antidiabetic, so it’ll help process all those sugary treats you’re eating over the holidays” fact. Does that really explain why cinnamon is associated with this season from a historical perspective? I can’t say for sure that past generations weren’t adding cinnamon to holiday foods because they knew it was an antidiabetic. But I’m going to continue doubting it until I see something persuasive.
The author could have supported their statements a little better, but scattered throughout the articles are reasons like:
Ginger is harvested in winter and will decline in quality over time, so it may be best to harvest and use sooner rather than later. It will help with the side effects of meat stored for harsh and long times
Nutmeg is harvested in August and then proceeds through processing routes that may take enough time to complete and be ready for use by winter
Cinnamon is largely harvested after monsoon season June-December, so will be available for use in time for fall and winter time
I don’t think the author was trying to say that these spices are harvested in the fall and enjoyed in the winter. In fact, I think they are clearly saying the opposite.
Just as cranberries’ fall harvest makes them a natural choice for Thanksgiving, I thought that perhaps the seasonality of spice harvest had something to do with their use during the winter months. However, this doesn’t appear to be the case.
And
Take ginger…The plants can be harvested at any time of year if they are mature and haven’t been exposed to cold or wind.
Or, if they are trying to make that point, they are doing so in a way that includes contradictory details.
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