Considering the intelligence level of some of the people I meet it's no surprise that we're not smarter than cephalopods.
Before I learned how intelligent they were I once caught an octopus when diving, I totally regretted it afterwards. I put it in my sprung loader 'catch bag' and within minutes if figured out how to open the bag and spring the lock!
It's hard to believe she had learned that previous to meeting me!
A cuttlefish knows how to be a cuttlefish. Plenty of corvids around here, they know how to be corvids. Humanity suffers from the ability (curse) to be conditioned and never question the conditioning. We need consensus/belief to be social but wind up being anti-social. We "think" our selves are permanent and everything else isn't, unless we "think" it is. We fear the death, could that be the end of ME, so we conjure up beliefs about heaven/hell/reincarnation cosmic justice. Sorry for going on. I think I'd rather be a cuttlefish. Or corvid (love them) they know how to just be. Thanks Guy.
Yes, we are conditioned by society. Yes, we refuse to believe we are conditioned.
I remember my paternal grandmother dying when I was ~11.5 years old. I cried for weeks before I realized I wasn’t crying for her—I barely knew her—I was crying for me. I realized I was mortal. This was, and is, another example of conditioning.
I am apparently running a crow daycare in my backyard...the adult crows who nested in my Douglas Fir trees have brought their three fledglings into my yard while they forage for food. The young birds hang out, play with sticks or feathers they find, chase each other and the squirrels (and get chased by the squirrels) and play in the several bird baths I have like they are kiddie pools! It's so fun to watch, and I feel lucky that their parents deem my backyard safe enough for their youngsters.
Crows might survive this human caused mass extinction. Small enough, adaptable enough. They can be nasty like us, minus the ecocide, genocide, slavey, etc.
“a rogue, seemingly desert Earth wandering across the Universe could still have some tiny chance of blooming again under some lucky — and unlikely — circumstances”
Extremophiles in deep sea vents and voccanic area pools where the water is near boiling may be candidates for carrying on "complex" life through geologic time. Unless the Earth goes to a Venus warming we can "hope" some diversity of life will evolve out of this. Consider that in the deep Unraveling when most or all of humanity is gone there will still be a lot of biomass laying around at all latitudes for opportunistic birds and insects to survive through the extreme heating. But I don't know how one would access the likelihood of this.
When humans go extinct, we take all life on Earth with us. Nuclear facilities imploding will cause ionizing radiation to strip away stratospheric ozone, thus super-heating Earth. Life will not survive this event.
The ongoing, accelerating rate of environmental change indicates otherwise. I depend upon the peer-reviewed evidence, and not depending on lucky and unlikely circumstances: “a rogue, seemingly desert Earth wandering across the Universe could still have some tiny chance of blooming again under some lucky — and unlikely — circumstances”
Bacteria 100 meter deep in ocean mud/ living off chemicals at the bottom of gold mines. As a child I learned a "planet killer" asteroid or a thermonuclear war would result in only bacteria remaining. Now climate change/ecocide. I suspect this is all that will remain, and you are correct, perhaps not even that. We wont be here to know. Still, go corvids!!
Considering the intelligence level of some of the people I meet it's no surprise that we're not smarter than cephalopods.
Before I learned how intelligent they were I once caught an octopus when diving, I totally regretted it afterwards. I put it in my sprung loader 'catch bag' and within minutes if figured out how to open the bag and spring the lock!
It's hard to believe she had learned that previous to meeting me!
https://www.scienceabc.com/nature/animals/how-smart-is-an-octopus.html
You’ve trained an octopus? Why am I unsurprised?
Thank you for your collegiality. I appreciate everything you do to support my work.
A cuttlefish knows how to be a cuttlefish. Plenty of corvids around here, they know how to be corvids. Humanity suffers from the ability (curse) to be conditioned and never question the conditioning. We need consensus/belief to be social but wind up being anti-social. We "think" our selves are permanent and everything else isn't, unless we "think" it is. We fear the death, could that be the end of ME, so we conjure up beliefs about heaven/hell/reincarnation cosmic justice. Sorry for going on. I think I'd rather be a cuttlefish. Or corvid (love them) they know how to just be. Thanks Guy.
Yes, we are conditioned by society. Yes, we refuse to believe we are conditioned.
I remember my paternal grandmother dying when I was ~11.5 years old. I cried for weeks before I realized I wasn’t crying for her—I barely knew her—I was crying for me. I realized I was mortal. This was, and is, another example of conditioning.
Thanks for the morning science snippet! It takes checking ones ego at the door to admit we are not the smartest animal.
Looking around, I see many other examples 😅
I am apparently running a crow daycare in my backyard...the adult crows who nested in my Douglas Fir trees have brought their three fledglings into my yard while they forage for food. The young birds hang out, play with sticks or feathers they find, chase each other and the squirrels (and get chased by the squirrels) and play in the several bird baths I have like they are kiddie pools! It's so fun to watch, and I feel lucky that their parents deem my backyard safe enough for their youngsters.
That’s wonderful! On the topic of intelligence, crows are among the most intelligent birds. Thank you for sharing.
Crows might survive this human caused mass extinction. Small enough, adaptable enough. They can be nasty like us, minus the ecocide, genocide, slavey, etc.
“a rogue, seemingly desert Earth wandering across the Universe could still have some tiny chance of blooming again under some lucky — and unlikely — circumstances”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-35068-1
I’d love to believe other species will survive. Unfortunately, the evidence indicates otherwise.
Extremophiles in deep sea vents and voccanic area pools where the water is near boiling may be candidates for carrying on "complex" life through geologic time. Unless the Earth goes to a Venus warming we can "hope" some diversity of life will evolve out of this. Consider that in the deep Unraveling when most or all of humanity is gone there will still be a lot of biomass laying around at all latitudes for opportunistic birds and insects to survive through the extreme heating. But I don't know how one would access the likelihood of this.
I used to be confident that tardigrades would squeeze through the bottle neck.
Strona and Bradshaw et al dispelled me of that.
Guy and I interviewed Professor Corey Bradshaw on his paper "Extinction Cascades".
Links to the paper, our interview and ancillary corroborating evidence embedded below.
https://kevinhester.live/2020/06/04/professor-corey-bradshaw-explains-the-unfolding-extinction-cascades-on-nature-bats-last/
Thanks to both for the reality check. I searched for and amazingly found the Strona Bradshaw paper is also and still on the NIH website!: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9757742/
Thank you for sharing this information, Kevin.
When humans go extinct, we take all life on Earth with us. Nuclear facilities imploding will cause ionizing radiation to strip away stratospheric ozone, thus super-heating Earth. Life will not survive this event.
The ongoing, accelerating rate of environmental change indicates otherwise. I depend upon the peer-reviewed evidence, and not depending on lucky and unlikely circumstances: “a rogue, seemingly desert Earth wandering across the Universe could still have some tiny chance of blooming again under some lucky — and unlikely — circumstances”
(https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-35068-1)
Bacteria 100 meter deep in ocean mud/ living off chemicals at the bottom of gold mines. As a child I learned a "planet killer" asteroid or a thermonuclear war would result in only bacteria remaining. Now climate change/ecocide. I suspect this is all that will remain, and you are correct, perhaps not even that. We wont be here to know. Still, go corvids!!
“Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.” (Albert Camus)