The Future is Wild: A Natural History of the Future
The Future is Wild is a very interesting book as it provides us with a peek into the planet earth 200 million years from now. However, the most fascinating aspect of this book is how the authors rely on the knowledge of the past to build the image of the future. This logical linkage between the known past and the mysterious future takes our imagination to its limit, and yet does not cross the limits of our reasoning and logic. The book begins by explaining briefly the history of the planet earth and the frequent patterns of evolution in order to set up the readers’ minds, and then it jumps smoothly five, a hundred, and two hundred million years in the future. During these jumps, many changes occur as completely new species evolve while others go extinct. Also, the shape of the continents keeps changing till they all form another single landmass just like they did in the far past. It is really remarkable how the earth had a supercontinent during the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras about 250 million years ago, then it broke apart into several smaller continents, and after that, 200 million years in the future, theses several continents rejoin again to form another supercontinent. It is as if history repeats itself but now it gives a chance to new species to take over the planet. Another interesting, and yet sad, piece of evidence about the planet earth is that the Human era that we live in is actually part of a ten thousands warm spell in a hundred thousand years of what they call a glacial cycle of an Ice Age. This is interesting because it indicates that no matter what human beings do, this interglacial period is only temporary, and that it is scientifically impossible to prevent the planet from being mostly covered by ice in the next five million years. This fact alone is sufficient to motivate humans to try to find other inhabitable planets in order save themselves from being extinct.
What I really do not agree with in this book is:
The Future is Wild assumes that the Human era will defiantly end with a period of mass extinction resulting from a combination of human influence and natural phenomena. With this claim, the book eliminates any possibility of surviving the Ice Age.
In this paper Martin is arguing that late quaternary or near time extinctions where caused by human activity or as he calls it “overkill”. Martin recognizes that there have been many forces that have triggered extinctions in the planet on the past but disagrees with the idea that near time extinctions where caused by some commonly believed causes like climate change, disease or nutrient shortage. He argues that the arrival of humans to different continents, islands and the subsequent excessive hunting, the introduction of diseases and other competitors and predators was the cause of extinction of a great number of species “As our species spread to various continents we wiped out their large
Americas by 14,000 ago” (O’Brien 12), after large portions of North America encountered the last ice age, which
I’ve always wondered how the human race will go extinct. I’m not a survivalist or have a cabin in the middle of nowhere with canned food that will last me the next five years. I don’t spend hours pondering this question or losing sleep, but I am simply interested in this puzzle. The answer to this question can have numerous answers, but no one knows for certain how it will happen. The discussion about how the world will end would lead me to present this topic at a UVA Flash Seminar if given the opportunity.
In recent decades, the contentious issues surrounding climate change and the corresponding effects it likely exerts upon contemporary civilization has developed to become one of the most pressing areas of concern afflicting humanity (Armstrong, 1). Currently, climate change has started to demonstrate its potentially calamitous consequences upon human subsistence practices, and has even begun to alter the very environments that entire societies reside in, theoretically endangering them in both instances (Armstrong, 1). Though the hindrances inherent in climate change are potentially devastating to the preservation of modern society, the problem of climate change itself is not one that is exclusive to the contemporary era. Rather, the harmful
In, The Fate of the Earth by, Jonathan Schell, he starts with the extinction of dinosaurs then moves onto how it’s not possible to judge on human extinction. He also talks about how the extinction of animals and how we have learned from our mistakes. He states how we live, then we die. And how different catastrophes could kill everyone or how they could slowly become extinct from those catastrophes. He mainly talks about population and how the extinction of human beings and once we are extinct we are done.
Once the author made his view clear, he goes on to display possible scenarios of how human existence can change within the next millennium. He proposed four possible scenarios. The first scenario that Nash discusses, the “wasteland scenario” depicts
The Human Race has left the previous Epoch and began a new one referred to as the Anthropocene
ABSTRACT: This paper is intended as an inquiry regarding contemporary critical assays of subjectivity. In response to the contemporary politics of representation, both in expressions of essentialist identity politics and in versions of social constructivism, and their implication of all pedagogical practices in transfers of power, I wish to project the question of the subject’s futures. I choose to discuss the limits of the interior, monadic subject for consideration not only its historical and contemporary effects in the politics of representation, but also for the possibility of thinking beyond it. In the spirit of Foucault’s ethical project only a special kind of curiosity and a thinking ‘otherwise’ could, if luck and wit permit, allow us as individual subjects to go beyond ourselves. Thinking otherwise, when possible, could also suggest going beyond ourselves collectively in the creation of provisional critical pedagogical and ethical community.
Climate change is arguably one of the most controversial topics in modern science, and undoubtedly one of the most important. Ongoing research has shown that the planet’s climatic temperature has increased slightly yet significantly over the past century. Studies have also found that this warming can be attributed to human activities since the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As time goes on and humans continue their harmful actions, climate change and its related effects will continue to negatively impact nearly all living organisms.
Our world is always changing, so is our climate. Some changes are apparent, others not so much. Climate change is an important issue of concern in the twenty-first century. Environment, if it changes at all, evolves so slowly that the difference cannot be seen in a human lifetime (Wearth, 2014). Mostly all scientists predicted that it would take thousands of years for the planet to warm up due to emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels called greenhouse gases. But in the past 200 years, things began to change. The rate and the amount of warming that is happening on this planet are unprecedented. Wearth says, “People did not grasp the prodigious fact that both population and industrialization were exploding in a pattern of exponential
Nine of the eleventh hottest years in the 20th century have occurred since 1985 which is not consistent with a natural trend. Glacier Shrinkage is occurring at a much faster rate than can be explained by natural trends. Even when the heat effects of volcanoes and other misleading weather phenomena that would make the temperature of the earth seem higher than it actually is being taken out of consideration studies show that the surface temperature of the earth has been increasing at a rate of 0.17 degrees Celsius per decade. These figures are not consistent with a natural trend, and, when one considers the tens of thousand of years in which humans have inhabited the earth, and that humans have really only started burning fossil fuels heavily since the industrial revolution, and the fact that the world’s population is only going to increase, this number is dauntingly
In Dipesh Chakrabarty’s essay, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” he begins with “…the proposition that anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history.” With this initial statement, Chakrabarty declares that the advent of manmade climate change in the anthropocene, humans can no longer be considered separately from nature as they had been previously segregated by Enlightenment and western thinking. In other words, “humanism,” or human-centered thinking is neither relevant nor reasonable in the face of global climate change. According to Chakrabarty, since human and natural history are both intrinsically tied together, the fate of mankind is now
For almost all of recorded history, man has been fascinated with his future and all of both the wonders and horrors it might hold. From the Aztecs, who created a calendar that dated all the way to a couple of years prior to today, to the famed Nostradamus who was allegedly clairvoyant and whose prophecies have been interpreted to fit modern happenings, to modern-day apocalypse writers, man is held captivated by that which he cannot know for certain: the future. Many literary artists have published works on their idea of the future of both the human race and our planet, with very few of them having much of a positive outlook. It is generally agreed upon that some form of disaster, be it man-made or natural, will occur and the current way of life will be altered dramatically. Populations will be decimated; individuals will begin to resort to anything they have to do to survive. Emotions will be shut off or altogether ignored and people will be overall desensitized, which tells much about their psychological state of being. Emotion is necessary for someone to retain a stereotypically “right” state of mind. According to articles in several issues of Time magazine, governmental trends show that the dystopian governments in works such as Anthem by Ayn Rand are indeed a possibility, and societal trends show that the people would not hesitate to resort to horrible inhuman things to survive. “Black Friday” is a country-wide yearly sale that happens right after Thanksgiving, and during that event people trample each other over the deals they will get, and if someone is trying to get the item that someone else wants, there is no telling what the other person will do to get that item. That is during a time of overabundance! Imagine how those ...
other species to go extinct as well. Humans can be held responsible for the temperature change
Our planet has managed to survive and thrive for about 4.54 billion years. In the last 2 million years we have caused enough damage and destruction to make our world “broken” beyond repair. We will not be able to get back the world we once had. The reason behind this is global warming, specifically, the increase of the global temperature due to the burning of fossil fuels and the release of greenhouse gas emissions into our atmosphere. If we do not make the issue of global warming a priority in today`s society, our entire way of life will be at risk. There are many reasons why so many people believe global warming should be a concern. Thoroughly examined points include: scientific predictions, rising temperatures, human causes, drastic climate changes and animal adaptations. Though there are several points arguing how global warming should not be a concern, the reality of the matter is that it needs to be taken into consideration on a global scale before it is too late, as to do nothing would have devastating implications on humankind.