We have been (arguably) "civilized" for about 10,000 years (150 in the USA;-))
=> 150 years? You give us too much credit.
Jeff Bieler
Mark Pilkington wrote:
> A slighly different perspective...... We all think that the atmosphere is
> hugely thick and will absorb all we dump into it. The sky is the limit etc.
> Also we think that we have so much control over what we do. I fly planes as
> Marin does, and since I have been flying I have more of a feeling of how
> fragile the earth is and how little control we have over it if any. The average
> commercial airport runway is about 10,000 feet long, imagine how short one is
> as you drive past it. If that were upended vertically, it would reach higher
> than where humans can comfortably live. Now think of the 3000 miles across just
> the USA for example!(15,600,000 feet) The atmosphere is such a thin veneer
> around us. While on the subject of making things vertical, remember the Kursk,
> the Russian Submarine that sank? If that sub were upended where it lay 200
> feet of it would have been above water! It was 500 feet long and was in 300
> feet of water and we had no influance or control over what happened to it
> (apart from the political problems). The ocean is 20,000 feet deep in places.
> We are just on borrowed time here, we have had a huge influence on a small
> planet in a cosmic blink of the eye. We are damaging it, and we have to be
> careful. I am not an Eco-freak, but I did study Rural Resources and their
> Management for 4 years in England. I also fly 30 year old aircraft, drive
> Landrovers, hunt, shoot, and fish all of which are considered by some as not
> environmentally friendly. I am continually surprised by the surprise with which
> the media handles natural disasters, as if to say "the humans are here, no more
> volcanoes, avalanches, earthquakes, landslides, droughts, floods, fires or
> meteorites please" We could be gone in a moment if an asteroid hit us. The
> dinosaurs and their predecessors were here for 400,000,000 years and never got
> beyond being big dumb lizards. We have been (arguably) "civilized" for about
> 10,000 years (150 in the USA;-)) and have managed to overpopulate and damage
> the planet almost irreversibly in that time. We do change things and we have to
> be careful.
> Having just read this through, I notice that it only mentions "Landrovers"
> once! Being alarmed at that, I will mention that I spent until 10pm last night
> gleefully putting the slave cylinders on my SIIa after getting a large package
> from England full of small peices of Landrover. Tonight is the night for the
> gynocological wrestling of the clutch slave cylinder into its unorthodox
> position on the side of my unenvironmentally sound, non-Landrover Chevy 327 V8.
>
> Thanks for getting this far!
> Mark Pilkington
>
> "Robert A. Virzi" wrote:
>
> > Bill, Peter, and others-
> > An interesting article on global warming, truth or fiction, can be found at
> >
> > http://www.latimes.com/news/science/science/20010401/t000027891.html
> >
> > Light reading, but a bit long. Covers such interesting phenomena
> > like the Ross ice shelf, ice ages, and temp fluctuation on geologic
> > time scales. Worth a read if you're planning to contribute to this
> > thread.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Apr 05 2001 - 13:53:38 EDT