Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 9722507" data-attributes="member: 177">So, yes, extended infancy and childhood is a result of that big brain.But, again, there's no selection pressure against it unless it causes death before successful reproduction.  Meanwhile, the human population of the planet has tripled in the last 75 years - our big brains mean too many kids are being born and growing to adulthood, not to few.Also, this just shows that Thanos was an idiot.  Cut the population in half?  We'll regrow it in under a century!Yes, humans have come close to extinction before.  You suggest this "may have been" due to intelligence.  But, barring some specific evidence, it "may have been" that we'd have gone extinct if we didn't have the intelligence.  There's no real telling."May have been" is not a supported argument - it is an appeal to emotion.So, interestingly, do you realize that it is our insufficient intelligence that is driving us into dangerous scenarios?  The apocalyptic ends become more likely because we still rely on emotion-based risk assessment that is very bad at understanding long-term impacts. Fossil fuels exist due to entirely natural processes where life buts up against geology.  Living things die, get buried, and in the long run the fossilization process produces coal (from trees) and oil and natural gas (from plankton).  If you have enough sea life, oil and natural gas deposits are pretty much inevitable, as far as we understand the process.  Coal is a little more complicated, and less inevitable.But even then, you can go a long way on charcoal.  It just takes longer.  But longer on human timescales, not geological ones.</blockquote>

Verification