End of the world
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- driftlab0
cool I mean eeeeekk. When I die and then become a god of my own lands, you guys can all stay with me but hands of my chicken tikka and girlfriend or I will smote smite youse all.
chossy
(Sep 20 05, 08:48)
- chossy0
and so it shall be
- IRNlun60
not the end of the world; just a reminder to humans about who's really running sh*t. To be specific, earth. Earth is running sh*t...
...I think that needed clarification in these kinds of treads.
- JazX0
Any thoughts?
Jaline
(Oct 19 05, 06:57)Without natural disasters there would be no people
65 million years ago, the globe was shaken to its core. That much is certain. What the experts don't agree on is what kind of catastrophe really occurred. Was it a meteorite ten, twenty kilometres in diameter that crashed into the Earth? Or was it a series of violent volcanic eruptions that darkened the heavens for a lengthy period? Whatever the reason, the world turned cold and thus pretty inhospitable for the dinosaurs which inhabited it at the time.But the little, warm-blooded mammals, that until then had eked out a wretched existence in the shadow of the giant lizards, were suddenly given their chance. This was the first major geo-historical crossroads that pointed evolution in the direction of the human race. Among the smaller mammals that now came into their own was the tree shrew family. It was from this species that prosimians, apes and, finally, human beings evolved.
Without this cold catastrophe the world might still be ruled by Tyrannosaurus Rex. Frustrated tree shrews would still be choking in the dust thrown up by his feet. Indeed, that is the way things were for a very long time; after all, mammals were already around 220 million years ago. The first true mammal, the eozostrodon, was already in existence when the dinosaurs began their impressive career.
Then, when it went cold and dark, the mammals were able to move into the fast lane. They had a constant body temperature. Their most important sense was that of smell, which they used to find insects at night. Weasel-like creatures were armed and ready for the new climate, while the likes of Tyrannosaurus Rex were in their final throes. Without the global disaster, the evolutionary path that led to homo sapiens would never have been blazed. In this way, drastic environmental changes guide destiny and accelerate evolution.
After this big bang came the tertiary period, the heyday of the mammals. The subsequent Pleistocene epoch then began with a warm period that, on a geological time scale, set in like lightning. The ensuing abundant precipitation brought forth opulent vegetation. In eastern Africa - the birthplace of mankind - yet another natural phenomenon took place: rampant volcanic activity sprayed the region with ash which acted as a fertiliser. Plants, and plant-eaters, multiplied, and the apes left the primaeval forest to partake of the fantastic range of food that the steppe now offered. Now living at ground level, they learned to walk upright and became increasingly intelligent. With his superior brain, our forefather, Australopithecus, was able to hold his own against lions and hyenas. When the next climatic catastrophe caused the temperature to drop again, the humid forests to shrink and the steppe regions to expand, Australopithecus was already ideally suited to the new landscape. As anthropologist Jared Diamond explains, it was interaction with the environment that shaped the course of human evolution. And disasters reshaped the environment time and again.
Primaeval man later emigrated from the African continent in three waves, initially inhabiting only the Old World. If disastrous cold spells during the Pleistocene epoch hadn't covered half of Europe with glaciers, America would have remained untouched by human foot (at least until the arrival of Columbus). Because the swelling of the continental ice sheets dried out the Baring Straight and turned it to tundra. This enabled man to cross from Asia to America by foot 12,000 years ago. And conveniently enough, there were sufficient mammoths on hand to provide him with food and clothing during this trek.
- kelpie0
jesus christ, if I had a fucking penny &c...
- Jaline0
haha, thanks guys :)
- JazX0
Furthermore.
Disasters are ambivalent
In January 1999, King Taufa'ahau Tupou the Fifth's kingdom began to grow. Fifty kilometres from Tonga's capital, a 300 metre long and 40 metre wide volcanic island emerged out of the South Sea. In many places on earth, such an eruption would have been a terrible catastrophe, but in this case the monarch and his subjects were delighted about this unexpected gift from Mother Nature.
So as we see, strokes of fate can be perceived in highly diverse ways. Some people are devastated, some start again from scratch and successfully re-build their lives, and still others learn a valuable lesson and change their lifestyle for the better. One and the same visitation may have a totally different impact on different people. Collective destiny-changing events are no exception. Even disasters are ambivalent.
It is not the wind-strength of a hurricane, the water level of a flood or the intensity of an earthquake that determines the extent of the terror it causes. It is much more the scale of the damage the storm, flood or quake wreaks, whether the people were prepared for it, and how they cope with the disaster when it occurs. It is the number of victims and the size of the economic loss that define the calamity.
Our Blue Planet is a risk-filled home. But still it is more life-supporting than any other heavenly body known to man. Many a natural event is undoubtedly formidable, but without being disastrous. When rivers burst their banks in the Amazon jungle or Siberia is blasted snowstorms, flora and fauna are tormented, admittedly, but it is not until people are affected, or feel affected, that an occurrence is seen as a disaster. It doesn't always have to be a question of life and death either. When a fire raged through the Yellowstone National Park in 1988, the loss of a revered landscape sufficed to make Americans bemoan a national disaster.
Whether or not something goes down in the annals as a disaster is decided spontaneously and intuitively. There are no set criteria, not even for professionals in relief organisations and insurance companies.
Insurance experts speak of a disaster when a certain level of insurance claims or a certain number of deaths or injuries is exceeded. For a UN helper, the decisive criterion is whether the smitten region is able to recover on its own or whether it has to request external assistance.
Nature is not known for distributing suffering equitably. As in war, there are nearly always winners and losers. During the Great Fire of London in 1666, boat owners on the Thames earned a small fortune by selling wealthy Londoners refuge from the flames on their vessels. In the wake of an earthquake, the building industry booms. In ancient Egypt, mud from floods of the Nile served the farmers as a welcome fertiliser for their fields.
"The beauty of the Californian landscape, the wild coast and the charming valleys are largely the work of the San Andreas Fault. In actual fact we should be grateful to it", says Allan Lindh, geologist at the United States Geological Survey in California's Menlo Park. He has drawn an economic balance of the curses and blessings of the seismic unrest in California and comes to the conclusion that the fissure generates five to ten times as much benefit than it causes detriment. The advantages include not only the beautiful landscape that attracts tourists; shifts in the Earth's crust also create propitious conditions for agriculture, winemaking and even oil extraction. Lindh values these assets at between 10 and 20 billion dollars a year. The damage caused by a major quake, he says, would amount to around 100 billion dollars; but tremblers of this magnitude occur only every 50 to 100 years.
It is not only human society that draws benefit from disasters: nature too, has its opportunists. Many plants and animals exploit the results of widespread destruction. After the River Oder flooded in 1997, ecologists observed an astonishing increase in the number of rare fish such as dace, chub and ide. Dyke breaks and washed-up sand had suddenly provided these species with new habitats and improved spawning conditions.
In the early seventies the alarm bells went off in the ears of conservationists in the USA. A little bird, the Kirtland's Warbler, was threatened by extinction. Ecologists went about trying to find out why. The result was a mighty blow to contemporary beliefs about conservation. The Warbler suffered badly from a lack of forest fires because it only nests in young saplings of the Jack Pine tree that only grows when fire destroys old trees.
Disasters are the motor of evolution. "It has always been the short, sharp phases of massive, often catastrophic change that have allowed the new to emerge", says biologist Josef H. Reichholf. The great disasters in the Earth's history, in which numerous species of plants and animals were lost forever, made way for other types of flora and fauna.
After one of the most violent natural phenomena in recent history, scientists were able to observe just how quickly this can happen. On 27th August, 1883 the island of Krakatoa between Sumatra and Java was torn apart by a series of tremendous volcanic eruptions. The noise of the explosion was heard 2,200 miles away in Australia. A small piece of the island called Rakata remained above sea level, but the lava had destroyed every vestige of life on it. Nine months later a French expedition discovered the first new living creature on the island: a tiny spider - blown over from a neighbouring island - had begun spinning its delicate web. Just one year later the scientists counted thirty species of bird, ten types of mammal and nine different reptile species living on the island. 45 years later Rakata was completely covered with luscious tropical rainforest. Natural disasters destroy and create. They are a constant provocation for all living things.
But what is a natural disaster? And what is a man-made one? There is often but a fine dividing line between the two. When in 1997 the rains failed to arrive in Indonesia because of the ocean current known as El Niño, this wasn't really a cause for alarm. The forests did dry up badly, but they would have recovered again at the first rainfall. Oil palm farmers, however, decided to take advantage of the drought to burn-clear new land for planting. The fires got out of control, darkening the skies all over South East Asia with billowing smoke. El Niño provided the kindling, but it was the farmers who lit the fire.
Likewise, the flooding of the Yangtse to which 3,600 people fell victim in 1998 was not purely a natural disaster, but also the work of man. After the flooding had subsided, the Chinese government was forced to admit that large-scale land-clearing work in the upper reaches of the Yangtse was largely responsible for the magnitude of the catastrophe: due to the lack of vegetation, the rain that fell could not be absorbed and instead flowed straight into the river. Similar activities also aggravated the flooding of the Rhine and Oder rivers in recent years. Since the 17th century, riverside woodlands that used to soak up the excess water had been cut down to gain arable land. This had deprived the rivers of their natural catchment areas.
Beyond the bounds of floods and fires, man himself is the biggest threat to man. The consequences of his conduct can be much more deadly than those of the worst natural disaster. The totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century cost more human lives than all elemental forces put together. Even the beneficial achievements of technological progress, such as the automobile, or apparently harmless drugs (tobacco, alcohol) have catastrophic side effects. However, these only become visible when one adds up the fates of their innumerable solitary victims. Although man-made, these individual (mis-)fortunes take on "a trait of fatefulness, that previously would have been interpretable only as a work of the gods", wrote philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. The Germans have grown accustomed to around 8,000 traffic fatalities, almost 10,000 alcohol-related deaths and around 100,000 deaths through nicotine abuse per year. No storm, fire, flood or major technical disaster has ever taken so many victims.
- todelete__20
if the end is near i'm buying a fucking lamborghini and topping it out in the school zone near my house. fuck it.
- discipler0
don't forget the theory of a global deluge, jazx. ;)
- JazX0
Not only nature, statistics, too, are tricky
In the early nineties, United Nations experts warned: "The frequency and magnitude of natural disasters are increasing dramatically." A wave of media reports carried this message all around the globe. Now, a decade later, most people are thoroughly convinced that "natural disasters are on the rise" (Die Welt) and are "becoming ever more ominous" (Süddeutsche Zeitung). But is that really the case?
What certainly is true is that insurance claims are rising rapidly. But there can be many reasons for this. All over the world, people are becoming more affluent, although, of course, affluence is always relative. More and more people are insuring their belongings. And more people are living in high-risk zones. This is especially true of poor countries with rapidly growing populations, such as the coastal regions of Bangladesh. In other parts of the world, poverty is not a major factor in the popularity of dangerous areas as a place to live. For example, more and more Americans are moving to California (earthquakes, bush fires) or Florida (hurricanes).
The population density on the coasts of the United States has doubled over the last 20 years. The number of cities in the world with more than a million inhabitants has increased fourfold in the last thirty years. 1999 became the first year in which more people lived in cities than in the countryside. All of this would suffice to explain the rise in insurance claims, even if the number of storms, earthquakes, floods and volcanic eruptions were to remain the same.
There is another factor that causes uncertainty: Information from the past is often unreliable. It is usually based on newspaper reports. But the media coverage depends on the news-worthy occurrences of the day. A landslide that buries a village in South America only finds its way into European public attention if there was not much going on in Berlin, London, Paris, Moscow and Washington. 100 years ago, this egocentricity of the industrialised nations was even more pronounced. Newspaper readers back then were hardly interested at all in the death of a few hundred natives in some remote colony. The best illustration of this fluctuating interest is the disaster curve of the last 100 years, which exhibits a dramatic dip between 1936 and 1945. This is hardly because Mother Nature was behaving particularly benevolently at the time, but rather because the Second World War was overshadowing all the other disasters that were happening.
Finally, yet another source of uncertainty: it is very seldom for a final balance to be drawn up of the damage suffered. Often, for understandable reasons, figures are tossed around very early on that are then snapped up by reporters, regurgitated over and over again and never checked as to their validity. For example, the true cost of the Northridge earthquake that shook the region around Los Angeles in 1994 has not been positively established to this day. So it is no wonder that the catastrophe damage estimates published by the major reinsurance companies seldom agree. Even official government figures can not always be trusted. In dictatorships, for example, it is quite normal to play down natural disasters so that nobody gets the idea of questioning the "perfect" system's ability to cope. Conversely, it is in the interests of poverty-stricken developing countries to exaggerate reports of catastrophes to attract as much foreign aid as possible.
As a result, disaster statistics have to be taken with a grain of salt. Any attempt to extrapolate an increase or decrease in the occurrence and intensity of natural disasters is in for a surprise. The Austrian economists Josef Nussbaumer and Helmut Winkler investigated 1,422 natural disasters that each cost more than 100 human lives between 1986 and 1995. They could not identify a clear trend.
The bad news first: the number of minor disasters rose considerably. But - and this is the good news - the frequency of very large disasters (more than 10,000 deaths) declined in the 20th century. Major catastrophes of this kind (mostly droughts) had a huge impact on the mortality statistics. 98 percent of all deaths were attributable to just 140 major disasters. The reduction in the number of such catastrophes leads to the next piece of good news: natural disasters were killing less people at the end of the century than at its beginning. In affluent countries the number of deaths sank dramatically, and even in the developing countries the number of disaster fatalities fell slightly - despite the constantly expanding population.
This gives rise to all kinds of questions: is the number of disasters increasing, or is it just the number of media reports about them? Are natural disasters becoming less catastrophic (because there are less deaths), or are people just protecting themselves better? At least one conclusion would appear to be plausible: the poor suffer more than the rich.
Nussbaumer and Winkler are cautious about making any interpretations and emphasise that "both the availability and the reliability of the data are subject to a geographical and temporal shift". Their answer to the question of whether the forces of nature are on the increase: "The current status of research does not permit a clear answer to be given."
- IRNlun60
uh oh. Looks like this thread just reached a turning pont...
- discipler0
haha
- JazX0
Of course, I didn't write that, but there were some very good points here:
Life On A Riskly Planet
http://www.maxeiner-miersch.de/l…stop thinking you are so important people, you live in sub-par dangerous times in comparison.
f*cking drama queens
;)
- discipler0
Matthew Chapter 24 -
Jesus left the temple and was walking away when his disciples came up to him to call his attention to its buildings. "Do you see all these things?" he asked. "I tell you the truth, not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down."
As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately. "Tell us," they said, "when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?"Jesus answered: "Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, claiming, 'I am the Christ,' and will deceive many. You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains.
"Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me. At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.
"So when you see standing in the holy place 'the abomination that causes desolation,'spoken of through the prophet Daniel—let the reader understand— then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Let no one on the roof of his house go down to take anything out of the house. Let no one in the field go back to get his cloak. How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers! Pray that your flight will not take place in winter or on the Sabbath. For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equaled again. If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive, but for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened. At that time if anyone says to you, 'Look, here is the Christ!' or, 'There he is!' do not believe it. For false Christs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and miracles to deceive even the elect—if that were possible. See, I have told you ahead of time.
"So if anyone tells you, 'There he is, out in the desert,' do not go out; or, 'Here he is, in the inner rooms,' do not believe it. For as lightning that comes from the east is visible even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. Wherever there is a carcass, there the vultures will gather.
"Immediately after the distress of those days
" 'the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light;
the stars will fall from the sky,
and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.'"At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory. And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.
"Now learn this lesson from the fig tree: As soon as its twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near. Even so, when you see all these things, you know that it[d]is near, right at the door. I tell you the truth, this generation[e] will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.
The Day and Hour Unknown
"No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.
"Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come. But understand this: If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him."Who then is the faithful and wise servant, whom the master has put in charge of the servants in his household to give them their food at the proper time? It will be good for that servant whose master finds him doing so when he returns. I tell you the truth, he will put him in charge of all his possessions. But suppose that servant is wicked and says to himself, 'My master is staying away a long time,' and he then begins to beat his fellow servants and to eat and drink with drunkards. The master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he is not aware of. ...
- todelete__20
uh oh. Looks like this thread just reached a turning pont...
IRNlun6
(Oct 19 05, 07:24)i'll second that.
its been said though by a number of scientists that disasters, like the weather come in cycles.
for 10 years somewhat mild, then for the next 10 or whatever you're fucked.
we all have to remember that natural disasters have been happening for millions of years.
and the next time an asteroid is threatening to drill earth one can only hope superman is there to save us.
- JazX0
hey it's superman
- todelete__20
kona out. this thread is going down a road i'd rather not travel so early in the morning.
the usual religion crew can take over from here.
*kona punches out timeclock
*religion crew punches in
- JazX0
I actually shouldn't have posted that one post. Too much creationists vs. evolutionaries differences.
But I mean come on, the Rock Record says something else about disasters in the past
think K-T Boundary
- ETM0
People have been predicting the "End of the World" since the dawn of man. I for one am tired of all the hype... just end it then!
Seriously though, weather and natural disasters always go through times of heavy activity. For example with all the huricanes, people act like it's the end, but we only tied a record this year from the 1930's. So there is presidence for this kind of activity without the end being near. Everything is a cycle.
- Jaline0
It's true that there's usually a cycle of hurricane activity. Like how when you work in a fast food restaurant, there's always a huge rush of people, and then it's silent, and then more people, etc.
Bad analogy, but, anyway, I heard about that on TV, and how it wasn't supposed to be like this for another 10 years or so.