Adm.Hyman Rickover, the Father of the Nuclear Navy and of Shippensport nuclear reactor. In the twilight of his career, he testified before Congress in January 1982. Below is an excerpt from his testimony. Given who this man was and what he did, his statements were profound.

Here’s an excerpt from Rickover’s testimony:

“I’ll be philosophical. Until about two billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on earth; that is, there was so much radiation on earth you couldn’t have any life — fish or anything. Gradually, about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet and probably in the entire system reduced and made it possible for some form of life to begin…

Now when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something which nature tried to destroy to make life possible… Every time you produce radiation, you produce something that has a certain half-life, in some cases for billions of years.

I think the human race is going to wreck itself, and it is important that we get control of this horrible force and try to eliminate it… I do not believe that nuclear power is worth it if it creates radiation.

Then you might ask me why do I have nuclear powered ships. That is a necessary evil. I would sink them all. Have I given you an answer to your question?”

On the hazards of nuclear power.
Testimony to Congress (28 January 1982);
published in Economics of Defense Policy:
Hearing before the Joint Economic Committee,
Congress of the United States, 97th Cong., 2nd sess., Pt. 1 (1982)

_____________
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover

I go with both.

2nd 1945

3rd and final strike? 2011

BOOM!! #1 REACTOR BLEW SKY HIGH. BOOM!!

And the lands around Chernobyl are deadly and will be for a long time.
Fortunately for Japan, much of what blew up in Fuku went east, into and over the Pacific. Unfortunately for the US, tho.

The very tool used to date events was affected by nuclear tests:

335 years is but a heartbeat. Means absolutely nothing on the scale of epochs.

Dawn of Genus Homo

It's all about the global exchange of everything in the wake of the voyages of discovery.

Fascinating stuff.

One of my favorite things is to return to a field of study where I thought I was knowledgeable and find a great deal that I thought I knew was wrong, and a great number of new insights I had never expected. 1493 is definitely that sort of book, along with its companion "1491".

I remember Alfred Crosby's "The Columbian Exchange," from somewhere back in the '80s, but Mann has really run with the notion. And more.

- Kurt Vonnegut

Last edited Fri Mar 13, 2015, 11:27 AM - Edit history (1)

minute they left Eden the weeds started to grow and the life expectancy of mankind began to shorten. And nothing has changed since then. I cannot give you an exact day though.

I do hope that jokes aside this version is pretty right on the psychology of mankind. We have from the beginning (whenever that was) placed ourselves apart from nature and above the rules of nature. We have always had a bad affect on the world. The "good old days" are a fantasy.

Sweet Thursday is the day between Lousy Wednesday and Waiting Friday. - Steinbeck

or Sweet Sundae.

You misspelled Genesis!

Are you sure you read the Bible?
Because after they left the Garden of Eden, Eve planted some rose bushes.
You know, to spruce up the place.
And so, a few years later she asked Adam to trim them.
So he did.
But, he hacked the shit out of them because he didn't know a damn thing about trimming rose bushes.
And that was when Eve said, "You're sleeping on the couch tonight!"

Mankind has never fully recovered ever since that fateful day.

So, don't even bother to think of asking me about my own experience trimming rose bushes.

The thorns, the thorns!

(The horror, the horror)

and that is when everything went down hill...



As soon as Adam realized if he didn't eat anymore he didn't shit...things were actually going pretty good!

(Oh, and I forgot, before god made them eat the fucking fruit, childbirth was PAINLESS!)


Well, here is what really happened-

And mass production allowing supergreed to suck the souls from scores of moral midgets corporatization and massive wealth concentration without moral restraint.

Also we are "changing" the Earth, that is undeniable- but "screwing up" is a subjective value judgment.

Certainly there are subjective arguments to be made that the mass extinctions we are causing are a bad thing, for many species including us (and certainly the extinct-ees) however, our existence and behavior is no more inherently "unnatural" than anything else that has happened on Earth for the past 4.7 Billion years. And "natural" is a meaningless distinction anyway. Certainly the asteroid that hit in Chixculub was a very "natural" piece of rock behaving in a very "natural" fashion, when it slammed into the Earth precipitating the death of a good percentage of the life forms on the planet.

Observing that humans are having a massive impact on the environment, certainly, a no-brainer. Suggesting (or, maybe, lamely hoping) that we as intelligent actors of our own fate try to mitigate the impact we cause, obviously a sensible point of view.

But imagining that there was some pre-human state of perfection that we "screwed up" (and "caused to fall&quot is, really, just a warmed over boilerplate original sin, garden of eden script, with different labels.

In fact, several people in this thread admit as much, whether they realize it or not.

Except that nuclear pollution that we have introduced is not natural.

In fact it is unnatural.

There is a balance in nature that we observe as evolution. What we have been doing as humans is consciously ending the natural evolution of life.

We know better yet we proceed.

but I don't know that it will be the final word. Basically, when the waves of epidemics has destroyed so much of the population of the Americas that farmlands and cleared lands returned to forest, which absorbed enough CO2 to mark a low-point in global levels. Its a definite measurable and verifiable point in time, which may make more sense as we proceed past 400ppm and whatever that will bring.

Other perspectives may offer other more valid points, but 1610 is a good one to talk about with the kids - there's a big story there to tell.

of the Industrial Revolution, powered by water. Steam came in at the end of the 1700s and New England was pretty much deforested from 1830-1880. Coal was quick on its heels and that's when carbon emissions and measurable increases in atmospheric CO2 began.

So yeah, people lived pretty much in harmony with nature until the Industrial Revolution sped up use of resources.

That's when we started to form large groups, which pretty much demanded that we also become "political" and to choose leaders. Once we were "planted" in one place, we had to defend "our space", and to start to "improve" that space.

When people formed strong attachments to place and "clans" , the next step had to be wars..and the taking of other people's spaces as we depleted our own.

Yes, they had large cities (Babylon, Alexandria, Tenochtitlan) but all it took was a drought or a flood and it was back to the draing board. Or someone with a cough. or a neighbor who had pointy things.

In terms of human impact on the rest of the world, we were pretty much nothing until the beginnings of mechanization and intercontinental travel. Once we started shuffling species across the globe and harvesting / processing material faster than it could be replenished, that's when we started really making a difference.

Environmental impact of humans is always a function of population density.

Giving up nomadic life would provided the original foci of negative impacts that happen day after day, week after week, month after month...with little opportunity for recovery, expansion of that damage would occur alongside of population growth and eliminate species that would make recovery possible through secondary succession

Cities, require structures to live and work in, human built structures are a modification of the environment. Cities concentrate resources--AND--waste. These would create unusual foci of energy and nutrient inputs and support populations of unwanted organisms that are human competitors consuming stored resources and organisms associated with decay. Ergotism for example, a disease of fungal toxicity, would have emerged as a consequence of concentration and mixing of contaminated grain stores.

Disease transmission rates are density-dependent saturation functions, as human population concentrations increased disease transmission would increase alongside the population growth

Control of the pest organisms would mean expansion of predators that tolerate humans...likely to include large numbers of cats which not only feed on 'vermin', but pretty much all ground nesting organisms.

Maintaining herds of animals to support population centers would have concentrated over-grazing and non-point" pollution.

Conducting set-place agriculture near cities with no soil conservation would have concentrated degradation of land.

The disappearance of the megafauna may not have been our fault, exactly, but agriculture certainly is. It would be hard to pinpoint a date, but the late Medieval seems...late.

If this civilization doesn't collapse, every computer will have it, and if civilization does collapse, then the entire concept of Anthropocene isn't going to matter much to anyone for a very long time. Let the next civilization, if there is one, make their own determination when this idiocracy started, and call it whatever the hell they like.

Otherwise as a convenient geological marker nuclear weapons fallout occurs in a similar time frame as Unix time.

I think 1610 is obscenely eurocentric, as wretched as claiming Columbus "discovered" America, or that this civilization began with the Renaissance, or worse, Christian Rome.

Western civilization is what it is because it stole so much from other cultures, often stealing the credit for innovations while obliterating more accurate histories, in much the same way a radical organization might run a bulldozer over an ancient city or sacred site.

We humans aren't going to be around in a hundred thousand years.