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CORONAVIRUS COVID-19

kenny jones kenny jones
I'd suggest it's simply that the media lose interest in a story once it stops being 'news' - I think it'd be fair to class the media as suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder, although whether they obtained this from the population they have served, or we have caught it off them, I am unsure.

I seem to recall reading once that the human population, huge as it seems to us, would actually all fit onto the Isle of Wight. Granted there'd probably not be a lot of elbow room and it might not be possible to run around much. I suspect that the Earth could actually sustain 7 billion of us, provided we used the resources sensibly.... so that's not going to happen then, is it?

Dave
 
Could the world's population fit on the Isle of Wight? It has been revealed that the age old saying that the world's population will fit on the Isle of Wight – is, in fact, not true. Experts have said that the Island has an area of 380 million square metres. Six people per square metre gives 2.6 billion.
 
Okay,
so a third of us stand on the Isle of Wight while the rest stand on the Isle of Man, that still leaves a hell of a lot of the Earth's surface without people standing on it.... I think it works out at something like 100 people per square km of habitable surface area, if we all set up independent kingdoms, though I might have slipped a decimal point somewhere along the way.

That we can all exist, all 7 billion or so of us, on the planet is evident, I don't think it would take an outrageous effort to try to do so in a more sustainable manner, but unfortunately whilst we in the west are perhaps at least somewhat inclined towards that view there are very large sections of the world population who are more concerned with shorter term goals - even if this means that, at some point, there will no longer be a long term to be considered.

Dave
 
I do not think we want to become extinct, we just will be one day, ask the dinosaurs.

Talking of dinosaurs, they found the biggest one yet 3 years ago according to the news but have only just come to find out how big it actually was.


Arkle
 
It won't be too long before we have bases on the Moon and Mars - 20 years to 30 years or less. They will probably still be dependant upon the Earth at that point, and not self-sustaining, but perhaps in 100 years time they will be.
So the human race has a fair chance of seeding itself it the universe elsewhere and surviving long-term.
I can't wait for my future reincarnations :).

I suggest you go and check out Elon Musk and SpaceX if you haven't already done so.
Blinking amazing the things they are doing and have done to date so far.

Start here :- SpaceX Falcon Heavy- Elon Musk's Engineering Masterpiece - YouTube

and then here :- Mars Making the New Earth | Full Documentary - YouTube
 
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arkle55 said:
Here's the deal if the earth dies we die, if we die the earth lives. Perhaps this is the reason why every living creature dies.

Arkle
Click to expand...
According to the scientists the dinosaur's died out due to an asteroid strike - who knows what natural disasters that will happen in the future, but we don't help ourselves at all by being so complacent that our planet and "nature" will continue to support us when we have so little regard for the damage we continue to do.
 
At some point I think it's a racing certainty (sorry, couldn't resist using that incredibly inaccurate phrase) that we'll be hit by another large piece of rock, they go past quite frequently and some have missed us by - in astronomical terms - very small margins. As the Galaxy rotates there are periods when the Sun passes through/coincides with denser regions of space, which tend to trigger lots of movement in the outer regions of the solar system, which includes catapulting some of the debris inward. There's a lot of stuff out there beyond Pluto, and whilst Jupiter's large gravitational field tends to 'sweep up' things that would otherwise come into our neck of the woods (remember Shoemaker-Levy 9, when that chain of lumpy snowballs hit Jupiter?) it doesn't catch everything.

How habitable we can make Mars I don't know, but I doubt life on the Moon would be anything people could stand for all that long. I know there was an estimate of a century or so to terraform Mars some time back, but how many people could live there and so on ...... I think we'll just have to find a few more Earth like planets and colonise them. Maybe not in our lifetimes, eh?

Star Trek here we come..... though I've tried talking to the microwave and it never delivers Rigellian tea, hot, or any of those other things they do on telly.*

Dave

* It's not bad at heating up mugs of soup though.
 
If colonisation of other planets is the answer........we're half way there already as when you see reports on the news relating to Covid and the need to be self disciplined, there's a sizeable minority who appear to be on different planets already.

 
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arkle55 said:
Here's the deal if the earth dies we die, if we die the earth lives. Perhaps this is the reason why every living creature dies.

Arkle
Click to expand...
Yes....
it is often said that we need to 'Save the planet' !!

No.....we need to save humanity......planet Earth can take care of herself.
Until the day she is hit by a really, really, really big piece of rock or incinerated by our expanding Sun of course.
 
Pitmatic said:
According to the scientists the dinosaur's died out due to an asteroid strike - who knows what natural disasters that will happen in the future, but we don't help ourselves at all by being so complacent that our planet and "nature" will continue to support us when we have so little regard for the damage we continue to do.
Click to expand...

I always wonder with that theory though how after all had been wiped they did not come back as original but were lost forever in the ether and time.
 
Same way any other extinct creature remains gone forever - no living animals left to breed. Enough of them died out as a result of the strike to leave too few survivors to form a large enough breeding group to restock. Meanwhile much smaller creatures that could find enough food and water to survive did so, and when the planet was cleaned up enough to allow it they went on to breed unchecked by the large predators that had helped keep their numbers in check previously.

Destroy the habitat required for life, species dies. I have no doubt whatsoever that if man dies out something else from the animal kingdom will eventually thrive.
Dave
 
davejb said:
Same way any other extinct creature remains gone forever - no living animals left to breed. Enough of them died out as a result of the strike to leave too few survivors to form a large enough breeding group to restock. Meanwhile much smaller creatures that could find enough food and water to survive did so, and when the planet was cleaned up enough to allow it they went on to breed unchecked by the large predators that had helped keep their numbers in check previously.

Destroy the habitat required for life, species dies. I have no doubt whatsoever that if man dies out something else from the animal kingdom will eventually thrive.
Dave
Click to expand...

Yes good explanation their Dave! i can project backwards to see that event happening bacause all would be very disfigured and sparse, maybe not of been an asteriod attack though but just a revamp in creation or a quantum leap even who knows.
 
The large and powerful are the ones that cosmic events wipe out. Smaller creatures, those that live and thrive in conditions not as affected by the event, are the ones that survive and go on to evolve.

Apparently, large lumps of rock and the sun's future red giant phase are not the only threats we face. There are supervolcanic eruptions, gamma-ray bursts from supernovae, neutron stars and black holes, solar storms, and probably more that I've forgotten.

:eek:

Guess who's watching a series called "How the Universe Works" currently? :crazy:
 
arkle55 arkle55
There's long been a theory that eventually the Universe stops expanding and shrinks back to a singularity - the 'Big Crunch' - with the Universe possibly then going through another Big Bang, a repeating cycle where the Universe is reborn, ages, and dies. This is predicated on gravity eventually slowing the expansion, then reversing it.

However, fairly recent observations of the distant Universe have tended to suggest that there's an alternate option, that gravity will not pull it all back together and that something, possibly a repulsive force generated by gravity over truly immense distances, will cause everything to move further and further apart until the Universe just basically 'goes out' and the planets and stellar remnants all eventually just cool down and go dark. In the unlikely event that you could stand in one point in space - let's pretend the Earth somehow exists for ever and you live into eternity, then you'd look up at the night sky and eventually it'd just go dark as all the stars disappeared.

A bit like a wet weekend in Blackpool, although astronomers/cosmoligists tend to use other descriptive phrases.

Dinosaurs probably died out due to a massive impact event, the link below is a short and fairly readable description of several events and the evidence for them that tie in to significant changes in life on Earth. It pretty much boils down to irridium enrichment in the geological record - ie samples drawn from the crust where the deeper you go the further back in time you are looking, which have thin layers that are significantly richer in irridium than normal - irridium being something that tends to get flung into the air by a major impact. Having found irridium enrichment that can be dated to specific periods in our distant history there was then a search to find the craters that these impacts would have left behind - obviously the Earth's crust gets recycled over time, and weathering can make such things harder to spot, but they were looking for pretty big craters so there was more chance of finding at least evidence of such craters.

1988LPICo.673...85J Page 85

adsabs.harvard.edu

It always amazes me how much we have learned about so many things, it's crazy to think that people can figure out ideas like quantum entanglement, and how quarks interact, how stellar radiation pressure balances gravity to allow stars to exist..... the Universe is an amazing place!

Dave
 
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