Korean Job Discussion Forums

[pharflung]

I hope I look this good when I am 40,000 years old!

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/070711-mammoth-picture.html

[khyber]

1) Mammoth=COOL!
2) "Resurrecting" mammoths = uber-brilliant!
3) New underwater remains? =strange but....
First, you'll note the date of that article is from 2002. That's oooollllld.
Second, I can't find anything more recent. And frankly, it'd seem like that would be something scientists would want to sink their teeth into.

[Alyallen]

I'm just wondering if that hunter is still alive after naming a wooly mammoth after his wife. DEATHWISH!

[Junior]

There are a lot of mammoth remains being found now as the permafrost melts due to climate change.

Apparently in Siberia they have mountains of bones and tusks collected over the past 2/3 years.

[pharflung]

Some interesting points.

BTW, did you notice the reporter misspelled the name of the hunter's wife, at least once? Even pros make typos. But they shouldn't. That's what editors are for.

You know, in the grand scheme of things, 2002 doesn't seem that "oooollllld." But I should have noticed this.

Archeologists and others have been finding what appears to be the undersea remains of Atlantis all over the place, and it gets reported in the national media, yet the official world view never quite seems to change. This has been going on for at least 30 years.

Of course, in some instances there may be other explanations. In one case the proposed explanation was almost as radical as the Atlantis theory. Researchers found straight blocks of stone running down into the water off Florida. They were too geometric to be natural, and too old to be from modern construction. So what were they? It seems they were built by ancient Chinese explorers who built them from poured concrete as boat ramps for moving their junks in and out of the water. Chinese artifacts were found in the area.

But that doesn't explain everything.

I read a book that claimed that the big cut stone used for breakwaters in southern Florida were hauled out of shallow water where they seemed to form artificially regular patterns. Sometimes they have holes drilled in them. Anyone who has been to Florida knows there are no granite quaries, no stone, in the state, itself. Yet people don't ask, hey, where did that rock come from? I didn't. The author claimed they came from the remains of Atlantis.

True? I don't know; I'm not in Florida anymore. But some of the stories you hear are pure bunk, like the Bermuda triangle hokum. I lived near the so-called Bermuda triangle, and no one there had had any strange experiences. It was all the invention of an AP news reporter back around 1947, from what I read.

Some reporters just make stuff up. This happened to the coverage of the sinking of the Titanic. Just read
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/britain_wwone/titanic_01.shtml
to see how it works.

Was there an Atlantis? You would think there would be more obvious evidence, if there was. But the fundamental problem is that scientists have, until recently, assumed that life on Earth has been relatively stable.

Now we are realizing otherwise. When you add up all the potential causes of devastation - earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, asteroids, polar shifts, global warming, ice ages, disease, drought - you realize that intelligent life on Earth is an all too precarious miracle. Devastation happens, the only question is the time frame. And it looks like the time between disasters is shorter than we thought.

I don't buy into the exploitation of this fear by religion. Evangelists have been making a mint by foretelling the end of the world for at least a century now. You can't live your life based on fears of doom.

But religions sometimes thrive off of actual doom. Some believe that the rise of Islam corresponded to the massive eruption of Krakatoa in 535 AD, which caused worldwide famine. And Krakatoa was small potatoes compared to Toba.

[cwemory]

So did they try to cook and eat the mammoth meat?

[Ya-ta Boy]

[khyber]

[sojourner1]

The mammoth seems to be the cold climate elephant that probably was killed off by hunters about 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. It probably was good to eat and provided oil for fires and fur for winter clothing. I think it would be awesome to synthesize the seeds of life from genome mapping. That is creating eggs from the genetic information to grow an extinct animal.

[paquebot]

[pharflung]

While I don't endorse the premise of that movie about a sudden snap deep freeze in our future, when talking about the wooly mammoth, you need to explain why these animals are being found flash frozen, in such pristine condition, sometimes with temperate climate vegetation in their stomachs.

To what extent that is connected to their extinction, I don't know. If they died out gradually, that suggests another cause than a very sudden climate change.

khyber:

[pharflung]

Any questions?

[caniff]

As for the increase in world population, the estimates are based on current trends (I presume).

Any hope that the under-developed world will catch up with the developed world, most of which has a negative birth rate, thereby eventually reducing rather than increasing the population?

[twg]

[pharflung]

caniff: