Korean Job Discussion Forums

[pharflung]

What if Doomsday arrived, changing the face of the Earth?

Could the work of humanity be so thoroughly erased that future generations would regard ours as a myth much like Atlantis?

Or has information become so widely disseminated through digital technology that the technological and cultural record could never be lost? How long would these CDs, DVDs and hard drives keep working? Or are digital media more ephemeral than good old books?

We face a variety of potential threats. Nuclear war is presumably no longer an issue, but a variety of natural disasters, we now know, have caused worldwide devastation in the past.

If nothing else, global warming is threatening extensive destruction of plant and animal species.

Norway is prepared to seed the future, with a sort of flora time capsule containing plant seeds from around the world.

[nicholas_chiasson]

define survive. The maya civilization collapsed before the arrival of the Spainish, yet we know how to read most of their writing. the Atlantis civilization was likely related to the Thera caldera. The world is a big place, and if 90% were destroyed...600,000,000 live... a number twice the population of the US. So in other words...yes.

[xeno439]

I think by survive he means actually continue to live, not just have our history, culture, language, etc. remembered.

[Julius]

It shows a complete ignorance of ecology and typical selfish approach that excludes nature.

No earth could survive with only corn cobs and pear trees growing. It requires a massive wild diversity of plants and insects etc to keep ticking over.

What would pollinate these crops exactly without bugs and birds to do the job?

[nicholas_chiasson]

nature is self correcting. dinosaurs died out...very very quickly...ice ages occur. at best global warming speeds up a normal process. granted a normal process that kills millions of people in worse case, but one that will self correct. If one believes in the old earth theory, of the billions of years man has been a factor for only 60 million or so. I think we exagerate our influence.

[pharflung]

I assume the human race would survive just about anything, given all our resources. But would there be enough skilled people to keep our complex technological and industrial system operating? And without it, could we preserve our culture, our knowledge? Could we do this with, say, 6 million people, or perhaps 600,000?

There are forces of nature that could kill substantially more than 90 percent of humanity, and they could strike with perhaps only weeks or days of notice. The most statistically probable seems to be the supervolcano.

There have been many supervolcanoes that have erupted in the historic past, with a VEI rating of 6 or so, including Vesuvius and Krakatoa. But a truly devastating supervolcano has a VEI rating of 8. The most recent major supervolcano to erupt was Toba, about 70,000 years ago. Geneticists believe it killed all but about 20,000 humans, total, on the planet. It is called the Toba Catastrophe. Toba is in Indonesia. Whenever I read about a large earthquake in Indonesia, it makes me a little nervous. We've had several in the past days. But seismic activity is common there.

While Toba is not active, there are four historic supervolcanoes that do show life. One lies under Yellowstone National Park. The others are Long Valley in California, Rabaul in Papua, New Guinea, and Santa Maria in Guatemala. A big enough eruption from a supervolcano could cover the entire planet in ash several inches to several feet deep, and blot out the sun for months or years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano

The only other disaster of world-wide effect that has happened in the past is a large asteroid impact. But it would be conceit to believe a few hundred years of science is enough to gauge all the risks we face in a rapidly changing environment.

[twg]

Anything that will wipe us out will probably wipe out most of the life on the planet with us. In that case, all of our achievements will likely return to dust before another intelligent species arises... if one ever does.... so it doesn't matter.

Civilizations, on the other hand come and go. Ours won't be any different, and while there will be a huge loss of population due to the fact that we can't support what we got with pre-modern technology, the species should survive.

Unless, of course, we've altered our environment/ ecosystem to the point that we can't adapt to it in the future.

Personally, I foresee a slow, pitiful extinction over the next few thousand years.

[Darashii]

Hopefully aliens have recorded our signals and will seek us out, hoping to find out who shot JR.

[browneyedgirl]

It would just become stories. Other civilizations have lost impressive knowledge in just a few generations. Think about, you jump in your car, and even if you knew kind of how it works, would you be able to rebuild one with just that? No, unless you knew not only how all the parts worked, but also how to manufacture each part from natural resources.

People should worry about hybrid plants that can�t be grown from seeds- if something like your Doomsday happened, it would be very hard to supply people with food.

[RACETRAITOR]

[cbclark4]

I do not think Civilization can survive religion.

[kermo]

A newspaper in Vancouver has been running a series of worst case scenarios about what they would do in case of a chemical spill, volcano, etc. Can't remember which one, but it's probably worth a look.

I wanted to comment, however, because I first read the title as "Can Civilization Survive The West?"

[uberscheisse]

[wormholes101]

If civilization came to an end, it's a hell long walk to Norway!

[Czarjorge]

There are a few data dumps in the world. Theoretically these would house all the scientific and cultural knowledge of the world.

If Norway is collecting seeds, I wonder if someone is collecting DNA imprints of all the creatures in the world.