shadesofgrey

It's relative. It's also a balance. Anything can be a plague (including humans) if you have too much of it. Plenty of other species have ballooned in size over time, but there's a system of checks and balances in nature that bring them back to a manageable level (predators, food sources, natural disasters, etc). Humans are exempt (now) from most of these checks and balances because of our ability to significantly alter the environment around us with technology to suit our needs. So, if we wanted (and we appear to want to) we can theoretically go on expanding our population as long as we have the ability to feed ourselves. We may be able to stave off things like disease and famine for a certain period of time with our technological prowess. However, we haven't figured out a way to stave off war (the third population control of humans throughout our history) and if we don't end up nuking ourselves, then our increase in population will necessarily have to come at the expense of other species. We're in a closed system on Earth, so if one element in that systems grows, the other elements must shrink. So to an animal or plant that we drive to extinction, we could certainly be viewed as plague. However, plants and animals don't write the history books, and since we're the only sentient beings on the planet, our opinion is the only one that matters to us. So whether or not you see humanity as a plague is dependent upon the importance which you place upon human life. If we're the top dog (no pun intended), then we come first, at the expense of everything else. Wall-E took that too the extreme, simply portraying a world in which humanity had crowded out literally everything else and as a result (and a result of our own lack of sufficient ingenuity it appears) was wiped out. At the end of the day, however, it was a cute movie about some robots and if you think it's REALLY part of the liberal agenda to corrupt and brainwash America's youth, I'd just say you were being alarmist and that you should chill out. If anything, appreciate the technology that went into making the movie. Pretty impressive for its time.

You can't possibly believe this to be true: "Growing evidence that tropical rainforests may now be expanding faster than they are being cut down, though more data are needed to determine the nature and extent of reforestation trends." SECONDARY rainforest is so vastly different in composition and function from virgin rainforest that a comparison literally cannot be made and still be based in reality. By this conclusion (if you can call it that), you could plant grass over every deforested area and it would have the same climatological effects as what was originally there. I recommend reading "The Wild Trees" by Richard Preston for a glimpse (and that's all it is because that's all we as a species know as of now) into the myriad of ecological differences between virgin forest and second- or third-growth forest. The difference in complexity is astounding. Unfortunately I find many objectivists, strictly to avoid being labeled "environmentalists" (as if nothing worse could possibly happen) meet the subject with flat denial or endless quibbling over reference semantics rather than capitulating that we may not, in fact, be doing a good thing by flattening every last bit of forest on the planet. That said, you can START to repair that which was polluted, but you absolutely cannot (depending on the extent of the damage) return said ecosystem to its original state before whatever environmental insult took place. That takes amounts of time that exceed the duration of civilized man on this planet. We can mitigate damage, we can see the return of some species and indeed, their thriving under certain circumstances. It would, however, be a gravely short-sighted error to assume (and that's all it is - an assumption) that a few years after something was rendered bereft of life that it's back to its normal state. No ecosystem is that simple. I do agree that the cleanest cities are in the developed world. This is fairly straightforward though, as your average developing country doesn't have anything resembling a Clean Air/Water Act or the legislation and regulation (however restrictive it may be) determining how much of what chemical gets discharged into the environment and in what form.

gulch - Thanks for this post. Interesting - - - I know many people who would start gushing in an unintelligible way about how this makes them feel humble. My reaction, on the other hand --- I'm impressed that humans can sort these things out! That they can measure such distances. Bill P Well not humble obviously, but it has a way of making one feel SMALL. That, and it makes me start thinking about space elevators and whatnot seeing that, as of now, we have no where else to go and our track record on planet maintenance has not been all that impressive thus far.

Apparently, there are some much larger stars: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Star-sizes.jpg http://www.tigerdroppings.com/rant/message...c.asp?p=7556769 However, as I recall, there are many more stars that are smaller than the Sun than are larger than it is. Unfortunately, I can't find a good link verifying that fact. Darrell There are, mostly as a result of "smaller" stars being more stable than larger ones. That is, they don't STAY larger for as long as the smaller ones stay smaller secondary to novas and supernovas.