Crazypoops posted:

Honestly though, whoever programmed this survival horror game is an rear end in a top hat

Deep Dish Fuckfest posted:

you can't tell me what to do. that's ecofascism. you're doing an ecofascism

Car Hater posted:

All we had to do to win was put the fire in the cave and run fast from the tiger to get it and wave it around when needed, we would have been #1 forever


A million years of Flintstones society, no problem


We're the assholes

"The largest mammals have always been at the greatest risk of extinction – this is still the case today posted:

Look at the size of mammals over human history and we see a clear trend: they’ve gotten smaller.

We now have lots of evidence for this decline in mammal size from across the world.

See the changes in the Levantine – the Eastern Mediterranean – where researchers have reconstructed the mass of mammals in the region going back more than one million years.1 To do this they look at the fossils that are preserved in sediment layers; these sediment layers can be dated and let us leaf through the pages of the past. It lets us see what animals were around one million years ago; 500 thousand years ago; or ten thousand years ago. Note that the researchers did not include small mammals (those weighing less than 400 grams) in this dataset – these would have been very abundant across the record.

The results are shown in the chart.

We see a steep decline in the average mass of mammals over time. Over the last 1.5 million years, the mean mass of hunted mammals decreased by more than 98%.2

1.5 million years ago, our Homo erectus ancestors were roaming the earth with mammals that weighed several tonnes. There were the ‘straight-tusked elephants’ (which weighed between 11 and 15 tonnes), the Southern Mammoth, and incredibly large hippos. Species-by-species, these majestic animals began to disappear.

The evidence points toward one main culprit: humans.3

The small (our ancestors weighed around 60 kilograms), but big-brained, hominids hunted them to extinction.4

It is staggering how few of our ancestors were around at the time. Globally, there would have been a few million at most. In any given region, the population would have been the size of a small town today.

The record suggests that humans have always hunted the largest mammals.5 This makes sense: it gives a good return on investment. One successful kill could feed a family for a long time. Bigger mammals are also easier to spot and track down.

As we see from the study in the Levantine, until around 20,000 years ago, most mammals were bigger than humans. But since then, the majority have been smaller.

This overhunting of large mammals might have been the catalyst for our ancestors to engineer fine and intricate tools. Once we had run out of big animals to eat, we had to engineer tools to catch the smaller ones.6

12,000 years ago the average mass of mammals was around 30 kilograms. Around half a human. This is around the time that farming began.7

Hubbert posted:

as much as i love primitivism, no

Hubbert posted:

as much as i love primitivism, no

Car Hater posted:

The mammoths & other elephants wouldn't have died out if they weren't too good to take jobs as vacuum cleaners or heavy construction equipment like god intended

Koirhor posted:

we had electric trains in the 1930’s

Evil_Greven posted:

we even had electric cars in the early 1900s

but then combustion engines advanced and ford marketed them as 'manly' compared to the electric city cars

Car Hater posted:

The mammoths & other elephants wouldn't have died out if they weren't too good to take jobs as vacuum cleaners or heavy construction equipment like god intended

Car Hater posted:

I point back to my record of multiple years of advocacy for the immediate nuclear annihilation of all mankind in response to the notion that I have any cracks left to ping

Hubbert posted:

There are always more cracks to ping.

Zodium posted:

you can always discover that whatever you're doing is having the opposite effect of what you intended.

Popoto posted:

do we think there’s an eccentric doom-pilled billionaire out there currently building a hidden cache of knowledge for possible future intelligent life that would come post-humanity?

Popoto posted:

yeah like that was my question: is it even possible? a single one having a pang of illumination? a class traitor to their own kind?

quote:

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

Dystopia Barbarian posted:

Lol, no. I for one do not. If a billionaire gave a gently caress about humanity they wouldn't be a billionaire, and they sure as poo poo wouldn't be focusing on building bunkers.

They're narcissistic parasites at best and sociopaths at worst. That's the entire billionaire spectrum, change my mind.

DR FRASIER KRANG posted:

lmao there's a show in CBS called "Fire Country".

ahaha they just make lovely television about our world catching on fire

Popoto posted:

do we think there’s an eccentric doom-pilled billionaire out there currently building a hidden cache of knowledge for possible future intelligent life that would come post-humanity?

the last bunker

coming soon to a theater near you

DR FRASIER KRANG posted:

lmao there's a show in CBS called "Fire Country".

ahaha they just make lovely television about our world catching on fire

Tony Tone posted:

Tony Tone posted:

Microplastics posted:

Does the thread have a background image and if so can we make this it

Ihmemies posted:

World is going go poo poo because every leader has people below them they need to worry about. So the leaders worry more about people instead of the planet and biosphere.