joigus

Yes, you're right. My own pessimistic thinking is that we would be so busy at each other's throat that nobody would care about other survivors out there. But your question is very interesting, as well as the answers so far. I do believe with you that attempts at communication with intelligent animals should be a good laboratory for that hypothetical situation. Maybe we can train some animals to speak once a code is "agreed."

This is a very good idea. I just hope when/if they read the message, they don't mistranslate it to "Hey, there's food and other usable energy here."

Thermodynamics is the study of equilibrium. The Earth is not a system in equilibrium. Climate science most emphatically is not sheer thermodynamics. Thermodynamics, e.g., does not allow you to calculate anything statistical, like, e.g., fluctuations. Statistical mechanics does. In (most) statistical mechanical systems, you can see that the temperature is the average kinetic energy per degree of freedom. These degrees of freedom are coded in what I called specific heat. Because systems are ultimately Hamiltonian, they satisfy an interesting mathematical property: The phase-space points can mix all they want (and in chaotic systems they do, which makes averages more robust, not less), but they do not contract in volume, meaning that microscopic systems spread their dynamical information very efficiently. IOW, there is no chance that a small region of phase space can store big quantities of energy making local averages non-robust, as you are suggesting. As to local cooling: If the first statistical moment of the distribution is shifting, an increase in the second moment is exactly what I would expect before the system reaches the next closer-to-stationary stage. If the variance goes up, some places would overheat and others would "overcool." Nothing unexpected there, because the system is "trying to equilibrate." So temperature measurements are significant. But they're not the whole story, as has been pointed out to you over and over. The sea is nearly a perfect absorber of radiation and the ice caps are nearly a perfect reflector (albedos.) There is the question of sea currents too. The ice caps should be building up by now because we are well within a Milankovitch cycle. They're not: It's just the opposite. This will interrupt the circulating flow in the seas. None of these important details seem to have caught your attention, which would have amounted to an interesting conversation. All you're interested in is to not let go of your strawman (the average temperature parameter) and punch its face repeatedly. The average temperature, being significant, is the catchphrase you've chosen to attack. It's your voodoo doll against climate science. Your point does not stand, it's a blurry blob. Your strawman does.

Monitor the trend of the averaged temperatures of a turbulent gas measured over wide spans of time and space which have highly heterogeneous pressure and surface conditions. Exactly. Of the average temperatures of a turbulent gas measured over wide spans of time and space which have highly heterogeneous pressure and surface conditions. You seem to have a very basic problem of understanding. And @VenusPrincess, don't go further in that direction, because I can see very clearly now how much you ignore about ergodicity and the role it plays in physics. Doh!

A statistical distribution is made up of an infinite series of statistical moments. What you're saying is that the first statistical moment is not significant. Never mind that reports of global temperature are meant to monitor general trends, not to build a rover to operate here or there. @Area54 has seen your strawman miles away. I was distracted. <T_Mars> = -63 ºC <T_Venus> = 453 ºC So this is utterly useless even to build a rover? I don't know why you want to build a rover in order to monitor Earth's global climate, by the way. If you wanted to build a rover, it would be silly to rely only on average global temperature as "the" parameter. I wouldn't describe the behaviour of an ant's colony only in terms only of its average position either.

Not everything that's useful or meaningful as an average must have a valid thermodynamic definition. The average receding speed of the galaxies is increasing, yet the universe is not a thermodynamic system. The concept of temperature that's used in these atmospheric models is more akin to the concept of temperature in the heat equation. It is not the thermodynamic concept of temperature but for small cells of material that have a definite specific heat. Do you suggest the Earth's atmosphere does not have a useful concept of specific heat?

You already said. Sorry.

Glycine has been found in asteroids too. It's the simplest amino acid. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17628-found-first-amino-acid-on-a-comet/

You make a good point here, but there are other factors. I can imagine no epoch in human evolution in which planning for the future, interpreting other people's intentions, guessing the best solution to a domestic problem --all of which is achieved mainly through language-- did not play a major role in women's lives. It is generally assumed that high-brow intellectual activity was what led to developing big (energetically costly) brains in humans. But the big pressure, the day-to-day strain on the brain to be able to develop more sophisticated cognitive abilities, is social, not inventive. That's what most anthropologists say. I may be able to provide more info about it later. It's been estimated that the main focus, by and large, of human language throughout the day is gossip, not the realm of 'big ideas.' And that goes for women and men alike.

This is known to be false. https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/64249main_ffs_factsheets_hbp_atrophy.pdf https://aging.ufl.edu/files/2011/01/deconditioning_campbell.pdf

Exactly. A person with few glicolytic fibers, a person whose body cannot synthesize myoglobin properly, etc. But also a person who doesn't exercise properly. The women that you're showing in the video --I haven't watched it either-- both are genetically conditioned to be that way, and have exercised to be that way. So it's a combination of both factors. Having a certain genetic make-up favours you being more muscular, but it doesn't determine it.

You've read a tad too much into what I've said. Some conditions are necessary. Other conditions are sufficient. Still other are necessary and sufficient (those are the terms in which you seem to be thinking.) A further category is when conditions are neither necessary nor sufficient: They are statistically correlating conditions. You say genetics determines what you are. I say genetics is affects what you are. See the difference?

Probably. And probably comes from a very ancient obsession with fertility. Hunter-gatherer societies were thin on the ground. And they needed manpower as any other. In northern Spain there is a Solutrean cave in which lots of vulvas are depicted. And fertility statuettes all across Europe. I don't think the motivation for that was ancient pornography.

It's a snowball phenomenon. And well known. And all evidence contrary to OP's premise. This is a very interesting conversation, but it's spilling over into wider aspects of anthropology.

Well, nomads are a bit of an exception. They are more pastoralists than agriculturalists. But they depend on agricultural societies to obtain the grain. Or move for pastures new, which leads to waging war again, when there are pastoralist agricultural societies claiming the land. Whether these and other similar societies used the bow and arrow is secondary. Agriculture brings conflict on account of claiming the land for yourself, and thereby war, which was the point. Yes. Agriculture is known to result in larger families. That's part of the equation. So we don't have 10,000 years of less war. It's just the opposite.

By the way, all the Bactria-Margiana area is full with evidence that these societies were agricultural, and also were very military-minded. They had to move because their rivers changed their courses. And conquered new land, south-east of Andronovo. According to Viktor Sarianidi.

Of course they're found in Andronovo. They're found in the Sahara too. And they made their way to America through the Bering Strait. It's one of the oldest techniques that comes from hunting and has been used on and off in warfare. You don't think it's true that I mentioned bows and arrows in connection with hunter-gatherer societies? I did. I know what I've mentioned, and in connection to what.

That's very well known. The Tuthmose pharaohs brought it to Egypt. The Romans also copied Carthaginian ships. So what? What's the point? The point is military build up (resting on both professionals and part-time soldiers) seems to be a requirement of agricultural societies. Agriculture brings large-scale war and preparation for war for obvious reasons. Although this is lateral to your reasoning, it's one of your premises. That's why I'm dwelling on it.

No. It is a universal phenomenon: Hittites, Egyptians, the Mitanni, the Hycsos... Quite simply: agriculture implies warfare on a grand scale. Study some ancient history. Bows and arrows I mentioned in connection with hunter-gatherer societies. They sometimes are present in agricultural military societies, sometimes not. Moot point. The Luwians, the Spartans,... it goes on and on. The Spartans are an interesting case: They managed to enslave a whole population to do the agricultural job, while they indulged in their militaristic activity.

Here's your claim: Large-scale military activity came about because of agriculture, not in spite of it. Hunter-gatherer societies are involved in periodic squabbles, rather than military power build-up. In hunter-gatherer societies, the same bow and arrow, slingshot, etc. that are used for hunting are put to alternative use in those squabbles. Agricultural societies, on the contrary, nurture specialists: artisans, peasants, blacksmiths and potters, textile workers and administrators. Your premises are plain wrong. The famous fyrd that Harold Godwinson mobilised against Hardrada and William the Conqueror were peasants.

Nobody's saying you haven't. And stop playing straw-man, please. I can see right through it. And if you have, then you know, no doubt, that once an organism's genetic makeup is set in motion, so to speak, developmental biology takes charge to determine how it's going to develop, right? The environment interacting with this genetic conditioning does that. Right?

That's why I didn't do that. Apparently you need some help to read and understand simple sentences in English. Maybe repetition can do the trick:

Of course not. Many genetic conditions can affect your muscle composition. But the cases of women looking more muscular than in previous generations --that you brought up-- is easily explained by factors having to do with a person's lifestyle, not with evolution. IOW, you have not proven that we as a species are evolving towards sexual dimorphism. People are changing their muscular development because of the gym and the diet.

My emphasis. Be careful with what is 'generally accepted.' And we didn't even start talking about the effect of hormones.

You missed @Prometheus's excellent point about hippocampi. The answer to this is a similar argument applied to muscles. Although muscles can change more easily than nervous tissue. Even for hippocampus. In fact, the kind of muscular tissue you get depends very directly on the kind of exercise you do, or whether you exercise at all. Astronauts that spend a long time in outer space suffer a rapid deterioration of their muscular tissue if they don't exercise regularly. That has nothing to do with evolution, but with adaptation of your tissues to varying environmental conditions.