Perhaps in some minor 'unknown' areas for unknown reasons that could be true, but overall it's far from true. The rotting material creates exponentially more methane than any mechanism could trap. You and they don't even mention the mechanism that traps methane at all, the methane being released is from bacteria eating thawed organic material.

EDIT: Actually, your study quote did not say that "they've identified regions up north where the soil absorbs more methane the warmer it gets"...it said "numerical simulations predict" they exist, "but the drivers, magnitude, timing and location of methane consumption rates in High Arctic ecosystems are unclear." This means places where methane capture outpaces release, or happens at all, have not been found-'location unclear'.

OK, you did say 'if we magically remove all the CO2 we've ever produced' (ignoring methane and other greenhouse gasses) in your second post. I missed the 'magic removal' part. My mistake, but that makes it a silly argument since we can't do magic. If we could, there would be no problem....and if I crapped diamonds I would be rich.

Well, in the context of talking to a person from 1912, if you explained to them that the 'progress' (by which I guess you mean population explosion and technical advancements) of the last century comes at the cost of the environment, nature, and may destroy the planet over the next century (at least for human survival), I would bet anyone with an IQ of 90+ will say 'selling (or even gambling) our permanent future for temporary industrial progress is a terrible idea, no thanks'.

Well, you must see that some of that great 'food production' is actually corn and grain for livestock, bio fuels, palm oils, etc., not human food stuffs. In order to make that 'food', forests are destroyed, removing entire eco systems that provided 'bush taco' (natural foods) which wasn't included in the equations about overall food production. Food HARVESTS of natural foods have declined rapidly worldwide, just look at the ocean. It may be unfishable in 15-20 years at current acidification rates. Kill the base of the food web, and the web falls apart. It's a rare place today that can support a human population without industrial agriculture and food importation, both of which have failed to solve starvation issues to date.

You can only be ignoring that data about it being catastrophic. I referenced it earlier. Just to mention ONE way, by 2025 it's estimated that 2/3 of people worldwide will live in a water shortage. In most cases, there's absolutely no way to fix this. For instance, Northern India/Southern China is nearly 100% dependent on glacial melt water, glaciers that have lost 50% in the last decade, and that rate is expected to continue to accelerate. With no water, industrial agriculture fails instantly, and people die in 3 days or so. There's NO solution for this disaster, not a plan, not an idea, nothing. There are already immigration problems worldwide, how to solve that when the immigration increases exponentially everywhere?

The downvote was not for your opinion, it was for your dangerously mistaken estimations and conclusions, and insistence that, contrary to all human history and all scientific evidence, this time humans will find and implement a working solution to the problem in time (already too late IMO) that's not worse than the problem was, and so we should not be bothered by the coming massive shortages and upheaval that comes with them, because somehow in that upheaval we'll find and implement massive global solutions to currently insurmountable issues. We can't even slow down the rate of increase in CO2 emissions, it's unbelievable to think we'll turn that to a negative number in 20-30 years even if the tech is invented (which still leaves us in Mad Max times at best, IMO), much more so to think we could erase 100 years of emissions in that time. EDIT:...and I find that kind of dangerous unrealistic suggestion insulting.

Diseasecausing , fecal and other bacteria are literally EVERYWHERE. They get on to everything we eat and drink, the stuff we touch.. everywhere. They are however pretty harmless in small quantities.

For instance, I'd probably worry more about using an Iphone, and then touching the rim of the glass afterwards. If you wanna get paranoid about it, try microscoping a swab from the glass of your phone touchscreen. thats the dirtiest place on earth.

Our bodies have evolved to live in dirty environments, so dont worry too much about it. wash your hands and do the normal hygiene stuff, and you probably wont die from fecal bacteria.. Just order a strong drink and wait for the alcohol to kill it

rat soup anyone.

It would only be fair to have a control rat submerged in water for that time. The rat gut and skin are full of bacteria which would aid decompositon.

Any carbonated drink has carbonic acid from the dissolved CO2 as well as the citric acid in drinks such as mountain dew. Funny enough bones/enamel are more susceptible to breakdown (by demineralisation from acid) that some of the soft tissue which leaves just stringy collagen portion of the bone which is also what the tail is made of.

MASSIVE LONG POST WARNING: feel free to skip this

I usually like Vsauce a lot, but I disagree with just about every assumption and every conclusion he makes in this video.

Anthropogenic vs external extinction event -
I think the likelihood of an anthropogenic extinction event is low. Even in the cold war, at the apex of "mutually assured destruction" risk, IF that destruction was triggered I think it would have been extremely unlikely to make humans go extinct. The US and USSR might have nuked each other to near-extinction, but even with fairly mobile nuclear fallout / nuclear winter, etc. I think that enough humans would have remained in other areas to remain a viable population.

Even if ONE single person had access to every single nuclear weapon in existence, and they went nuts and tried to use them ALL with the goal of killing every single human being on the planet, I still bet there would be enough pockets of survivors in remote areas to prevent humans from going utterly extinct.

Sure, an anthropogenic event could be devastating -- catastrophic even -- to human life. But I think humanity could recover even from an event with an associated human death rate of 95% or more -- and I think the likelihood of anything like that is real slim.

So that leaves natural or external extinction events. The KT extinction (end of the dinosaurs) is the most recent major event, and it happened 65 million years ago. Homo sapiens have been around 150-200,000 years, and as a species we've been through some fairly extreme climatic changes. For example, humans survived the last ice age around 10-20,000 years ago -- so even without technology, tools, buildings, etc. we managed to survive a climate shift that extreme. Mammals survived the KT extinction, quite possible that we could have too -- especially if we were to face it with access to modern technology/tools/knowledge/etc.

So I think it would probably take something even more extreme than the asteroid responsible for KT to utterly wipe us out. Events like that are temporally rare enough that I don't think we need to lose any sleep over them. And again, it would take something massive to wipe out more than 95% of the human population. We're spread out, we live in pretty high numbers on basically every landmass on earth (perhaps minus Antarctica), we're adapted to many many different environments ... pretty hard to kill us off entirely.


"Humans are too smart to go extinct" @1:17 -
I think we're too dumb to go extinct. Or at least too lazy. The biggest threats we face are anthropogenic, but even the most driven and intentionally malevolent human or group of humans would have a hard time hunting down *everybody, everywhere*.


Doomsday argument -
I must admit that I don't really understand this one. The guess of how many total humans there will be, EVER, seems extremely arbitrary. But anyway, I tend to think it might fall apart if you try to use it to make the same assertions about, say, bacterial life instead of human life. Some specific species of bacteria have been around for way way longer than humans, and in numbers that dwarf human populations. So, the 100 billionth bacteria didn't end up needing to be worried about its "birth number", nor did the 100 trillionth.


Human extinction "soon" vs. "later" -
Most plausibly likely threats "soon" are anthropogenic. The further we push into "later", the more the balance swings towards external threats, I think. But we're talking about very small probabilities (in my opinion anyway) on either side of the scale. But I don't think that "human ingenuity will always stay one step ahead of any extinction event thrown at it" (@4:54). Increased human ingenuity is directly correlated with increased likelihood of anthropogenic extinction, so that's pretty much the opposite. For external extinction events, I think it is actually fairly hard to imagine some external scenario or event that could have wiped out humans 100, 20, 5, 2, or 1 thousand years ago that wouldn't wipe us out today even with our advances and ingenuity. And anything really bad enough to wipe us out is not going to wait for us to be ready for it...


Fermi paradox -
This is the most reasonable bit of the whole video, but it doesn't present the most common / best response. Other stars, galaxies, etc. are really far away. The Milky Way galaxy is 100,000+ light years across. The nearest other galaxy (Andromeda) is 2.2 million light years away. A living being (or descendents of living beings) coming to us either of those distances would have to survive as long as the entire history of human life, all while moving at near the speed of light, and have set out headed straight for us from the get-go all those millions and millions of years ago. So lack of other visitors is not surprising at all.

Evidence of other life would be far more likely to find, but even that would have to be in a form we could understand. Human radio signals heading out into space are less than 100 years old. Anything sentient and actively looking for us, even within the cosmically *tiny* radius of 100 light years, would have to have to evolved in such a way that they also use radio; otherwise the clearest evidence of US living here on Earth would be undetectable to them. Just because that's what we're looking for, doesn't mean that other intelligent beings would take the same approach.

Add all that up, and I don't think that the Fermi paradox is much cause for alarm. Maybe there are/have been LOTS of intelligent life forms out there, but they have been sending out beacons in formats we don't recognize, or they are simply too far away for those beacons to have reached us yet.


OK, I think I'm done. Clearly I found the video interesting, to post that long of a rambling response... But I was disappointed in it compared to usual Vsauce stuff. Still, upvote for the thoughts provoked and potential discussion, even though I disagree with most of the content and conclusions.

I don't believe that it is what most people think. Most people believe in God, for starters, according to every poll ever taken on the subject, at least here in the US.

The mystics, who deserve far more credence than stage actors, say that God created the universe because an eye can not see itself, nor a sword cut itself. For God to know himself, the universe was created, so that God could see all of the possibilities. And one of those possibilities is imperfection, or at least what we see as imperfection, such as people who kill or bacteria that makes us sick.

The programmer programs the computer and he doesn't always know how it's going to turn out. The artist throws paint on the canvas but a certain chaos theory enters into it.

At any rate, to see the Universe and not realize the intelligence behind it is just sad. At the least a thinking person should investigate all aspects of it.

To ignore the intelligence behind the universe is just stubbornness. How do you maintain your anger at God when you don't even believe in God?

I got news for you. If you are mad at God, then you believe in God. If you think God fails your standard, then where did that standard come from?

Stevia is too new to make any real determinations on. Currently, there is a lot of uncertainty. Just because something comes from a plant doesn't make it safer. Almonds used to be loaded with cyanide before we eliminated the trees that had those kinds of almonds. There have been recent studies questioning the safety of stevia, and this will likely be dealt with over the next decade. Unfortunately, certain countries have gotten around the necessary procedures for sufficient scientific inquiry because they are marketing it not as a food additive or sweetener but as a dietary supplement, which makes it easier to avoid such scrutiny. Unlike xylitol, which is perfectly fine for human consumption and has been shown to inhibit growth of oral bacteria that leads to caries and plaque, stevia is simply an unknown at this point.

However, stevia has also been around for a while. It has been a product since the 90s and has been banned and un-banned in numerous countries. European reports have shown that it is safe, but it is also still banned in many countries there.

For those of you think that it is "natural" and thus safer, I urge you to look up the naturalistic fallacy on wikipedia before going any further here. It has also been used as a sweetener by certain tribal peoples for centuries, so that means absolutely nothing as far as science goes, but it will still sway many people over, just like traditional herbal Chinese medicines like tiger penis powder and rhinoceros horn powder.

However, it is not a "natural" substance whatsoever, even though that word means nothing in nutrition anyways. Basically they take a small amount of Rebaudioside A from the stevia plant and use a bunch of alcohols and other chemicals to extract out the active sweetening ingredient and then crystallize it. This is then renamed steviol. It is significantly less sweet than most of the other sweeteners, except maybe saccarin, at only about 150x the sweetness of sugar.

Basically, Stevia is probably not bad for you, although the verdict is definitely not in on this one. It is no more "natural" than any of the other sweeteners. You need more of it to reach the same level of sweetness as your other sweeteners so dosage could be an issue. But you have to understand that each of the companies that makes these sweeteners has to find a way to sell their product. So, what do they do? They claim that their sweetener is "natural" and "safe" which implies that all of the other sweeteners that came before it aren't, and as evidence by my previous tirades, this is simply not the case. But they profit from our unwillingness to look at the data for ourselves and play on our natural tendencies to trust them.

In short, we are not certain about stevia yet, but we are certain that sugar is bad and aspartame is fine. However, you probably shouldn't eat any processed food, but we already know that in our bones. We all know that cooking up a delicious meal from simple ingredients is the best way to eat healthy but we don't do it because we are lazy. I am just as guilty of this as the next person. We can only dream of a future similar to "The Invention of Lying" where marketers aren't allowed to lie to us and can simply say that their food is bad for you but you drink it because it tastes good and because you have been for years. A world where they can't market to our children so we don't all grow up addicted to halloween candy or cereals that are more sugar than grains. The best way to do this is to cut your cable from the television and live on the internet with AdBlock installed. Then those fuckers can't get at you as easily.

"The idea that your cat is the Creator of the Universe has no explanatory power. To have an argument that your cat is the Creator you need to provide positive reasons for it. The Universe is finely tuned: if design is an explanation than I wouldn't need to disprove anything and everything as being a potential Creator, I would simply need to examine the evidence for design to make a determination as to what kind of being this must be, and using Occams razor I could come to some definite conclusions about it."

And I would posit that any same test applied to the Judeo-Christian god would fail the test equally (given that "god did it" isn't a theory, it's a construct). For that matter, so would any other god you want to throw out there. Assuming an intelligent creator pre-dating the universe created the universe calls into question "How did this dude himself go about getting created?". That question can only basically be answered with "It's turtles all the way down".

How do you know that a Universe governed by laws isn't the signature of a Creator?

How do you know my cat didn't create it? Equal empirical evidence (none) of both constructs.

Why would you expect to see a grand cosmos such as this, with such awesome beauty, whirling away with mechanical precision? The mere fact of its existence let alone its operation and stability is something too grandiose to be automatically regulated to some accident.

Really? We happen to live in a time period called the Stelliferous Era in which stars exist. Too far in the past, they couldn't form; too far in the future, they will no longer form. So oddly enough, given that the conditions are at this particular time are favorable to life, life came into being and evolved. So if it's your belief that god created this universe to be human friendly, why'd he wait so long for the conditions to be right for us to exist? Why not just do it on Day 1? Or why didn't he wait longer? Why did the universe have to be human-friendly in the first place? He's god -- he can do anything, so why are humans bound to all these rules of math, physics and chemistry, like every single other bit of life from bacteria to Blue whales?

How do you know that a Universe governed by laws isn't the signature of a Creator?

How do you know it's not my incredibly clever, and possibly deific, cat? Again, same empirical proof (none).

Why would you expect to see a grand cosmos such as this, with such awesome beauty, whirling away with mechanical precision?

We live in a time where the universe is able to support life. Outside of this neatly-ordered era, we'd be plasma or neutrons.

You forgot one....
'The Church says that the Earth is flat, but I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow of the earth on the moon and I have more faith in the Shadow than in the Church.'-Ferdinand Magellan

I would say that many of these people in your linked list were not actually 'creation scientists', most were from before the invention of the scientific method, and many others were heretics that may not have stood in public opposition to 'creation science', but didn't believe it. At the time, stating something against the church's doctrine might get you tortured to death.
That's not why we call scientific 'laws' laws. It has NOTHING to do with church or god.
Not a single hypothesis in 'young earth' "theory" (a complete misuse of the word 'theory') is testable, because they're just plain wrong and based on a single person's terribly bad math based on the bible and the length of each generation listed within it. It was NEVER scientific in any way. Sorry.
Not a single hypothesis in creation "theory" (there's that misuse of the word again, it's not a 'theory') is testable either. Not one. If it were, you would have scientific proof of god, and you simply don't. Please don't lie about science.
Macroevolution has been seen in the lab, in fruit flies and bacteria amongst others. It has been observed and repeated with empirical testing. IT is a THEORY, not an inference based on an unprovable hypothesis (like creation science and young earth both are).

The ancestry of living beings isn't just traceable through the fossil record. The study of genetics shows us a huge and utterly overwhelming amount of evidence for the common ancestor idea. Common genes can be traced back to show the lineage of different animals and plants and groups of animals and plants.

Homology is a complex subject..it would take awhile to get into. I found a good link that illustrates the argument against it being a proof that macroevolution occured. If you want to take a look we could discuss further:

http://creation.com/does-homology-provide-evidence-of-evolutionary-naturalism

Ring species show that small changes can indeed lead to separate species. Antibiotic resistant bacteria are evolution in progress. You say that just because small changes can be seen it doesn't follow that big changes can evolve but that's stupid. Big changes are just a series of connected little changes.

I guess it depends on who you ask?

Erwin, D.H. (2000) Macroevolution is more than repeated rounds of microevolution. Evol. & Devel. 2:78-84.

the independence of macroevolution is affirmed not only by species selection but also by other processes such as effect sorting among species.

Lieberman, B.S. and Vrba, E.S. (2005) Gould on species selection. in MACROEVOLUTION: Diversity, Disparity, Contingency. E.S. Vrba and N. Eldredge eds. supplement to Paleobiology vol. 31(2) The Paleontological Society, Lawrence, Kansas, USA

Micro- and macroevolution are thus different levels of analysis of the same phenomenon: evolution. Macroevolution cannot solely be reduced to microevolution because it encompasses so many other phenomena: adaptive radiation, for example, cannot be reduced only to natural selection, though natural selection helps bring it about.

Scott, E.C. (2004) Evolution vs. creationism: an introduction. (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press).

Macroevolution is decoupled from microevolution, and we must envision the process governing its course as being analogous to natural selection but operating at a higher level of organization.

Stanley, S. M. (1975) A theory of evolution above the species level. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (USA) 72: 646-650.

In conclusion, then, macroevolutionary processes are underlain by microevolutionary phenomena and are compatible with microevolutionary theories, but macroevolutionary studies require the formulation of autonomous hypotheses and models (which must be tested using macroevolutionary evidence). In this (epistemologically) very important sense, macroevolution is decoupled from microevolution: macroevolution is an autonomous field of evolutionary study.

Ayala, F.J. (1983) Beyond Darwinism? The Challenge of Macroevolution to the Synthetic Theory of Evolution. reprinted in PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY, M. Ruse ed. p. 118-133.

When discussing organic evolution the only point of agreement seems to be: "It happened." Thereafter, there is little consensus, which at first sight must seem rather odd. -(Simon Conway Morris, [palaeontologist, Department of Earth Sciences, Cambridge University, UK], "Evolution: Bringing Molecules into the Fold," Cell, Vol. 100, pp.1-11, January 7, 2000, p.11)

I'm late back to this party and iI don't have time to properly address all the points you make so I'll just stick to this one.

The ancestry of living beings isn't just traceable through the fossil record. The study of genetics shows us a huge and utterly overwhelming amount of evidence for the common ancestor idea. Common genes can be traced back to show the lineage of different animals and plants and groups of animals and plants.

There really is a lot of very good peer reviewed scientific evidence.

Darwin may well have taken a leap of faith but it is one which has now been backed up with a huge amount of evidence. Evolution is not open for questioning any more than gravity is. It's a very simple process which can even be seen happening around us.

Ring species show that small changes can indeed lead to separate species. Antibiotic resistant bacteria are evolution in progress. You say that just because small changes can be seen it doesn't follow that big changes can evolve but that's stupid. Big changes are just a series of connected little changes.

That said mutations can be big as well as small. We've all seen photos of two headed snakes for example. That happens to be a detrimental change, but if a large change occurred that happened to be beneficial and the individual survived to breed then a large change could occur very quickly. Remember these are chance occurrences, there's no intelligence driving evolution, it's just a simple process of random mutation and natural selection.

If you accept that genes can mutate randomly (something which is known to be fact and can be shown happening) and that natural selection occurs (again something which can be shown happening) then there really isn't anything more to be said. Those two processes, given a lot of time can change an animal or plant dramatically. And time is something life has had a lot of. Even the cambrian explosion you mentioned happened over 20 million years or so.

This is evolution. There's nothing complex about the process, there really isn't. There's no way that mutations and natural selection can fit together in any way that isn't evolution.

So the fact that the Red Cross had to go to the reserves and declare an emergency means that it's better for the First Nations people? How about all the missing indigenous women that have had little attempts to figure out what's happening to them, or where they could possibly be?

Have you been on any of the reservations in the past few years? Have you talked to anyone about the conditions? You think they'd really fight any kind of change to improve the health and social services on the reserves? Most of the water services are worse quality than Walkerton, when the water was filled with bacteria.

Is it better than the small pox blankets, murder, and "correctional schools" we sent them to? Yes, but it's still substandard living on a lot of the reserves. Is it all of them? No, some are doing quite well, but those are the minority.

Let's also look at the prison population in Canada, where around 30% is First Nations. There's something rotten in the Dominion of Canada when it comes to living standards and treatment of Aboriginals.

TL:RD: Flush mix tap for few seconds after not being used for hours. Count to three.

I would say that it is still advisable to flush out the stagnant water from pipes before drinking the water. Not a lot, until you feel the temperature to change. Reason is that while the warm water is now sanitary, it is still warm. Warm stagnant water goes bad pretty quickly, the pipes are NOT clean on the inside. If you have ever seen water mains pipes, you would probably boil your water, brit filter it and most likely perform an exorcision. It's bad, it is really really bad.. The main reason why the water stays drinkable is movement. Moving water is safe, the bacteria that lives on moving water is mostly harmless to us. But 15C to 22C is called "the death zone"; bacteria that thrives on moist conditions, between those temps is the most deadly we can find. E.Coli, Botulinum etc. all explode with those condition. So you take warm water to wash up that last tea, it stays in the pipes and you get a nice shot of bacteria first thing in the morning. Or you keep the tap on for ten seconds, flush out the main colony and then drink a fresh cold water; i'm sure this little trick will add years in to your life (just the fresh glass of water and the feeling we get from that should do the trick..)

But the days of flushing the whole length of pipe several times a day is unnecessary. Only important when it has sit for hours after running hot water thru that particular piece of pipe, maybe just few meters or few seconds. And even then most likely it's 100% safe but the gunk that sits in the pipes is DIRTY.. ffs, we got some wooden main lines still in use in the old town (built around circa 1600).. BTW, the water from those wooden pipes.. excellent, specially in the winter as it is just super cold, totally clear of all bacteria, it's like spring water. But that is mostly because they have been in use for hundreds of year, all the time with moving, cold, clean water running thru them. It's bacterial colonies work with us cleaning it.

Compare that to the other pipe system running thru our homes here: the main heating water that heats our homes, that water is so toxic that every cut you have while working with them, just a drop and you will get infected. It takes minutes and the cut will swell up. And the only really difference is that the heating system is on closed loop, with warm water and it sits for half a year stagnated.. It is still "clean" water, looks clean, doesn't smell. But that stuff is equal to biological warfare..

Why i know this? Well, i'm ex-junkie. Knowing what kind of water you inject to your veins is pretty fucking important if you wanna stay alive.

Agreed, it's not much of an update to say 'we THINK it's being caused by a bacteria or virus', but it's apparently all they know. Not good.

Says the man whose active community involvement is wielding the flaccid ban-hammer and talking smack to people he despises by MAKING SHIT UP AND SPREADING HIS BRAND OF BILE (and continues to do so) IN ORDER TO STIR UP SHIT AND CAUSE HARM WITH A VIEW TO SELF-JUSTIFICATION OF CONTINUING THESE DYSFUNCTIONAL ACTIONS. PERIOD, SIR. Don't think for a second that it's not as transparent as Scotch, fucking tape. It's seems it's the only fun you have here as an internet bully, your only purpose for continuing your script seems your own self-satisfaction and twisted aggrandizement with similar ilk....

Notice always, the brown-nosing closing salutatory back-pats to anyone who inhabits his camp. Again mate, trans-fucking-parent.

The only bacteria here in human form resides and is fed by similar folks unwilling to see pulp-forests for sturdier trees.

Funny how you "argue"....'you're absolutely wrong, and if your right I don't care' and 'I have more important and interesting things to do than argue', then you continue to argue. Just too funny, I guess that means you're done learning.
Tell Venus a planet can't 'die' from a runaway greenhouse effect. What I meant was die as a place where people and other 'higher level' organisms can live. Bacteria and waterbears can live with or without the planet, so they don't count.
Yes, the internet is full of crazy people, but you can change if you accept your insanity. I don't see that happening. :-)