we're still cat food

Humans like to think of themselves as masters of the universe, commanding, destroying, or saving the environment around us. When we think about our 'caveman' past, we imagine tribes of hunters bringing down mammoths and bringing home slabs of meet to cook over an open fire. However, the truth is that we were more prey than predator. Many predatory animals eat primates. And as anthropologist Donna Hart says,

The theory of Man the Hunter as our archetypal ancestor isn't supported by archaeological evidence, either. Lewis R. Binford, one of the most influential figures in archaeology during the last half of the 20th century, dissented from the hunting theory on the ground that reconstructions of early humans as hunters were based on a priori positions and not on the archaeological record. Artifacts that would verify controlled fire and weapons, in particular, are lacking until relatively recent dates. Because no hominids possess the dental equipment or digestive tract to eat raw flesh, we need to be able to cook our meat, but the first evidence of controlled fire is from only 790,000 years ago.

And, of course, there's also the problem of how a small hominid could subdue a large herbivore. The first true weapon we know of is a wooden spear about 400,000 years old, although the archaeologist John Shea, of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, likened it to a glorified toothpick. Large-scale, systematic hunting of big herbivores for meat may not have occurred any earlier than 60,000 years ago — over six million years after the first hominids evolved.

Hart says there is plenty of evidence of predation on early humans, including from large birds of prey. SHe goes on:

What I am suggesting, then, is a less powerful, more ignominious beginning for our species. Consider this alternate image: smallish beings (adult females maybe weighing 60 pounds, with males a bit heavier), not overly analytical because their brain-to-body ratio was rather small, possessing the ability to stand and move upright, who basically spent millions of years as meat walking around on two legs. Rather than Man the Hunter, we may need to visualize ourselves as more like Giant Hyena Chow, or Protein on the Go.

It goes on to this day.

each year 3,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa are eaten by crocodiles, and 1,500 Tibetans are killed by bears about the size of grizzlies. In one Indian state between 1988 and 1998, over 200 people were attacked by leopards; 612 people were killed by tigers in the Sundarbans delta of India and Bangladesh between 1975 and 1985.

This explains the attraction of horror movies, where we get to indulge our primal radar for predators. We've got circuitry dedicated to that stuff, and it rarely gets used. That's why people are more likely to develop a fear of snakes than a fear of powerlines or knives. A horror movie is a good workout and a throwback to our ancestral past. Other times, we make up new, fictitious predators, such as aliens, demons, or ghosts.
Predation on humans will never be finished, either. Oh, sure, we've got wolves and snakes licked. But we have predators breeding in our midst, biding their time. Every city has its stray cat population- they are very difficult to exterminate. Over time, they may learn to evade us, live among us, and prey upon us. They may become the shadows in alleyways and sidestreets that we fear. This may not happen next year, next decade, or even next century. But humans are successful creatures, and cats are hitchhikers along for the ride. The longer they are around, the more uses they will find for us.

garbage is good

Recently a friend of mine pondered the future of garbage:

I began to wonder whether ultimately it is ecologically more responsible to litter. The argument goes like this, if you assume that the amount of garbage produced is not going to diminish and in fact will increase. In fact the only way this would not happen is if either our society collapsed back to an agrarian state or there was some massive global change in the attitudes of people and we all began avoiding processed food and consumer goods. At present I consider the later virtually impossible and the former possible, but unlikely. Which means that I must accept that the volume of garbage produced will grow somewhat exponentially. So even if we segregate it in special areas, eventually it will spread out over the world. Thus, eventually all life on the plant must adapt to living in our refuse. If we don’t expose them to this change in their environment until the very last minute, they will have no opportunity to adapt. But if we gradually expose them by spreading the garbage around, then the gradual selection pressures will allow life to adapt to a world covered in a layer of plastic bags.

This got me thinking about the role of garbage in the ecosystem and the future of garbage on earth.

First, to the issue of whether garbage will eventually cover the earth. This seems to me to not be plausible, since garbage decays and degrades over time. What is the decay rate versus the accumulation rate? Decay can take many forms, e.g., rotting, disintegration, being buried and sent deep into the earth, sinking to the bottom of the sea, but let's just call it decay. Then there should be some equilibrium point at which the amount of garbage will stabilise. When the rate of garbage production increases, the equilibrium point will move up to a higher total amount of garbage.

We can already see that this phenomenon is in effect, for example, with used cars, tyres, and plastic bags that litter the world. Also, there are people in some third world countries (I know for sure in the phillipines) that live in garbage dumps and forage. I remember there was a news report out of the Phillipines some years ago about several such people that were killed in a garbage landslide.

Maybe today's garbage is tomorrows archeological artifact. Stone age people probably didn't value their earthenware pots as much as we value them. In ten thousand years, a team of people will spend vast amounts of money to collect plastic bags and broken stereos.

Over millions of years today's garbage dumps will eventually become rich deposits of rare, high-energy compounds. Our descendants, who by that time may or may not be human, will value them as places to be mined and used for technologies far in the future. Bats had no idea that their shit would one day be called guano and be a valuable product. Maybe the same is true for us. Another species will value our detritus. The more we produce, the better for them. So hurry up and start polluting my friends. The future of the planet depends on it.

purpose

This blog is a place primarily to record whimsical observations and musings on science, technology, time, the future of mankind, fantasy, and science fiction. I don't know how often I'll post to it.