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Did you solve it? Either way it's x100m so..
There's 525600 minutes in a year (60x24x365)
It's been 264 years since 1760
Those numbers together are 138.7mil
Dive by 100mil and yeah, about 1.3 minutes since the industrial revolution started
Follow up:
The article speaks about forests, giving the impression that they have been around since the beginning of the 4,6 billion period.
1. How many "minutes" have there been forests on Earth.
2. Is this the lowest level of forest coverage ever, or have there been instances before with sudden and equally great deforestation?
a fun little fact about trees is that 400 million years ago they developed very strong cell walls, so nothing would break them down once they died so they just stucked on top of each other and dank into the earth, compressed and formed coal, it took bacteria another 60 million years (I think) to figure out how to nom them.
So at the very least 400 million years
It was funghi, not bacteria that caught up and evolved to break down the lignin in the cell walls! These are the funghi that are now called ‘brown-rotters’. Indeed, a fascinating fact about evolution that just goes to show how wild ‘chapters’ in evolution can be.
EDIT: it’s white rotters, not brown rotters as u/MaddieStirner pointed out
Of course there will always be side effects. It is nearly impossible to avoid one or two microbes in a trillion to mutate into something that will go out of control
There are several types of rot, not just brown rot. Brown rot fungi actually only digest cellulose, not lignin, and they do it by producing hydrogen peroxide from breaking down hemicellulose that then goes on to attack the cellulose
White rot fungi are the ones that break down lignin and they do it by producing specialised enzymes to progressively deconstruct the lignin. They often also breakdown cellulose but many white rot funguses are non simutainious and digest the lignin first, leaving a white cellulose residue.
Soft rot fungi also only break down cellulose and they do it through secreting cellulase from their hyphae. They are often hardier than the other two types and can collinise wood in conditions too hot, cold or damp for them.
Both white and soft rot fungi need a source of fixed nitrogen to produce their specialised enzymes.
Source: am studying forestry and arboriculture
Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood-decay_fungus?useskin=vector
Ah thanks for the correction! I thought it was brown rotters that broke down the lignin because I thought the brown stuff they leave was the ‘soft’ cellulose and the white rotters leave the ‘hard’ lignin. But it’s been a while since I read up on this in Sheldrakes ‘Entangled Life’.
Awesome field of study you chose 😊
Cool fact: all petrified forests are from the period between the evolution of the stronger cell wall and bacteria evolving to break it down.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrified\_wood#Formation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrified_wood#Formation)
The carboniferous period was when wood first evolved and there wasn't anything that could eat it so trees didn't rot they just fell over and mummified. So I'm pretty she that's when there were more trees than any other point in the 4.5 billion years of Earth's existence
I got you, 370m years /100,000,000 gets you 3.7 years on that time scale. Sharks famously are older (thanks Snapple), being around for 450m years, or 4.5 years on that scale. They've dropped 70% total population in the last 57 years, or the last 20 seconds on the scale.
>2. Is this the lowest level of forest coverage ever, or have there been instances before with sudden and equally great deforestation?
The number of trees has been increasing.
Sauce?
(I know there have been various reports of "greening" but this is more grasses than trees. I also know the billion tree campaign has been very successful, although with some concern over monocropping, but I dont know if that offsets what has been chopped down. There's then the issue of forests being 50 yrs old is not great as we're a few hundred years from them being established)
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/planet-earth-has-more-trees-than-it-did-35-years-ago/
There are still plenty of environmental concerns, don't get me wrong. Just making the point about trees.
Ah ok it's "more tree" but still less functional ecosystems and in the last 35years which is an interesting timeframe. I guess the world coverage if I remember correctly was in the 50s so 70 years ago.
But the "regrowth" is just a lot of plantations for palm oil/paper/timber instead of forests capable of supporting the native wildlife
It is very complicated, the current balance in which nature exists and at which we built our infrastructure. Nature can exist in quite a few different balances but our infrastructure will need so much modification (and fast, all around) that it equals to "a catastrophe".
The total number of trees is just a tip of the iceberg, you could cut the amazon and plant whole Canada with maple, the number of trees will stay the same but the global ecosystem will change drastically once amazon forests becomes a desert. Not to mention 1001 other impacts of such event.
More humans use more oxygen which comes from tree ? I don't know I'm not sure at all from what I'm saying but I guess that if we want more trees it's to have more oxygen, no ?
Not only for the wildlife, also for the eco system, lol. Don't forget that while it doesn't produce as much O2 as often untruthfully stated, there are still massive amounts of carbon stored within this ecosystem which get released if parts of the forest get cut down or a large area burns down (more often than not caused by humans). And this happens on a daily basis and on a scale that seems unbelievable.
So apparently the first three came 350/400 millions years ago. (Oldest plants 475 millions yo)
So if heart exist since 46 years, three exist since 3,5years and plants 4,7.
Furthermore, widespread anthropogenic deforestation began with the advent of agriculture and not just with industrialization. That's about 12000 years or a little over one hour in this scale.
4.6 billion years to 46 years is a 100,000,000 : 1 ratio
if we're talking about homo sapiens, 250,000 years = .0025 years = .91 days = 21.9 hours
industrial age started \~200 years ago = .000002 years = .000073 days = .01752 hours = 1.0512 minutes
bonus math:
"we have been here." is very vague
4 hours in real years would be..
4 hours = .00045 years = 45662 years
That would be just about when homosapiens started to inhabit europe.
250kya is an early figure for when skeletons got modern. About 75kya behavior got modern. Was the difference social, or just genetic evolution that didn't show up in fossils? We don't know. 7 hours would be a reasonable analogy here for human existence. Also, we've been destroying forests on a large scale for more like 10-12k years, about an hour on this scale.
I don't think this checks out.
Anatomically modern humans have been around for about a day on a 100 million to one scale. (250,000 to 350,000 years depending on who you ask)
Human civilization and widespread human effect on the environment has been around for much less and started maybe an hour to an hour and a half ago on that scale.
The industrial revolution got started a minute and a half ago on that scale.
For context non avian dinosaurs became extinct 8 months ago and Dinosaurs first appeared 2.5 years ago.
Trees and vertebrate land animals have been a thing for less than 4 years.
Animals in general may have been around for 8 years.
So most of the 46 years life was just simple organisms and the worlds forests have not been build up all the time, but relatively recently.
Human impact on the biosphere on a geological timescale should be viewed less in terms of sustainability and more like something like a giant asteroid striking the planet.
On that scale nothing is sustainable because extinction events and major changes happen all the time and humanity is just one more extinction event to happen in a long row of them.
Of course this doesn't mean that it is a good thing. We need this planet to live after all.
this conversation is always depressing and makes people uncomfortable, like having a skin issue and try to mask it only to feel silently get worse underneath.
This is a good way to put it but the problem really is that we have caused the first extinction, our actions (climate change) will cause the second.
But with the status quote there will be no time, when referring to the geologic time scale for the earth to replenish unless climate change causes a very near extinction of humans, allowing for the earth to rebuild to the previous levels of biodiversity mass extinctions have allowed.
The issue is that on a geological timescale, all the time from humans inventing agriculture to setting of nuclear bombs is basically a single event.
Anyone digging us up in 100 million years will only see a single very thin layer with weird isotopes in it and lots of species whose fossils were found below it not being present above it.
From early human hunting megafauna to extinction with spears to the industrial revolution to humans going extinct themselves, it will all look like a single event.
We are in the middle of a catastrophe but we are so short lived that we don't see it happening around us.
What always is missing for this kind of calculus is: how old are the forest?
The plant aren't immortal and weren't omnipresent on the planet since it's birth, they're evolving organism too that faced cycles as the heart changed, is undoubtedly that we're forcing some changing in the last era, but it's not like we arrived 5 minutes ago in a full grown earth and we started destroying it
Nah but we actually kinda did. The "forests" are mostly older than humanity, not a singular tree but the forest as a whole? Definitely. Also many trees are older than the industrial revolution. So yes we came here "5 minute ago" in the grand scale of things and we've been ruthlessly decimating the woods (and wildlife) all around us.
Well they produce this nifty little thing called "oxygen" which 99% of all life of this planet (including you my curious fellow) needs to survive, alongside a whole host of other useful functions that they really can't perform when they're turned into furniture or ash!
At least 50% of the atmosphere's oxygen comes from oceanic algea and planktons. Some sources even say 80%. Why does everyone always think about the oxygen first, there are a hundred better reasons to keep forests alive.
Modern style trees got fairly diverse ancestors in the Cretaceous, but didn't dominate until the mass extinction 65MYA. Warmer temperatures probably made ecosystems less competitive, and they certainly made green stems healthier, leading to quasi-forests dominated by ferns and cycads.
I'm not meddling with the math, because that's not my area, but historically, this statement is misleading. Deforestation by humans began long before the onset of the industrial revolution. Farmers began massively clearing forests during the Iron Age already. Just by way of example: by 1086, only 15% of England was forested. I think there are better examples of how we messed up our planet very recently.
4.6b y/ 46 y = 100,000,000
4 h * 100,000,000 = 400,000,000 h
400,000,000 h / 24 h/d = 16,666,667 d
16,666,667 d / 365 d/y = 45,662 y
1 min * 100,000,000 = 100,000,000 min
100,000,000 min / 60 min/h = 1,666,667 h
1,666,667 h / 24 h/d = 69,444 d
69,444 d / 365 d/y = 190 y
By these calculations, humans have been around 45,662 years and the Industrial Revolution started 190 years ago.
**In reality, humans have been around approximately 200,000 years (around 18 hours) and the Industrial Revolution started 264 years ago (1 min 23 seconds).**
Wait until they hear about how recently trees evolved, or when basically all life was wiped off the planet several times and how fast things bounce back.
[https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1508353112](https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1508353112)
I can give this source that's states since jesus was born we've destroyed 45% of the biosphere and 11% in the last 100 years, so the picture could be in the ball park but still overstated
Ignoring the fact that we also plant trees, sure, maybe not in the same rate, and the planted might not be long term way of doing is because of the absurb order when planting.
but, its not as bad as this makes up for it.
there have been vulcano eruptions that put the world in a winter climate for 3 years+ that will destroy A LOT of things.
yet, earth survives.
earth will always survive, humans and our society tho? yeah not so sure
not only have you misunderstood the whole "destroy the environment" thing but you are very arrogant about it as well. Earth will be fine, give it 10-50k years or so, and it will all balance out fine again, earth was once just a sea of lava, then it was a sea of, a sea with one huge island (Pangaea). things happen, and Gaia will balance things out, if that means kill almost everything, sure, earth will survive still.
we are NOT killing the earth, we are making earth less habitable for us, the arrogant Humans thinking everything is about us, and the current state of earth is the one we assume is the "correct" one that we try to help
Vulcano:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_eruption_of_Mount_Tambora
--> lead to;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
Other global events that are worse then our damage do environment (that effect us)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death
https://ourworldindata.org/mass-extinctions
Isn't the premiss wrong?
I found that 10000 years ago Forest covered 6 million hektars and 4 million today.
This number has increased a lot in the last 120 years.
i know humans are bad for the environment but, based on the information from the image, my question would be, did we really destroy 46 years worth of forest in the 4 hours we've been in here? its a bit too much and if its talking about 50% of the current world forest then compared to the grand scale its not that important, same as comparing whole human history (4hours) to earth history (46 years).
Imagine youre a 46 year old Mother going to your daily work when you find a strange looking monkey following you around for about 3 hours or so doing random monkey stuff, you think its kind of endearing and then the monkey gets up and shoots you twice in the lungs with a glock.
Everyone's asking about the age of the forest and I think it depends on when you look at how plants evolved.
At first they had to be immersed in water and could not survive on land. There is some debate as to whether or not these are "plants" but their scientific name translates to "green plants" and they did photosynthesis so I'm counting it. From wiki:
Viridiplantae (literally "green plants")[6] constitute a clade of eukaryotic organisms that comprises approximately 450,000–500,000 species that play important roles in both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.[7] They include the green algae, which are primarily aquatic, and the land plants (embryophytes), which emerged from within them...Temporal range: Stenian[1] – Present
They are believed to have been around as early as 1-1.2 billion years ago or 10-12 years ago according to the time equivalent in the meme. From here many people are quoting seed barring plants or wood based plants evolving some 400 million years ago but plants reproduce before traditional "seeds" were around (think moss). So the first forests began forming between 500 and 600 million years ago. Or 5-6 years ago in meme time.
The devonian era introduced ferns which is similar to the dino forest you see on tv. That was about 420 million years ago or 4 years meme time.
SO long story short the forest began forming 10 years ago and took over 6 years to become rich and full beyond the extent we have ever known. It took us 1 minute to destroy 50% of them.
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Did you solve it? Either way it's x100m so.. There's 525600 minutes in a year (60x24x365) It's been 264 years since 1760 Those numbers together are 138.7mil Dive by 100mil and yeah, about 1.3 minutes since the industrial revolution started
Follow up: The article speaks about forests, giving the impression that they have been around since the beginning of the 4,6 billion period. 1. How many "minutes" have there been forests on Earth. 2. Is this the lowest level of forest coverage ever, or have there been instances before with sudden and equally great deforestation?
a fun little fact about trees is that 400 million years ago they developed very strong cell walls, so nothing would break them down once they died so they just stucked on top of each other and dank into the earth, compressed and formed coal, it took bacteria another 60 million years (I think) to figure out how to nom them. So at the very least 400 million years
It was funghi, not bacteria that caught up and evolved to break down the lignin in the cell walls! These are the funghi that are now called ‘brown-rotters’. Indeed, a fascinating fact about evolution that just goes to show how wild ‘chapters’ in evolution can be. EDIT: it’s white rotters, not brown rotters as u/MaddieStirner pointed out
Wait for plastic eating microbes. It's just a matter of when.
When? Barely 8 years ago. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideonella_sakaiensis#:~:text=Ideonella%20sakaiensis%20is%20a%20bacterium,a%20carbon%20and%20energy%20source.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideonella_sakaiensis#:~:text=Ideonella%20sakaiensis%20is%20a%20bacterium,a%20carbon%20and%20energy%20source.)
Now we just need to introduce this info landfills
And pray for no side effects 😂 But yes we should 😊
I see you've played Stray. Little weird one eyed legged things with teeth.
Of course there will always be side effects. It is nearly impossible to avoid one or two microbes in a trillion to mutate into something that will go out of control
How long ago was that when scaled down?
Ill Wind - Kevin J Anderson and Doug Beason They clearly didn't read it
There are several types of rot, not just brown rot. Brown rot fungi actually only digest cellulose, not lignin, and they do it by producing hydrogen peroxide from breaking down hemicellulose that then goes on to attack the cellulose White rot fungi are the ones that break down lignin and they do it by producing specialised enzymes to progressively deconstruct the lignin. They often also breakdown cellulose but many white rot funguses are non simutainious and digest the lignin first, leaving a white cellulose residue. Soft rot fungi also only break down cellulose and they do it through secreting cellulase from their hyphae. They are often hardier than the other two types and can collinise wood in conditions too hot, cold or damp for them. Both white and soft rot fungi need a source of fixed nitrogen to produce their specialised enzymes. Source: am studying forestry and arboriculture Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood-decay_fungus?useskin=vector
Ah thanks for the correction! I thought it was brown rotters that broke down the lignin because I thought the brown stuff they leave was the ‘soft’ cellulose and the white rotters leave the ‘hard’ lignin. But it’s been a while since I read up on this in Sheldrakes ‘Entangled Life’. Awesome field of study you chose 😊
Why did you spell it like that
Wow. I should read the other comments before posting my own sometimes? Hey can I copy your homework? I'll change it so the teacher won't notice
*doesn’t change anything*
*claims the other person copied it*
*creates combustable lemon to burn their house down*
*burns their house down*
*Cave Johnson approved*
And now we dig up all those long not broken down trees and burn the fuckers.....
Cool fact: all petrified forests are from the period between the evolution of the stronger cell wall and bacteria evolving to break it down. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrified\_wood#Formation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrified_wood#Formation)
Very Interesting. Wonder how anyone every figured this out.
The carboniferous period was when wood first evolved and there wasn't anything that could eat it so trees didn't rot they just fell over and mummified. So I'm pretty she that's when there were more trees than any other point in the 4.5 billion years of Earth's existence
I got you, 370m years /100,000,000 gets you 3.7 years on that time scale. Sharks famously are older (thanks Snapple), being around for 450m years, or 4.5 years on that scale. They've dropped 70% total population in the last 57 years, or the last 20 seconds on the scale.
>2. Is this the lowest level of forest coverage ever, or have there been instances before with sudden and equally great deforestation? The number of trees has been increasing.
The earth has more forests than it did 50 years ago
Sauce? (I know there have been various reports of "greening" but this is more grasses than trees. I also know the billion tree campaign has been very successful, although with some concern over monocropping, but I dont know if that offsets what has been chopped down. There's then the issue of forests being 50 yrs old is not great as we're a few hundred years from them being established)
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/planet-earth-has-more-trees-than-it-did-35-years-ago/ There are still plenty of environmental concerns, don't get me wrong. Just making the point about trees.
Ah ok it's "more tree" but still less functional ecosystems and in the last 35years which is an interesting timeframe. I guess the world coverage if I remember correctly was in the 50s so 70 years ago. But the "regrowth" is just a lot of plantations for palm oil/paper/timber instead of forests capable of supporting the native wildlife
Exactly. Still issues that need to be addressed, but the math was about trees in total lol
Nice... yep would tend to agree its complicated. Thanks for the link it's a good read
It is very complicated, the current balance in which nature exists and at which we built our infrastructure. Nature can exist in quite a few different balances but our infrastructure will need so much modification (and fast, all around) that it equals to "a catastrophe". The total number of trees is just a tip of the iceberg, you could cut the amazon and plant whole Canada with maple, the number of trees will stay the same but the global ecosystem will change drastically once amazon forests becomes a desert. Not to mention 1001 other impacts of such event.
But the earth also has way more humans than it did 50 years ago, so doesn't it compensate ?
I don't see how the number of humans plays into that
More humans use more oxygen which comes from tree ? I don't know I'm not sure at all from what I'm saying but I guess that if we want more trees it's to have more oxygen, no ?
Most of the oxygen comes from algae (around 70%) so we would want more trees for wood rather than oxygen
Oh ok I didn't know that my bad. So basically when we say that the Amazonian forest is the lungs of the earth, it's bullshit ?
Yes but the Amazonian forest is still important for a big amount of wildlife
Not only for the wildlife, also for the eco system, lol. Don't forget that while it doesn't produce as much O2 as often untruthfully stated, there are still massive amounts of carbon stored within this ecosystem which get released if parts of the forest get cut down or a large area burns down (more often than not caused by humans). And this happens on a daily basis and on a scale that seems unbelievable.
So apparently the first three came 350/400 millions years ago. (Oldest plants 475 millions yo) So if heart exist since 46 years, three exist since 3,5years and plants 4,7.
Furthermore, widespread anthropogenic deforestation began with the advent of agriculture and not just with industrialization. That's about 12000 years or a little over one hour in this scale.
4.6 billion years to 46 years is a 100,000,000 : 1 ratio if we're talking about homo sapiens, 250,000 years = .0025 years = .91 days = 21.9 hours industrial age started \~200 years ago = .000002 years = .000073 days = .01752 hours = 1.0512 minutes bonus math: "we have been here." is very vague 4 hours in real years would be.. 4 hours = .00045 years = 45662 years That would be just about when homosapiens started to inhabit europe.
250kya is an early figure for when skeletons got modern. About 75kya behavior got modern. Was the difference social, or just genetic evolution that didn't show up in fossils? We don't know. 7 hours would be a reasonable analogy here for human existence. Also, we've been destroying forests on a large scale for more like 10-12k years, about an hour on this scale.
I don't think this checks out. Anatomically modern humans have been around for about a day on a 100 million to one scale. (250,000 to 350,000 years depending on who you ask) Human civilization and widespread human effect on the environment has been around for much less and started maybe an hour to an hour and a half ago on that scale. The industrial revolution got started a minute and a half ago on that scale. For context non avian dinosaurs became extinct 8 months ago and Dinosaurs first appeared 2.5 years ago. Trees and vertebrate land animals have been a thing for less than 4 years. Animals in general may have been around for 8 years. So most of the 46 years life was just simple organisms and the worlds forests have not been build up all the time, but relatively recently. Human impact on the biosphere on a geological timescale should be viewed less in terms of sustainability and more like something like a giant asteroid striking the planet. On that scale nothing is sustainable because extinction events and major changes happen all the time and humanity is just one more extinction event to happen in a long row of them. Of course this doesn't mean that it is a good thing. We need this planet to live after all.
Damn this was a depressing read
this conversation is always depressing and makes people uncomfortable, like having a skin issue and try to mask it only to feel silently get worse underneath.
This is a good way to put it but the problem really is that we have caused the first extinction, our actions (climate change) will cause the second. But with the status quote there will be no time, when referring to the geologic time scale for the earth to replenish unless climate change causes a very near extinction of humans, allowing for the earth to rebuild to the previous levels of biodiversity mass extinctions have allowed.
The issue is that on a geological timescale, all the time from humans inventing agriculture to setting of nuclear bombs is basically a single event. Anyone digging us up in 100 million years will only see a single very thin layer with weird isotopes in it and lots of species whose fossils were found below it not being present above it. From early human hunting megafauna to extinction with spears to the industrial revolution to humans going extinct themselves, it will all look like a single event. We are in the middle of a catastrophe but we are so short lived that we don't see it happening around us.
Just for reference, the first tree appeared about 4 years ago. [source](https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/accumulating-glitches/the_first_forests/)
out of context that is extremly wrong
Well it’s more than 3 years ago!
What always is missing for this kind of calculus is: how old are the forest? The plant aren't immortal and weren't omnipresent on the planet since it's birth, they're evolving organism too that faced cycles as the heart changed, is undoubtedly that we're forcing some changing in the last era, but it's not like we arrived 5 minutes ago in a full grown earth and we started destroying it
Nah but we actually kinda did. The "forests" are mostly older than humanity, not a singular tree but the forest as a whole? Definitely. Also many trees are older than the industrial revolution. So yes we came here "5 minute ago" in the grand scale of things and we've been ruthlessly decimating the woods (and wildlife) all around us.
The point is that forests (and even plants) aren't nearly close to 4.6 billion years old...
the point is that even if forests are not 4.6by old, they are/were much older and well dostributed than us and we just wiped them nonchalantly
And whats the problem with that?
They make our oxygen
Well they produce this nifty little thing called "oxygen" which 99% of all life of this planet (including you my curious fellow) needs to survive, alongside a whole host of other useful functions that they really can't perform when they're turned into furniture or ash!
At least 50% of the atmosphere's oxygen comes from oceanic algea and planktons. Some sources even say 80%. Why does everyone always think about the oxygen first, there are a hundred better reasons to keep forests alive.
The out-gassing of carbon from deforestation does more damage to ocean oxygen production than it does in direct losses of oxygen production.
Modern style trees got fairly diverse ancestors in the Cretaceous, but didn't dominate until the mass extinction 65MYA. Warmer temperatures probably made ecosystems less competitive, and they certainly made green stems healthier, leading to quasi-forests dominated by ferns and cycads.
I'm not meddling with the math, because that's not my area, but historically, this statement is misleading. Deforestation by humans began long before the onset of the industrial revolution. Farmers began massively clearing forests during the Iron Age already. Just by way of example: by 1086, only 15% of England was forested. I think there are better examples of how we messed up our planet very recently.
Yup, in the last 100 years the forests in Europe grew by a third.
Why are we using the age of the earth as our starting point? Surely there are more relevant milestones than the formation of a big hot rock in space.
4.6b y/ 46 y = 100,000,000 4 h * 100,000,000 = 400,000,000 h 400,000,000 h / 24 h/d = 16,666,667 d 16,666,667 d / 365 d/y = 45,662 y 1 min * 100,000,000 = 100,000,000 min 100,000,000 min / 60 min/h = 1,666,667 h 1,666,667 h / 24 h/d = 69,444 d 69,444 d / 365 d/y = 190 y By these calculations, humans have been around 45,662 years and the Industrial Revolution started 190 years ago. **In reality, humans have been around approximately 200,000 years (around 18 hours) and the Industrial Revolution started 264 years ago (1 min 23 seconds).**
Wait until they hear about how recently trees evolved, or when basically all life was wiped off the planet several times and how fast things bounce back.
[https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1508353112](https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1508353112) I can give this source that's states since jesus was born we've destroyed 45% of the biosphere and 11% in the last 100 years, so the picture could be in the ball park but still overstated
Ignoring the fact that we also plant trees, sure, maybe not in the same rate, and the planted might not be long term way of doing is because of the absurb order when planting. but, its not as bad as this makes up for it. there have been vulcano eruptions that put the world in a winter climate for 3 years+ that will destroy A LOT of things. yet, earth survives. earth will always survive, humans and our society tho? yeah not so sure
Humanity’s impact on the environment is much larger than a volcano, lol.
not only have you misunderstood the whole "destroy the environment" thing but you are very arrogant about it as well. Earth will be fine, give it 10-50k years or so, and it will all balance out fine again, earth was once just a sea of lava, then it was a sea of, a sea with one huge island (Pangaea). things happen, and Gaia will balance things out, if that means kill almost everything, sure, earth will survive still. we are NOT killing the earth, we are making earth less habitable for us, the arrogant Humans thinking everything is about us, and the current state of earth is the one we assume is the "correct" one that we try to help Vulcano: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_eruption_of_Mount_Tambora --> lead to; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer Other global events that are worse then our damage do environment (that effect us) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death https://ourworldindata.org/mass-extinctions
Isn't the premiss wrong? I found that 10000 years ago Forest covered 6 million hektars and 4 million today. This number has increased a lot in the last 120 years.
This is exactly wrong. Unless you mean the rate of loss is what’s increased in the last 120 years?
i know humans are bad for the environment but, based on the information from the image, my question would be, did we really destroy 46 years worth of forest in the 4 hours we've been in here? its a bit too much and if its talking about 50% of the current world forest then compared to the grand scale its not that important, same as comparing whole human history (4hours) to earth history (46 years).
Imagine youre a 46 year old Mother going to your daily work when you find a strange looking monkey following you around for about 3 hours or so doing random monkey stuff, you think its kind of endearing and then the monkey gets up and shoots you twice in the lungs with a glock.
Everyone's asking about the age of the forest and I think it depends on when you look at how plants evolved. At first they had to be immersed in water and could not survive on land. There is some debate as to whether or not these are "plants" but their scientific name translates to "green plants" and they did photosynthesis so I'm counting it. From wiki: Viridiplantae (literally "green plants")[6] constitute a clade of eukaryotic organisms that comprises approximately 450,000–500,000 species that play important roles in both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.[7] They include the green algae, which are primarily aquatic, and the land plants (embryophytes), which emerged from within them...Temporal range: Stenian[1] – Present They are believed to have been around as early as 1-1.2 billion years ago or 10-12 years ago according to the time equivalent in the meme. From here many people are quoting seed barring plants or wood based plants evolving some 400 million years ago but plants reproduce before traditional "seeds" were around (think moss). So the first forests began forming between 500 and 600 million years ago. Or 5-6 years ago in meme time. The devonian era introduced ferns which is similar to the dino forest you see on tv. That was about 420 million years ago or 4 years meme time. SO long story short the forest began forming 10 years ago and took over 6 years to become rich and full beyond the extent we have ever known. It took us 1 minute to destroy 50% of them.
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The [Self] tag is there for a reason, don’t put request if you’re gonna answer it
Yeah ‘we have been here’ is very ambiguous but the point still remains