RI: For Those Writing Sci Fi

[Tundra]

http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b35/Livinginthepast2/earth.jpg


I thought this could be useful!

[AXJ]

8)

[cowmage]

Thanks for sharing that. Where'd you find it?

Of course, nuclear waste that's been disposed of properly won't show up in the ecosystem.
We don't tend to store nuclear fuel in permanent fashions, though, I suppose.

[Tundra]

I found it just on a random forum actually! Nothing to do with writing.

[MichaelB]

Actually, most of that is inaccurate. Endangered species CANNOT recover once genetic variation within the species is depleted. GM crops will NOT dissapear, as they will add to the genetic variation of the wild-type plants and thus will continue (the original crops may have gone, but the genes that were transplanted will survive in other plants due to cross-pollination).

And there are concrete and stone archeological remains older than 1,000 years. Take the pyramids: 3,000 years approximately. Aztec ruins: even older.

[cowmage]

Actually, most of that is inaccurate. Endangered species CANNOT recover once genetic variation within the species is depleted. GM crops will NOT dissapear, as they will add to the genetic variation of the wild-type plants and thus will continue (the original crops may have gone, but the genes that were transplanted will survive in other plants due to cross-pollination).

And there are concrete and stone archeological remains older than 1,000 years. Take the pyramids: 3,000 years approximately. Aztec ruins: even older.I don't agree.
An endangered species will certainly have problems at first, but the population will start to recover almost immediately. Genetic variation will take longer, but it'll certainly happen.
Genetically modified crops that survive will certainly leave their mark on the gene pool, but not all farms grow crops that could survive locally without active care. Many of those that could survive would be too productive for their environment to sustain them and die off when they'd depleted certain nutrients.
And the pyramids were built to last. Modern scyscrapers aren't. (Even if the pyramids hadn't been intended to last, they were going to. They can't fall over because they're, like, pyramids, and won't collapse very readily because they were built using the "Great Big Rocks Piled on Top of Each Other" school of construction, which doesn't give them much internal space to collapse into.)

The earth would certainly not return immediately to a state that could be reached by natural processes (I'm using 'natural' to mean anything that lacks direct human cause) but it would do so eventually. Kudzu and other invasives would potentially devastate whole ecosystems, but would eventually overpopulate and die or develop predators and get eaten or both. The world would recover; it would do so partly by changing.

[vindemiatrix]

I hope I'm there for some of that. :D

[MichaelB]

I don't agree.
An endangered species will certainly have problems at first, but the population will start to recover almost immediately. Genetic variation will take longer, but it'll certainly happen.


If there was a large enough change in the enviroment as to wipe out human existance, chances are that most endangered species are already gone.

And current knowlege of genetic inheritance shows that once genetic variation is lost, the only way it can be rebuilt is by mutations, which happen very, very rarely to create new alleles. It would take a significant lenth of time (in the hundreds of thousands of years) For enough genetic variety to be created for the population to stand much of a chance aainst any environmental change.

And in the hundreds of years after human extinction, there would be too much change happening for a tiny population to survive.

[Tundra]

I think it's just if they 'disappeared', not if there was an actual cause for us leaving. Like... they all got kidnapped by aliens.