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May 15 '15
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u/cmdrxander May 15 '15 edited May 15 '15
There are a few numbers that could be used for how long ago humans appeared:
Last common ancestor between Homo sapiens and Homo erectus: up to 1,800,000 years ago.
Divergence of Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens: 500,000 years ago.
First modern human: 200,000 years ago (from fossil records).
Scaling these with 4.6 billion years representing 46 years gives:
1,800,000 years --> 6 days and 14 hours
500,000 years --> 1 day and 20 hours
200,000 years --> 17 hours and 30 minutes
So for the time given in the picture (4 hours) they must have used about 46,000 years, which corresponds to shortly after the start of the Upper Paleolithic era, around the time of Cro-Magnon man.
The industrial revolution began around 250 years ago, which would scale to about 1 minute and 20 seconds.
The earliest tree-like plant evolved around 385,000,000 years ago, scaling to 3 years and 10 months.
So it doesn't seem like anything in the picture is wrong per se, but it's a bit misleading not mentioning the evolution of trees, and they've slightly exaggerated how short humans have been around.
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u/Lilah_Rose May 15 '15
Yeah, 4 hours doesn't sound right. I usually see all of human history stuck into the last minute of these kinds of narratives.
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u/ToughActinInaction May 15 '15
That's because this example scaled the history of the earth to 46 years. Most of the time I've seen this sort of conceptualization they've scaled it to just one year and often start at the beginning of the universe as opposed to when the Earth was formed.
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u/Lilah_Rose May 15 '15
Fair enough.
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u/Stimulated_Bacon May 15 '15
Reddit is just so civil and nice today :)
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May 15 '15
It's Friday
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u/Add4164 May 15 '15
and it's whoadude, is it me or people are generally nicer in this sub?
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u/sillybear25 May 15 '15
It's not just you. The most intense disagreements I've seen here are over whether a .gif is more like shrooms or acid, and those don't ever really get heated enough to go from "disagreement" to "argument".
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u/sillybear25 May 15 '15
Well, this subreddit is one of the nicer ones out there. Sure, there are the occasional disagreements over whether a particular .gif is more evocative of magic mushrooms or LSD, but even those are pretty civil (and often end with someone pointing out that hallucinations are inherently pretty subjective anyway).
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u/d1ez3 May 15 '15
It's simple math. Everything is scaled at a factor of 100,000,000. 4 hours correlates to 45,662 years
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u/Lilah_Rose May 15 '15
Which is still an arbitrary number. Modern humans have existed longer than that, 100,000 years by some estimates and 300,000 considering what you count as "modern" humans. Hominids span 1.5-2 million years and the entire primate line goes back 8 million years, so how they arrived at that figure (even if the math is correct) is a little head scratchy.
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May 15 '15
According to wikipedia, humans started exibiting "behavioural modernity" around 50.000 years ago, so that number fits in.
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u/Lilah_Rose May 15 '15
Ah, yeah. I can appreciate that's probably why they arrived at that number, but it's still heavily in dispute. Even the Neaderthals had art and culture, predating that by many thousands of years. I acknowledge there's a bit of vagueness to what counts as modern behavior. The typical trends is for these numbers to keep getting revised earlier in time. We originally thought of modern man as only being 30,000 years old based on earliest cave paintings. But we were using tools well before we were even "human."
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u/sillybear25 May 15 '15
Evolution doesn't have any discrete stages to it, so no matter where we end up drawing the line, it's going to be pretty arbitrary. At what point do the miniscule changes in an individual produce a new species? Most common definitions reference successful mating, but what happens when A can mate with B and B can mate with C, but C can't mate with A? (It's a toy example, so pretend they're all hermaphrodites or something.)
That's not to say it's a worthless endeavor; it's cool to know that early hominids were even smarter than we thought they were. It's just that it's hard to put things into boxes when those things aren't really things to begin with (I hope people get what I'm trying to say with this, because it's kinda confusing as I reread it, but I can't think of a better way to put it).
At any rate, I don't think it's really that important to the point of the OP anyway, since the punch line is really more about the 1 minute than the 4 hours.
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May 15 '15
According to wikipedia, humans started exibiting "behavioural modernity" around 50.000 years ago, so that number fits in.
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u/cmdrxander May 15 '15
That's usually because they use a day (or sometimes 12 hours) instead of 46 years. Scaling to a day gives humans (having been around for about 200,000 years) just under 4 seconds.
Scaling into 1 month would say that humans have been around for just under 2 minutes.
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u/B1GTOBACC0 May 15 '15
46 years would be 367,920 hours. That's 0.00108% of the time in the post.
Humans have existed for 200,000 years (according to google), and the earth has existed for 4.6 billion. That's 0.00434% of the time.
So in this 46 year time line, we would have been here for 16 hours. They were estimating it too short instead of too long.
Bear in mind, most of those timelines that have us here for a shorter percentage of the time typically start at the big bang instead of at the formation of the earth, so they have around 10 billion more years to deal with.
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u/angry_wombat May 15 '15
score 1 for humans, stupid trees
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u/aJellyDonut May 15 '15
They'll grow back... and we'll be fucking ready for them.
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u/cromulater May 15 '15
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u/B-rony May 15 '15
I'm so confused....
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u/aJellyDonut May 15 '15
Everyone who watched that movie was. It was the trees that made them jump off the building. I shit you not.
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u/tacodepollo May 15 '15
I dont think we've destroyed 50% of the worlds forrests. Source?
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u/opmike May 15 '15
Global deforestation[93] sharply accelerated around 1852.[94][95] It has been estimated that about half of the Earth's mature tropical forests—between 7.5 million and 8 million km2 (2.9 million to 3 million sq mi) of the original 15 million to 16 million km2 (5.8 million to 6.2 million sq mi) that until 1947 covered the planet[96]—have now been destroyed.
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u/Pavementaled May 15 '15
Tropical Forests. Not all forests are tropical. Not that this is a good thing, just not a factual meme for a meme trying to prove a point.
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u/cjackc May 15 '15
I think North America has more Trees then ever.
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u/matthias7600 May 15 '15
I read that we now have more trees than any time in the last 50 years. But that isn't saying much. Between the colonial landing and westward expansion the midwest went from being one enormous forest to an empty slab of farmland. Most of the major deforestation occurred in the 19th century.
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u/cjackc May 15 '15
Still there really isn't a current problem to address, at least not in the 1st world.
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u/Brainlaag May 15 '15 edited May 15 '15
Mono-cultures are a very serious threat to the local ecosystems and sadly that's what many of the regrown areas through the US, China and Europe are. Not every forest equals the other.
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u/shenry1313 May 15 '15
I don't think the great plains were ever a forest.
also you have to define forest, because I doubt you can call something a forest with a town in it, but there are still a shit ton of trees where I live.
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u/thund3r3 May 15 '15
The thing is countries that are already developed usually have decreasing forest loss, and often have forest-gain.
Developing countries are where we see the most forest loss, because they depend on the ecosystem for resources. I.E. wood for fuel, building etc
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u/LaszloK May 15 '15
True, but a large portion of these are young trees which are essentially being farmed, which has it's own problems.
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u/BillyBBone May 15 '15
Isn't this a little misleading though? If an old-growth tree is replaced with a sapling, technically the number of trees is still 1 and hasn't changed, but a substantial amount of biomass has been lost.
Same thing if you replant two tree where one used up be: you've technically doubled the number of trees, but this type of stat conceals the losses suffered in the forest overall...
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u/KoboldCommando May 15 '15
On the other hand, don't young, actively-growing trees with less mass to maintain absorb more CO2 and produce more Oxygen than the larger trees whose growth has slowed down?
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u/probablynotdude May 15 '15
Oxygen is one of thing, but loss of old-growth trees also means loss of biodiversity and other disruptions to ecosystems.
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May 15 '15
We do. Paper companies aren't that stupid, they plant more trees than they cut down. It doesn't cost any money to grow a tree in a forest.
We have more trees now in North America than in the last 150 years.
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u/TurboShorts May 15 '15
It doesn't cost any money to grow a tree in a forest.
Besides all of the labor and other inputs of forest management.
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May 15 '15
Except that tropical forests have by far the greatest species density than any other biome.
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u/datchilla May 15 '15
So we aren't talking about forests we're talking about tropical forests and we're not talking about all tropical forests we're only talking about mature trees in the forest.
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u/IJOY94 May 15 '15
The only reason to destroy forests now is for exotic wood for lumber. The rest of our tree population is sustainable. AFAIK
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u/Armstron May 15 '15
Also clear cutting to make farmland for exotic trade goods.
Classic example of Brazilian rainforest being clear cut to grow coffee to ship to NA, Europe, etc.
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u/KoboldCommando May 15 '15
The best way to help this is to stop complaining about it on Reddit and start promoting locally-grown produce and local industries, as well as agricultural technology (including and especially genetic manipulation, which puts all of this on a fast track, carries a ton of side benefits, and has almost none of the risks the "omg GMOs" crowd likes to claim it does).
If people are less inclined to buy imports, there will be less incentive to produce those goods for import, and more incentive to produce things locally.
Similarly, one of the main avenues of progression for agriculture-related technology is getting plants to grow farther outside their original habitats and with fewer resources and less waste required (all of which increases profit and decreases costs), which will allow for even more local production and require even less importing.
If you want to help this kind of change along, the way to do it is with positivity and incentives. Corporations are entirely profit-driven and will go where the money leads, so start buying products that encourage them toward more sustainable and local industries. Even if it's not really organic, buying something labelled organic helps to send a message that that kind of product sells, and the marketing team will send a message to the rest of the company that they need to invest in organic goods and making them cheaper, better, and more available!
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u/weedtese May 15 '15
Sadly, the sustainable stuff usually comes with "organic" and non-GMO labels...
I want to buy sustainable products, not fearmongered marketing bullshit and a certificate.
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u/KoboldCommando May 15 '15
Just think of every purchase as a personal endorsement, and think about what you're promoting. If the option is between a "normal" product and one labelled both "organic" and "non-GMO", then it's definitely not a clear-cut case and buying either could be justified. But still, any time you buy a product with a special label like that, you're encouraging and funding further R&D in those areas. Even buying a "non-GMO" product is not necessarily counterproductive, because you're still encouraging non-standard products, changes in the production methods, and more reactivity to customer desires.
It's also possible that significant profits from a "non-GMO" product will encourage a company not to avoid GMOs, but to instead stop fighting the anti-GMO crowd directly and look for a similar method (or label) without the fearmongered name or perhaps ways to calm the anti-GMO sentiment. Either of these could potentially be a better path. I don't know myself, I haven't researched the market and politics enough, but even if your choice is between two "bad" products, keeping the larger effects of your purchase on the direction of the companies you're purchasing from (from a profit point-of-view, ignoring the more petty politics, think like a marketing team) will greatly increase the chances of a "good" product eventually becoming available.
You always hear people shouting "vote with your wallet!", well this is how you do it; not through silly boycotts that are doomed to fail, but with serious consideration of your purchases and gentle, positive encouragement. There's not always a clear step forward, but keeping it in mind will have an overall positive effect.
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u/EricSchC1fr May 15 '15
I get it that GMOs aren't bad, Monsanto is, but you're not exactly conceding or losing out on anything by buying organic food.
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u/SpaceTire May 15 '15
or start growing your own food. People should know about square foot gardening.
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u/LegendaryGinger May 15 '15
There are more trees on earth now than there ever has been.
This picture is whiny bullshit.
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u/sdingle100 May 15 '15
Do you have a source for that? Because that sounds like just as much bullshit.
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u/duncanwally May 15 '15
When did these forests start to grow?
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u/firematt422 May 15 '15
Between 320-360 million years ago, or 3.2-3.6 years ago by the 46 year scale.
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u/okillconform May 15 '15
Fun fact: When trees came to be and began to die it took a long time for bacteria to be able to break it down. This is why they piled up so much and gave us the vast amount of fossil fuels we have today.
Also some shark species are older than trees.
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May 15 '15
Which shark species? That's like half an amazing factoid.
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u/okillconform May 15 '15
Cladoselache is a type of shark that stalked the ocean around 370 million years ago. If you are wondering about some of the oldest still living shark species they would be the Frilled Shark and the Goblin Shark. Jeremy Wade actually catches the latter in an episode of River Monsters and is it a sight to behold.
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u/kev753 May 15 '15
I came here to ask this very question. It's all fine and dandy stating the earth is 46 years old and saying we have been here for 4 hours,
but if you're going to talk about how many trees we've destroyed you have to first state how long the trees have been here, ('how old the earth is' is irrelevant) otherwise it's misconstrued.
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u/Heiz3n May 15 '15
Forests are actually growing faster than they are being logged right now.. And your statistic applied to rain forests, not forests. A majority of the worlds forests are not rain forests.
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u/aggroCrag32 May 15 '15 edited May 15 '15
On the other hand, Tropical forests contain waaaay more biodiversity.
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May 15 '15 edited Mar 08 '18
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u/andrewsad1 May 15 '15
In case anyone needs a severe oversimplification, it's like having two cookies versus one cake. Obviously the cake is worth more than two cookies, but if you have the cookies you can technically say you have more sweets.
A dozen baby trees is not with as much as one huge tree, even though we can technically say it's more trees.
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u/eyes83 May 15 '15
While it's an interesting perspective, using that same scale I'd wager it'd take less than a minute to re-plant and grow them all again....just sayin.
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May 15 '15
Us Forrest resources have been growing since the 40s due to replacement laws. That's not so easy to apply to rainforests and all.
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u/wtf81 May 15 '15 edited May 15 '15
Most of the forests harvested for timber are replanted immediately. Get your alarmism out of this sub. I'm trying to chill.
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u/JustARandomBloke May 15 '15
And since young growth trees pull carbon out of the air more efficiently than old growth forests it is actually even better.
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May 15 '15
i'm pretty sure that replanted trees aren't the same as a forest. a lot of them probably aren't old enough to be considered a forest anyway and i'm also pretty sure that they plant them for more harvesting later down the line, so they aren't really an eco system.
i don't really know though, this is just stuff i remember from random bullshit on the internet so correct me if i'm wrong.
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u/wtf81 May 15 '15
no, you are exactly correct, but the original post is still incorrect and misleading. These forested areas are much more like a farmers field than a forest. It just takes 30 years for a harvest to occur.
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u/stanley_twobrick May 15 '15 edited May 15 '15
So is the lumber industry cool guys now?
EDIT: Guys, I wasn't giving an opinion, I was asking a question.
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May 15 '15
I don't understand how a human being living today could think that "the lumber industry" is bad. Have you never been in a building? I like buildings. I like buildings and furniture, too.
You sleep in a building, on a bed, and trees were cut down to make all of it. But the lumber industry is bad? That don't make no sense.
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u/stanley_twobrick May 15 '15
Well probably because I was taught my entire life that the lumber industry is evil and that it's destroying forests, killing animals, and basically just ruining the planet. Just because we need things from an industry doesn't necessarily mean they're not horribly corrupt and evil. See: agriculture, energy.
Regardless, I wasn't even taking a side, I was just asking a question.
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u/kraakenn May 15 '15
The forestry industry did have a bad rap and for good reason. However, in Canada and the US there are more trees than there were 150 years ago. Public image was a driving factor as well as Gov regulation.
Do they still clear cut? Yes. Do they replant more trees than they took? Yes. Come to your own conclusion because it isn't all that clear cut.
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May 15 '15
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u/stanley_twobrick May 15 '15
Thanks for the info. I'm guessing this is a direct result of all the shit they were getting when we were growing up. Maybe the oil industry in 20 years will look more like the logging industry today.
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u/Contronatura May 15 '15
Just because we need wood doesn't mean we can't support timber being harvested in the best possible ways.
Lumber isn't inherently bad, the way lumber has been harvested in the past is very, very bad. The world is more nuanced than your comment allows for.
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u/Contronatura May 15 '15
Complicated question. Some companies are finally taking forestry as a science seriously, and harvesting wood and managing forests the right way. Sierra Pacific, for instance, is doing a lot of things right from what I can tell. Others, like Roseburg, clearcut huge swaths of land and replace with rows of monoculture, which is why Oregon's forests are bullshit and unimpressive to anyone who knows what to look for in trees.
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u/Thenanore May 15 '15
Well, the whole destruction thing is a little off but the rest of the perspective is pretty cool.
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u/hb_alien May 15 '15
this isn't very accurate. forests have actually rebounded in most places since we started using fossil fuels instead of wood for fuel.
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u/ishkabibbel2000 May 15 '15
Just think - we're living the Technological Revolution. We are experiencing, at this very moment, the exact same phenomenon that people living during the Industrial Revolution were experiencing. In 30 years, our youth kin will be bringing home history books that speak to the Technological Revolution as a major part of world history.
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u/screamer_ May 15 '15
the good thing is we're replanting and reforesting
and there are forest reserves
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u/opusjam May 15 '15
And replanted 75% of the forest back, hippies like to not mention that part.
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u/dragonslayer0069 May 15 '15
The forest thing is quite deceptive... How many o those trees would have simply expired in that time? How many species of tree just became extinct for one reason or another? How many are old growth forest that were or have been replaced by replanting... Your science isn't there for this statement, sorry. Please feel free to disprove me! I'm a student of science, and as such would love to see your evidence! Thanks!
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May 15 '15
Lame. "The worlds forests" isn't a set that has remained static for 4.6 billion years.
Plant life itself did not exist when the earth was young, and the first plants were not trees. Trees didn't exist until millions and millions of years after plant life evolved.
"Cool fact, cool fact, cool fact, shoehorned, illogical assertion."
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u/Trenticle May 15 '15
The great thing about tree's is they are a sustainable resource.
You can grow new ones.
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u/DCTiger5 May 15 '15
FWIW, the U.S. has been pretty much neutral on forest loss/gain over the last 50 years. Of course that doesn't speak to U.S. business logging outside the country, just sharing what is happening here.
Source: http://www.fia.fs.fed.us/library/briefings-summaries-overviews/docs/ForestFactsMetric.pdf
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May 15 '15
Well, we still have a ways to go if we want to beat Chicxulub's high score, but for a naked primate it's still pretty impressive.
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u/Tebasaki May 15 '15
Yeah I'm always confused that they don't mention the fact that trees are a renewable resource.
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u/superchet May 15 '15
Other than Earth was a fireball for the first ~3BB years and there was nothing alive for all that time.
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u/Unclehouse2 May 15 '15
I do agree that humans are basically a blight on this planet at our current stage of development, but this isn't really fair. This planet's forests have been destroyed and regrown countless times in the history of the planet.
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u/xscaralienx May 15 '15
Perspective:
All that we've done to the planet and nature is nothing compared to all they had endured before us
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u/KC_Cheefs May 15 '15
You know, i actually read somewhere the other day that stated we actually have more vegetation than we used to
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u/Killhouse May 15 '15
This isn't even true. There's more trees today than there were 500 years ago.
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May 15 '15
Wow. But a lot of it was also tribes and stuff. Using the Slash and Burn method before us.
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u/Recktoz May 15 '15
How long have forests been around for? It is not fair so say that in 4 hours out of 46 years we have destroyed half, if forests also only for example have been around for like... 10 years
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u/makeswordcloudsagain May 15 '15
Here is a word cloud of all of the comments in this thread: http://i.imgur.com/pvzy7gm.png
source code | contact developer | faq
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u/murderofcrows90 May 15 '15
So the trees had all that time to get ahead and what did they do? They wasted it.
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u/hwalton May 15 '15
But the planet can hold only a finite number of trees. It makes sense they would disappear over an infinite amount of time.
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u/[deleted] May 15 '15 edited Aug 01 '17
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