REleamses

[Doug Yanega]

Straying even farther off-topic...

Paul Weaver wrote:

>Who are we to think that we can save
>the planet or destroy the planet.  The planet has been here for billions
>of years before man arrived and will be here billions of years after man
>has left.

The planet, certainly, but all the other organisms on it? It doesn't appear
impossible for us to reduce the planet to a sterile waste, if we do things
just right. Are you *POSITIVE* that we cannot push the climate past the
threshold conditions for it to become permanently overheated? Are you
*positive* that all the thousands of nuclear warheads around will never be
used, and that if they are, that this won't eliminate all terrestrial
vertebrates, and much of the rest? A planet populated by little more than
bacteria is not a very promising legacy. Myself, I wouldn't put it past us
to have that sort of destructive potential. It probably *is* our choice, to
save or destroy. All depends on what we do, exactly, but the worst-case
scenarios are pretty grim.

Anyway...

Doug Yanega    Depto. de Biologia Geral, Instituto de Ciencias Biologicas,
Univ. Fed. de Minas Gerais, Cx.P. 486, 30.161-970 Belo Horizonte, MG   BRAZIL
phone: 031-448-1223, fax: 031-44-5481  (from U.S., prefix 011-55)
                  http://www.icb.ufmg.br/~dyanega/
  "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
        is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82