AJUMP23
Parody of actual AJUMP23
If space is not real. What is it instead.
-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
First Commercial Spacewalk Completed Successfully
- Thread starter AJUMP23
- Start date
Oh, I think it took waaaaaay more than 3-5 generations for the Nepalese to get where they are today.
But what will really blow your mind is HOW did they evolve for high altitudes AT ALL? If you believe the story, we all came from some savannah primate that itself came from some more primitive tree primate that came from an even less evolved rodent thing. Why do we have ANY genes that account for high altitude? When were we EVER living up on the tops of mountains, or when was ANY ancestor of ours doing it? So either that capability was latent in our genes, having been acquired by some eons distant mammalian ancestor and just kept around for millions of years and just needed selection to pick the folks with the highest concentration of them or "random" mutation somehow CREATED these genes only when humans decided to walk up to the tops of the mountains instead of hang out in the nice forests and plains around sea level.
This is the point where "Darwinian" evolution and the classic system of long evolution under selective environmental pressure kinda falls flat for me. It implies that some group of humans just kept pushing, generation after generation, to live a little bit higher in the mountains, year after year, to put this constant pressure to select for higher red cell load, better oxygen delivery, and all that. Otherwise why do we have the capability to adjust to elevation AT ALL, unless it was designed into our DNA? Was it from some sea dwelling mammal ancestor? Did we once live up on mountains? Was the O2 content of the planet once much lower and those adaptions hung around? Living through the ice age pushed folks to live in high, arid, low oxygen environments and those where the ones that lived to come down and give all of us those genes? Because pretty much all humans can adapt to high altitudes, given time, though certainly the Nepalese and others like them do it much better.
Imma gonna go smoke some weed now and think rational thoughts
efyu_lemonardo
May I have a cookie?
SpaceX has accomplished a small incremental step, one which companies much larger and older than them, operating with much bigger government budgets, have not been able to (Boeing...). They deserve credit for getting the space industry out of a very expensive rut in which its been stuck for decades, and indirectly saving Billions of tax dollars which can be put to use elsewhere.Yeah, but things like the Apollo program hit 0.4% of GDP, which is an ASTRONOMICAL sum for basically the privilege of bragging rights. To REALLY go for Mars or some other body would be an undertaking making the scale of the pyramids, Versailles, or other giant resource sinks seem like nothing. Then consider the cost of moving humans, at scale, from Earth to Mars. It's almost unfathomable barring some quantum shift in propulsion tech. It's easy to try to compare it to colonial expansion of the New World but that's so many orders of magnitude less difficult (hell, humans spread to oceanic islands practically BY ACCIDENT during storms, it's so easy to do!) that the comparison is potentially a fatal fallacy.
I'm not against space exploration, far from it, but you gotta really look at the inherent and unescapable difficulties that endeavor really poses and separate out the sci-fi fantasy. What SpaceX just accomplished is much closer to THIS than to what actual transplanet travel will need to be...
I really don't understand the need to be so alarmed. You've just described yourself how much bigger their vision is than the reality of what is possible. So why focus on that?
Looking at what they've actually accomplished - much cheaper space exploration - I can't see it as anything but a win for us all.
Visions are often no more than motivational tools, but sometimes they help bring out creative thinking which can lead to new ideas. This is how the process of discovery works.
efyu_lemonardo
May I have a cookie?
Swiss Cheese. But keep it a secret.
calistan
Member
That’s just how it works. Like how some Kenyans make really good distance runners because of the altitude, but other than those environmental adaptations they’re the same as people who live by the sea.Oh, I think it took waaaaaay more than 3-5 generations for the Nepalese to get where they are today.
But what will really blow your mind is HOW did they evolve for high altitudes AT ALL? If you believe the story, we all came from some savannah primate that itself came from some more primitive tree primate that came from an even less evolved rodent thing. Why do we have ANY genes that account for high altitude? When were we EVER living up on the tops of mountains, or when was ANY ancestor of ours doing it? So either that capability was latent in our genes, having been acquired by some eons distant mammalian ancestor and just kept around for millions of years and just needed selection to pick the folks with the highest concentration of them or "random" mutation somehow CREATED these genes only when humans decided to walk up to the tops of the mountains instead of hang out in the nice forests and plains around sea level.
This is the point where "Darwinian" evolution and the classic system of long evolution under selective environmental pressure kinda falls flat for me. It implies that some group of humans just kept pushing, generation after generation, to live a little bit higher in the mountains, year after year, to put this constant pressure to select for higher red cell load, better oxygen delivery, and all that. Otherwise why do we have the capability to adjust to elevation AT ALL, unless it was designed into our DNA? Was it from some sea dwelling mammal ancestor? Did we once live up on mountains? Was the O2 content of the planet once much lower and those adaptions hung around? Living through the ice age pushed folks to live in high, arid, low oxygen environments and those where the ones that lived to come down and give all of us those genes? Because pretty much all humans can adapt to high altitudes, given time, though certainly the Nepalese and others like them do it much better.
Imma gonna go smoke some weed now and think rational thoughts
Thats not just how it works. Kenya isn't really very high in altitude other than around the mountain, heck even Nepal isn't that much different than, say, Colorado. So why do almost all humans have the ability to adapt to high altitude? Where did those genes even come from and how/why are they so widespread? It's not like only a few humans have the capability, virtually EVERYONE has the same adaptive capability though animals will display a far greater phenotypic (external appearance, not genetic change) variation due to altitude adaptation than humans do. It's a strange thing with genes, we are carrying around a TON of 'junk' in our genome and we have lots of stuff that only activates under kinda specific/contextual circumstances that seem like very difficult to just attribute to "natural evolution".
or rather, evolution as darwin described it, gene acquisition as we know it today, and the likely complexity of our distant ancestors is probably very misunderstood. We (humans) probably went through a much more mutagenic period (or many of them) as well as way more profound near extinction events leading to the impression that modern humans were all coming from one area of Africa when in fact we were far more widespread in previous times and there were a lot more "versions" of us with specific adaptations that were folded into 'humans' and spread around.
calistan
Member
That all bodes well for our future Martian colonies!Thats not just how it works. Kenya isn't really very high in altitude other than around the mountain, heck even Nepal isn't that much different than, say, Colorado. So why do almost all humans have the ability to adapt to high altitude? Where did those genes even come from and how/why are they so widespread? It's not like only a few humans have the capability, virtually EVERYONE has the same adaptive capability though animals will display a far greater phenotypic (external appearance, not genetic change) variation due to altitude adaptation than humans do. It's a strange thing with genes, we are carrying around a TON of 'junk' in our genome and we have lots of stuff that only activates under kinda specific/contextual circumstances that seem like very difficult to just attribute to "natural evolution".
or rather, evolution as darwin described it, gene acquisition as we know it today, and the likely complexity of our distant ancestors is probably very misunderstood. We (humans) probably went through a much more mutagenic period (or many of them) as well as way more profound near extinction events leading to the impression that modern humans were all coming from one area of Africa when in fact we were far more widespread in previous times and there were a lot more "versions" of us with specific adaptations that were folded into 'humans' and spread around.
TheInfamousKira
Reseterror Resettler
Oh, I think it took waaaaaay more than 3-5 generations for the Nepalese to get where they are today.
But what will really blow your mind is HOW did they evolve for high altitudes AT ALL? If you believe the story, we all came from some savannah primate that itself came from some more primitive tree primate that came from an even less evolved rodent thing. Why do we have ANY genes that account for high altitude? When were we EVER living up on the tops of mountains, or when was ANY ancestor of ours doing it? So either that capability was latent in our genes, having been acquired by some eons distant mammalian ancestor and just kept around for millions of years and just needed selection to pick the folks with the highest concentration of them or "random" mutation somehow CREATED these genes only when humans decided to walk up to the tops of the mountains instead of hang out in the nice forests and plains around sea level.
This is the point where "Darwinian" evolution and the classic system of long evolution under selective environmental pressure kinda falls flat for me. It implies that some group of humans just kept pushing, generation after generation, to live a little bit higher in the mountains, year after year, to put this constant pressure to select for higher red cell load, better oxygen delivery, and all that. Otherwise why do we have the capability to adjust to elevation AT ALL, unless it was designed into our DNA? Was it from some sea dwelling mammal ancestor? Did we once live up on mountains? Was the O2 content of the planet once much lower and those adaptions hung around? Living through the ice age pushed folks to live in high, arid, low oxygen environments and those where the ones that lived to come down and give all of us those genes? Because pretty much all humans can adapt to high altitudes, given time, though certainly the Nepalese and others like them do it much better.
Imma gonna go smoke some weed now and think rational thoughts
So you think it's all Coded somewhere in our junk DNA and environmental triggers play a role in sort of unlocking the genetic pathways to effect practical change? Brother, I'm in for a doobie, too.
