Colonize Mars 1ac contention 1: Inherency
***NEG ANSWERS AT: EXTINCTION ADVANTAGE
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***NEG ANSWERSAT: EXTINCTION ADVANTAGEIt’s not too late to reverse ecological destruction The Australian, 6-16-2010 (“Frank Fenner sees no hope for humans”, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/frank-fenner-sees-no-hope-for-humans/story-e6frgcjx-1225880091722) Fenner's colleague and long-time friend Stephen Boyden, a retired professor at the ANU, says there is deep pessimism among some ecologists, but others are more optimistic. "Frank may be right, but some of us still harbour the hope that there will come about an awareness of the situation and, as a result, the revolutionary changes necessary to achieve ecological sustainability," says Boyden, an immunologist who turned to human ecology later in his career. "That's where Frank and I differ. We're both aware of the seriousness of the situation, but I don't accept that it's necessarily too late. While there's a glimmer of hope, it's worth working to solve the problem. We have the scientific knowledge to do it but we don't have the political will."
(“Has Earth's sixth mass extinction begun?” http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/science/stories/2011/03/13/has-earths-sixth-mass-extinction-begun.html?sid=101)
The authors suggest that a "perfect storm" of conditions might be setting the stage for future extinctions. These conditions include invasive species that out-compete or simply eat native species; habitat destruction and fragmentation; disease; and rapid changes associated with global climate change. Anthony Barnosky, lead author of the report and a professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, noted that it is not too late to avert the sixth great extinction event. "So far, only 1 to 2 percent of all species have gone extinct in the groups we can look at clearly, so by those numbers, it looks like we are not far down the road to extinction. We still have a lot of Earth's biota to save," Barnosky said. We can still save the environment and stop extinction The Northern Star June 2011 (“Mass Extinction Is Now Only 300 years Away”, http://northernstar-online.com/stories/edition0069-02.html) Escalated by human activities, life on Earth is hurtling toward extinction levels like those that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Such enormous losses have only occurred five times in the past half-billion years, during events known as "mass extinctions". Now scientists are warning that if current extinction rates continue, Earth will lose 3/4 of its species as soon as 300 years from now - a geological blink of an eye. In order to reach mass-extinction status, 75% of all species need to disappear within a geologically short time frame, meaning that Earth is currently on the brink of the sixth mass extinction. We are mindlessly marching toward barren landscapes and empty seas, a predatory procession fueled by human population growth, resource consumption and climate change. Scientists say habitat destruction, global climate change, introducing invasive species and population growth all contribute to the losses, working together to create a global disaster. But the good news is, people are the ones who are driving this extinction, so if we hurry, we can still prevent it. Stanford University biologist, Paul Ehrlich, suggests starting by prioritizing species preservation, capping human population growth and limiting resource consumption.
(Frederick, Professor of English at Cornell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life.) Elaborating crisis is thus not only hard to do but can also perhaps never really be done. Worse, even an actual occurrence of crisis, not just an elaboration of its imminence, is no guarantee that people will fall in line with the analyses and prescriptions of environmentalists. Environmental crisis, as Ulrich Beck has argued, is uniquely susceptible to social construction, and while an actual crisis, like Samuel Johnson's hanging, can indeed concentrate the mind wonderfully, it can concentrate it on the wrong target. Revenge against an outgroup can easily substitute for remedy to ecological crisis-especially given the political machinery devoted to obscuring problems and displacing blame described in Chapter 1. Looked at critically then, crisis discourse thus suffers from a number of liabilities. First, it seems to have become a political liability almost as much as an asset. It calls up a fierce and effective opposition with its predictions; worse, its more specific predictions are all too vulnerable to refutation by events. It also exposes environmentalists to being called grim doomsters and antilife Puritan extremists. Further, concern with crisis has all too often tempted people to try to find a "total solution" to the problems involved – a phrase that, as an astute, analyst of the limitations of crisis discourse, John Barry, puts it, is all too reminiscent of the Third Reich's infamous "final solution." A total crisis of society – environmental crisis at its gravest – threatens to translate despair into inhumanist authoritarianism; more often, however, it helps keep merely dysfunctional authority in place. It thus leads, Barry suggests, to the belief that only elite-and expert-led solutions are possible. At the same time it depoliticizes people, inducing them to accept their impotence as individuals; this is something that has made many people today feel, ironically and/or passively, that since it makes no difference at all what any individual does on his or her own, one might as well go along with it. Yet another pitfall for the full and sustained elaboration of environmental crisis is, though least discussed, perhaps the most deeply ironic. A problem with deep cultural and psychological as well as social effects, it is embodied in a startlingly simple proposition: the worse one feels environmental crisis is, the more one is tempted to turn one's back on the environment. This means, preeminently, turning one's back on "nature" – on traditions of nature feeling, traditions of knowledge about nature (ones that range from organic farming techniques to the different departments of ecological science), and traditions of nature-based activism. If nature is thoroughly wrecked these days, people need to delink from nature and live in postnature – a conclusion that, as the next chapter shows, many in U.S. society drew at the end of the millennium. Explorations of how deeply "nature" has been wounded and how intensely vulnerable to and dependent on human actions it is can thus lead, ironically, to further indifference to nature-based environmental issues, not greater concern with them.
(Sally C., President and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute, “On Earth Day, Don't Buy into the Eco-Doomsaying” http://www.journalpress.com/guest-columnist/562-on-earth-day-dont-buy-into-the-eco-doomsaying-) Before we commit hundreds of billions of dollars to cleaning up the planet to fight global warming, it's important check the facts. The United States -- and indeed the rest of the world -- has made remarkable environmental progress over the last few years. Take climate change. The climate-induced catastrophes we've been conditioned to fear appear to be founded on little more than hype. According to a recent report from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, there is "no evidence" of a change "in the severity of tornadoes and severe thunderstorms" over the past few decades. The Program's report also found that over the last 150 years, the rate of U.S. hurricane landfalls has actually been declining. Indeed, many in the scientific community have begun to speak out against climate-change hysteria. Noted physicist Freeman Dyson, for example, blames "lousy science" on global warming for "distracting public attention" from "more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet." Among those other dangers is pollution. But America has achieved remarkable success in curbing pollutants, particularly airborne ones. The Environmental Protection Agency reports that the nation's total emissions of six common air pollutants -- including carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and lead -- dropped 41 percent from 1990 and 2007. And the atmospheric level of chemicals harmful to the ozone fell 12 percent from 1995 through 2006. Even Los Angeles -- the most polluted city in America -- has cleaner air. According to the American Lung Association, Los Angeles has experienced a 27 percent drop in particle pollution over the last decade. There's good news on the ground, too. Rainforests are regenerating on previously cleared land throughout the world. Scientists in Central America recently estimated that for every acre of rainforest cut down annually, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in once-barren tropical areas. In the United States, water quality is improving. Last year, researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey sampled 17 major water sources and tested for 258 different man-made chemicals, including pesticides and herbicides. The annual mean concentration of chemicals in all samples was less than the human-health benchmark. Roughly half the chemicals were not present at all in the samples tested. Cleaner air and water have contributed to the recovery of many marginalized animal communities. Human extinction inevitable: genetic drift Sci-Tech Story, 2011 (May 19, “Protein complexity could be our demise”, scitechstory.com/2011/05/19/protein-complexity-could-be-our-demise/#more-2275) Did you know that badly folded proteins could be the cause of our species’ destruction? Neither did I. I know about nuclear bombs, climate change, asteroid strike and even pandemic as possible doomsday scenarios. I’m aware of predictions that in the not too distant future mankind might be overpowered by or merge with artificial intelligence (the Singularity). I know of plenty science fiction tales of ‘gray goo’ or some other nanotechnology disaster. In fact, to be honest, I’m becoming somewhat inured to the various ideas of how human beings could cease to exist. “Yeah, yeah…tell me about it next week.” So when a couple of major science publications run a relatively brief article, Nature News 11-May-2011, paywall [The Achilles’ heel of biological complexity] and Scientific American 12 May 2011, paywall [Why Are You So Complex? Complicated Protein Interactions Evolved to Stave Off Mutations] which states: …it may be a losing battle. Genetic drift may eat away at the ability of our proteins until they are overwhelmed, leaving us a sickly species. “Species with low population are ultimately doomed by nature’s strategy of evolving complexity.” I don’t get all that stressed. Neither does the article. Yet…the story is interesting in how it casts light upon a little discussed aspect of biology, the behavior of our proteins (and the field of proteomics), and their importance to life. I’ll tell you that one factor in a doomsday scenario I was not expecting is that there are too few people. As we approach the 7 billion mark in population that seems far-fetched. However, compared to bacteria – where 7 billion of a thousand species might live in a pool of water – we don’t have a very large genetic population (i.e. gene pool). This leaves us exposed to what biologists call genetic drift. Genetic drift occurs when a genetic mutation is carried by reproduction of genes merely by chance, and is not subjected to the winnowing process of natural selection. Biologists have known about genetic drift for many decades, but its significance was a matter of controversy. It was generally thought until the 1970’s that natural selection was far more important. What it eventually boiled down to is that in large populations natural selection and genetic drift are both active and essentially balance out. In small populations, genetic drift wins by the numbers. In this game of genetic chance, human beings have a small population. This means that a detrimental genetic mutation isn’t necessarily removed from the human gene pool; in fact, it can continue to spread through genetic drift. In this case, the concern is with mutations to the ability of proteins to take required shapes and perform their required functions. Proteins are the building blocks of life. They are manufactured in every cell under the guidance of DNA. How they work depends not only on their chemical composition (huge chains of amino acids called polypeptides), but also on their shape (their configuration or folding). A protein works because it has the right chemical properties and also the right shape. When proteins ‘misfold’ bad things can happen such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and prion diseases. Normally proteins in animal cells sort of stick together (not a scientific term, I know), which has the effect of hiding or sheltering portions of the protein that are water-sensitive (generally hydrophilic, attracting water molecules). Scientists believe this evolved so that the shape of a protein would not be affected by intruding water molecules. Over the eons, however, as mutations continued to change how proteins were constructed, the protein-to-protein properties that protect the shape became increasingly complex. At some point, they began to be too complex to ‘fix’ – certain mutations changed the proteins so that water molecules could access the hydrophilic portions of the protein – and the shape would change. The most obvious example of this problem are prions, water-logged proteins so poorly constructed that they lose their shape (folding) and cause other proteins to do the same. There are many prion related diseases, such as ‘mad cow disease’ and Creuzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. Where is this leading? To some scientists this looks like a dead-end development. In humans, at least, the ability of proteins to use complex behavior to protect against genetic mutations has its limits. Random drift then ensures that mutations spread throughout the population, unchecked by natural selection. The worst case is that some prion-like mutation creates a disease that in pandemic fashion reduces the human population below the survival level. Translated, that means species extinction. Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. 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