It's merely a future that is much further out. Scientists and doctors aren't even close to being able to interface man made technology to nerve endings and brain waves in a way that could compete or enhance the natural. The same is true with AI and machine learning that is supposedly due to destroy humanity any minute now. It's all a bunch of hype.
I quit subscribing to Popular Mechanics and the like many years ago because they were always so hyped with the next big breakthrough that never happened. It was science fiction (which I do love to read, but not when it is proclaimed as reality).
People buy into these cults and do bizarre things like this all the time, people want so badly to believe the comic books.
The narcissism of man is on full display with things like this. Do you realize just how little we understand about anything? Any field of science, medicine, exploration, psychology, philosophy. All whose pillars of truth are overturned regularly. I wonder why people are so stupid as to believe the next thing the surgeon general recommends them to eat or not eat, just to have that completely changes 5 years later. People basing their child rearing on psychologists whose studies cannot be reproduces almost 90% of the time.
Here is my philosophy. Wither you believe in creation or evolution, look back to learn how our bodies should stay healthy. The things we should eat and not eat. The exercise we should do. Look back before man started screwing things up (I'm talking hunter gatherers here). Use common sense when taking care of the planet. Look how interdependent everything is and don't screw that up.
Use your head, don't listen to someone else's hype. They are just trying to make a buck or gain power and influence.
The things that get hyped when they're fiction stop being hype when they become real. I used to watch Beyond 2000 and marvel at the tantaluzing future it promised me: wireless phone calls using a grid of "cellular" microtowers, vision corrective surgery with tiny cuts made into the cornea, athletic shoes that provide extra cushioning with small gas-filled chambers in the heel.
Cellphones, LASIK, and Air Jordans are just part of the fabric of everyday reality now. We've seen their benefits but also their drawbacks. As they became widespread consumer products and services, not just experiments in a lab someplace, thwy lost their sheen and became the new normal.
But we still live in wonderful times, even if we choose not to see it.
My question is this. Why would pesticides on the farms that wipe out a lot of these moths be causing a problem?
The bears were there before the farms. If the farms are creating a lot of new moths that weren't otherwise there, wouldn't the pesticides be bringing things back into equilibrium?
I am really against using pesticides and I try to eat only organic products, but I am just wondering why no one else seems to be talking about this. Those mass quantities of moths being there isn't natural in the first place.
The bears were there before the farms. If the farms are creating a lot of new moths that weren't otherwise there,
Another possibility is the moths were there before the farms as well, and the land they lived on now happens to have been turned into farmland. If that is the case than it's not as likely anymore that pesticides would bring an equilibrium. Maybe there were even more moths before it the land was one huge monoculture. (just spraying ideas here, I don't know what kind of land moths prefer nor if it really is a monoculture there)
I'd rather know why people disagree than see my post silently downvoted, so I'll elaborate.
The idea of a "natural equilibrium" or some such is mostly a misconception. It's a misleading way of thinking especially in the long term. Conditions change, organisms adapt to the changes, but changing one condition of many back to a previous state (e.g. by getting rid of moths) doesn't mean that organisms that have adapted to that condition will somehow "roll back" their adaptation. Instead, the new change will necessitate a new adaptation.
In this case, whitebark pines have been a major source of food for yellowstone bears, but have been in decline due to mountain pine beetles. Their season begins earlier and earlier as the air temperature rises, and their generations grow larger and larger, their life spans longer and longer.
This means that if you wipe out the moths, bears won't realistically go back to eating what has historically been their diet. Instead, they will have to adapt in some other way, for example by migrating up the mountains where it is colder (less beetles), start harassing humans, eat some other abundant bug etc.
Bears are good at foraging, though, and will seemingly eat whatever they find, so they may just find another source of food near their habitats when the moths are gone.
Bears' other food sources have been in decline due to climate change, and they have adapted to the new conditions. There is no natural equilibrium to somehow return to when the moths are gone, just the continuation of what is actually a pretty chaotic process that doesn't naturally tend to a particular state.
I quit subscribing to Popular Mechanics and the like many years ago because they were always so hyped with the next big breakthrough that never happened. It was science fiction (which I do love to read, but not when it is proclaimed as reality).
People buy into these cults and do bizarre things like this all the time, people want so badly to believe the comic books.
The narcissism of man is on full display with things like this. Do you realize just how little we understand about anything? Any field of science, medicine, exploration, psychology, philosophy. All whose pillars of truth are overturned regularly. I wonder why people are so stupid as to believe the next thing the surgeon general recommends them to eat or not eat, just to have that completely changes 5 years later. People basing their child rearing on psychologists whose studies cannot be reproduces almost 90% of the time.
Here is my philosophy. Wither you believe in creation or evolution, look back to learn how our bodies should stay healthy. The things we should eat and not eat. The exercise we should do. Look back before man started screwing things up (I'm talking hunter gatherers here). Use common sense when taking care of the planet. Look how interdependent everything is and don't screw that up.
Use your head, don't listen to someone else's hype. They are just trying to make a buck or gain power and influence.