This particular post isn't about parasites, but it is interesting thinking about what a mature human civilization might look like, oh, a million years from now. Since parasites tend to accumulate as ecosystems age, if humans continue on our current trend of making ourselves an essential part of Earth's biosphere (along with things like ants and the various descendents of cyanobacteria and their hosts), our descendents are going to be the host for a lot of truly fascinating parasites, all of which will exploit us despite, and sometimes because of, our best efforts.
]]>Did they all magically forget how to use solar power (assuming you can even burn through all the available fissile material that fast)?
]]>And the solar power limit only exists when your industrial base is trapped down in a planet's gravity well. If you can hang collecting stations in planetary or solar orbit, you can generate arbitrary amounts of electricity.
Humanity currently using about 4E12 watts. Our use for solar power is limited, since terrestrial insolation is only about 1E16-1E17 watts - a lot more than we're using, but there are process losses and we still need to run a planetary biosphere on that. (Contrary to what a corporation would tell you, life support is not optional.) On the other hand, total solar output is around 4E26 watts, so you could run - or melt - a planetary civilization with a tiny fraction of that.
]]>Scott, Agreed, but the problem with climbing out of a gravity well is concentrating enough energy in a small-enough place (e.g. a rocket, or even a launch laser) to boost something to orbit or beyond. That problem never goes away. While I theoretically love the idea of beanstalks, I do believe that a beanstalk would be the gutbucket god plays bluegrass on (here I'm thinking that "tiny" vibrations on a cable tens of thousands of kilometers long are horizontal swings of a kilometer or more while you're spending a week traveling up, not counting twists).
As for fission power, even discounting totally reasonable NIMBY protests (San Onofre is in my local grid, and it appears that the protesters had a better grasp of the plant's engineering flaws than did the plants' PR flacks, because some ex-engineers were among the protesters), the central problem with reactors is what I stated above: they last for a few decades, and they generate a lot of very hazardous, very long-lived waste, whatever their design. Were the plants built to produce for thousands or tens of thousands of years, I wouldn't particularly object, but they're not. Their working life is less than mine, and that makes them unworkable in the long run.
]]>"The bacterium Vibrio fischeri is a squid terraformer. Although it can live independently in seawater, it also colonises the body of the adorable Hawaiian bobtail squid. The squid nourishes the bacteria with nutrients and the bacteria, in turn, act as an invisibility cloak. They produce a dim light that matches the moonlight shining down from above, masking the squid’s silhouette from predators watching from below. With its light-emitting microbes, the squid becomes less visible."
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/08/19/how-to-terraform-a-squid/
]]>I think it has crossed the line from self-defence and become a major parasite on human beings.
]]>Human endogenous retroviruses
For me they beautifully underline just how ubiquitous parasitism is.
]]>(And if you're reading web pages in an environment where grep is the easiest way to check if a phrase has already occurred, I'll salute you for being hardcore.)
]]>Imagine a virus that infects through wounds in the skin, then finds the nearest neuron and slowly (over months) transport itself to the brain where it begins to modify it. In simpler vertebrates it modifies their behaviour to be more aggresive, while in more intelligent ones (like humans) it also starts a process of dementia which sometimes even make us more likely to bite. At the same time the salivary glands are infected so that when the victim eventually bites someone else there is a high concentration of viruses that gets in direct contact with the wound and the cycle starts all over. The rest of the host i left unaffected.
Good thing Rabies isnt more effective or we would've had something pretty close to a zombie apocalypse at our hands a long time ago.
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