Things humans do that monkeys don’t do

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This presentation will lead you to appreciate some of the behavioural differences between us and our closest cousins on the evolutionary scale, monkeys.

We will deal mainly with what humans do - that monkeys don’t dodon’t do and finish with one striking similarity.

What qualifies as something that humans do that monkeys don’t do?

THE ADOPTION OF A PROCESS OR THE BUILDING OF INFRASTRUCTURE THAT: Requires petroleum or a large amount of inputs Will be irreversible once energy becomes rare Will be inoperable without petroleum Will cause irreparable future harm to the environment

and perhaps to society Our descendents will curse us for

If you have prior understanding of:

Peak oilCarrying capacity

Exponential growthThe I=TAP formula

Overshoot and dieoff

you will better appreciate the irony of what humans do that monkeys don’t do.

 

In recent years, the modern human has acquired a fondness for bottled water:

Bottled water:

Not guaranteed to be any healthier than tap water Can cost up to 10,000 times more than tap water Transporting bottled water long distances involves burning

massive quantities of fossil fuels Nearly a quarter of all bottled water

crosses international borders to reach consumers Making bottles to meet Americans' demand

for bottled water requires enough energy to fuel 100,000 U.S. cars for a year

In a number of places there is better regulation governing the quality of tap water than bottled water

Adds more garbage to landfill

http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2006/Update51.htm

Yet, it is so easy to avoid:

Have we become so lazy that we can’t fill a jug or a reusable bottle?

Would a monkey build a Ski Hill in the desert, knowing that oil will run out???

The United Arab Emirates have more money than they know what to do with. So what do they do? Have a look at the following pictures.

Ski hill under construction

Eureka! It’s completed! Ain’t it modern looking?

Actually, it’s really funny! Snow in the scorching heat of the desert!

Complete with chairlift and lights

Right down to the snow-covered pine trees!

But that wasn’t enough!!!

Now they’re building the largest artificial island in the world to

turn into waterfront lots.

Enormous vacuum pipes transfer gravel from the sea bottom onto newly made mounds to form the islands.

How about the world’s largest swimming pool?

Sur la côte Pacifique, à 130 kilomètres de Santiago du Chili, se dresse San Alfonso del Mar. Plage de sable, restaurant, salles de cinéma et boîtes de nuit : ce complexe touristique créé en 2007 pourrait ressembler à n'importe quelle station balnéaire. A ceci près qu'il entoure la plus grande piscine du monde. Découvrez-le.

San Alfonso del Mar, Santiago de Chile:1 kilometre long, 2,5 million litres of water, covering 20 acres

Chile can’t be accused of thinking small!

Another nail in the coffin of biodiversityand sustainability, huh?

« Mother Nature doesn’t know how to do things right », seems to think Fernando Fischmann, the creator of this monstrosity

The Biggest Private Yacht!!!

In 2003, the launch of Paul Allen's 127m (416ft) "Octopus" secured its number one position as the world's largest yacht.

Microsoft's "accidental billionaire" Paul Allen - worth US$20 billion according to Forbes, the third richest man in America and 7th in the world - owns two other monster yachts such as Tatoosh ranked 3rd in the World in 2003.

Octopus cost Allen over US$200 million and has Permanent crew of 60, including several former Navy Seals. It has two helicopters, seven boats, a 10-man submarine and a remote controlled vehicle for crawling on the ocean floor. The submarine has the capacity to sleep eight for up to two weeks underwater.

On average, owners must spend a minimum of 10 percent of the purchase price every year to keep these yachts in good working condition and cover crew salaries. Therefore “Octopus” which cost Allen US$200 million requires a US$20 million annual budget.

Have a look at the following photos.

Monkeys don’t sail, so they might not even think of this one…

The paradox is that it is perfectly rational for Paul Allen to indulge in this kind of luxury.

Before passing judgement on Mr. Allen, lets consider this. If he deprived himself of his toys it would make not an iota of difference in the onset of the oil peak.

And when the ramifications of peak oil send the price of the barrel of petroleum through the roof, Mr. Allen will still have plenty of money to secure the supply he will need.

So why should he make a sacrifice when everybody else is living it up?

Here’s the world’s tallest building

Monkeys like heights, but not to the extent that humans do.

The Taipei Tower

The Taipei 101 tower, Taipei, Taiwan, achieved its full 508-meter (1,674 feet) height with the addition of a huge metal spike capping the 101-floor structure.

The 60-meter spire pushed the tower's height well above the 452-meter high twin towers in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur.

The designers of the Taipei 101 tower say it has been built to withstand typhoons and earthquakes, both of which have struck the Taiwan capital in recent years.

Taiwan, which straddles an active fault line of the western Pacific regularly experiences earthquakes.

In September 1999 a powerful quake of magnitude hit the capital, killing more than 2,400 people and destroying or damaging over 50,000 buildings.

The architects behind the new Taipei 101 tower say it will easily ride out a quake of similar strength, or an even more powerful one.

The Taipei Tower

Lets assume the engineers are right and that the tower will never fall.

The problem is that after Peak Oil this building will become useless, unless we can harness a few tens of thousand monkeys to ride an exercise wheel connected to a generator to provide it with power.

World’s largest cruise ship

The largest cruise ship in the world is under construction just a few years before global oil production peaks!

Project Genesis

Not ugly as cruise ships go, this future white elephant will displace 222,000 tons and will carry 5,400 passengers.

It will measure 360 metres and have a freeboard of no less than 65 metres in height!

She will generate 1,800,000 litres of fresh water and 35 tonnes of ice every day.

For the amusement of its passengers, it will provide an ice skating rink, rock climbing walls, a water park and an on-board surfing system.

It is being built in the Turku ship yards of Finland at a cost of $1.1 billion U.S.

One wonders what the investors think this monster will run on when oil runs out.

Of course, what they are thinking is “I can recoup my investment and make a killing in ten years”

The world’s largest passenger aircraft

The A380 may seem like a good idea now.

But what will we do with the carcases when the tourism industry goes to the dogs after peak oil?

Terminal five - Heathrow

Spanking new! Inaugurated by the Queen in March 2008

Grow grow grow as usual in spite of the peak oil alarm bells!!!

60 million passengers per year in 2008 – how many will there be twenty years from now?

Big Box Shopping Centres

Without gasoline, how will we drive to the big box stores?

After peak oil, what will we do with these empty stores? Will we have enough resources to disassemble them and return the land to agriculture?

Dismantling of railways

Putatively for saving money

The Canadian government decided to trash the future of transportation by dismantling thousands of kilometres of railway tracks throughout Canada.

Scrapping streetcars

In the 1950s the majority of Canadian municipal councillors, thinking of themselves as “progressive”, dismantled their streetcar systems.

Why?

This environmentally sound method of public transit was trashed in favour of noisy, smelly busses that depended on petroleum.

One factor that influenced the decision was the notion that streetcars were old fashioned and busses modern.

Curtain walls

Built because they were pretty…

Curtain walls

Curtain walls are windows that form an entire wall. They don’t open and therefore don’t allow the tenant to control air quality naturally.

Once energy becomes expensive, how will we heat, cool and ventilate buildings made this way?

Irrigation

On the surface, using irrigation for growing food or useful products such as cotton might sound like a good idea. But look at what it’s done to the Aral Sea…

The Aral Sea:

an inland body of fresh water turned into a salty desert.

The Aral Sea

Irrigation with fossil water

We are using groundwater faster than it’s replenishing itself.

Ogallala aquifer in central-southern USA

Irrigation with fossil water

We have artificially increased food production through an unsustainable reliance on underground water that was sequestered in aquifers millions of years ago.

But when those sources run dry, the global society will have to grow less food with what falls from the heavens.

Draining wetlands

Draining wetlands

The idea is to replace the cropland usurped by urbanization and to create new building lots.

Drawbacks:

Loss of ecosystems and biodiversity

Destruction of replenishment of groundwater sources

Antibiotics in feed and water

Factory farming is enhanced by the addition of antibiotics to animal feed and water

The downside?

The few bacteria that survive inside the gut of a pig on antibiotics do so because they have natural resistance to the antibiotic. Then the surviving bacteria reproduce and have a built-in resistance to the particular antibiotic that was used.

Overuse of antibiotics therefore is responsible for the creation of resistant strains of bacteria

The downside?

We are shooting ourselves in the collective foot by this misuse of these former wonder drugs.

Every year current antibiotics become less effective at dealing with bacterial infections.

We are now talking about flesh eating disease and super bugs, the result of human greed (for cheaper meat).

Do scientists think of all the consequences of their research?

I certainly didn’t when I spent most of my career helping to develop the science of embryo transfer, known as ET.

This was me when I was muchyounger and had more hair

It was only ten years later that I began to understand that the way we were using this technology was going to lead dairy farming to disaster one day.

Cows of excellent genetic potential (good milkers) are used as donors. ET cows are treated with hormones to

make them produce a large number of ova which are fertilized by artificial insemination with semen from genetically superior bulls.

The cow’s reproductive tract is subsequently flushed to recover the embryos.

The microscopic embryos are transferred individually into healthy cows of inferior pedigree. The recipient cows carry the calves to term.

The resulting ET calves possess all the great genes of the donor cow and her sire.

7-day old cow embryosready for implanting

The making of the super cow

A city slicker could be forgiven for thinking that tweaking genetics to make cows give more milk is a good idea.

The making of the super cow

This is what scientists have been very successful at doing for the past 70 years. And ET technology helped speed up the process.

Whereas cows used to give 20 kg a day of milk, the average cow now gives 50 kg a day and some up to 100 kg a day!

The problem is…

The concept of GIGO, “Garbage In – Garbage Out” applies to cows as well as databases.

In order to squeeze massive amounts of milk out of cows you need to cram massive amounts of inputs into them…

…and these inputs can’t be produced without…you’ve guessed it…

…feed that is high in protein and energy

as well as the best quality hay and silage

fed in a controlled way, according to the individual’s milk output

Oil, of course !!!

ET technology is not inherently bad

Embryo transfer technology itself is actually fairly low tech, as it requires little in the way of equipment and resources. A veterinarian can carry it out with the standard equipment in his clinic.

What’s wrong is the purpose it is What’s wrong is the purpose it is being used for.being used for.

We could be using this procedure for creating a cow that can produce milk on a lower grade diet, such as grass.

Grass grows without the high inputs required for grain and in the summer the cow can harvest the crop herself

without the use of diesel engines.

What about reproductive services for humans?

With a world that already has four times more humans than it can support, why in heaven’s name would a society encourage in vitro fertilization?

Men and women are genetically programmed to do everything in their power to spread their genes.

The answermay be that:

Are we consumers or are we consumers?

Here’s a typical neighbourhood in the city of Gatineau, the neighbour of Ottawa, Canada’s capital

One house out of two has its own swimming pool that is used an average of perhaps ten times in the year (the summer season in Gatineau is short!)

Are we consumers or are we consumers?

What’s odd about this picture? – Notice the blue spots in the back yards? They are swimming pools.

Why not share?

Instead of everybody having their own small swimming pool that needs maintenance, why not have one large neighbourhood pool that everybody can share?

Are we consumers or are we consumers?

CRYOGENIC PRESERVATION OF THE DEAD

The new wave is for people who die prematurely of an incurable disease to have their bodies frozen with the purpose of reviving them in the future when a cure is found for the disease that did them in.

CRYOGENIC PRESERVATION OF THE DEAD

Aside from the practical and ethical questions this raises, we must consider the question of energy. A cryogenic container loses about 1% of its liquid nitrogen per day. Therefore it takes a constant input of energy to keep a corpse in a frozen state.

CRYOGENIC PRESERVATION OF THE DEAD

A rich person could put money into a trust to maintain his body frozen in perpetuity after his death. The trust would use the interest revenue for buying the energy needed to produce the necessary liquid nitrogen.

Il other words, a stiff could legally steal energy from future generations forever.

Kill your baby's life support systems for a little convenience?

For hundreds of thousands of years babies have been defecating and mothers have found a variety of ways of dealing with the “curdled milk”, from licking it up to sequestering it with natural absorbents.Suddenly, a mere 40 years ago, somebody got the bright idea that making disposable diapers made from paper and selling them would be a way to become very rich.

Kill your baby's life support systems?

The idea caught on like wildfire. Mothers and fathers alike started buying these very convenient devices. Within a few years the large makers of the old-fashioned reusable diapers discontinued making them.

It was much more lucrative to cut down trees, debark the trunks, mash up the wood fibres and separate them with strong chemicals, dump the resulting wastes into the waterways and into the atmosphere, roll the paste into paper, line the paper with petroleum-derived plastic, attach little pieces of Velcro and elastic, package the finished product in yet another plastic wrapper and transport the product to distributors and then to stores so they get bought by the parents who get there in their SUVs.

Kill your baby's life support systems?

So from the moment of his birth the modern baby unwittingly joins the ranks of the world’s worst polluters.

Kill your baby's life support systems?

The fact that parents are destroying the very foundation of all life on Earth for a little convenience seems to go right over their heads and furthermore, seems to be the acceptable social norm.

Just as we are about to reach peak oil…

The space shuttle is ferrying construction materials to complete building the international space station.

International space station under construction

The space age has been a lot of fun and a great learning experience…

But without oil and natural gas we won’t be able to create the fuels and necessary infrastructure to carry on space travel.

Just as hopeless as government-backed space travel…

… is private space travel. Sir Richard Branson’s dream will will be a monumental flop when energy becomes rare.

Just when natural gas has peaked in North America…

You find with your gas bill a very strange sort of solicitation…

When we’re running out of natural gas, why is your natural gas supplier encouraging you to find new uses for the resource?

And then you scratch your head when you find out they’ve just moved their headquarters into a brand new building!!!

Supersizing education…

We had plenty of petroleum, so why not?

By centralizing schools we were able to provide more services to our children: cafeterias, gymnasiums, swimming pools, libraries - all amenities that didn’t even exist when I was a child (but then, that was prehistorical -- almost six decades ago!)

It was just a matter of boarding up the small, local schools and building mega sized ones.

It didn’t matter that our kids needed to travel in petroleum-combusting, polluting busses, without seat belts, crammed three to a seat, for two hours a day, while their parents each drove their SUVs in opposite directions across town to work.

It was the expedient thing to do.

How will we transport the kids to their mega-schools in an

oil-challenged world?

And on the following page, you will find something else monkeys don’t do…

Smartass humans have invented a weapon capable of killing of all six+ billion of us!

Since we are a warring species, it is only a matter of time before some wiseguy decides to launch one of these suckers onto a neighbour he doesn’t like. And then we might all fry.

Nuclear explosion

Come to think of it…

We’re not much smarter than our distant cousins dangling from branches, aren’t we?

Albert Einstein signed a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt urging that the bomb be built and later admitted it had been a mistake..

One of the stupidest inventions ever

Mr. Crapper’s flush toilet

A modern version of Crapper’s toilet

A stupid invention

Monkeys don’t flush their crap into rivers – at least, not intentionally

An absurd invention that took on like wildfire

Since the implementation of Crapper’s idea trillions of pounds of precious organic material from our daily bowel movements has been flushed into our waterways, silting up our rivers and polluting the oceans…

…and furthermore, depriving our cropland of rich compost.

A stupid invention universally accepted

In other words, we take organic material off our fields, rendering the soil less productive, and we put this material down the drain in the form of feces, polluting the very water people downstream have to use as their drinking water supply and we lose this resource forever.

Is this intelligent????

Another superlative: F-A-S-T-E-S-T…

The current (October, 2008) land speed record (LSR) for an earth-bound motor vehicle is 763 mph, which was set by Andy Green behind the wheel of the Thrust SSC back in 1997. That car was designed by Richard Noble, among others, and he and his driver are teaming up again to build a new supersonic car (SSC) to shatter the old record on its way to a new LSR of 1,000 mph. The new car is called the Bloodhound Project, a curious name since "speed" doesn't readily come to mind when thinking about that particular breed of canine, but whatever. The new Bloodhound SSC will be powered by three engines: a hybrid rocket, Eurojet EJ200 jet engine and 800bhp V12 engine, the latter of which will pull the vehicle around at low speeds and act as a starter motor - the world's most powerful starter motor - for the jet engine. The car's design is also completely different from that of the Thrust SSC, which Green and Noble used to set the current LSR. That car had two outboard jet engines, but in order to reach speeds of Mach 1.4 on the ground, the Bloodhound SSC will use a narrower fuselage that's been aerodynamically optimized to safely travel at speeds approaching 1,000 mph. Since this is an engineering exercise, the Brit-based Bloodhound team will gear up to their ultimate goal by scheduling successive runs to reach 800 mph in 2009, 900 mph in 2010 and finally 1,000 mph in 2011. You can read more about the car from Noble himself at the project's website, or check out the current design mockup in our gallery below. See the following pictures.

The Bloohound SSC

When is fastest fast enough?

And now, before terminating, I will tell you about the similarity between monkeys and humans I mentioned at the beginning of this presentation:

Just as a monkey hanging from a tree lets his poop drop wherever it may…

Humans do likewise…

…they let their crap fall wherever it may!!!

Are we really smarter than monkeys?

In conclusion:

The intent of this spoof on human-monkey differences is to underline humanity’s lack of foresight and planning.

We live day-to-day or election-to-election with no regard for future generations.

I find this paradoxical, since the most precious thing in our lives is the happiness and welfare of our children.

End