Can you expand on that? I hadn’t heard of it before, and the wiki article isn’t much more than a stub. What are the fundamental questions, and what difference would it make if we knew the answers?
There are a lot of kinds of plants and animals. They interact. Their current and future distribution makes a difference, and it takes both general principles and detailed local knowledge to have any idea of what’s going on.
Discordant Harmonies is about the idea of balance and stability of Nature, and that it’s just something people made up. There isn’t a reliable pattern of succession when a forest is destroyed, and that cute pattern of opposing sine curves between predators and prey has never been observed in the real world, not even for microbes in a test tube.
Microbes are smaller and more numerous and weirder and faster changing than plants and animals, and people have done much less to observe them in the wild, for tolerably obvious reasons. Microbes make a difference to disease, to digestion, to soil formation, and probably to a number of things I haven’t thought of.
It would be very cool transhumanism if people could watch bacteria (probably with machine augmentation, I suspect there would be optical problems, and I’m sure there would be information processing problems) as easily as they watch birds.
I’ve actually been thinking about this, rather casually, for a couple of decades. For one thing, this kind of understanding would be necessary for a long-term closed environment, like for a large space colony. Also, it would be useful, like a seed bank, in restoring the earth if there was a sufficiently bad catastrophe.
Are you aware of bioreacter/chemostat research? If so, could you suggest some “best of breed” review articles or a textbook on the subject? I know of the research but haven’t read into its literature, and would appreciate an educated pointer :-)
Microbe ecology. It’s a huge subject, and we’ve barely started to understand it.
Can you expand on that? I hadn’t heard of it before, and the wiki article isn’t much more than a stub. What are the fundamental questions, and what difference would it make if we knew the answers?
There are a lot of kinds of plants and animals. They interact. Their current and future distribution makes a difference, and it takes both general principles and detailed local knowledge to have any idea of what’s going on.
Discordant Harmonies is about the idea of balance and stability of Nature, and that it’s just something people made up. There isn’t a reliable pattern of succession when a forest is destroyed, and that cute pattern of opposing sine curves between predators and prey has never been observed in the real world, not even for microbes in a test tube.
Microbes are smaller and more numerous and weirder and faster changing than plants and animals, and people have done much less to observe them in the wild, for tolerably obvious reasons. Microbes make a difference to disease, to digestion, to soil formation, and probably to a number of things I haven’t thought of.
It would be very cool transhumanism if people could watch bacteria (probably with machine augmentation, I suspect there would be optical problems, and I’m sure there would be information processing problems) as easily as they watch birds.
At least, that’s what I mean by microbe ecology.
I’ve actually been thinking about this, rather casually, for a couple of decades. For one thing, this kind of understanding would be necessary for a long-term closed environment, like for a large space colony. Also, it would be useful, like a seed bank, in restoring the earth if there was a sufficiently bad catastrophe.
Are you aware of bioreacter/chemostat research? If so, could you suggest some “best of breed” review articles or a textbook on the subject? I know of the research but haven’t read into its literature, and would appreciate an educated pointer :-)