Monthly Archives: June 2024

On Orangutans

In a college course a long time ago, I wrote a paper on orangutans. They are the smartest primates, aside from humans. They can watch humans and use tools (washing clothes, cutting, sawing, hammering, etc) and have even been known to use tools to get out of their cages. Their main limitation with tools is that they cannot make the tools. Apparently, they can even recognize themselves in mirrors.

Controversial Opinion

I was wondering about this question today: should we worry about another global ice age? For a few million years, there have been regular ice ages, about every 100,000 years. Incidentally, a few factors mean that we may not see another for a long time, a delay to this normal process. As it turns out, man-made global warming might actually be delaying the onset of another ice age. And while, certainly, there are many other negative impacts today of this process, this particular effect hadn’t occurred to me. In a weird way, humans have lived so as to make the earth more hospitable for themselves (in at least this one way).

(Well, technically, we’re in an ice age, but in ice ages there are glacial and interglacial periods, and we’re in an interglacial period, with glacial periods being the much colder periods we normally associate with the term ice age.)

https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/will-there-be-another-ice-age