Butterfly wing clap explains mystery of flight
sciencedaily.com
sciencedaily.com
What I realize now is that, contrary from what I would assume just looking at butterflies in the field flying around, is that their wings are pretty flexible during flight, and this is used to direct the air flow to produce force in desired direction (upward swing -> force air behind -> move forward; downward swing -> force air below -> lift up).
I don't know if my kids have ever seen a butterfly. Scary, considering I'm from a Manhattan slum, and I still saw plenty of them (and moths, and ticks - which my brother picked up in a city park) growing up.
We are in the process of birthing, bootstrapping, giving autonomy to beings who are relative to us in power as we are to insects. We can barely even form a concept of just how much of us they can see, and to what extent they know our thoughts and actions.
And we are training, teaching these beings how to behave with our own behavior. Just as with children, "do as I say, not as I do", is not very effective past a certain point.
Not that what we say is that much better than what we do. Most people consider insects and even most mammals to be largely irrelevant, and not worth considering in most decisions, dumb weak automatons, out-evolved and bottom of the food chain, worth thinking about only if they provide some useful resource.
Our general policy of disregard and often outright extermination without cause is, beyond appalling, is downright frightful when extrapolated to its effects on ourselves in the future...
For those saying butterflies still exist: Yes, they still exist. But I've yet to talk to any person who pays attention to insects and nature, who's lived in the same place for a while, who has not reported a decline in insects of all kinds, from ladybugs, to butterflies, to lightning bugs, to our long-time symbiotic friends the mosquitoes, beetles, even cockroaches. Not just a decline, but a change from "used to be swarming with e.g. ladybugs once a year, to, they still show up in some numbers.
We're like a kid left home alone for the summer a little too young and irresponsible just wrecking the house, putting holes in the walls, letting the tub run over, shorting out the electric, leaving the fridge open, throwing food onto the walls, without anyone to stop us.
I was with you up until there. In what way is our relationship with mosquitoes symbiotic?
I can't reply to this query quickly, give me a bit.
However, my understanding is that there are no species that feed exclusively or even mostly on human-biting mosquitoes. I've been told the environmental impact of human-biting mosquitoes going extinct would be minor, though, dramatically reducing human morbidity and mortality in some poorer countries would have indirect environmental impact.
As any software maintainers will tell you, even with a system merely several years in existence, anytime you provide different inputs you have not tried before, e.g. taking mosquitoes out of the equation completely, you increase the chance of different, unexpected, output.
This is general theory, but I've come across quite a bit of research suggesting that all the parasites we've been living with for millenia are crucial to priming and functioning of our immune system.
I haven't seen anything about mosquitoes specifically yet, but I've seen it for leeches, lice, and worms. Mosquitoes are even more prevalent in our biome, so even more likely to be essential.
We did not grow up in a sterile world, all these other beings have been growing up alongside us this whole time.
Overstatement.
You're right that there is new information out there, but lived experience puts a pretty modest upper bound on how crucial it can be.
I'm not going to yearn for the good old days of ringworms, tapeworms, and god knows what else. I'll wait until either someone figures out how to put the good parts in a vaccine or a replication scandal proves the whole thing to be BS in the first place. Yeah, there's a tiny chance that in the meantime I'll suffer an autoimmune disorder that I otherwise wouldn't have -- but I won't have parasites or the very real consequences that they bring to the table, and in my book, that's not just a small net win, that's a big net win.
I've heard that too. I'm pretty sure we really don't know. Our understanding of entire ecosystems isn't that complete, by a long way.
We are nowhere near that. Just getting AI to perform at the level of an actual insect would be a huge achievement (but then, how would we know we're there?), scaling from that will require a whole bunch of big breakthroughs in a whole bunch of fields.
But I don't think we'll have to worry at all about a hypothetical AI singularity if we don't get a much better handle on our impact on the world we are a part of, and quick. Because we're in the midst of a mass extinction of geological dimensions, and if our limited understanding of past extinction events is any guide, this will get ugly way beyond any scenario I've seen discussed in the mainstream, and possibly quite abruptly. We're not prepared, and we're hugely vulnerable.
Yet we, as a collective, don't seem to "get" this beyond some very abstract recognition that most people brush aside as alarmism or "can't do anything about it anyway". I've talked to a whole bunch of people who, in essence, are kinda happy with all this; mostly warmer weather, less nasty insects, what's not to like? To me, that's wayyy scary.
I think if you try to add up in your mind all the interconnected datacenters, cameras, and industry in the world, you can easily arrive at something at least insect-like, definitely bacterium-like.
In the late 1980s/early 1990s, I remember the local nature center giving a demonstration on their work to tag and study Monarchs using small stickers on their wings.
It hard for me to fathom that Monarch butterflies are likely to be declared at-risk soon.