Ice doom of DOOM!

[james_davis_nicoll]

The previous ice age lasted some 110,000 years and ended about 11,000 years ago. In other words, some 4,000 generations of humans knew of nothing but harsh winds and eternal snows. The apparently "normal'' periods between ice ages, like the present one, have averaged between 8,000 and 12,000 years. In short, the next ice age is overdue. The key question is when it will come. Can space be colonised by a sufficiently large population so that, when the next ice age strikes, it will not threaten the survival of the race?

Comments

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

They do say you never convince scientists with the contrary opinion, you just have to wait for them to die off. I recall reading that there were still scientists who didn't believe in atoms late into the nineteenth century.

Plate tectonics didn't really become a thing until the seventies. I did a geology O-level at school in 1969 and the idea wasn't even mentioned then. About three years later, the BBC did a Nigel Calder science special, Restless Earth, that popularised the idea. (I still have the tie-in book.) I imagine it would have taken at least 20 years for the old guard to die off.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Ernst Mach held out against atomism into the 20th century. There was a kind of extreme positivism that regarded anything not directly observable (for some value of "directly observable") as a hypothesis to be avoided. The standard histories usually say that Einstein's explanation of Brownian motion in 1905 was a major turning point.

[calcinations.livejournal.com]

I disagree- from what I was told at uni and have read subsequently, Plate tectonics was the solution to the problems that they had been worrying about since the early 20th century, so by the late 60's it was agreed upon, except for stupid people who held out longer. Also school textbooks are often decades behind actual up to date research. Don't confuse public understanding of the topic with the actual professional researchers understanding.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

My impression from being a geology major at Caltech in the 1990s, plus further reading, was that plate tectonics was adopted quite quickly. It's a good case of how a "paradigm shifted" *without* people dying off. People resisted the old evidence of continental drift, for lack of a mechanism, then seafloor spreading data came in, and they went and looked harder for a mechanism. (That's probably simplifying work that had been going on in parallel.)

The accelerating universe went from not even being a candidate idea to accepted pretty quickly, with two teams reporting the supporting observations.

I have the impression that quantum mechanics was adopted pretty fast as well, apart from Einstein, but then all the names you hear with it are young, so I dunno.