Non's days of do-goodery may be drawing to a close...

[The Dharma Bum]

On the other hand, scientific evidence points to the conclusion that life is a byproduct of the process of entropy. In other words matter and energy has organized itself according to the dictates of the physical forces that order the universe in order to reach the most efficient way to release stored energy and degrade it. The result is the process of life.

If this is truly the ultimate purpose of all life then a valid conclusion to draw would be that expelling as much stored energy as possible in the form of heat is a good thing, and that is quite simply the reason the human species is the way it is. Wasting stored energy and destroying other organizations of matter is what we are meant to do so we do it.

consumerism, energy depletion, and global warming are "right" on a cosmic level and that is why it happens

vote for sarah palin, the universe depends on it

[The Dharma Bum]

be fruitful and multiply

[The Dharma Bum]

[The Dharma Bum]

This is the rule of Dharma

[John Galt]

[The Dharma Bum]

Fleas from rats swimming ashore from herring boats off of the coast of the new world several hundred years before Columbus actually landed are what they think caused the epidemic that wiped out 90%+ of the population. So the time lines fit quite well, and the science behind it is sound.

Hence the source

[John Galt]

[The Dharma Bum]

There was sporadic European contact with the new world since around the 11th century from explorers, fisherman, whalers and others and contact doesn't mean they necessarily landed, just some vector for disease was transmitted.

There is no doubt that 90 percent of the Amerindian population was wiped out by some unknown epidemic the time European settlers started coming. The largest city on the planet in the 12th century was Cahokia in the Mississippi River valley. This urban civilization was gone for over a century by the time Europeans had arrived.

[Spider]

Ya, but they probably collapsed on their own. Lacked the technologies needed for sustained urbanization. (And if you read about Cahokia a little, you find that "urban" in the European sense isn't terribly applicable. There are pretty serious keystone technologies that allow people to live at such densities without snuffing themselves out that they simply didn't have access to. We went over this last time you brought it up.) No reason to think it was European disease that did for them. The population levels the Europeans found, in addition to the centuries it took for the Mesoamericans to develop such complex societies...no way the population was wiped out that early. The Spanish would have been pretty bored to find everything cut off at the knees centuries earlier.

The theorizing above is interesting, but its theorizing regardless. Occam's Razor and all that jazz. Presenting it as some sort of accepted truth is pretty far out. Its just a neat set of ideas.

[The Comrade]

there are like five current books on my shelf right now that back up everything dharma has suggested.