Not everyone was so sanguine. The New York Times made the stakes clear to readers. Democrats in Congress jumped on Sputnik as an opportunity to score political points while pushing for more funding for research, education, and space exploration. Republicans had used fears of communism to win public support and hostility toward racial integration to divide Democrats. Lyndon Johnson, then majority leader in the Senate, used Sputnik to earn a national following on his way to a presidential run.
Let us do what ever it takes. Mennen Williams wrote a poem lampooning the golf-loving president for his muted response to Sputnik. You say on fairway and on rough The Kremlin knows it all, We hope our golfer knows enough To get us on the ball. Making the situation worse, a month after Sputnik, the Soviets successfully launched a small spacecraft carrying a stray dog. The following month, the United States tried launching its own satellite, but the rocket blew up on the launch pad.
Together, these events made it seem like the Soviet Union had finally pulled ahead in the race for technological supremacy. In , the Americans explode a hydrogen bomb.
In , the Soviets do it. And if you start looking at this trajectory, then you can be concerned. In , a plurality of Americans believed the Russians led the United States in long-range missile capability, and it hurt Eisenhower in the polls.
Ike watched his approval rating drop to a career-low of 49 percent in the months after Sputnik, after peaking at 79 percent only a year prior.
In the face of declining public support and sustained political pressure, he capitulated to Democrats. The creation of NASA , which brought a small collection of agencies already invested in space exploration under one roof. The creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency , which researched advanced military technologies. Trump wants to get rid of the Advanced Research Projects Agency. The passage of the National Defense Education Act , which bolstered science education by, among other things, providing student loans for those who excelled in math, science or engineering.
Trump has called for significant cuts to science education. Johnson and his allies succeeded in passing these measures despite initial objections from the White House. He was sort of forced to do it. Were we going to do space activities? Of course. For the past century, scientists have debated whether natural climate changes or human activities, such as overhunting, was the main cause of these large animals' decline.
A study published in the journal Nature concluded that climate change ultimately wiped out woolly mammoths Mammuthus primigenius and other Arctic-dwelling megafauna that survived the end of the Pleistocene, as the warming climate made it too wet for the vegetation they ate to survive. Humans did, however, hunt mammoths. Scientists who think that humans were probably the key factor in their extinction, like Faurby, argue that mammoths survived climate changes before humans came along and likely could have survived to the present day were it not for the additional pressure humans placed on them.
Related: How would just 2 degrees of warming change the planet? Christopher Doughty, an associate professor and ecosystem ecologist at Northern Arizona University, models how large animals of the past and present move seeds and nutrients around through eating and defecating. Doughty hypothesizes that without humans, elements would be more evenly distributed across the landscape.
This would mean more fertile soil, which would cause ecosystems to be more productive. Humans tend to clump elements together through practices such as agriculture and the creation of fenced-off areas, so these areas become less fertile over time compared with wild systems, according to Doughty. Greater fertility means plants can allocate their resources toward more fruits and flowers, so the world could look more vibrant and feed more animals. The climate might also be different, and while it's difficult to say how humans and megafauna may have influenced climatic changes thousands of years ago with evidence obscured by time, it's much easier to judge our impact on Earth's climate today.
Through global warming , caused by activities such as the burning of fossil fuels, humans have raised the average global temperature by about 1. Earth, therefore, would have been at least that much cooler without us. A study published in Nature concluded that human-caused warming will postpone an upcoming ice age by at least , years. It wasn't due for another 50, years, though, even without the human delay, so it's unlikely that Earth would be in the midst of another ice age today if we weren't around.
Modern humans Homo sapiens as we are today were not always the only hominins on the block, and removing us from the equation might have opened the door for our Neanderthal cousins. Scientists aren't sure why Neanderthals went extinct around 40, years ago, but because they interbred with H. There were likely multiple reasons for Neanderthals' demise, but we are a main suspect. Chris Stringer, a professor and research leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, thinks competition for resources was a factor in Neanderthals' disappearance.
Related: What if Neanderthals had not gone extinct? According to Stringer, Neanderthals were leading complex lives in Europe, similar to modern humans, but they had difficulty coping with climate changes and were relatively few in number, with low genetic diversity. This is bad news for any species, as it's a sign of inbreeding and ill health. Neanderthals were likely "already in trouble, and when modern humans got there as well, I think that may have been what tipped them over the edge," Stringer said.
But it wasn't just Neanderthals that humans may have held back. Scientists are still learning about at least one more human lineage that lived around the same time as modern humans and Neanderthals: the Denisovans. This lineage appears to be closer to Neanderthals than modern humans in genes and appearance, but is distinguishable from Neanderthals by its very large molars. Humans likely interbred with Denisovans as there is evidence of Denisovan DNA in present-day humans living in places such as New Guinea in Oceania — a finding that indicates Denisovans were in Southeast Asia interacting with the ancestors of modern humans that later settled further east, according to a study published in journal Science.
Denisovans also partnered with Neanderthals in Siberia, where the fossilized remains of a Denisovan-Neanderthal hybrid were found, Live Science previously reported. These Denisovan interactions, along with fossil evidence, suggests that they had a larger geographic range than Neanderthals, encompassing a greater variety of environments, and therefore, arguably, were more widely adapted than the Neanderthals. DNA evidence also suggests that the Denisovans probably had greater genetic diversity than Neanderthals did, according to Stringer.
Neanderthals and Denisovans matter, because if one or both of these lineages survived, they could have carved a similar path to what H. They may have overcome any potential intellectual shortcomings, which it's not clear they had, through evolution , he added.
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