Guys... this is intended to be a 1v1, me vs. Flint.  Could we keep the greater discussion out, at least until we each get in our couple of posts?  Thanks!

Sweet!  As for defining the age, shouldn't be much of a problem, once you see my post. 

Note to the community: This is one giant Devil's Advocate on my part, mainly only taking place after some out-of-forum discussion between the two of us... I don't plan on starting some massive suicide cult. 

I want to start off with a small side note.  I believe the best way to calculate the best course of action is to evaluate the viewpoint which most effectively protects the most lives.  That being said, we must remember one thing: Humans are not fully self-sufficient.  We rely on forests for oxygen, a stable biosphere for food, and various animal species existing in order to sustain biospheres.  Even outside our planet, we require the sun to provide sunlight.  Thus, as much as human life is valuable, the world around us is important to sustain that human life.

There's two key arguments here:

1: Our impact upon the universe.

Humans today are on the verge of achieving a number of technological breakthroughs.  Now, we normally see many of these as generally good things.  However, there's a great risk with each coming technology.  Humanity has so many different technologies expanding, all at the same time.  With modern societies, this is inevitable, as the drive for progress creates ever-expanding growth.  That being said, these always create the possibility of unintended consequences.

A: We're on the verge of a massive breakthrough in nanotechnology.  Nanotechnology, when fully materialized, has the possibility to revolutionize the way we live, by manipulating matter at the atomic level.  This is pretty awesome, and could have huge implications for every aspect of the way we live.  The very profitability of the technology, even being seen today, would indicate that this makes nanotechnology's development inevitable.  Even national governments, including China and the United States, are in races to see which nation will be the first to garner the benefits from fully maturing nanotechnology.  And no, this is not something coming out in 50 years.... nanotechnology is being matured today.  Authors such as Ray Kurzweil have said that fully matured nanotechnology will be a reality within 10-15 years.  The future is here.

That being said, many scientists have highlighted a major fear in nanotechnology's development: the "gray goo" problem.  In order to most efficiently produce nanomachines, most machines would need to be able to self-replicate, taking matter from outside the environment to produce what is needed.  Using external machinery to create final outputs of nanotechnology would either be inefficient, requiring human inputs when none are needed, or would be self-regulated, resulting in the same system, in effect.

So most nanotechnology will take the form of self-replicating machines.  Okay.  Except that it only takes one glitch, one failed experiment, or one deliberate reprogramming of a single machine in order to turn a productive nanofactory into a global disaster.  Imagine if just one of those self-replicating machines were to be programmed to produce copies of itself using materials that could be easily obtained from the environment, such as oxygen or carbon?  Or imagine if a safeguard to normally tell a nanomacine to stop reproducing... suddenly stopped working?  Either of these could happen quite easily, by either accident or design.

And the results would be disastrous.  Eric Drexler, a physicist who first proposed this theory, laid the calculation out quite plainly.  If a single nanobot could produce a copy of itself once every half hour (a fairly conservative estimate), the mass of nanobots would weigh the size of the Earth within just 2 days, destroying the planet in the process.  In addition, because matter travels between spacial bodies, there is a risk that these machines could spread even beyond the Earth, reaching other asteroids, planets, and even outside our solar system.

B: I know this website probably isn't the most legitimate of websites, but it is fairly effective in explaining the argument.

http://www.exitmundi.nl/quantum.htm

"It will be over before anyone can say `sorry'. In a laboratory somewhere, someone tries to get hold of a weird and completely new, exotic type of energy. But boy, the experiment goes out of hand. Suddenly, there's a BIG explosion. And then there's nothing -- our planet, the sun, all planets in our solar system and even some stars surrounding our solar system have been blown to smithereens.

And explaining what went wrong isn't even simple. We're talking quantum physics here: the physics of the vanishingly small building blocks that make up all matter in the Universe.

In quantum physics, everything is totally different from daily life. Quantum particles can be in two places at the same time, and can behave both like waves and particles. In fact, when you hear a quantum physicist say `particles', don't think of little, round balls. Quantum `particles' are better compared with tones of music: they're definitely there, but you can't see them or catch them.

One of the most mind-boggling properties of quantum particles is that they come into existence out of nowhere. Suck every molecule of air out of a bottle, making it completely vacuum -- and quantum particles will still be there. They pop up in pairs out of nowhere. And within a tiny fraction of a second, they merge together and -- zzzip! -- they're gone.

It is precisely this odd `quantum vacuum' that may one day open the door to a very new source of energy. Suppose you're able to snatch some of those out-of-nowhere particles away. Admittedly, you'll have to be REALLY fast. But if you do succeed, you'll have harvested particles out of nowhere. And since matter and energy are basically the same stuff (according to Einstein's E=mc2), you'll have energy out of nowhere!

The advantages would be unimaginable. Here's an energy source that never runs out, is everywhere around, is extremely cheap, and causes no pollution whatsoever.

But then again, there is a small, but alarming risk. There may be simply energy too much. Mining the quantum vacuum might bring about an unstoppable chain reaction, releasing an ever increasing amount of energy. In fact, no-one knows how much energy will be released: calculations done by physicists give answers anywhere between zero and infinity.

Obviously, too much energy would mean trouble. The explosion could be huge enough to blow apart our entire solar system and everything around it. And of course, infinite energy would bring about infinite destruction, bombing not just a handful of stars, but everything in the entire Universe.

Gladly, no present-day scientist is capable of mining the quantum vacuum. On the other hand: one day, there will be. And that day may arrive sooner than you think: some estimate  around 2020 science will be ready. Let's hope physicists finally have their calculations straightened out by then."

There's not much I need to add to this, at least for now...

C: Just call this scenario "Rise of the machines."

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html

By Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and a computer scientist.  He's very well-known for this specific piece, "Why the future doesn't need us."

"First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.

If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can't make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite - just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone's physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes "treatment" to cure his "problem." Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them "sublimate" their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.1 "

Oh, sorry, I forgot to mention: This specific passage was a quotation from the writings of Ted Kaczinsky, the Unabomber responsible for various bombings at research facilities.  While his actions weren't necessarily justified, his argument still stands.  Assuming computer technology is advanced to the point where it meets, and exceeds, human capabilities, humans would no longer have the monopoly on intelligence.  In effect, we would be relegated out of existence.  Not necessarily through some giant war, like you've seen in movies.  But either way, computer technology would be the future, and life would be obsolete.

2: Our impact upon our own biosphere.

As humans moved outside their stone-age civilizations, they transformed into what modern ecologists call an invasive species.  We traveled to biospheres that were, at the time, not adjusted to accommodate humans.  With each advancement in modernization, we step closer toward pushing out various biospheres.  A few examples:

Global agriculture removes huge swaths of land from natural use.  In many cases, this includes land which was vastly important for the world.  The best example here is the Amazon Rain forest, currently being destroyed to make room for cattle ranching and farming to feed millions of people.

Biotechnology-based plants have been extremely strong in the capability to compete with other plants.  Rice seeds that have been allowed to escape containment have easily been able to outcompete most crops.  if given the capability to reproduce freely, such plants could easily become invasive species across continents, destroying any ecological balance on the planet and destroying the global food supply.

Resource extraction is devastating to regions of the planet.  Mining interests to this day fight against environmentalists interested in protecting key regions.  With just one favorable election, ecologically protected regions could be removed from protection status, mined, and set to points where the ecological properties are modified enough to dejustify protecting the region, losing key biospheres.

Monocropping is one of the most dangerous farming techniques, and it's extremely common in the developed world.  By only using one crop in farming regions, the land being farmed is degraded to the point where it loses its minerals, leaving the land to become unable to sustain most life.

Every form of energy production currently produced, with the exception of solar energy and possibly geothermal energy, have some damage upon the environment, whether it's carbon monoxide emissions, thermal pollution, the risk of massive spills, or any other form of pollution.  Each one has devastating effects upon the environment.

Industrial-level resource extraction doesn't factor in the needs to balance the environment.  Overfishing and whaling risk throwing ocean biospheres into chaos, in particular.

Why do I list all these problems?  Because nature is a fragile being.  It depends on a large level of genetic diversity in order to survive.  If enough species that fill a particular niche are removed, the entire tapestry unfolds.

Let me give you two examples of this:

1: The bees.  Honeybees are probably the #1 best example of a keystone species.  They are needed globally in order to pollinate a number of plants.  Today, however, they are starting to die out.  Nobody's exactly sure why.  A good portion of theories present some form of human interference as the cause, as Colony Collapse Syndrome has only been widespread recently.

2: Whales.

http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/species/birds/spectacled_eider/worldcatch.html

The story is insane.  100,000 otters inhabited the Aleutian islands.  Then five baleen whales came into the region.  Within 5 years, the numbers dropped to 6,000 otters.  All because of one extremely tiny instance of an invasive species moving into an environment.

I'll avoid the global warming debate with you.  I'm more familiar with the science of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence than climate change. 

Did you want me to give the first rebuttal post, or shall you?

I figure that with my odd hours so long as we wait for the other poster to 'catch up' we can post retorts soon as it could be the next stage.

That way continuity happens and neither of us are penalized for my odd hours.

Sorry, been busy all day, and lost one post due to a computer malfunction mid-typing.    Only typing this because I woke up in the middle of the night.

Interesting opening.  Although I'll get to the specifics of your posts, I want to start with a brief overview of some things that have happened so far:

1: Aside from argument 2, Flint's reasons why leaving the stone age is good assumes a value system in which humans are a priori.  That doesn't work: if I win a risk of even a single one of my scenarios being true, it means humans should not be valued because either:
A: They will inevitably destroy themselves, or
B: The advancement of humans comes at the expense of other creatures and habitats, in addition to habitats upon which humanity depends.

To that end, if I win this argument, the evaluation of what is "good" is far from conventional wisdom.  You should evaluate the debate not based on who saves the most humans, but on who keeps humans down the most before we can bring the planet and possibly bodies outside the Earth down in a fiery blaze.

2: Flint has absolutely 0 answer to a couple scenarios.  Most notably, he skipped the quantum vacuum mining scenario.  Don't let him write new answers to these for the following reasons:
A: There were no time restrictions on posting.  He had plenty of time to write his arguments.
B: I didn't post this response for two days, giving him a ton of time to look back and edit.
C: I had all my arguments perfectly numbered.  There's no reason he should have missed argument 2, while answering arguments 1 and 3.
D: Allowing new answers would degrade the debate to the question of who can sneak in the most new stuff later in the debate, killing any capability to discuss the topic.
E: The strategy behind what I did during this post was based on the strategic choices Flint decided to make.  Don't punish me for his failure in this regard.

This should be considered a conceded argument, thus meaning that, within this context, we should assume a 100% risk that humans will inevitably destroy themselves, and the universe, through attempts at mining the quantum vacuum.

3: Flint provides no reason as to why humans prevent any extinction-level events at the astronomical scale.  That means that, even if I concede 100% of his opening statements, the best you can hope for in preserving human technological advancement is to preserve life on Earth.  In contrast, my arguments indicate that human existence has  a risk not only of destroying our planet, but of destroying much more.  A simple utilitarian calculus would tell you that, all other things being equal, it's preferrable to sacrifice a single species, or even the planet, to save a universe.

Now to his opening statement

1: Humanity's extinction.

General answers

A: I can concede these scenarios, and it only helps out my case.  My opening was an indictment of humanity.  If I win a risk even one scenario, it means human extinction is inevitable.  Furthermore, destroying humanity due to a plague, starvation, or another calamity would prevent them from ever building tools like monocropping or artificial intelligence, which extend the destruction far beyond the human species.  This was NOT the best argument to write against me.

B: Isolation of communities prevents your global calamities.  Just as smallpox never reached Native Americans until Europe landed, so too would calamities be isolated to specific regions.

Now to the specifics

A: Disease

1: Native Americans empirically prove you wrong, in that they existed for many millenia without being wiped out, and only were wiped out after the intervention of post-stone age humans.

2: How many easily transmissible diseases have a 100% kill ratio?

B: Food supplies

1: Native Americans prove you wrong on this question.  There's plenty of food to sustain humans.  It's only a question of how many people there are per square mile.  We need agriculture to sustain huge populations condensed into small regions (cities).

2: If I win monocropping below, it's another reason why this argument is bad.

C: Weather

1: We can't change the weather.  The best you can do is adaptation.

2: The fact that pre-industrial humans lived through the ice age, the transition from the ice age, and the mini ice age (not using Europe as my example: only Native Americans, which were pretty much the only tribe with ancient technology levels still living during the mini ice age) proves you wrong.

3: Aside from global weather calamities, extinction-level events won't result in human extinction, simply because they don't have expanded global implications.  The probability of these scenarios, therefore, is slim.

D: Interbreeding

communities interact with one another, allowing the exchanges of genetic material among them.

Now to your argument 2

First, let me start with one thing: Don't worry, Flint, I'm not going to base any of my argument on whether global warming is real.  We can just stay away from that debate entirely. 

That being said, group both A and B here.

1: Your examples of protecting other things are defensive protection mechanisms.  That is, humanity began making moves which hurt the proliferation of these species, then established your proposals to reverse trends caused by humanity.

Hypothetical example: The Zarf Beetle has a population of 1 million bettles throughout the continent of Politica.  Then humans began industrializing the land, cutting down the population of Zarf Beetles to 10,000.  A conservation effort was thus put into place to repopulate the beetle, and successfully brought the population to 900,000 bettles.

In this example, do humans get credit as preserving nature?  Nope.
A: The ecosystem proved that it could sustain 1 million Zarf Beetles without human assistance.  Thus, unless you get everything back to 100% normal, the environment would have been better off without you.  I'm not saying that all efforts

B: Short term, there could be longer environmental damage created.  To figure this out, you now have to determine that animal's place in the environment.  Assume, for example, that the Zarf Beetle had a cooperating relationship with the Justinian Walrus, residing on the animal's back and eating Avignon fleas that otherwise prey on the Walrus.  In the period where the Zarf Beetle populations declined, the Justinian walrus would also lose its population, and Avignon fleas would increase.  This chain would get bigger and bigger as the number of parts in the web were further examined (maybe the Justinian walrus was a key food source for the xeno pirnahas, or the Avignon fleas had interactions with Primo trees, all of which would be disrupted).  Now, fixing the environment is no longer an issue of just regenerating one species.  You'll have thrown an entire ecosystem out of whack.

Humanity claiming the credit for repopulating something it already killed is akin to giving congratulations to a thief who later returned the goods he stole.  Nice effort, but you still did some harm.  Most animals we save wouldn't be endangered if it wasn't for humans in the first place.

2: Then there's the problem of overcompensation.  To many conservationists, it's hard to prove exactly when a species has successfully been repopulated.  For example, take whaling.  Japan has argued for years that some species of whales have been successfully repopulated as a result of decades of banned whaling.  The baleen whale story I posted above is a perfect example of the result: nature creates perfect balances of animal species.  Human intervention operates outside this balancing mechanism.  Thus, when a population is increased to levels above and beyond what it once was, that species will be forced to migrate to other ecosystems.  The link above proves the result: 5 whales were able to take a 100,000 otter population down to 6,000 otters in 5 years.

While the otter may not be considered a keystone species within its environment (yet), we may not know its full role in the environment.  Furthermore, it doesn't mean future examples wouldn't involve key species.

3: Even if you do find an instance where humanity is protecting a species of animal or plant that would otherwise be wiped out by nature, it creates a problem.  Nature chooses winners and losers in an ecosystem based on that animal's ability to be part of said ecosystem.  As a result, the extinction of animals rarely results in the collapse of an ecosystem, because new animals will fill in niches.  Thus, human protection of animals that would otherwise go extinct due to nature is the evolutionary equivalent of corporate welfare, allowing species to exist which (Side note: Does this mean God's a capitalist?  ).

Arguments 3 and 4 are answered similarly to #1.  The ability to intelligently think and to increase supplies of resources can only be considered useful if it serves external purposes.  In fact, my indictments of human technology are a reason why the growth of intelligence may be a bad thing.

Now to defend my own arguments.

1) Universal impacts

A) Nanotechnology

In regards to the math behind nanobots being able to overtake the Earth, a few things:
1: Just throwing out an equation isn't enough to prove the argument wrong.  You have th justify why each part of your math exists in the whole.
2: We may be overcomplicating this from a mathematical perspective.  Quite simply, the only thing that can be proven from this part of the debate is how long it would take for a gray goo outbreak to overwhelm the Earth.  The only way winning this argument helps you, then, is that humans get critical time to answer the outbreak.  That being said, I'll avoid the math (unless you do something really crazy with it and claim, purely through your calculation, that gray goo won't overwhelm the planet for years after outbreak).

Now to the non-math portion of this debate.
Atomic temperature/composition: Yes, I'll agree that temperature+atomic compounds may interfere with the spread of an outbreak.  That being said:
1: An effective gray goo outbreak wouldn't need to use every type of atom on the planet.  Remember, nanotechnology doesn't currently claim it can disassemble atoms into their basic parts, then recombine them to form other atoms.  More than likely, a gray goo outbreak would involve machines only using the most common atoms, like oxygen, carbon, or hydrogen, simply leaving the other atoms intact (this would also address your equation above: your math assumes that an outbreak would need to consume 100% of matter on the planet).  Someone who decided to create a gray goo strain that only built copies of itself with gold, einsteinium, and uranium would pretty much be the most idiotic mad scientist on the planet.
2: In terms of temperature, that's a huge issue which we're not sure about.  Generally, however, in excited temperature states, atoms are more easily manipulated.  This may be a leap, but considering that a gray goo outbreak would involve a huge amount of chemical and mechanical reactions at once, a good amount of thermal energy would probably be released with the process, bringing atoms to such an excited state.  Now, we can't know this for sure... we can't even know the temperatures which could allow gray goo outbreaks anyway... much of this debate is speculative.

As for the production-level barriers:
1: Remember what we're talking about: a single self-replicating nanobot unconstrained.  Let's take a look at the odds of this happening:

First, you have, in such a world, billions of various self-replicating machines in hundreds of industries, ranging from agriculture to warfare to simple cleaning tasks.  If any one of these gets messed up, you have a problem.
Second, how many humans are around?  I'll pretend we're in a theoretical world of 0 population growth between now and then.  That means there are 6 billion people in the world.  All that would be needed is for one of these people to know enough about nanomachines, and to have the desire, to hack into a single machine and rearange its programming.
Third, there's the glitch possibility.  Now, we can't be sure how nanomachines will get their instructions, whether it be through electric pulses, chemical stimuli, or other mechanisms.  That being said, we can assume there are some triggering mechanisms to allow humans some control over said machines.  With that, all that needs to be done is a simple error with a single molecule, and the whole problem goes to hell in a handbasket.
Fourth, remember that individuals could become the creators.  Just as someone could deliberately decide to hack into a nanobot to release gray goo, an individual with enough expertise may be able to create their own self-replicating nanobot, avoiding any possible production barriers.

B) Quantum mining vacuum.

As I said above, no answer.  This is 100% cold conceded.  No matter how much you may disagree with this scenario, within the context of this debate, you should assume that the argument here is 100% true.

C) Artificial intelligence

Um... why?  Why is AI unable to exist?  Because it hasn't been created so far?  What makes human-level intelligence so unique that it can't be duplicated by a computer?  The basis of your argument rests solely on the fact that such a technology hasn't been created yet.  That's true of all inventions.

Plus, isn't a human simply a biological machine?

2) Environmental impacts

A) Agriculture

First of all, note the lack of an answer to the Amazon Rain Forest.  Even if Flint wins every other part of this debate, losing this scenario means he should automatically lose the debate:
1) The Amazon is one of the richest centers of biodiversity on the planet.  You lose that forest, you lose more species just in that region than what was ever saved by humanity.
2) The Amazon provides a huge amount of oxygen for the world.

In addition, the very argument of land use was unanswered.  Crops are inherently an invasive species.  In order to create a farm, some land inevitably has to be pushed aside, requiring the removal of noneconomic natural resources in order to establish economic resources.  The very definition means that biospheres will be destroyed.

B) Biotechnology

Also unanswered.  Biotechnology-based plants risk becoming global weeds, wiping out all other plants.  This is probably one of the most likely scenarios for destruction of biodiversity.  These crops already exist, so it's only a question of a seed escaping containment.

C) Resource extraction

I'll concede this argument, for the most part.  However, I want to continue with one argument which I don't see a response to: industrial-level fishing. 

D) Monocropping

I'll concede that modern technology prevents erosion from monocropping.  That being said, the technologies to sustain said growth create whole new problems.  A perfect example of this is fertilizers.  Fertilizers in US agriculture have been well documented to seep into the Mississippi River, collecting within the Gulf of Mexico.  Once inside the Gulf, the fertilizers remove oxygen from the water, creating large "dead zones" where fish can't live, and fish eggs in the region will overwhelmingly only hatch male fish.

E) Energy output

I'll agree that nature releases more pollutants than human energy output.  Don't care about the energy debate anymore.  I've got enough ammunition in the other sides of the debate.

F) Species loss

A good portion of my responses to your opening statements are applicable to this debate.  That being said, let's look at your arguments.

1) You said primitive man wouldn't care about many species.  That's true.  However, a couple arguments:
i) First, many of these species didn't conflict with primitive man's needs.  The honeybee, for example, doesn't significantly conflict with humans.  Yes, an individual bee's nest may threaten nearby humans.  However, at best, that means there are isolated incidents of conflict.
ii) Second, large-scale animal removal efforts can't exist in ancient societies.  Even if you assume the most drastic scenario that a civilization decided to outright eradicate an animal species, the reach of such a civilization doesn't extend very far.  In contrast, modern societies can kill animals at pretty much any location on the planet.
iii) Population levels change the strain of humans on species.  In modern society, fishing is needed to feed millions of people throughout the world.  The increasing population increases the demand upon nature to provide said resources.  In contrast, stone age societies would only have an extremely small fraction, maybe numbering in the couple hundreds at most, pulling resources from any single region of the planet.

2) In regards to the honeybees, you mentioned Chinese and American demand for bees.  Your statement utterly ignores the diagnosed issue of Colony Collapse Disorder, which I mentioned previously... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder

"Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) or sometimes honey bee depopulation syndrome (HBDS)[1]  is a phenomenon in which worker bees from a beehive or European honey bee colony abruptly disappear. While such disappearances have occurred throughout the history of apiculture, the term colony collapse disorder was first applied to a drastic rise in the number of disappearances of Western honey bee colonies in North America in late 2006.[2]  Colony collapse is economically significant because many agricultural crops worldwide are pollinated by bees. European beekeepers observed similar phenomena in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain,[3]  and initial reports have also come in from Switzerland and Germany, albeit to a lesser degree[4]  while the Northern Ireland Assembly received reports of a decline greater than 50%.[5]  Possible cases of CCD have also been reported in Taiwan since April 2007.[6]"

3) Give me examples of species stone age men hunted to extinction.

4) Here's the trick: Even if modern man doesn't hunt animals to extinction, you still have to defend humans that lived up until now, as prior humans were a prerequisite to achieving the level of technology we have today.

Edit: Mixed up the "Avignon flea" with another flea type

Is that a concession? 

Just checking! 

Holy crap! 

"A cave man need not worry himself here, as the T Rex is probably to close for such a complex worry"

Did you study history with Palin

"Cave man " & dinosoaurs did not co-exist, they were many,many ,many miliions of years apart

The last dinosaurs died out about 65 million years ago. The earliest "human-like" ancesters (e.g cavemen or nenderthals) were about 6 million years ago. They did NOT overlap.

Btw "neanderthal man" was around for far longer than modern humans have been- so its a bit early to say weve done better than them or that we are better at surviving.

Also :
Volcanoes emit around 100,000,000 tonnes of CO2 a year.
man-made emissions of CO2 =approx 10,000,000,000 tonnes of CO2 per year.
So volcanoes emit around 1/100th of CO2 that we do.

There's a set limit to the posts we are doing.  Afterwards, I don't think either of us would mind third parties jumping in... 

*goes back to typing*