We’re fucked. I told my therapist this. I told our financial planner that I don’t expect us to survive, but we opened the account for my partner to take care of her. We’re gonna destroy ourselves. Will it be on the timeline I expect? Maybe not. But T2 has already proven that things are moving faster than I had anticipated.
Humans: A nice experiment. Maybe talking dogs will be the next ascendent species.
don’t look up
My dude, we are primates that adapted to walking upright. We are a creature that once filled a niche in a food chain, that scrounged for berries and slept in caves or trees. We have turned shiny rocks into strands of hair, wrapped them around silly shapes and spun them with water boiled by the heat of stars captured in pellets made to exploit the decay of the very smallest form of existence. All to provide the caged lightening that powers the rocks we taught think so that you and I can share anxiety about our potential end.
We see the world with eyes that are trained to spot faces in the dark with a brain that lives in fear of tigers. Nature has built us to see the horrors around us at all times because it helped us survive. Now we live in a world where where our nature is exploited for fabric that represents shiny rocks that represent berries we could have eaten or something dumb like that. Don’t let it get you down.
Complete wipe? Probably not. Change on a scale so deep and wide as to render their relation to what we are currently as relevant as our relation to a nautilus? Yeah. Pretty much guaranteed. Deep time has seen more worlds made of this planet than you could ever imagine surviving.
The future is unknowable.
Nonsense take to side step looking at trends and whats likely sure we can’t “know” but we can estimate with above random chance.
The only way we can make moral decisions is by doing our best to anticipate the results.
The business of being human and the business of speculating about the future are one and the same.
IDK I’ve predicted my own birthday and Christmas correctly dozens of times.
I even predicted in the year 2000 that AI would become a thing around 2030, I admit that’s the most bulls eye long term prediction I’ve ever made. But still to make a blanket statement that it is unknowable is false.
There are trajectories, and there are statistics that can predict a lot.
Like for instance many of us predicted Russia would lose the war against Ukraine already a couple of months in.
And it was predicted 2 years ago that USA would go to war with Iran and lose.
I can also predict that the return of Jesus Christ will not happen within the next 2000 years either!In fact the entire purpose about humans having consciousness from an evolutionary perspective, is to serve as a mechanism for predictions based on experience to improve our rate of survival.
Always better to think that for 95% percent of human history we were relatively non-hierarchical cooperative groups and although its possible other paths are available to us.
Humans will survive. Civilization will survive. That’s almost guaranteed. That was never really up for debate. The debate is whether civilization will survive in a form that we would consider to be dignified. Will we have political rights? Will we have privacy? Will we be in a democracy? Will we live as serfs in a technofeudal society? These are the questions that we need to ask.
And they are important to ask because these are things that we can do something about. In my opinion, the elite intentionally promote doomerism, because people are more unwilling to fight back if they feel like the fight has already been lost. I believe that things can get better. I believe it despite everything going on because I have to. The worst thing you can do is to cede the future to the enemy.
Civilization should be destroyed.
Humans will survive, but we may have some MAJOR population decreases. Earth will survive, nature will survive, one way or another.
No it won’t.
In 500-600Myrs, life under known parameters will be completely impossible.
But our technology will have scaled, barring a repeated civilization and technology crash of epic proportions.
Bullshit.
Our “technology,” culture, practice and morality keeps proving that the rich are obsessed with their wealth, power and privilege, and don’t give a flying fluff about future needs nor adaptation.
Your presumption is that age-old one that naively assumes that new tech = betterment of reality for the human condition. But it rarely actually works that way outside of stuff like vaccines.
I recently saw an estimate of around 2 billion more years.
500-600Myrs ahead (all while everything gets hotter and hotter, outpacing species ability to deal with it), photosynthesis as we know it will stop working.
That’s exactly what the article I linked was about.
Excellent.
It’s going to be rougher even earlier than that. In a “mere” 250 million years we’ll get another supercontinent, which sounds amazing but it’s the sort of geological situation that lead to the destruction of most terrestrial life because all the land becomes a giant desert.
I got on a geology kick one day, I came out wiser and much sadder.
Oh sure, I am sure they weren’t saying humanity would last that long (although technology may help), just ‘any plants’.
As a child in the 70s, I was sure we were going to wipe ourselves out in global thermal nuclear war. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty instead took the nuclear cores from thousands of American and Russian missiles and consumed it in civilian nuclear power plants for electricity. If you had told my 10 year old self my game console would be running on decommissioned Russian nukes, I wouldn’t have believed you.
The rapid technological advancement of green technologies (especially them being financially cheaper than fossil fuels) gives me hope humanity (and most of the species of Earth) will survive climate change.
So, yes, we might indeed still wipe ourselves out, but we have on many occasions, as a species, stopped at the brink and turned around to go back to safety.
“Green technologies” won’t solve it when a lot of them aren’t green, others aren’t adapted and the profit motive still rules humanity.
“Green technologies” won’t solve it when a lot of them aren’t green,
Sure, I’m not talking about greenwashing products though.
the profit motive still rules humanity.
This is perfect example supporting my argument. Solar power is cheaper than any fossil fuel. The profit motive, in this case, is for the green tech.
stopped at the brink and turned around to go back to safety.
I’d say we haven’t so much turned around as veered off to skirt along the edge until we’re about to hit the next one. There is a real chance we’re going to end up not being able to diverge and actually go over the edge. If it when that will happen is impossible to predict before it’s too late though.
You’re free to hold your own model, but I’d question some of yours.
I’d say we haven’t so much turned around as veered off to skirt along the edge until we’re about to hit the next one. There is a real chance we’re going to end up not being able to diverge and actually go over the edge.
That’s a different edge in a different direction. There’s certainly an element of inertia to large, extinction level events, but not all extinction level events share that same inertia. As an example, nuclear war and climate change don’t share the same path of humanities destruction.
If it when that will happen is impossible to predict before it’s too late though.
Humanity is pretty good and being able to predict things which will negatively effect us. We’re just not great at stopping doing those things that cause those negative things.
nuclear war and climate change don’t share the same path of humanities destruction.
Not nuclear, but don’t underestimate how much greenhouse gases have been released by blowing up oil refineries in recent wars. I’m not saying it’s the same path, but they are connected.
Humanity is pretty good and being able to predict things which will negatively effect us.
True, but not at convincing others to stop doing it, or accurately predicting whether we can convince enough people in time to avert disaster.
I think civilization in its current form may end, and with it billions of people, but as a species we are pretty adaptable, I think there will be lots of survivors and they will be able to thrive eventually.
But I think it’s even more likely that there won’t be any one big collapse, and things will either oscillate or reach a steady equilibrium for millennia to come.
If I were to think catastrophically, I’d say that the powerful ones will move out to another planet and those who stay here will keep extracting stuff for aforementioned until Earth will become inhabitable
