106
Clickbait title. I don’t plan to be living over the next few centuries or millennia. There are plenty of reasons to not buy a beach house but this ain’t one of them.
I think that's kind of a tongue in cheek joke.
Regular people don't respect the actual issue at hand(like yourself a little) trying to portray it as relevant or something they can understand is important for scientists to do.
Unfortunately science and the truth are worthless if morons don't understand them.
OTOH, you've yet to encounter any conclusive evidence that you're mortal.
Honestly, I'm 195cm so in all likelihood I'm mortal than most people on average
Well, tall people have it harder with pumping blood, so you might be mortaller.
When we stopped caring about our communities, we stopped caring about being a part of something bigger and capitalism has taught us all to just sit and stew in our own depression and our own emotions. Boomer generation 2.0.
Agreed with everything except boomer generation 2.0. The younger generations DO care, but we're powerless thanks to the boomers who cannot give up control to the younger generations.
Completely different attitudes, completely different causes.
I'll compromise and say it's a little of column A and a little of column B.
It's true the Boomer boomers took away a LOT of the bedrock of modern democracy, capping off with the reign of Reagan and the whole greedonomics of the 80's.
But the younger generation has only been led to believe they're powerless, it's just that the actions they would need to take up at this point have become massively uncomfortable and the corporate wing of our federal government has had free reign to spill comfort all over us every day. We are a manipulated population.
It's really hard to mount organized, democratic resistance and grassroots community action when you're going to face massive amounts of anonymous hate, threats and backlash from even friends and family for championing... checks notes ...clean water and medical care, while alternatively you can retreat to Discord where you have a polycule of various other people who feel too deeply about the world that they have chosen escapism and fantasy and air conditioning and a sheltered world where nobody is going to trample their feelings.
Not saying there aren't principled fighters out there, it's just that it's much, much harder to get the general, scrolling public to pay attention when everyone just wants to scroll their feeds and check out after working 18-hour shifts to stay alive.
This isn't an insurmountable problem but we would need enough people to suddenly feel uncomfortable enough to set aside their daily discomforts and start organizing for a better tomorrow, but the internet has a way of attacking you for wanting better things, so we also need to do something about the internet.
We all hem and haw endlessly about how bad the climate change problem is, but by not collectively DOING something about it, we're leaving it up the countries that actually have the biggest populations and have the most at stake in taking drastic action.
In America or Europe we are talking about building sea-walls and flood control systems, spending billions or trillions on preparing for rising sea levels.
What about India? China? Southeast Asia? They have far more to lose from extreme weather and wet-bulb heat events and far more people with lives at risk and less resources to put into massive concrete walls around their coastal cities. How are we going to feel when they start seeing extreme, unilateral options as viable? If they decide to do drastic geoengineering projects like shading the earth with aerosols or orbital shields, we could all suffer if those projects have unintended consequences. (The climate is complicated, yo.)
US/EU could have done a lot for long time, but they don't care about the root problem. There is no need to pull out your selected countries as somehow needing more oversight than the West. We are the cause of this problem. The question is more, how do we ensure competition stays away from existential processes and ecological systems that we all need ?
I mean, at this point the best thing that can happen to our biosphere and atmosphere would be the inevitable AI-driven societal collapse that will be the result of unchecked capitalist crusades to make the best, fastest, biggest line go up the furthest before anyone else, safety be damned.
I used to be the one screaming at people in the transhumanism subreddits that they're delusional, now I'm screaming that they're not delusional, no, go ahead, make it smarter, faster, bigger... put the thing in charge of the stock market, it'll be great bro, I promise.
This is such a good point about the global power dynamics. The rate of melt is actually accelrating faster than most models predicted even 10 years ago. Countries with less resources might resort to desperate geoengineering measures becuase they literally can't wait for the rest of us to get our act together.
One -possible- different past. Of course, we may be wrong about what caused it to be much warmer -in Greenland- -at that time- .
One simpler example: the Earth's North polar axis may once have farther from Greenland. Plate tectonics has made this a much different planet than it was 200Million or 400M or 600M years ago, and there was possibly a time when Greenland was much farther from the pole ... and had no ice.
Or (if Charles Hapgood was right), much of the Earth's crust may have shifted it's position (think an orange-skin no longer firmly attached to the orange) over, say, 100,000 years or so.
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
106 points (100.0% liked)
science
20412 readers
895 users here now
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
rule #1: be kind
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS