yeah, but another billion dollars and being so rich that you'll never be able to spend it in MANY lifetimes is so great.
/s
We've had a few extinction events, and I suspect even the Holocene extinction event (which is already in progress) will not be as bad as the Permian–Triassic.
Right now, three possibilities are in the running to kill off humans:
~ Climate-change induced famine and drought
~ Nuclear escalation (The US is looking at broader options... using low-yield nuclear weapons in a regional conflict)
~ AI takeover, which will likely look like the owner class developing armies of murderbots to annex the world before the AI accidentally determines they are a target as well. (And less so the Yudkowsky and Soares scenario.)
But humans are more likely to do what Homo Erectus did and go through a low population phase. They had a population less than 10,000 for millennia for a while before expanding again, only to get wiped out by competition with their cousins.
But even if humans die, life on earth will regrow across millions of years, and may even evolve intelligence and technology.
Glad I live now then 100 years from now, I’ll be dead before the earth implodes
Yeah, turns out we experienced the peak of civilization. Someday, people will be begging to party like it's 1999.
Hasn't every generation experienced "the peak of civilization" absent a few minor regional fluctuations, such as the European Dark Ages?
Seems a bit premature to say the ride is over, unless you're only concerned with a handful of Western counties consciously bucking a global trend over the span of a few decades.
The soviet union wasn't exactly great environmental stewards either. Perhaps the problem is a technological gap between industrilization and sustainability.
Why you bring that up
Sort of a famous counter-example.
A seventy year long break from capitalist economic practices over half of Europe and most of Asia seems like it should have produced a noticeably different set of ecological outcomes.
But industrialization appears to take the same ecological toll from Beijing to Belgrade.
Because I believe ecological sustainability is achivable under any economic system!
Capitalism requires continuous and unlimited economic growth. Economic growth requires accelerated resource extraction. Capitalism is not ecologically sustainable by design.
Capitalism, like socialism, means many things to many different people. At it's core capitalism is simply a philosophy built around the idea of the free exchange of goods and services between individuals. I don't think most people would that infinite growth is an essential part of that equation as there are real examples of capitalistic economys that shrink every year.
Where are those capitalist "economies" that don't require growth? Are they decoupled, and not relying on the growth of the global economy? Does their pension system not explode if economic growth would come to a halt? If so, what makes them capitalist?
So you brought up a part of the current system with it failing?
Capitalisms faiilures on multiple cornerstones, in addition to ecology, are broadly documented. You're allowed to update a belief with knowledge
I think our ecological failures are often misattributed to economic philosophy. Collectivist societies have also caused irreparable ecological harm in the past, so the issue can't be capitalism exclusive.
It's not exclusive and no one said it was. Just that capitalism as we have it now has no room for ecological considerations.
Meh. I'm no fan of capitalism, but I'd say the problem is humanity itself, or maybe an evolutionary system that favors short sighted local advantage at the expense of eventual extinction.
I already posted the great filter today, so...
the great filter
The problem with "Great Filter" Theory is that we have yet to identify even non-intelligent life outside of Earth.
It's one thing to say intelligence is self-terminating. Or, at least, incapable of sustained extra-terrestrial expansion. It's quite another to say every other observable planet in the galaxy must have already experienced intelligent life and wiped itself out before we started looking.
Far more likely that we're in a Dark Forest than a Great Filter. Or, at a minimum, that we are unable to identify extraterrestrial life because we haven't figured out how to spot it at such a large distance.
You have been lost to right wing propaganda. That is exactly what they want you to believe, so you stop believing in a way out. So why not just keep the status quo with oligarchs using all of our resources and destroying our planet?
"Humans are bad and have always been bad" is not only factually wrong, it is a belief which only serves one political purpose.
I wouldn't say human beings are a virus, but parasitism is a survival strategy for about 65% of life. In the case of human beings, we have complex social structures which allows for parasitism of ourselves.
The owner class behaves like a parasite, and we've seen this in feudal ages, in which the warrior castes dominate agricultural castes.
In capitalism, the ownership class behaves very much like a cancer. Resources consolidate at the very top with those who are in the owner class getting smaller and smaller. Currently, in the US, the difference of wealth between the 0.1%, the 0.01% and the 0.001% are stark, not to mention between them and the rest of us.
Multiple economists, including Nobel laureates are saying the ultra-wealthy are too rich, and have more wealth (total or percentage of the whole) than any other time in history, and the only way out of this mess is to redistribute it all. If we don't then the oligarchs dominating the US will soon turn their eyes and power to the rest of the developed world.
Cringe ecofash r/im14andthisisdeep ahh take
Evolution only cares about passing on genes. It's rare in the animal kingdom for menopause to exist. For the most part there's no point in an animal living if it's unable to mate. Scientists have the "grandmother hypothesis" for why this happens in a few whales, humans and some chimps: in a species where the grandmother might help care for a baby that has some of her genes, the grandmother can be useful to the mechanism of passing on genes even if she's no longer able to pass on her own.
That means that a creature might care about how the world looks maybe 25 years past the point where it can have offspring. Caring about environmental degradation that takes place on a multi-century scale is just not something that evolution prepared us for. Why would it? No creature in history has ever been able to modify its environment the way humans can.
Viruses are actually a good analogy. A virus depends on a living host. But, viruses often kill their hosts. Like humans, it can actually modify its environment in a way that that environment becomes toxic to the virus's existence. That seems bad. For any individual virus though, its "life" is so short compared to the life of the host that any mechanism that made it try to avoid killing the host would just be a useless genetic trait that would not be optimal.
Humans have these immense brains, and they allow us to do things that aren't simply the result of evolutionary drives. But, we're still animals. Those drives really structure everything we do.
Altruism can actually be evolutionarily advantageous. For example, vampire bats share food with hungry individuals, and this can be reciprocated later. Insects like ants and bees have workers that give up their own reproduction to help raise relatives, thereby still passing on shared genes. Even among unrelated animals, repeated cooperation can favour altruistic behaviour.
I don't know why you need to go farther than humanity itself to clearly demonstrate the benefits of an altruistic survival model.
Modern human health care is predicated on individuals dedicating decades of their lives to education and research before dedicating decades more to the grueling physical labor of providing health care. And yet, our 8 billion person population size is wholely predicated on the massive bump in the human survival rate where professional medical services exist.
Yes, there's some advantage to the survival of the community, not just the genes. But, it's sort of an expensive gamble. Not just sharing with an individual that might out-compete you later, but also the energy / effort / "programming" etc. required to act in an altruistic way. That's why you sometimes see altruism in nature, but it's not the rule.
Yes but some systems push the bad side of human and other the good side
The systems that can feed the most bodies and enslave the most minds conquer, Borg-like, the ones the feed & enslave less. Wars grow bigger as their opponents grow bigger. Eventually we are all engulfed in one fragile system that has to fail but once.
Ackshuuully there's no such thing as overpopulation or overconsumption or carrying capacity overshoot. Those are myths made up by ecofascists, a very real and very scary right-wing political movement. The obvious true solution is for the whole world to come together and agree to follow my preferred system of government (or absence thereof) and then there will be plenty of resources to go around for everybody and billions of humans can live sustainably ever after.
And if you say that's unrealistic and won't happen, it must be because you are a literal exterminist Nazi who hates life and wants to do eugenics by genociding everybody- especially the brown ones and the poor ones- even though you didn't say that- but come on, we all know you were thinking it.
So be ashamed of yourself, you Nazi, and go away now so I can win this argument by default- before I'm forced to post the well supported counterargument which I totally have.
Yeah, the AI are the bad guys in that movie. But it's the humans that blot out the sun.
COVID-19 has drawn much of this discussion into the public sphere. Whereas it’s generally seen as poor taste to refer to groups of people as infections, diseases, and plagues – for good reason – this seems to be forgiven when the group being referred to is non-specific. Hand waving at humanity in general, as if being vague is ethical bulletproofing, gets a pass. It is relatively common today to find another viral tweet with tens of thousands of likes gesturing towards the clearing waters of Venetian canals, or the wandering deer of Japan navigating neon-lit city centres and declaring that the Earth is healing itself; the smog-cleared skies of California receive a probing enquiry – perhaps we were the real virus all along?
Strange as though it may seem, musings of this kind have become more and more common as the weeks have gone by and the evidence of nature ‘reclaiming’ previously populated areas has begun to accumulate. Suffice it to say, there is more than a little of the eco-fascist ideology floating around in the assumptions of that question; when somebody asks if humanity is the ‘real virus’, they set up a system in which the Earth is a being and humanity a problem that needs to be solved. The solution being proposed is rarely stated outright, but it doesn’t have to be because it’s implicit in the question; you cure a virus by getting rid of it. Beneath the surface level wonder at seeing a wild boar shuffle across Italian cobblestones, there is a lurking belief that maybe the world would be better off without us. Or, more commonly, the world would be better off without some of us, with who that some is being left as a blank to be filled in by the subconscious of the questioner. Unquestionably, whoever that somebody is, will be someone else.
[...]
The language of the eco-fascist claims that human beings are the problem, and that with their self-isolation – that is, their removal from the system – has come ecological recovery. Such individualised and atomised analysis prevents the ever-important systematic approach; the real problem is capitalism, and it is with the interruptions and staggerings of capitalism that recovery has come along. Deeply embedded in the language of the right wing, the misattribution of the worst elements of capitalism to the mere existence of human beings exists as a dual weapon.
Firstly, it allows them to turn their vitriol upon individuals... Secondly, it allows them to imply a connection between the two; to link the existence of capitalism to the existence of individuals and bind them together ideologically; to present capitalism as human and therefore inevitable and inescapable.
Fraser, J. (2020). Eco-Fascism: The Rhetoric of the Virus. Organise Magazine. Archived at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jay-fraser-eco-fascism-the-rhetoric-of-the-virus.
Humans have beenaaround a lot longer than capitalism, and we didn't destroy the planet until recently.
The problem is not humans, as many small groups of people across the globe have proven they can live with the environment, and take care of it.
Look up what happened to the Maya.
Power not derived from the movement of animals is very new. The industrial revolution is what greatly changed the damage humans can do to the environment. The industrial revolution led to capitalism, not the other way around.
That scene has always haunted me with how accurate it was
I mean, I guess in theory that’s how it’s supposed to work. Imagine something just outside our grasp, like a structuralists geometry of social dynamics. You might never know what kind of intelligent social system with generational knowledge actually has the opportunity to bypass the great filter. Evolution is a never ending game of FAFO. Maybe it stands to reason, the Neanderthals went extinct… such intelligent life forms tend to kill each other and eventually themselves?
I wonder if an advanced fungus based intelligence could do better. Or a silicon crystalline one, on hotter planets, with much lower temporal awareness of course.
Part of me wonders, if evolution can make a generally intelligent life form capable of advancing itself as a unit part in thanks to connective technology like the internet… and that’s in just a few hundred million years, what kind of life forms could theoretically exist with such abilities innate to their being? Perhaps in 30 billion years of evolution, might you come across a species that would find internet technology redundant and inefficient in contrast to their biological abilities?
So true. All fed by greed.
We aren't gonna let another asteroid beat us to it. Not again, anyways.
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