Wouldn't that mean, then, that most all "doom and gloom" we get today is as irrelevant as those of old?
Human nature + escalating technology is the scary formula we are exploring today.
No one is worried about the number of people who have ALREADY been killed by nukes, they are worried about the number of people who might be in the future. But I suppose I fundamentally agree with you. I think we may have more to fear from scientifically engineered diseases than we do from nuclear weapons.
If you observe this then you can see that in the future people will look back at now and think the same. history tells us the same thing. it's human nature to think that doom and gloom now is much worse than before, simply because we are in this moment and without perspective.
We, today, have the ability to dictate what others tomorrow over- or under-appreciate as doom and gloom. Whether there is a cognitive dissonance is irrelevant, but what actually happens is very much only avoidable going forward, not looking back.
Nobody suspects the flue.
Yeah, but without bacteria we wouldn't be where we are today. Whatever that means.
I would not identify rather specific technologies accelerating the reach of the dysfunctional into "technology in general", just like I wouldn't lump together the bacteria that caused the plague and those that live in my stomach.
Today's are engogenous. Several are existential.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Ancient_Rome#Enviro...
I don't think so, but a regular decline isn't impossible.
It was just a few decades ago that 80 million people died in a single war.
If most of society dies in pain and hunger to climate change, would the survivors say "bah, just more fear mongering"?
For me, humanity is the sum of human experiences, not the mere presence of the species. The end of the world being relative and analog.
>The vast majority of hungry people live in developing regions, which saw a 42 percent reduction in the prevalence of undernourished people between 1990–92 and 2012–14.
http://www.worldhunger.org/2015-world-hunger-and-poverty-fac...
Most of it is because of conflicts. Poverty is decreasing fast across the globe and there were relatively a lot more people dying from hunger in the 80s.
The world did not end for the other billion on Earth living at the same time. You can't just throw figures like that without putting them in perspective.
If even the US government couldn't resist obliterating 2 cities in Japan with Nukes can you imagine what the Nazis would have done? There would have been zero consideration for the loss of human life, possibly large areas of continental Europe and the US would have been bombed.
I think "the world did not end" meaning "it never will despite what's been said and done in the past" is a really dangerous miopic notion
In the end, though nazis didn't value non-arial lives, they were no idiots. Why would they destroy cities and pollute areas supposed to be the part of Reich? The end of the world is both hard and unprofitable. "Nazis would" is a scary tale nicely covering the actual face of war that always remained the same.
What is really scary today is that some countries develop supreme air/space control systems, so those in the club become immune to any sort of dialog.
There was no economic in V1 and V2, yet they did it, harming themselves economicaly more than they harmed the targets.
Additionally they knew losing WW2 is existential threat for most of them. If they could destroy London with one push of a button - they would.
Nukes at the time were still weak weapons. You could inflict a lot more damage (and a lot more damage happened on Tokyo and many other Japanese cities) by regular firebombing. You did not need nuclear bombs to inflict catastrophic loss of life.
Now when it came to thermonuclear weapons, the magnitude is entirely different, but that only occurred many years later. It would never have occurred at the time of WW2.
It just look like the notion is always morphing from generations to generations : the flood, the plague, the apocalypse, the nuclear winter and now climat change.
From biblical hazards to scientific hazards, maybe humankind is finally like the high school student who only work great when under heavy pressure for it's exams.
And maybe just maybe this is how you can best reconcile science with religion because no matter your beliefs, this is a test for all of us... Are we making enough "good" around to deserve joy for us, our children and all they children after them?