Comment by gepi79 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gepi79 | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks for the clarification. I guess you did not downvote me. As always, reasonable interesting people do not downvote so easily.

> We are in grave danger of dying out;

I do not think so and there is no reason at all to think so.

Again: https://xkcd.com/

Again: I welcome a reduction of farm animals by 50% or 75%.

> because of lack resources

What resources of and on Earth are scarce in your opinion ?

Depending on skills and technology, they are not scarce for a world population of 10 billion humans or they are scarce with a world population of 1 human.

> and because of our mind-boggling stupidity, sheer arrogance and our inability to deal with our tribal instincts.

Yes, most societies worldwide are very insane. Obvious proofs: Wars and military and poverty in 2018. All elected and re-elected US presidents being evil mass murdering war criminals.

IMO, humanity is not so insane that humanity will die out. If people became vegan and current morality and practices and technology improved we could live in a biological paradise even with 10 billion people.

Improvements like cooperation instead of competition, waste treatment, recycling, no fossil fuel, no insane individual commuting every day because of flexibility, no insane transport of products, less waste of time and energy for needless production,...

I live in Belgium.

Do Belgians need butter from Ireland ? No.

Do Belgians need milk products transported around Europe ? No.

I studied agriculture at university so I know a little more than the average arrogant angry downvoter.

And I am in favor of transhumanism (e.g. machine body parts) in case somebody might read my previous comment in the future.

The problem is not of a technical nature, but of a political/social one.

> Depending on skills and technology, they are not scarce for a world population of 10 billion humans or they are scarce with a world population of 1 human.

This is very true. If organized properly we could very easily feed the 7.7 billion people that live on earth today. We could easily feed the 11 billion people that are expected to exist in about 50 years or so on earth. I do not doubt that the technological hurdles are gigantic, but the could be overcome.

Alas, I don't see that happening. Not because of the technological difficulty, but because of human stupidity or shortsightedness, our tribal instincts and the tendency towards reckless acquisition of resources that allowed our ancestors to become the dominant species on this planet in the first place.

You see, the problem is not our abilities to change the environment. The problem is our inability to change ourselves.

/If/ we all went vegan, /if/ we stopped needles, wasteful wars, /if/ we stopped consuming more than we need, /if/ ...

... then we could make it. But we don't change our behavior. We are still greedy little apes that are driven to resource acquisition to improve our social status in order to have higher reproductive success. We are reproduction machines, nothing that is changed by a few decades of wealth in some parts on earth.

It is this inability to overcome our biological imperatives that will doom us, because they prevent us from recognizing the foreigner as our sibling. And so we compete for resources, even though we've already so many resources that we die from over saturation.

So, unless all the peoples around the world start working together very soon to combat climate change, mitigate species and biomass loss, reduce the consumption of resources to a degree our planet can actually provide, I don't see how the human species will be able to survive.

It's not that we couldn't do it. It's that we're not willing to pay the cost in the /now/ to be able to survive in the /future/.

First: I had missed the part of your previous reply where you wrote that you too had downvoted my comment because of "my hubris". Unfortunately I read and replied too quickly because I had to leave. Now it is too late to correct my reply.

Second: Fortunately only few people need to introduce or enforce change to make big changes for all. Modern societies would have never happened if change was not imposed by a few on all.

Unfortunately climate change is a bad problem because it is also a political problem because appropriate technology might not be available and imposed soon enough. Politics are determined by the stupid ignorant democratic majority. Even in dictatorships like China because a dictatorship must be tolerated by the democratic majority.

Fortunately, the stupid ignorant democratic majority could die and leave the surviving elite (not a money based elite of billionaires) with a better society. Natural evolution.

IMO, relatively few humans will die because of climate change but many more other species will die out.

https://theconversation.com/capitalism-is-killing-the-worlds...

> One tweet, posted in response to the WWF publication, retorted that “we are a virus with shoes”, an attitude that hints at growing public apathy.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/google-deepmind-founder...

> "Either we need an exponential improvement in human behavior — less selfishness, less short-termism, more collaboration, more generosity — or we need an exponential improvement in technology."

> "If you look at current geopolitics, I don't think we're going to be getting an exponential improvement in human behavior any time soon."

> "That's why we need a quantum leap in technology like AI."

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