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Daishiman

So basically this heat wave has wiped away a substantial amount of biomass in the impacted area.

We are watching the world wither away, quite rapidly, with nothing to show for it.

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Profits are what we have. For the few.

So your paycheck is generated from losses?

Well, shareholders are getting fat, so its all good, eh?

Nothing to show for it? I mean if I get a cut I won’t die of a bacterial infection, so that’s pretty cool.

Ironic since the biggest threat to effective antibiotics is industrial agriculture practices.

‘Tis better to have antibiotics and lost them than to have never had them at all.

> We are watching the world wither away, quite rapidly, with nothing to show for it.

Except for the entirety of human civilization, sure.

The entirety of human civilization existed for all but the last 200 years without combustion engines.

But most humans by far have existed in the last 200 years. The current mean birth age of all humans ever (50% humans born before & 50% born after) is probably only like 1950 at the oldest.

Why is that a good thing? Humans, their livestock, and their crops have grown to dominate much of the land. That reduces biodiversity and makes for a less resilient ecosystem overall.

At the risk of sounding like a movie villain... anyone who's tried to go to Yosemite on a weekend must agree with this on some level

That's not really relevant but also not true. A reasonable estimate is that ~105 billion modern homo sapiens have ever lived[1], the inflection point you're talking about (50% humans born before & 50% born after) probably happened closer to 200-300CE[2]

[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12288594/ [2]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-are-the-demographi...

Hmm interesting. Would the number of human-years or human-hours lived be different? Perhaps looking at population/exponential graphs is giving me a false intuition because the birth & growth rates were much higher in the past but the overall growth rate stayed the same.

It is relevant if you think that the individual unit of human civilization is a single person.

And? I think human civilization is a lot more impressive now than 200 years ago.

Yeah, early humans were only capable of extincting megafauna. Today, we're doing dozens of species per day! We'd be much more impressive as a species if we didn't limit the use of DDT, CFCs, etc

Crazy to think that in the life span of this planet is ??? Before christ? After christ? A million years or two?

Exactly, no one knows the answer....

We can't agree as a civilization when this planet started, but everyone knows when it's going to end.... irony is thick around these parts...

"One thing I know, I know nothing."

Weird troll. You don't need to know what day a person was born, to recognize that they've got a dangerously high fever.

The world will keep turning, regardless of fitness for human life.

That's a pretty bad metric for success.

Agreed, I'm playing with the neutrality of the word "impressive." A tsunami is certainly impressive...

Modern humans are more impressive than our ancestors, according to you. Is that good, or are we a tsunami?

Well, in the very least our language AI bots can probably create better wordplay than this train wreck. Not especially impressive though.

> Ah, yeah. We're gonna go to Mars. And then of course we're gonna colonize deep space. With our microwave hot dogs and plastic vomit, fake dog shit and cinnamon dental floss, lemon-scented toilet paper and sneakers with lights in the heels. And all these other impressive things we've done down here. But let me ask you this: what are we gonna tell the intergalactic council of ministers the first time one of our teenage mothers throws their newborn baby into a dumpster? How are we gonna explain that to the space people? How are we gonna let them know that our ambassador was only late for the meeting because his breakfast was cold and he had to spend half an hour punching his wife around the kitchen? And what are they gonna think when they find out, its just a local custom, that over 80 million women in the Third world have had their clitorises forcibly removed in order to reduce their sexual pleasure so they won't cheat on their husbands? Can't you just sense how eager the rest of the universe is for us to show up?

-- George Carlin

Our material wealth and our industrial capabilities just make our failings so much more shameful in my books.

This quote seems really pathetic to me personally. One because it feels defeatist and ignores bounds of progress made against a problem that is simply difficult. Two because it highlights specific problems for which carlin has no personal culpability.

Organizing civilization is hard. I have no doubts the council of intergalactic ministers had a difficult run as well. That is the nature of nature.

Completely agreed with you. It's one thing to acknowledge humanity's faults, another to just be defeatist to the point of ignoring all good things we have done as a species just because we've done bad ones too.

Self improvement requires not falling into the mindset of blame. It’s “them” destroying the planet, rather than “us” solving the hard problems together. I think only human understanding and mastery of ego will determine the fate of the planet. We can do it, if we work on ourselves first.

What's defeatist about it? "This fucking sucks" is to social progress what "this is odd" is to science.

Furthermore, "This sucks" implies room for improvement, whereas "This is impressive" implies no great need for improvement. Being defeatist would be to not even criticize such shoulder patting because nothing can possibly change and this is the best we can do.

> Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.

-- Franz Kafka

I don't know who said it, but "Those who think they are something have ceased to become something" also springs to mind.

That quote says nothing that evokes "room for improvement" to me. It demeans modern civilization's achievements to plastic vomit and microwave hotdogs. It also mocks hope for the future of our ability to change by then. Which is pretty bullshit because the rate of all those things is declining. Kafka's quote there is also pretty shit.

Progressive sociological and technological change is difficult. We have made significant progress. We have a long way to go. Crying that we have achieved nothing diminishes large achievements that you take for granted.

We treat people the same way. If someone can sing very well or is very rich, but is also a murderer or rapist, those negative traits tend to be how we categorize them. And that's even if they don't murder or rape for 364 days per year.

> It also mocks hope for the future of our ability to change by then. Which is pretty bullshit because the rate of all those things is declining.

If you really think this quote is just about sneakers with lights in the heels, I can't help you.

> If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

-- Stephen Hawking

> Don't be deceived when they tell you things are better now. Even if there's no poverty to be seen because the poverty's been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much, that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you. Don't be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there's no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they'll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces.

-- Jean-Paul Marat

> The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the discovery of technical devices that, through automation, will make large sections of the population 'superfluous' even in terms of labor, and that, through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with this twofold threat by the use of instruments beside which Hitler's gassing installations look like an evil child's fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble.

-- Hannah Arendt

If someone, rather than trembling, speaks of how it's better than it ever was.. I frankly couldn't care less what they consider "shit".

These quotes are even less coherent with whatever thesis you're trying to convey. Like... I'm pretty sure even Jean-Paul Marat would believe things are better now than pre-french revolution Paris, or say, reign of terror paris. Things are far from perfect, but they're definitely improving on many, many metrics. Wealth inequality is a (growing) problem, but I'd still rather be poor today than poor a few hundred years ago.

> I'd still rather be poor today than poor a few hundred years ago.

That's super interesting. Thanks for your input.

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