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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

The way things are going, we will be the next dinosaurs, and that civilization in 13k will be digging artifacts from our time, while telling legends of a civilization that supposedly went to the stars, could travel across the globe in hours, being able to talk with anyone across the globe, cure most desease, designed machines that could see bodies at molecular level.

Naturally every adult knows that those stories are just ways for the grandparents to ease kids into their sleep, who would believe in such nonsense, given the current state of the planet in 13k years.

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Are you talking about global warming? Because that’s going to make a lot of people miserable but is far from a global civilisation destroying event.

Global warming, nukes, pandemics, you name it, we are quite good destroying ourselves.

None of those are destroying our civilizations, in fact we are better off now than 10 years ago on all those issues.

Just wait for it, specially if we really get into WW III with nukes.

The nukes prohibit their own use. Besides, there's been more than 2000 nuclear bombs exploded, >500 of which in the atmosphere, and I bet you didn't notice.

I also expect not to notice when the real ones explode close to Europe, much better than deal with the fallout thereafter.

I used to think like that. But Covid has really humbled me. Not to mention the possible release of ancient viruses due to melting permafrost.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/05/the-deadly-diseases-b...

I tend to be labeled a pessimist. When covid came, I was not surprised. If anything, I was surprised that it was not more deadly. At the same time (March 2020), I expected that Covid would lead to supply chain disruptions, nationalizatoin of industry and international conflict.

The way I see it, the period from 1945 to 2020 was the exception, not the norm. Apart from that period (in the Western World), humans have been facing more difficult times than 2020-2022 through most of history. Still we have surivived, and at times, prospered.

In the future, we may face disasters (climate change, pandemics, wars) that are hundreds of times worse than covid. Still none of those (except possibly nuclear war at some point) are likely to be the end of humanity, or even set us back so much that we are completely unable to record history. (A big nuclear war today would perhaps be a setback for human knowledge of history comparable to the loss of the librariy in Alexandria)

There are still existential threats. One may be if we build millions of new nukes and use them all at once. Others could be technological (AI, nanotech), yet other could come from space (asteroids, aliens).

But for humanity to be wiped out by pandemics or climate change seems highly unlikely.

> The way I see it, the period from 1945 to 2020 was the exception, not the norm. Apart from that period (in the Western World), humans have been facing more difficult times than 2020-2022 through most of history. Still we have surivived, and at times, prospered.

Now you got me thinking about this. Perhaps that period was a technological "sweet spot." Technology assisted us in our tasks. It wasn't too primitive where it hindered us like the periods prior. On the flip side, we were not overly reliant on that assistance like perhaps we are now (think chip shortages disrupting nearly every facet of life).

Also, population growth. The planet is significantly more populated. For example, had this baby formula shortage happened during a period of less population, could it have had less of an impact? Even if the same proportion of the population were, it may have been not so great of a stress as supplies may have stretched longer.

> Now you got me thinking about this. Perhaps that period was a technological "sweet spot."

Maybe, but I really doubt that. I find it much more likely that it was a combination of luck and culture. (Or rather of a culture that had not yet been corrupted.)

Anyway, even Corona was an extremely minor disaster, in the grand scope of things. In terms of years of life lost, the average per capita number is in the order of between a few days and a couple of weeks. Had corona been spreading in 1946, it would hardly have been noticed.

By comparison, the Black Death probably caused average life expectancy to fall by something like 20 years, globally for those alive when it started to spread. In other words, Covid was less than 1% as serious as the Black Death for the average person.

> Also, population growth. The planet is significantly more populated. For example, had this baby formula shortage happened during a period of less population, could it have had less of an impact?

Most people througout history would be completely unable to grasp why we make a fuss about things like the baby formula shortage. They were used to child mortality in the order of 50%, even in peacetime. Lack of baby formula in the US may perhaps cause the child mortality rate to go up by 0.000001%.

If I have a concern, it is not that we are living through difficult times now. We are not, these are still some of the best time in human history (for the average person, even in most developing countries). Rather my concern, is that most people have NO CLUE how much worse it can get.

I don't mean the semi-religious concern that you can find surrounding climate change, or a fatalist view on nuclear war. This kind of fatalism tends to just passify people, make them shrug, and say "if it happens, we're all dead anyway".

I mean for people to actually imagine living in a world where it is normal for your children to die from starvation, where there are no medicines. Where the infection in your thumb that you got from working in the fields until your hands were bleeding can actually kill you. Where packs of wolf-dogs roam the cities to feed on human corpses, many of them carrying rabies.

I mean in particular the willingness so many people seem to have to tear down our institutions that work very well, because they identify some minor flaw. Their willingness to polarize politically, the re-emergance of both facist and communist ideas to conveniently place the blame for our small problems on the "Others". And finally the signs that countries once again seem to be willing to use military force to annex other nations, for no other reason than nationalism.

I don't predict that any of this will lead to human extinction, but I'm worried that within 100-200 years we will see a conflict that will completely eclipse WW2, with 500million or more deaths.

THIS is why I call myself a pessimist, because I see it as likely (or not as unlikely as I would like) that humanity will return to a state that is, in fact, more or less the average of what humanity has experienced up until now, while most people seem to take it for granted that the near-Utopian (EDIT) situation we have now will remain mostly as it is.

> Maybe, but I really doubt that. I find it much more likely that it was a combination of luck and culture. (Or rather of a culture that had not yet been corrupted.)

I really think it was all the aftermath of WWII. That was such a catastrophic event with all that "never forget", that instead of going for war, peace was the better solution at any cost (for west and central Europe). Now as the remembrance is waning, military options become increasingly an option. The germans shipping heavy military equipment? Unthinkable 10 years ago.

WW2 was probably the main ingredient, but without Mutually Assured Destruction, a common enemy in the Soviet Union, a booming economy as well as the lessons learned in the 20's and 30's about not living beyond your means, the effect might have ended sooner.

In other words, the 1945-2020 period required "luck" in a number of dimensions, and should be considered a fluke, not the norm.

COVID was a minor speed bump, in the grand scheme of things. I’m not playing it down in a “it’s just the flu” Trump kind of way, but it was no worse than the Spanish flu or many past pandemics. It didn’t even cause a recession really, most of the economic issues we have at the moment are self inflicted.

We’re just not used to dealing with a disease like this. It was a serious problem, but the idea that it was any kind of existential threat is absurdly hyperbolic.

The Spanish flu was similarly dangerous and virulent, it’s impact was vastly greater, yet for most people it’s a forgotten historical footnote.

> It didn’t even cause a recession really, most of the economic issues we have at the moment are self inflicted.

It did, it was central banks by pressing money, who held the faith in economy high. There would, and time will tell, should have been some more companies default.

COVID was mindblowing. For the first time in recorded history the entire planet coordinated a response to an existential threat. And we survived.

In a matter of just three years we rethought how we work, live, travel, and socialize. The global community came up with a vaccine in an extraordinarily short amount of time, and then coordinated a roll out.

We've seen how humanity can adapt at scale when we are motivated. I don't know what answer we will have to the ecological ruin we have layed out. Maybe we don't have an answer to it, that will be a truly humbling moment.

"For the first time in recorded history the entire planet coordinated a response to an existential threat"

Umm... - Smallpox eradication was a global effort. - Polio eradication was a global effort.(unfortunately delayed by religious fanatics in a small number of countries)

I agree with all that you said. It is a great feat to witness. But just imagine, multiple viruses like Covid-19 cropping up all at once. That’s where we will fail.

We were already shifting to different working patterns before COVID hit. Had it been 10 years earlier it would have been much more impactful but the concept of working from home wasn’t novel in a great many industries before COVID. And those that couldn’t function remotely continued operate largely like they did before the pandemic.

Also it’s worth noting that the vaccines were already years into development before COVID hit. We knew there was a risk of a Coronavirus outbreak (by virtue of the fact that we had dodged two Coronavirus pandemics a decade earlier). Granted the increased funding and urgency of COVID helped speed things along; but they weren’t exactly starting from scratch.

So it’s still not really clear how we would cope with a more dramatic or unknown situation.

What I did learn about the pandemic was normal folk will completely disregard their own safety just to stick a middle finger to the government. Which is not only concerning for the future survival of our species but also a direct contradiction to your point about civilisation banding together.

Second order effects from global warming striking in synchrony with resource depletion and biodiversity drop looks pretty consumption -civilization destroying to me. Definitely 10 Billion humans don't have a happy life in 2100. Then again if you ask a 4th Century AD farmer about the Roman Empire they would probably give you a shrug.

They’d probably say “as long as they don’t debase the denarius we should be ok” good thing we learned that lesson.

I feel a bit hopefull because globally we really did try to get Covid right, most people tried in their own ways. That goes for all parts of the political spectrum. That of course led to conflicts and group think, which is the part that will destroy us. The issue with global warming is not the temprature, it's how we will all be affected and how we act because of that. History says we can not handle external stress, civilizations fall easily. Yes we are global now, that will mean a global civilisation destroying.

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