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Comment by atemerev | Hacker News Reader

Human civilization will survive mass extinctions and change of habitability of some places. Humans are resilient.

And if they won’t, life itself is even more resilient.

This is a very, very annoying strawman. Nobody believes that life, or even humanity will be wiped off the face of the earth. It's the tremendous amount suffering it'll have to endure that we'd rather avoid.

The tremendous amount of suffering will be there soon enough in the form of the next world war. Judging from observations in human history, mass suffering is normal, and the relatively peaceful environment of the “end of history” is quite an anomaly.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t do anything, converting our energy needs to nuclear and solar is the first priority. But yes, there’s a significant probability that it won’t happen soon enough, so we might want to think how to live when famines and mass climate migrations will happen. Linear progress is an exception, not a rule.

> And if they won’t, life itself is even more resilient.

You realize that's hardly reassuring, right? You're right though - life is resilient. Life has survived worse.

But our fragile global civilization, propped up by fossil fuels at a core level, is not resilient in the worst case outcomes of climate change. And keep in mind: in order to avoid the worst case scenarios, massive economic and political change needs to happen. No such changes are happening yet, though.

So yeah, I agree that humans and life in general will probably survive, but not in any way that would be recognizable to us now.

Hey, we are all going to die anyway, so that’s a baseline. The bar is pretty low :)

Now, I believe that human civilization is not there yet for coordinated global action. At the very least, it requires world peace, and we are on the brink of the next world war. Civilization can disappear even before we’ll feel consequences from climate change. Nothing is permanent.

Having said that, I think we should do everything to improve our prospects and our long-term quality of life, like building a lot of climate-safe nuclear power plants, stopping burning fossil fuels, and preparing for mass climate migration (which will not even be the first in humanity’s history). I think we’ll manage. But if not — I’m pretty sure that there are many other fine civilizations in the universe that will pass this particular test. We are not that important on the cosmic scale, and everything there is temporary anyway.

Humans have still suffered far worse. At one point, around 70kya, there were only an estimated maximum of 10,000 humans, and it is from that population that sprung forth 8 billion today. I highly doubt with even all the damage climate change will cause that we will go back to such numbers.

Your goalposts are still apocalyptic. Even going from 8 billion to 4 billion would be catastrophic amounts of suffering. The raw number of humans that currently exist is not a good measure for quality of life in general.

"it's not the end of all life" isn't much of a consolation for those that will have to live through the shitshow

Some people are used to such a good life that the concept of actual, intense, long-term suffering doesn't even register as something that can happen to them. And even when it is pointed out to them there's no gut feeling for how shit life can be

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