The World Has Already Ended
collapsemusings.com
collapsemusings.com
By all means, such hysteria never works:
> This is why I’m a doomer. Because the world has already ended, and human nature prevents it from creating a better world. Now, I’m just waiting for the end while enjoying the time we have left, like someone watching their last sunset.
I think it really happens when the harms of not doing the thing actually start happening and the pain of not doing it now becomes greater than doing it now.
That would likely mean once we get powerful enough (which might be global climate change/industry) we'll have one that we can't 'fix' in time eventually.
Yes, things are bad. I don’t think that painting the bleakest, most depressing mental image possible is good for me though.
Furthermore it's probably wrong, too. Just after my mom finished school, some people were talking about how the number of diabetics is rapidly rising so that soon there would not be enough land to raise all the pigs required to get the insulin.
This was just before synthetic insulin was invented.
I read most of it (I would have preferred study links so I could look at the uncertainties but whatevs) and it basically just said, everything's fucked and our only hope is to go back to small scale agriculture (which would require massive, massive population loss).
Like, the next century is gonna be touch and go for humanity (certainly at our current levels of technological sophistication) but just saying we're doomed is entirely unhelpful.
Unfortunately, it's going to take us a lot longer to fix this problem than it did to create it. Hopefully that will be an important lesson learned for future generations.
As well as his/her proposed solution requiring most of the current population to die first as non-fertilizer based agriculture (certainly local agriculture) is really unlikely to be able to feed all of us.
"Now, I’m just waiting for the end while enjoying the time we have left, like someone watching their last sunset."
I still blame the US elections of 2000 and 2016 for most of this and I go to my grave with that.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/02/hannah-r...
It’s nice to read about serious problems with a sense of optimism that don’t downplay the problem.
A shallow person in the West somehow thinks that they can reduce their carbon footprint by consuming "environmentally-friendly" products coming from these countries, externalising their pollution there.
If it's not climate change it would just be something else (though -- most of the falling civilizations in my link do fall at least partly to climate change. The sea peoples wrecking the bronze age was very likely due to that and mass migration)
Stepping out of fossil fuels means a great deal of industrial and civilizational change, which takes a lot of time. But things do change.
In these days, what we need is for people to take action (from voting and raising their voices in the media, to working on how to live in a sustainable way as a civilization), and promote a positive message that others will follow. Depression-inducing articles like this one risks to prevent people from believing in a decent future, and thus persuade them to stop caring and acting for a better world.
The problem is that these religious rituals are not doing much to mitigate any of the issues.
I tend to ask "how does that solar shade coming along" only to get downvotes from believers.
Sometimes they say that the issue is more complex, such as via ocean acidification. But the problem here is that if you're doing something, that issue becomes less complex, whereas if you're doing nothing (short of those religious rituals) your issue becomes even more complex.
I don’t look at it as doom but just as a period of very rapid change. As the Chinese saying goes, living in interesting times is a blessing and a curse.
I don’t know what happens next, which is both interesting and scary especially when I think about my kids. They could end up living in a collapsing failed state (or worse) or in a post-scarcity technosphere or something I am not imagining.
Except that a cloud of uncertainty hangs over it.
But a cloud of uncertainty is not worse than, say, constant starvation and plagues or eternal tribal wars. Would you bring a child into the world of the black plague? The Bronze Age collapse?
There has never been and will never be a utopia, especially one that can project into the future without fear. Having children means both blessing and cursing them with existence in a universe that apparently is not safety tested.
Resources will always be scarce, and honestly I don't know what people would do or how they would be motivated in a world where they can always have anything they want or need.
True post-scarcity would mean anyone could have their own private plane, spaceship, etc. That couldn’t happen without some kind of speculative singularity scenario where we get Mr. Fusion and benevolent superintelligent AI or something. Star Trek levels of post-scarcity are sci-fi.
I'm sure many Europeans thought WW2 was the end of everything; but the next generation had an incredible boom. It's always darkest before dawn. There are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen. And all that.
Unless either extreme position (i.e. between "we've already lost and can't do a thing about it" on one end, and "climate change does not matter at all/can easily be solved with today's or tomorrow's technologies without any drastic impact to anyone/will fix itself/was a hoax..." on the other one) ends up being absolutely true in retrospect (which I consider quite unlikely), this might well be a game-theoretical problem:
If everybody ends up a defeatist, we really might end up losing primarily for that reason (due to most people, including decisionmakers, not even bothering doing forward-looking research, not conserving resources we have, accelerating resource depletion for the sake of "living life to its fullest" etc. as a result of that ideology), and vice versa.
In the book, one proposed solution of humanity to that meta-problem is a mind-altering machine that can instill an absolute belief in any chosen fact in everybody undergoing the procedure...
I seriously hope we won't ever look to any such dystopian measures, but I think the more important metaphor here is that defeatism, even if intellectually more honest and "true" (as far as that's an appropriate label for ideologies) in some contexts than an irrational believe that we can still succeed, can indeed become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
However there is a huge gap in humanity will emit less green house gases (GHG) because we switched to alternative energy sources and we emit less GHG because we mostly died off.
The reality with global warming is somewhere in the middle. It’s a slow boiling problem. We won’t be all dead but billions of people will need to adapt to new climate patterns.
CO2 spiking from ~280 parts per million to 400+ parts per million is a provable fact measured independently by many labs around the world.
https://blog.csiro.au/co2-data-twitter/
The science of global warming - aka CO2 and H2O capturing photons from the sun in infrared spectrum and heating up is well known physics. Experiments can be done at home.
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/02/25/carbon-dioxide-...
If an asteroid hit earth like when dinosaurs were around, humans would still make it through - it would be very painful. The world would not end.
Gasoline is not the enemy. Most countries don’t like that they have to import from Russia, Saudi Arabia and the likes. The fact is gasoline is a cheap, semi-abundant, portable, energy dense, relatively safe fuel. We got nothing better atm.
Batteries are a start but to be competitive with gasoline, they need to be cheaper and >10X more energy dense.
The fact is we haven’t cracked high efficiency artificial photosynthesis at scale. Capturing CO2 + solar energy into energy dense hydrocarbons.
Our bottleneck is human ingenuity. We ought to be pouring more resources into cracking what nature has been doing for millions of years.
Maybe civilization will burn out. Maybe not. In the end, we're all going to die whether it's individually or corporately. Make use of your time to the best of your ability. Love the people are you well—especially those who are hardest to love. If no one cries at your funeral, you have only yourself to blame.
Worst case runaway global warming, leading to a major disruption of the world climate - e.g. like the one in "The Day After Tomorrow". Non-stop wars for resources, with the use of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Complete global collapse of society and civilization.
One big problem with collapse are the 400+ commercial nuclear reactors in the north hemisphere. Without connection to a working electric grid and regular diesel deliveries those will go boom and will spread enough radioactive material to make most of the land on Earth deadly for humans.
Seriously, where do people get these ideas from ? This unfounded fear of nuclear fission is a huge reason why we're in this mess to begin with.
If by civilized you mean people have a roof over their head, communities of some size that work together, trade, etc sure there's a version of that which doesn't have a massive environmental impact.
If civilization includes huge city centers, centralized agriculture, broad reaching industries, centralized power distribution, regular air travel, etc then no I can't personally see that being done without massive impact.
My personal opinion is that centralized industry and infrastructure is a lynchpin in massive environmental impact. I don't think we can have the former without the latter.
My worry is the way will involve abandoning people around the world, pushing back against immigration and sharing as the rich get richer and more isolated, eventually underground bunkers. It is going to take a lot of work and faith and sacrifice to address this crisis humanely, but the reward will be larger than "at least I'm not in the desert." Self-serving populism is imo the biggest problem.
A new world has begun.
It may be wise to recognize this and work to shape the new world for better.
I believe the author is stating exactly this, that the sooner we recognize that we can't "fix" the problem (resetting back to "normal"), we can start embracing the new reality and work from there.
It's the denial that the change has already occurred that's the problem.
Do you mean how am I showing a different behaviour to despair and disinterest?
Firstly, just because I think we should not be doing one thing, doesn't mean I am doing the other thing perfectly. I am as human as the next person.
I'm not massively engaged with politics, climate change, etc, but I have a family and daughter. Caring about people, especially younger people, is a way that I don't write off the future. I also really enjoy wildlife and being outside, and support two different conservation charities. My wife supports a couple of different children's charities. It's not a lot (I'm not activist hero), but it's something.
Of course, if someone wanted to say that the above amounts to nothing, and I'm a hypocrite, then they are welcome to think as much.
If there are such problems in the world, then resolve them. Don't just die.
You can of course still be content in life and ignore all this. I'd like to think that humanity can be better, what makes me sad is that we aren't, or our current system of society and government makes it impossible.
Lotta people gotta die before that happens. Who gets to live?
I'll wager a large number already farming and many still living close to hunter gather lifestyles will pull through okay.
They'll just have to deal with the circadian surfacing survivalists struggling with eating gold bars.
Still pretty grim seeing such broad loss of diversity in nature
But it was for a cup of coffee which probably will be extinct as well so jokes on them...
The answers range from "Nothing" to "Hot full-scale war" but it doubtfully includes climate change and stuff.
Except you can argue that Tel Aviv is also bound to be heavily affected by Climate Change and rising seas, whereas with Moscow it's questionable due to all the landmass.
Living in a russian village and growing your own food is a lot more sustainable in case of total collapse, e.g. caused by climate change.
Bullshit, in no time people with guns will arrive to kill you and grab your food. Holodomor is just one example.
A slightly different question is why this article is marked as [flagged] but not [dead]. Often (usually?) when an article is flagged by multiple users, it's also killed and made invisible (except to users with "showdead" turned on). Users with sufficient karma can then "vouch" for dead stories to revive them.
But when a story is [flagged] but not [dead], no user remedy is possible. The story is penalized to not appear on the front page, but the comment page is still usable. I think this state happens after a manual review: users flag, Dan assesses, and then decides that penalized but alive is the best outcome.
But maybe there is some other way it can end up like this? I'll write to Dan and ask.
I've resisted that on the grounds of not wanting to make things too bureaucratic, but I can feel myself tipping slightly on the question for a somewhat odd reason: there are too many mistaken/accidental flags, especially on mobile, so we probably need a confirmation screen to allow people to say "oops, cancel". If one adds that, it's probably fine to ask for a reason too.
Re the other questions: flags, above a certain threshold, act as downweights on the story. Above another (higher) threshold, the [flagged] marker appears. Above another (still higher) threshold, the story will also be killed, in which case it will show up as [flagged][dead] and closed to new comments. However, if a thread has already gotten a lot of comments, the software won't kill it. In addition, moderators sometimes put [flagged] on a post—but this is rare for stories; we do it more often on comments that are breaking the site guidelines.
So that makes 3 different ways for a story to end up [flagged] but not [dead]. The one you postulated (a story is [flagged][dead] and then we manually unkill it, so it becomes [flagged] but not [dead]) is technically possible and I can't say it never happens, but it's definitely not standard practice and would be a weird edge case if it did happen.
Have I answered your questions?
p.s. various past explanations can be found at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Edit: I forgot about another case. If a post is [flagged][dead] and then enough users vouch for it, it will stop being [dead] but will still be [flagged].
Anecdotally I can say that I've accidentally flagged a couple articles on mobile, the same goes for accidentally downvoting though its easy enough to notice that and fix it with the upvote I intended.
My reason for asking initially was mostly out of curiosity. I wasn't actually aware that there was a [dead] state separate from [flagged]. The few threads I've commented on and were later flagged just always make me wonder what the flag was for.
Its a larger ask of users with regards to moderation, but I could see it being really interesting to test out linking flags to comments. I.e. a user has to enter a comment when flagging a thread, potentially it is shown without the username visible for privacy.
Just my two cents though, thanks for following up here!
Accidental flags seem like another good reason to add a "reason" field. I'm not sure what interface makes sense, but I do think it would be useful to know if the flagging was done because the link was broken, or because the title is bad, or something else that could be easily fixed. Personally, I'd be more likely to flag dupes if there was a way to signify why I was flagging them.
Your answer also makes me wonder if all [flagged] stories should have a "vouch" link visible. I view flagging and vouching as opposites. It seems suboptimal and oddly asymmetrical that a story can be permanently penalized by flagging without allowing other users to cancel out those flags. The vouch link seems like a wonderfully democratic solution apart from this.
Alternatively, if the goal of showing [flagged] is to signify that a story is contentious, I wonder if [flagged][dead] stories that are revived by vouching should still keep their [flagged] tag even if the penalty is removed. Consider a story like this one but with fewer comments. If it's [dead], one can vouch for it and restore it fully; but if it's just [flagged], it's penalized forever.
I think it would be useful to know if there are some accounts or groups which frequently flag things. You could potentially expose this data without disclosing their names. Are there in fact people acting as censors?
Re who flags what: the basic pattern seems pretty consistent and I've described it a number of times over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... The short version is that there are some people who flag specific topics but usually those flags alone aren't enough to make the difference.
What most techno-solutionists don't see in their own rhetoric is that, while our technological prowess makes us a lot more capable of tackling those challenges than in the past, the same technological prowess makes us also much less likely to miscalculate the threat that we're under.
Techno-solutionism is a stance held mostly by two groups: (1) highly educated STEM people with a huge conflict of interest to make technology _the_ solution, and (2) poorly educated people who don't want to hear about the problem, and figure that "technology has saved us from diabetes, bacterial infections, polio and so many other threats, this will surely happen again".
The problem here is that the first group has Dunning-Kruger understanding of the global situation, because they are both uninterested in the actual solution and too interested in the non-solution, while the second group doesn't understand shit of what's going on* and doesn't trust anyone anymore.
So, while I am not inclined to say we're doomed, I have to admit that the current dynamics don't play in our favor.
[*] The best clue of that might be that lots of them don't see any contradiction in thinking that technology will save us from whatever comes next, while refusing to vaccinate their kids against the disease with the most awful lethality/preventability ratio: tetanus.
Problem is: those resource limits are essentially fixed. There's only so much greenhouses gasses we can put in the atmosphere before wreaking havoc on the climate. No technology will give us a 2x or 10x GHG budget. Similar story with energy, minerals, metals & so on.
Technology solutions may come. Or not. But you can't be sure that for any problem x, some tech y will be developed to solve it.
And if it does: all you've done is move the goalposts, and a while later you're back at the same problem. For example the green revolution allowed this world to feed many more mouths. So population exploded, and now we're back to the same problem, except with 8..10 vs. 1..2B mouths to feed.
Techno-optimists lean too much on those technology fixes to appear (and in time!), imho. A more realistic approach is to start with what's currently possible (or what seems realistic near-future). Then if new technology appears, it'll make the problem easier. Just don't count on it.
Humans have been not only around, but have been building tents and sewing clothes for hundreds of thousands of years. With both the climate chaning and sea levels rising/falling (where do humans build dwelling, if not near rivers and seas?), it seems to me like a massive case of survivorship bias and superiority-complex induced delusion.