The Collapse Is Coming. Will Humanity Adapt?
nautil.us
nautil.us
I guess it serves some evolutionary purpose, since it's so deeply ingrained.
We've done quite well with these people among us so far, despite them always, since the dawn of humanity, being wrong.
The last collapse happended to the natives of a whole continent just a few centuries ago by new types of disease. I don't think they expected that, so they didn't need to be wrong, it just happened.
But it's an interesting point. While the world never ends, entire peoples and nations do get extinguished with some regularity, and having people around who always look for ways this can happen could serve a credible evolutionary purpose, even though they're almost always wrong.
Also as others pointed out, you misinterpret or misrepresent the interviewee’s words by placing “the end of the world” alongside TFA’s as though a thoughtful discussion with domain experts (in biology) is the same as the ravings of apocalyptic cranks.
Do you have an argument besides the ad hominem directed at “these people among us”?
Sticking your head in the ground and going la la la not happening, it’ll be ok, pretending people are suggesting the end of the world when they aren’t isn’t going to help and that is what people are protesting about.
I’d like to think we’d come up with solutions because I think there is some hope,but comments like this make me lose hope as I think it shows people with no hope or vision for change and improvement.
I think religions are worldviews that appeal to universal human needs. If they all converge on some variation of Doomsday, that says something about human nature.
We atheists have to fill this need in other ways. When I was young it was nuclear war, after the Cold War it's been mostly environmental disaster. Now AI is coming up as a new candidate.
You're right that no one serious implies the literal death of every single human. A big enough disaster fills the need well enough.
This is of course just my personal speculation. I can't prove it, and have been wrong many times before.
Without an understanding of why it worked in the past, there is statistically no reason to believe it will work again.
Also, you can read human history as a record of societal collapse. Sure they recovered, it took sometimes hundreds of years for the history we know of. Since we talking climate and it may take hundreds if not thousands of years to stabilise again, one could argue, this is the scale of collapse we’re looking at. Humans could very well survive, but I wouldn’t call returning to the stone age something we should strive for…
> We've done quite well with these people among us so far, despite them always, since the dawn of humanity, being wrong.
Also known as "a just so story," with nods to Rudyard Kipling. Or, more recently, "evolutionary psychology."
Also, the world is not ending. Just the way it has been working since the Industrial age.
Sounds about as logical as a guy falling from the 30th floor, repeating at each floor “so far, so good”.
We have the technology to pause the worst effects of climate change indefinitely for a few billion dollars a year: https://news.uchicago.edu/radical-solution-address-climate-c...
It’s far from a complete solution, but it works well enough that the future described in the article is much more a dark fantasy than a likely reality.
But it does very effectively prevent anything even approaching a “collapse.” Relatively cheaply, even.
Didn't happen.
The availability of economically competitive alternatives to fossil fuels (like cheap solar + batteries) is a very recent development.
We are talking about technology as such not necessarily economically competitive.
I wouldn't consider the technology of solar engineering mentioned in your link economically competitive either.
Doable but not cheap.
The same is true for the technology to prevent climate change. It exists but it was expensive.
Interestingly, it's still expensive now because even though the basic technology is cheaper, the timeframe is much shorter, so we have to achieve more in less time than if we had started earlier.
We discuss spending more money and taking extreme measures (shall we darken the clouds? bullshit) instead of taxing these fuckers out of existence and calling it a century.
I sure don't attribute my tailpipe emissions to the oil company that supplied the oil that was refined into the gasoline that I consume.
Also, I need to immortalize a typo that I made writing the above paragraph:
Civil Warn
That's a good summary of the movie.
Where is the Civil War part?
If folks refuse, so be it, I did my ethical duty in making sure they were well informed.
Worked in OT a long time, an old saying is that you either schedule downtime to perform maintenance or the hardware will gladly do that for you.
It's the same with climate, we either suck the cost of rearranging how we live now or we are going to hit a wall with the foot still down on the gas, expecting constant growth.
"Optimise" is never a neutral verb, we always optimise /for/.
Growth-above-all capitalists observe, correctly, the correlation between economic output and human wellbeing, and assume, incorrectly, a relationship that is both purely and directly causal and straight-up linear.
What if we optimise for human wellbeing and build a society that works less like a Prescott Pentium 4 and more like an iPhone? Figure out what really matters and then set about doing more with less.
(Answers that will be uncomfortably socialist for some - public-ish goods being more efficient in many cases than private everything, and uncomfortably technocratic for others, but tough...)
Because doing more with more is running out of runway. And in this game, you can't just declare bankruptcy and start again. There's no second chances here.
I'm not saying degrowthers have all the answers, but any critique should be weighed even-handedly against a realistic view of the shortcomings of what we have now and where it's taking us.
1. How does the OCP “stop” colonialism?
2. If what you mean by “changing the perspective on good and desirable” is restricting who can have children and who can’t, then obviously people are going to be upset with you?
https://www.nottheendoftheworld.co.uk/
Hannah Ritchie's book.
Over the last 100 years, average temperature (of whatever use this metric is) has gone up 1.5 deg C. Meanwhile life on this planet has flourished. Planet’s green cover has increased. Humans are better off on pretty much every metric.
But that is not a full system, in particular, a sustainable one. And the signals that things are decaying fast, at least for what matters for our civilization, are all around. And they are not just about climate or the natural world.
As a chief beneficiary of such activity (clearly you are using a modern computing/communication device from a climate controlled space to access a frivolous internet chat forum), why don’t you take responsibility and the lead? Perhaps give up your computer(s), phone(s), automobile, refrigerator, television and quit commuting and vacationing away from your local park and live off the land by growing vegetables. You know you can show us the ropes and kick start a global movement that will turn the knob.
And yet you participate in society. Curious. I am very intelligent.).gif
Reducing dependency on cars and preventing climate disaster are objective goods.
Folks in these situations think the idea of not using a car to get around is crazy, because in some ways it is. It’s not the majority of people though. In the US the majority of people, 70%, live within 2 miles of all their basic needs. That’s the distance that more than 25% of people living in Denmark choose to ride a bike for an errand rather than drive.
https://www.visitdenmark.com/press/latest-news/facts-and-fig...
I’ve talked to a lot of climate deniers (unfortunately). These people may be saying and doing ignorant things but largely they are not stupid. They know when you make unfalsifiable claims, and that becomes part of their justification to ignore you.