What happens when a population cannot be maintained? Collapse. Whether by resource starvation (the poorest and most vulnerable go first) or conflict (populations invest in warfare.)
For students of history/lit, it may be anecdotal to know that "Odysseus" doesn't mean adventurer who goes around trying to find his way home it means "child of anger." Why was our hero named so? "For there are so many people in the world, and it makes me so very angry" (the uncle of Odysseus upon his naming.)
So according to some accounts, the Trojan war and many other conflicts of those times (the "sea people"), were cataclysms instigated by excessive populations for those times in human societal (technological) evolution.
While incompetents does explain more easily than conspiracy, I attest there is both.
Let us play this out, while such recklessness is possible (and none would ever hear or understand the true reasons), an immediate crisis is those who simply don't care they are a waste of their humanity.
Do not be a waste of your humanity.
What more can individuals do in the contest of civilization's passing?
Where did you get that translation from? That has an entirely different meaning from the more commonly accepted ones. Here's a couple:
From Robert Grave's The Greek Myths:
>In the course of my life I have antagonized many princes, and I shall therefore name this grandson Odysseus, meaning The Angry One, because he will be the victim of my enmities. Yet if he ever comes to Mount Parnassus to reproach me, I shall give him a share of my possessions, and assuage his anger.
From Fagles's translation:
>give the boy the name I tell you now. Just as I have come from afar, creating pain for many - men and women, across the good green earth - so let his name be Odysseus
Sounds like he's saying "name him Odysseus because I pissed a bunch of people off" rather than "name him Odysseus because I'm pissed there's too many people on this earth".
Too bad we can't anthromorphize evolution, else I'd say: maybe that was evolution's "idea" / "gamble" to begin with. Evolve the being that evolves everything "evolution" (nature) itself hasn't. Pyramids, skyscrapers, suburbs, machinery, poetry, computation, computation devices.. entirely abstract pure-thought-stuff machines aka programs.. abstract machines that "evolve" new ones.. and whatever stems from that when we/they get there.
But.. evolution doesn't have ideas or plans. Right? Nevermind that we, a self-proclaimed product of evolution, do. Did we even invent (create / evolve) .. the idea of "ideas" and "plans" there? Who could tell, other than some big overseer of it all =)
What does "outpacing natural evolution" even mean once non-random-mutation-based change makers .. just naturally evolved via the natural evolutionary mechanisms? Everything they (we) do then is "natural evolution" by extension / implication. Genes and fitness "came up with" (or randomed up) us doing all that, even us wondering and worrying whether we're "outpacing natural evolution".
Curious food for thought!
Do you mean what happens if we grow faster than we can adapt to, or that our ability to exploit natural resources can support?
If so, then what happens is pretty clear: population collapse.
But since the last few decades since 19th century, biological evolution of humans still progresses at a rate slower than the change of everything, our economy, lifestyle - from telephone to Radio to TV to Computers to Smartphones to VR(current decade) and this is just in communication. Overall impact of technology on our lives is very large from big markets, LLM models and nuclear reactors.
In the initial days, we utilized what was given to us to create a simple and efficient society, fast forward to today, everything requires electricity to run, and our bodies naturally don't produce electricity, hence we are already moving away from sustainable future, as soon as we collapse on other natural resources, end up utilizing planet's core or magnetic fields to obtain power.
And there are no noticeable changes in the human body, biological during last decade. We require lot of information to work, brain size and it's processing power is getting impacted with the usage of Social Media and other addictive things on the internet. Our bodies are physically less capable than people from Stone Age. If this continues, I see only two ways of this going for survival either we doom ourselves back to Stone Age / Beam us out of existence once the very fabric holding civilization is strained enough, and we loose all of our knowledge because everything was made virtual from books to tools and people were unable to even to repetitive work because of ML models, our social communication skills get impacted due to communication with LLM models and virtual assistants. No human interaction, meaning inability to teach next generation how to speak. And we become monkeys or worse chimpanzees.
Or we as a civilization become a parasite that explodes our own planet and then we move over to Mars, destroy it then next and so on. Maybe, on our way we slave other alien civilizations and utilize them as our source for energy and keep deestroying the universe(if there is any else the multiverse and across many timelines)
This is absolutely not correct on a biological level for a given individual or statistically for a population of people.
> Our bodies are physically less capable than people from Stone Age.
This is also absolutely not correct on a biological level, you might argue that on average humans have more issues like obesity, but the evolutionary ability of people has not changed since then, and with knowledge of physiology, exercise and nutrition, the strongest people alive today are probably much stronger than people from the stone age. I'm pretty sure no one could squat 1000lbs until the last 100 years or so.
Which makes me wonder if civilization lives long enough by any chance till the end of universe, The Big Crunch and all that, would the prevailing knowledge be of interest to another universe of it's just an abstract visualization that exists along with universe and it's history and is bound to die along with it?
While it's true that human brains have been shrinking, it's probably not due to social media - it's been happening for ages, for one thing.
>physically less capable
No. Your typical person is less capable, but if you hypothetically took people, taught them basic things about fire-starting, safe and unsafe foods, etc, and dropped them in the middle of some isolated forest, the ones who survived would probably wind up being just about as physically capable, if not more so, than your typical Stone Ager.
> if this continues [first theory]
That is unlikely. First of all, backups will likely exist. Print books continue to exist. Second of all, it is very difficult to live a life with no human interaction. Who will feed babies, teach children, et cetera? People - generally speaking - crave human interaction. Any AI/LLM that would be successful in eliminating the need for human teachers, caregivers, etc, would need to be very similar to them. We would still interact - maybe with robots, but still speak. Also, there are still uncontacted tribes, who would probably prosper.
> And we become monkeys or worse chimpanzees
1) What's your deal with chimps?
2) We're actually closer evolutionarily to chimps than monkeys
3) I...don't think you understand evolution?
> [parasite theory]
It...uh...
It takes 200 gigatons of TNT to blow up a 25 km asteroid.[1] Some quick Googling and extrapolation suggests that asteroid weighs about 32.75 billion tons - in other words, the amount of TNT it takes to destroy an asteroid weighs over six times as much as the asteroid. Possibly. It's hard to figure this out. While asteroids are unusually hard to blow up, probably, and of course it's possible this effect diminishes with size, and there are more effective ways to blow things up than TNT, blowing up the earth would require turning a significant portion of the earth into explosives.
Earth has survived being impacted by something the size of Mars. I don't see humanity - or any species - feasibly destroying Earth, let alone the universe.
(Please don't try to prove me wrong on this...)
[1] https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/3/7/18251559/ast.... Written before DART.
The bigger scare is when our technological output (toxic waste?) hurts our ability to evolve.
Looks like a college class assignment. It has been a while. I am going to pass.
Also it's not a college class query, it's out of genuine curiosity, but hey that's what killed the cat right? though I think that not asking this question might cause a significant setback in overall condition of us as a civilization right now.
When you have different bacteria stems and limited resources, then they'll fight for it with weapons (their antibiotics). Bacteria stem that is fast enough to use up resources will survive, while the slow ones will go extinct.
If, now, you think of humanity as different bacteria stems, it will be the same. A few human stems have resources and access to it, other dont. That corresponds to economy (or to countries with economy) for resource production.
So, "if the grow rate exceeds natural evolution" - first, it needs to be analysed what that means. In Europe, Japan, actually everywhere in the rich western world, the birth rates of woman go down. In poor countries, the kids are mostly birthed as a security for later years or for getting the work done.
So, there's your answer. The rich world with resources will keep the resources closed and inaccessible as the bacteria also do. The poor world will produce even more kids that can't be fed solely by the poor countries resources and go extinct by used up resources, or they use their weapons to get resources of others, which of course will use their weapons.
We'll see a lot of migration until the times the borders close. After that time wars for resources will start and will become even worse as the resources decline.
You can't talk about rapid growth of knowledge, technology or economics, without taking into account, that the growth is happening unequal in pace and amount through different parts of the world. We still haven't realized that concurrency is the problem. And the economy as we know it today is even more a problem.
But, don't ask me please. I don't have an answer or solutions to that problems. At least, none acceptable ones.
Prepare, it'll start in a few decades, when the earth don't have nutrients anymore, the clear water is not clear and the droughts have made yields go down.
Or maybe they will do nothing as we do nothing and simply close poor people and unfortunate's access to their solutions,if they even have any(I highly doubt that).
In what units are you going to compare those apples and… rackoons?..
We've outpaced genetics alone long ago, using our brains and dexterity to hunt, make fire, create clothing for most of the world's biomes, sail across the seas, etc. It's a sort of cultural evolution that continued where genetic selection slowed down. You can see lighter versions of that in animals, like chimp tribal cultures, raven sub groups (and language "dialects"), learned tool use passed down across generations in otters, etc.
But semantics aside, if our population grows faster than we can adapt, well, either we catch up (with better medicine, food, shelter, economics, agriculture, distribution, climate mitigations, etc.) or people start dying. Usually the poorer people in developing countries.
It's incredibly difficult to model human population collapse because there's so many more unknowns with us than other, more predictable species. If a supervolcano goes off and we suddenly face a global crop failure and massive food shortages, maybe the remaining countries will all try to work together to work out a new production and distribution system like we did with COVID. Or maybe the rich countries will start hogging all the resources, like we also did with COVID. If Putin nukes Europe tomorrow, that would change things, or if some high schooler gets fusion to net positive energy in her friend's garage, a lot of things would get easier. If ChatGPT goes Skynet on us next year, maybe we'll be all killed, or eaten, or saved. Who knows.
In the meantime, most countries don't have population control programs (the way China did a few decades ago) so people keep popping them out, especially in areas with either high poverty (needing child labor) or high infant mortality (gotta make a bunch in case a few die young). On the other hand birth rates are slowing down, or already negative, in many developed economies because a lot of people have trouble affording kids (in time or money), for example, or don't want to bring them into this world. I guess there's some hopelessly slim chance of a Star Trek style "fully automated luxury space communism" future, but more likely you'll have a few rich powerful people and everyone else working for pittances, with people dying left and right but enough getting made to replace them in the commodity labor market. We already have most of that system in place today.
And nature? An afterthought, until it isn't, at which point the survivors will adapt anew and we'll go through similar boom and bust cycles again and again... yay, the circle of life and all that.
It would be nothing short of a miracle if someone stumbles upon something like that and hence has very low chances. Similar to how ARM was built, by a person researching processors, and provides significant difference to the world. Earlier we were all going to doom very early with carbon emission from Data Centers utilizing no clean energy , our vehicles using non embeddable computers and factories. Each micro power consumtion could have made the world unsufferable by now, but somehow we delayed it. Some credit also goes to Covid.
Also, at current rate of tech growth with Cryptocurrency, sooner or later Governments are going to tumble (democracies only) as they will not have resources or the monetary capacity to control their areas. Something, like what happened in Bangladesh or Pakistan(when debt is high) would happen. So, no one to come together to fight the next big apocalypse. And as individuals humans are more destructive than constructive. Hence, mathematically instatable, but that's what hope and miracles are for, right? or should we change the way we live and go into hibernation for survival until our biological selves evolve to find the better solution, maybe that's what our last civilization did and we are here, having a far more technological world, but not scalable or sustainable. or we could leave it all up to the creator, or maybe aliens, another civilization from another planet acting as a parasite until we all either de-evlotionize or die out of existence.
Just look at the news. (Gaza, Ukraine, Syria, Libia, Yemen, a good part of Africa and so on) /s