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Comment by nacozarina | Hacker News Reader

Humans have been successfully using violence for conflict-resolution for tens of thousands of years. We’ll be fine, it’s not our first rodeo.

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> Humans have been successfully using violence for conflict-resolution for tens of thousands of years. We’ll be fine, it’s not our first rodeo.

Reducing this to zero should be our #1 goal. As technological advancement keeps allowing one bad person to take out more and more people, for lower cost. If technology keeps advancing, that ratio could eventually become 1:1B+, for a few thousand dollars.

In my opnion, this is the greatest race we are in, if we are to avoid our own Great Filter event. Using violence as a problem solving tool is simply not compatible with a truly technologically advanced species.

But has there ever been an advanced, more civilized means to change tested and demonstrated? All I can think of was broadly diluted violence, applied systematically in an industrialized way against large populations - economic hardships, lowering life quality, health etc - instead of focused, more local flare ups.

When the knowledge to do things like create novel pathogens, or "mirror life," becomes widespread, and the tools cheaper, we need to have violence as a problem solving tool in the past. That's a big challenge.

Also, I am trying to predict the future, so I am likely way off.

The ugly truth indeed. It sucks to die for the world you won't enjoy, but sometimes it's the only viable solution. Much of our progress has been to minimise casualties and human suffering in order to sustain the world most can agree is better (than the alternatives), but it seems the period of the wave just hits the troughs farther apart, but when it hits them it's like taking breath before the water swallows you, and without training it's quite the panic and suffering (and prospect of death). We know it's in our bones but we want to forget because our bodies are made to interpret pain in the most direct and literal sense -- re-conditioning is always painful too. Strong people create weak people who create strong people, etc.

So yeah _we_ will be fine, but some of us definitely won't, and with the growth in our numbers on Earth, the proportion of martyrs may be growing. Quantifying personal suffering is not possible, especially if the prospect is death.

Successfully ? Maybe the OG survivor bias here..

I don't see why this is voted down, we've come close to complete destruction of the human race multiple times, why would the future make that less true?

Anyone pish poshing war should go fight in one, and then let me know their opinions.

Violence against economic shifts from labor to capital have pretty much consistently failed though. At best they’ve won brief relief that eventually got swallowed by the invisible mouth.

You can’t really fight this stuff because of global competition.

Average quality of life for a society almost never goes down long term because when it does the government gets violently overthrown.

> We’ll be fine, it’s not our first rodeo.

Because World War I was fine, World War II finer....

Well sure, the conflicts were resolved.

Humanity will be fine. Significant numbers of individual people won't be.

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