Comment by bowerbird | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bowerbird | Hacker News Reader

you have definitely asked the right question.

all my thoughts boil the answer down around three problem areas:

1. violence -- the willingness to hurt (or even kill) other humans and animals, up to and including poisoning the planet

2. greed -- the desire for "more", no matter how much you have

3. competitiveness -- the desire to have "more" than others, even when that means you might have less than otherwise

these three are interconnected, of course, and i don't know if it would even be possible to separate them into a single "root cause", nor would i think that would be wise anyway, because they'll undoubtedly need to be treated as a _whole._

as for how to do that, i do have some ideas, but i'm not sure that "some ideas" will be enough. so my main suggestion is to _increase_human_creativity_, because that's the only way that we will ever solve the overall problem, in my humble opinion.

and yes, in many ways, our creativity is the thing that got us into this pickle in the first place. but i just can't think of anything else with even the faintest chance of getting us out.

i might add that time is running short.

most large mammals will be extinct in 10-20 years.

and you know that us humans are "a large mammal", right?

-bowerbird

Solid answer.

Most large mammals will be extinct in 10-20 years?! Enlighten me. I am aware of cetaceans and big cats facing major problems, but mammals as a whole is another thing altogether.

that's my prediction. 10-20 years.

so yes, i'm saying that almost everyone, including even "experts in the field", has drastically underestimated both problem severity and shortness of the time-frame.

and extinction is just part of the problem. because the extinction of apex predators means that other species in the food-chain get overpopulated, causing more problems, then undergoing crash/boom cycles, thereby upsetting the delicate balanced ecosystem on which we depend so much.

(not that it was "delicate" before, it wasn't, but once we've thrown it so far out of whack, it'll be very hard to achieve the delicate touch needed to restore balance, especially as we'll lack time, desire, and frame of mind. we'll just wildly swing, from one to the other extreme.)

and that's just out with the big-enough-to-see animals. dynamics in the virus-world, with the now-acknowledged looming uselessness of antibiotics, will be even worse. and that will impact human life much more squarely than an extinction of the lions and tigers and bears, oh my.

this crap will happen sooner than we believed, and will snowball much more rapidly than we thought, plus there will be all kinds of ugly "surprises" in store for us.

for instance, how long do you think the bees will last? and when they're gone, what happens to our food supplies? how long will we remain civilized when food grows short? and just how long do you think we can live with no food?

i was being conservative when i said "10-20 years", since people would think i am nuts if i said "7-11 years", but -- once the shit starts to hit the fan -- the time-frame will not be best measured by _decades_, but by _months_.

mark my words.

i hope i'm wrong. i really really really hope i'm wrong.

but that's my prediction.

-bowerbird

here's some chilling evidence: > http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/sunday-review/the-year-the...

we've only known about this migration spot since 1975, but even in that evolutionarily-brief time, we saw as many as an estimated _billion_ butterflies yearly, every november.

but the number has been falling.

last year had the lowest total we've known -- 60 million.

this year? 3 million. even toward the end of the month.

it's almost impossible to pretend that's not significant.

the insects we cannot see so readily, or track so easily, are probably suffering the same kinds of collapses, but we just don't know. we just plain do not know. it's sad.

-bowerbird

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