Kids born today are going to grow up in a hellscape, grim climate study finds
Kids born today are going to grow up in a hellscape, grim climate study finds
And we're STILL not willing to reign in capitalism.
We doomed ourselves. My pity is reserved for all the species we're taking with us in this murder/suicide for short term profit for the avarice diseased. Those capitalists are by far most to blame, but no one that contributes to the capitalist machine, myself included, is without blame for the effectively permanent destruction of our COMMUNal habitat.
Unless you're an eco-terrorist who has been actively trying to destroy the capitalist machine, the precious few good guys as far as I'm concerned if your goal is a viable habitat for our species at all beyond the next couple decades, we've all been seeing this oncomming train heading towards us our entire lives and done nothing of note.
We can't keep living like we've been living, as gluttonous consumers with 78 kinds of plastic packaged cereal made a thousand miles away in any form AND survive as a species, and it's clear which choice we've made. We aren't willing to live closer to the land, to farm the food our community eats, to live small lives understanding we are subject to earth and not the other way around, so we gotta go so life can go on without us.
Humans are pretty resilient. I don't think we're going to go extinct, unless we do the nuclear winter thing, which I personally believe is inevitable on a long enough timeline. Short of that, we'll see mass death and an extreme decline in quality of life, but we'll probably, unfortunately, continue on as a species. Either way, we'll end up destroying this planet eventually. We simply cannot exist in symbiosis with nature.
I'm not really on the fence about the bright vs dark future thing anymore, as you can see by my name. It's pretty much guaranteed we've chosen the dark future option.
Blah blah ecofascist doomerism. We can live harmonically with nature and have for most of our history. Our current consumerist society isn't compatible with sustainable and responsible practices but that isn't a forgone conclusion or intrinsic to human behavior. That's not to say that we aren't on a bad path, we absolutely are and a great many organisms are going extinct because of us, but ascribing a moral value to our very existence is the wrong move.
Not true. Humans always reproduced to the absolute limit (set by their agricultural technology and the bodies of women). The reason why this didn't wreck the environment is because that limited population was too small to turn 50% of land into farmland, they didn't know how to burn large amounts of coal and they didn't have the technology to produce harmful chemicals.
But i agree that humanity (or any other species) has no value. Saying humanity has value is like saying the white race has value. It's pure aestethics, it's not worth it to make anyone suffer for that.
Humans always reproduced to the absolute limit
My understanding is that this is not true. The big factor seems to be infant mortality, as that drops so does the average number of children per breeding pair.
Turns out you are right. At least on the surface.
But if we dig deeper, we find that only 10% of children made it to their 20s, and the reason for that was famine and disease.
So those that kept the population growing lived under conditions where the reason why their children died was because they could not feed them or keep them healthy. And if we take the 0.5% of maternal mortality, and apply it to those responsible for the population growth (those that made it into their 20s), we get a rough estimate of 50% effective maternal mortality. So it was the agricultural technology in combination with war, disease and child birth that kept the population low.
And that's what i meant: They lived in a situation where 80-90% of their friends had died of famine, disease and war, and under these horrific conditions they still produced 4.5 to 7.5 children per woman, which kept the population growing (slowly). As soon as that limitation was lifted, the population shot up.
Personally, i don't see any planning in that. They just had as many children as they could before they died, not worrying about how they would feed them.
Human nature is game theory driven by greed. Billions of people are too much chaos.
Only in a social framework that rewards greed. "Human nature" is almost impossible to understand because it can't be studied with a control group.
Incinerating the planet in the name of profit is a very recent concept.
Capitalism in its current form has existed for the last 2% of human civilization. 5% if you count mercantilism as a form of capitalism. For the vast majority of history, people owned their own means of production.
You are giving our species too much credit. For almost all of our history, we merely lacked the technologies capable of terraforming our planet against us for short term profit.
If the kings and feudal lords of yore had the capability to burn the long term future to goose their short term greed disease hoards, they would have.
We're a gaggle of monkeys just barely capable, with great effort, of devising tools with complexities and consequences we're still far too primitive to wield responsibly, nothing more.
I'm of the opinion this is one of those theoretical Great Filters that explains the lack of a loud universe filled with the signals of other civilizations.
Evolution is slow. If complex life is common and eventually leads to intelligence, maybe there's just a common chasm between when when a species becomes... clever enough, because we've proven as a species we aren't intelligent... To split atoms or otherwise alter the habitat of their world technologically, but still sit biologically in the tribal, zero sum, rival monkeys have to lose so we big win! mentality that is necessary in nature but harmful to a civilization, that inevitably leads to self-destruction.
What was the FIRST thing we sought to do with the awesome power of the atom again? Wasn't even a hundred years ago. That's who we are. We could have made a warm light for all mankind, instead we made big boomie boom rival monkey tribe, wheeeeee!
I guess feudalism was technically not capitalism...
