• @RBWells
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    4010 months ago

    Yeah the insect apocalypse is the most terrifying thing to happen so far in my lifetime, though if I never see another mating swarm of palmetto bugs it will be too soon.

    They do have short little lifetimes mostly, could bounce back but people just can’t stop using insecticide. It’s not even like fish, where we are consuming too many, we are literally just killing them, in ways that poison the food chain. Short term thinking will doom us all.

    • @shalafi
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      1410 months ago

      Been screaming about this for a couple of years now. I remember dad teaching me to always clean the windshield when we stopped for gas.

      I’ve seen the decline in my swampland in Florida in just the past 4 years.

      • @RBWells
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        910 months ago

        Also a Florida native and I think the county mosquito fogging is part of the problem, there is no way that poison isn’t harming other invertebrates. I know they do it to control disease and keep malaria from becoming endemic, it’s not literally for no reason but is the cure worse than the disease? We need insects.

    • @xenoclast
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      310 months ago

      The first mass extinction caused by an earth life form.

      After we finish killing ourselves off… I wonder in the deep future if some smart creature will find it in the geological record and make jokes about how unbelievably stupid we were

      • @[email protected]
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        1410 months ago

        We are not the first. The firat oxygen producers fucken nuked damned near every other lifeform.

        • @xenoclast
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          19 months ago

          Yeah, totally. But I suspect they didn’t know they were doing it, AND they didn’t also kill themselves in the process… on purpose.

          • @[email protected]
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            29 months ago

            They did kill themselves in the process, repeatedly until they finally evolved resistance.

            So whenever someone assumes that accelerationism will cause a single collapse and then we’ll get Star Trek… Nope, we’ll just keep rebuilding capitalism and collapsing until we actually evolve something better. Collapse won’t teach us how to work together any faster than poison taught microbes how to breathe oxygen.

            • @xenoclast
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              19 months ago

              Maybe. Although it seems just as likely that when humans die off intelligence may not even be a genetic advantage for whatever comes next.

          • @[email protected]
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            19 months ago

            The thing about humans is that as individuals we can be rather intelligent, but as a collective we arent even sapient. A human hivemind would become effectively brain dead in an instant. But jokes aside, what others see as doom I see as an opportunity to overcome. We may come out the otherside utterly fucken reduced, but so long as we do come out of the otherside mankind will always progress.

            Hopefully our descendants will look apon our actions as we look apon our chalcolithic ancestors who were the first metal smiths poisoning themselves with arsenic. A neccessary ill for progress. If we do not progress then it will all be for not.