Damn, we actually collapsed our environment in the name of profit. This must be the great filter. Its the enticing imaginary bullshit that leads to total obliteration over advancement. The chasing of made-up dragons to make some nonexistent number rise.
There’s a scene in Sagan’s Cosmos where he’s exploring the possibilities of life elsewhere. He’s in the Ship of the Imagination, looking around at various potentials. He runs across one planet teeming with a civilization, from orbit it had even more lights and connections that our own at night. And then the lights suddenly go out. He discusses how even thriving life can suddenly die and speculates on a few reasons why this one might have, like resources or war or whatever. Summary from memory, I have no idea which episode it’s in.
In reality it wouldn’t be a sudden disappearance, but a longer decay. The lights shutting off was just to illustrate how easy it is to lose something assumed to be permanent. I’d also recommend the beginning of Revolution to get that same surreal feeling, although the rest of the series was blah.
Ah, Cosmos, I remember watching that when I still believed people were creatures of knowledge and advancement. We’ll never know any of those things cause we spent the last 50 years prioritizing profit over all else. It didnt have to be like this.
Sagan always said we had the potential to be better, but he was also concerned it was an uphill climb. Where Carlin got angrier with age, I think Sagan would just have been disappointed in us. Especially in the fall back into ignorance and superstition, something else he warned about in The Demon-Haunted World. Every quote you can find from that book is profound, but this one is eerily hard hitting:
“We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”
Just read it a couple of months ago and it was these little nuggets that kept hitting me hard leaving me like what’s-his-face when he saw the statue of liberty in planet of the apes. We had a nice thing going.
What we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants. It is well within our power to destroy our civilization, and perhaps our species as well
Carl Sagan
And any other species’ chance. Given the expected lifecycle of the Sun that will affect the habitable zone we’re in, we have just under a billion years to go before the planet becomes unlivable by anything. Is that enough time for life to start over from some point and try again? Presuming minus a hostile period of time while Earth finds a new environmental balance, which always takes a while.
I think for whatever odds there are out there of other planets that can have the right conditions for life to become intelligent and expand further, they get one shot at it. If there were alien observers they’ve probably stopped by now. “That went like usual. Got close, but they did the typical mistakes.”
There’s also the argument that developing our civilization was only possible due to easy access to fossil fuels. We’ve now burnt all the easily accessible ones, so any future civilization won’t have them.
We climbed up, burnt the step ladder behind us and are now jumping off the cliff.
True except for coal, there’s a hell of a lot of still accessible coal. Coal is limiting of course and dirty. There’s also other resources like metals that we jump started society with that were easily obtained, even picked off the ground, and now are either buried in landfills or merged into alloys that even our technology can’t separate or reuse well.
I don’t believe planet self-destruction is the The great filter, just our filter and we failed. In all fairness it’s probably the first of many future filters that would have gotten us too.
The irony of filling up my screen with an advertisement as I try to read about what will be the collapse of our civilization is not lost on me.
So, what does this all mean for us? It means we have even less time to get our act together. Reducing emissions isn’t just a good idea — it’s crucial.
Our planet’s systems are interconnected in ways we’re only beginning to understand. If we want to keep things from getting worse, we need to act now. Every little bit counts, and the clock is ticking.
In other words…we’re fucked.
Well, yeah.
You were expecting maybe all of the countries of the world to absolve their differences and join hands to defeat the problems of climate change?
Sounds kinda like a fairy tale.
Yes, we are likely seeing the last generation of humans on earth.
We might be able to mitigate some of the effects of we start removing the actual problems people…granted the solution isn’t exact ‘legal’
I agree that it’s going to take popular action to prevent the capitalists from continuing as usual, whatever form this action takes. But it’s not going to happen until we’re organized and prepared to risk our own safety for the greater good.
We’re likely to see a lot of suffering and disruption along with increased mortality, but humans are way too resourceful to go extinct, even with a severe disruption to the climate
Maybe, depends on how uninhabitable the planet actually gets. We think we know what that looks like, but there are pretty wide error bars around the worst case scenarios.
Hmm, even if parts of the world become totally uninhabitable, this would also mean that other parts of the world will become more inhabitable. Usually arctic areas further away from the equator.
So yes there would be a lot of death and suffering but I don’t think we’d go 100% extinct.
There’s no climate scenario short of nuclear winter that renders the planet completely uninhabitable by humans though. We’re not facing a situation like The Road where the sunlight is completely blocked, killing every plant. Even with the worst case climate change scenarios, people are going to be able to find habitable areas and move plants to new regions where they will grow, or utilize technology to grow crops indoors, which already happens
It doesn’t have to be completely uninhabitable for it to be uninhabitable for humans.
The word “uninhabitable” usually means whether humans can live there, and I specified I was talking about humans. The earth is not going to become completely uninhabitable by humans. I’m saying you’re wrong when you said “this is the last generation of humans on earth.”
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But I was told capitalism was the best economic system in the world! Would the capitalists lie to me?
Close your eyes and think of England…
The trick to capitalism is to pay very close attention to who is asserting that it is a virtuous system. Not unlike the proper way to read a fortune cookie, one must add the phrase “for me” to the end of any such statement.
Great Britain will get more than chilly. Arable land was expected to drop from 32% of the region down to 22% by 2080, slashing their economy by a third. If the AMOC is already showing signs of breakdown, that timeline will need to be shortened.
Life on earth:
Life on Earth will be fine.
There have been lifeforms that have survived multiple global extinction events over millions of years.
Humans won’t. Which is why I stopped caring anymore about efforts to save ecosystems. Humans don’t deserve this planet and will righteously reap what we sow.
Other life will go “Oh no, humans are gone… Anyways.”
Whales, Elephants, and the other Great Apes are all likely to go too, and they don’t deserve it. Humans brought this on ourselves, but the loss of peaceful intelligent life is a true tragedy.
Haha, I have no hope left. I might just keep playing league and trash talking my teammates. At least when my mind is filled with hate, the despair can’t creep back in :)
League players are going to keep trash talking and being toxic just to keep each other distracted from the world.
And I think that’s beautiful <3
A weaker ocean current could mean colder winters in Europe and shifts in rainfall patterns that affect millions of people.
Millions? More like billions.
Fuck it let’s go. Day After Tomorrow us. There’s a whole section on tax law down here that we can burn.
Surely the circulation will increase in power and shift to different places. The circulation of water isn’t going to just stop, right?
Yes, it’s this current that’s stopping
Not water as a whole
Yes, collapse here is a fear mongering term, because it makes you think the current will stop without actually saying the word “stop.” It’s just shifting. Changing. We are in the process of coming out of an ice age. Things gonna be moving.
About to be a total Doomer, but I would just like to remind everyone that the current effects we are seeing are due to carbon pumped into the atmosphere 30 YEARS AGO! And emissions have only increased since then.
As a millennial, it’s been a hard reckoning that greed and evil truly won before I was born. There was nothing I could ever have done about it. All I can do is just ride it out. In a way, I am privileged. I’ve always had an interest in history, how fortunate I am to witness it’s end.
I’m reasonably sure I read a Clive Cussler book with that as the evil villain’s plot.
This only fucks Europe, right?
“This would bring big changes to the climate and ecosystems, including faster warming in the southern hemisphere, harsher winters in Europe, and weakening of the northern hemisphere’s tropical monsoons.”
Short answer: no.
Long answer: nope.
