Well, yes. Humanity as a whole will probably stop sucking ass before it gets wiped out completely. Though it might cost us a few billion. Lives, I mean, not dollars.
Got me worried there for a min, losing dollars would be unrecoverable! /s
Objection: feels like copeposting
Yeah, good luck fighting entropy.
Also basic human behavior.
self-destruction neoliberal capitalism is not basic human behavior
thank you for making this point. capitalist realism is a huge barrier to people imagining a better future.
Of course it is. Humans have always been extremely greedy and selfish.
Things would be much worse if we didn’t have regulations to control human behavior, and in the US we’re about to experience what happens when those regulations disappear.
No, they haven’t always been extremely greedy and selfish. All social animals strike a balance between self-interest and group-interest, and humans are no different.
Some humans have always been extremely greedy and selfish. And some of those humans have always been charismatic and persuasive. And many other humans are not equipped to differentiate between emotionally persuasive and right. Well-intentioned humans will often connect themselves to the wrong people or ideas.
That’s not really their fault. We’re repurposing evolution’s creations for things they weren’t built to do. We’re trying to build empathy and connection with people that are chronologically, geographically, and/or psychologically distant from us.
And unfortunately we’re trying to do that while a handful of us try to sever those connections and build physical and metaphorical barriers between us for their own self-interest.
Most of us struggle with the ability to feel empathy and connection with our own future selves. We often choose instant gratification over personal benefit, we often choose to forego temporary burdens in the present at the foreseen expense of finding greater burdens in the future.
That’s not greed or self-interest. That’s the opposite of self-interest. That’s just the burden of the rising ape. But it’s no reason to lose hope, and it’s no reason to stop trying.
The most important proof that humans aren’t all greedy and selfish is that people are still trying to do better. We are still trying to build better connections, even as others try to tear them apart.
humans lived in small communes for most of their history.
the renaissance wasnt people deciding suddenly to be rational and inventive. the feudal religious system was dying and stopped being the limiting factor.
capitalism is our modern day limiting factor, the one that encourages us to be greedy to survive when we dont need it anymore.
Surfing entropy.
Ride the stardust wave into an agricultural mountain dew future. It’s what plants love.
I don’t want to get along with anyone, but this is the outcome I hope for.
(Everyone just needs to come to the conclusion that I’m right and we’ll be able to live happily.)
Oh, absolutely. Humans will prevail. But right now the forest is on fire and many of us are the small bits on the forest floor that will be completely consumed by the oncoming fire. The destruction will test the perseverance of everything and the burgeoning that follows will be another minor Renaissance, like the period between WW2 and the Internet. When ignorance reigns and sequels are the only entertainment, expect the worst.
How many died before France got the revolution it needed to eventually make things better?
How many need to die right now for shit to happen so things finally start improving?
We might prevail in the end, but how long will we suffer in the meantime?
I have no idea if we will, but I want to give it the best god damn chance we can get.
I’m very much doom driven, but the past has taught me that humans tend to work their way through it.
Fun fact: my exes great grandfather modeled for Rockwell for this painting.
Depends on what one calls a good future. On a long enough timeline, everything (probably) decays to photons in an infinitely expanding universe. On an even muuuuch longer (est. 10 to the 10th to the 10th to the 1.2nd years) timeline, another iteration of this exact universe’s timeline spontaneously exists all over again.
Nah, climate change will either finish us or make us beg for death.
Some humans will work it out for themselves.
That is all.
We must assuredly all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.
China also is “stable” but an authoritarian shit hole.
Life and the economy goes on but under an oppressive regime
How dare you? Drop that optimism and start panicking like the rest of us!
It’s not an unpopular scenario - it’s just completely improbable.
The more likely scenario being that we wipe ourselves out long before evolving to learn to work things out.
There is a theory that the reason we haven’t found other intelligent life in the universe is that it inevitably destroys itself.
The most probable of the great filters IMO.
If we hadn’t had fossil fuels, including Uranium and Plutonium, we wouldn’t be able to wipe ourselves out quickly and likely a few would always survive all self made catastrophies.
There may be species out there who don’t have this stuff on their planets. Maybe we’ll meet them one day.
