You suggested we shouldn't use nuclear because then humanity will grow, which is apparently undesirable. If anyone deserves a profane response here, it's you.
Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Has Begun According to Scientists
- Thread starter hanselthecaretaker
- Start date
As it says in the holy book, population growth is the metric by which we measure the good.
I'm not going to only give this a cheap one-liner, as you've flipped the argument in a deceitful way. There is an ocean of middle-ground between "population growth is so bad we need to reconfigure our entire society to avoid it" and "population growth is the only metric worth considering" that you have strategically ignored.
But also: "Be fruitful and multiply."
A creation myth meant to explain among other things why there are a bunch of people said that? wow, very persuasive
if you think that was strategic rather than flippant, well
heh
in any case, there is no particular reason to think that having merely four billion instead of eight billion people alive (for example) must in itself be a terrible thing. Indeed, the moral condition of the species has not seemed to improve overmuch by population growth.
Of course, if you look at what Kwak actually said, it's not even an antinatalist argument. So maybe stuff the self-righteous bullshit?
If you'd prefer to regress to witch burning, you're welcome to. There is, at minimum, a correlation with population growth and moral improvement over time.
It almost certainly isn't - or if it is, there's nothing useful to do once we're there. Which is why people are pouring orders of magnitude more resources into travelling to Mars.
In that case what's your problem with Communism?
Life is rich in its diversity. Killing much of that to leave only what is obviously useful to humans is a form of barrenness. I did a biological sciences degree: as one of our lecturers said to us, if we can finish our degree and fail to appreciate the wonder of life in its many forms, we've failed to grasp a key basis of our degree. More practically, however, that diversity is much of what makes life itself robust...
You assume here that we will manage conversion of the world well. I think one of the things we're staring at is that we are not doing so currently, and may well continue not to. In which case the world may become a great deal more barren, and we will be the losers too.
LMGTFY - Let Me Google That For You
For all those people who find it more convenient to bother you with their question rather than to Google it for themselves.
This website would not allow me to contain the answer to this question in a single post.
In a geological timescale, we've flipped from deforesting like half of the inhabited world to actively bringing species back from extinction in a blink of an eye. How many thousands of years did it take for other major changes to stabilize?
It's insane how much of a non sequitur that is.LMGTFY - Let Me Google That For You
For all those people who find it more convenient to bother you with their question rather than to Google it for themselves.lmgtfy.app
So there is no practical timeframe for this. It's all hypothetical and making assumptions about the rate and direction of technological advancements.
Dude, space is the most hostile of all environments. It's not our savior. The idea that we can beat climate change by just packing up and moving to another planet is a fool's errand because fixing the climate would ultimately cost less than a single colony on Mars.
And there are so many other barriers besides that. You can't handwave it away with aquaponics.
I didn't say we didn't need to solve climate change, I have stated that we need to build more nuclear power, then someone stated unlimited consumption is bad, so then I stated we should go to space, and implied it's where we can find more resources.
Also fixing climate change is easier than going to Mars, and putting underground buildings, but that's only the economics and technology analysis part of it, the political analysis means fossil fuel interest groups, and their lobbyist who does it for a living will always have the upper hand over activists who rely on donations.
Also, let's face it, this planet will one day die. Due to the Sun growing larger and larger. That's going to be climate change on steroids.
That's at least 5 billion years from now. The chance humanity as we know it will still exist that far into the future is practically nil.
Probably because a forest sustains all manner of other forms of life, whereas rampant urban expansion viciously stamps them out.
Kicking the can down the road by any other name.
Giving up is not a solution.
In several billion years, at which point whatever the dominant species on this planet is, it will not be or look like us.
Will space colonization ever happen? Probably. I won't say never because that's a very long time. But it ain't happening in our lifetimes.
homeless hunts > witch hunts according to you, ok. That's really shaking my confidence that there hasn't been a great deal of moral improvement due to population growth.
That's fine, but it illustrates the point that it's really not just about consuming, reproducing, etc. There are other values about how we look our societies and how we interact with the world.
We have brought back zero species from extinction. We have saved a few from near-extinction, but then we near exterminated them in the first place, and the list of species we did exterminate is vastly larger than those we pulled back from the brink. Nor is clear many of those species will survive long term anyway, because they've lost so much genetic diversity that they are acutely vulnerable to disease and inbreeding.
As we know it I will agree with you, humanity could be very different as time passes. But I think humanity will still be around if we pass through all the great filters well enough
It's not kicking the can down the road, our fertility rate is decreasing as a species as I stated earlier, there will be sustainable growth.
As for giving up on climate change, I haven't given up I have just advocated for alternative solutions then the progressive unworkable solution to building lots of solar, and wind, by also building nuclear.
As for it happening in our lifetime, it depends on what you mean by space colonization, if you mean a base on Mars and or the Moon yes it will happen within our lifetimes. If you mean cities on either the Moon or Mars then no, and if you mean colonizing the universe or the local group, then unless an alien race visits us, and gives us the tech to do so, absolutely not.
I went there once to see, but there were a bunch of attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion in the way.
So you believe, legitimately, that human population can continue to expand endlessly without problems?
That remains unlikely as the cost of getting it installed in the first place would be phenomenally expensive and we would need to find work-arounds for about a million problems. Anyone on that base would have to volunteer to spend the rest of their lives living in a bunker to protect them from the radiation of Mars' weak magnetosphere, eating whatever they could grow in gardens fertilized with their own shit like in The Martian, and never going outside, all in an environment with less gravity than our bodies evolved to work with. That's assuming we get microfusion to work as a source of renewable power.
I'm sorry dude, but the whole thing is just too cost prohibitive. It's not a viable alternative solution because the science and tech are still several generations away and the money just isn't there.
Reasonably sage advice when the most advanced technology available was the wheel and crossing a country required months, and the oceans required years. Now both can be traversed in a matter of days if not hours. There is a point where wisdom stops being wisdom.
"Make sure that our tribe has more people than their tribe, so that we can kill them and take their stuff before they kill us and take our stuff."