Do You Have Hope for the Future?

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Depends on the day. I'm gonna be stubborn for the time being, but I reserve the right to go out, buy a pistol, and blow my brains out if it becomes clear that we've passed a point of no return.

Don't, I 'd rather let mother nature take me in an end of the world scenario.

Eh? Mother nature is slow, a gun is quick. a 'Kills Sammy' disaster could take decades to get you. A gun is gonna get you day 1

Hmm, I was more thinking to get washed away by a tidal wave or consumed by an earthquake or blown away by a hurricane. The last of which kinda sounds epic because at least you get to by high in the sky.

Yeah but the sky part doesn't kill you. Its the flying debris, the chuck of rock cracking your ribs and splintering your lungs, the nail through the eye, the steal rod through the Peripheral artery and then the literal back-breaking crash to the ground, dragged for a hundred feet, skin on the back tearing off in strips, muscle and bone breaking off, to come to a bloody heap, hopefully dead, looking like Pyramid Head got you and you forgot the safe word.

 

[TheIronRuler]

Climate change is going to be awesome. So interesting. Screw the beautiful utopian future of printed organs for transplant, the grim surveillance state that is china, the federation of Europe... What I look forward most is migration. Beautiful earth shattering history - literally moving the oceans... It'll be insanely interesting to work for and create new solutions for the problems our ancestors left us. We are left with the task of finding a place in a changing world that is reeling from our decades-long flagrant disregard of its health...

Sometimes I wish I went to a different field just so I could try and tackle those issues... Who needs processor optimizer algorithms when you're looking for wheat that can grow in the desert... This is so exciting!

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

The future is an illusion. Life is just a connection of nows. You never live in the future. It'll always be there outside your reach teasing you with the promise of untapped potential. You have to enjoy the now cause that's the only real thing. Putting off joy for the sake of a utopian future full of rainbows and unicorns is the only real way of having a bad life. You can have long term goals but you must live them daily, they must be your present. They must be part of your continued existence. If you notice you're just suffering through a meaningless life for the sake of some promise then that's a sign you need to examine your situation critically. No goal worth striving for feels hollow as you strive for it.

As for hope, that's something you need to do when not in control of your situation. I have expectations and aims and so on but I don't hope for them. I merely tackle them straightforwardly and do my best to not disappoint myself at my efforts. That's all you really need. If you fail at something then that's just how you measured up, hoping you wouldn't is kinda like asking to cheat your way into unearned privilege despite your faults, it's unseemly.

 

[Agema]

But if we had some kind of energy technology that could be scaled up quickly to support whole nations and operate in any location that has water to cool towers and relative geologic stability, that released no carbon emissions from energy production and used a type of fuel that's used for almost nothing else, wouldn't that just be amazing? We could reverse climate change with more clean power, we could recycle all our waste with more clean power, we could make ocean water potable to relieve droughts with more clean power, we could set up whatever transportation systems we want with more clean power, we could eliminate most of the smog with more clean power, think of the grand environmental gains we could have with more clean power.

Never bet on technology you don't yet have. It's like nuclear fusion: experts kept predicting it was 50 years away for decades. At least it's finally come down now and current estimates are about 30 - but I still wouldn't put that past being the calculated optimism of people who want to win physics research grants.

Oh please, in regards to temperature change, the Earth has run the gamut of high and low temperatures for millions of years

Not whilst we've lived on it, it hasn't.

I don't think the problem is that the human race faces annihilation. It's that it faces mass shortages of key things like food. That will lead to animal and plant extinction, mass starvation, refugees, resource wars, and general unhappiness and decreases in living standards that will probably be global. Quite how bad is anther matter. We might be talking about losing a decade or a few decades of development, and in a catastrophe situation, centuries.

 

[CM156_v1legacy]

To be honest, I don't know. I just know that this will be determined by others, regardless of what I do. So I can only go about my daily life as best I can, hoping for good things but preparing for the worst.

 

[immortalfrieza]

Let's see here...

First, we've got a total wackjob as president, that was evident not just from day 1 but while he was campaigning, yet he was voted in anyway. That's not what kills all hope in me, what does is the fact that Trump's opponent would be barely if any better and that it couldn't have been more obvious that was the case if and yet, people still pretend like elections actually make a difference. If it did, people like Trump and Hilary would be lucky if they could be receptionists at some backwater City Hall somewhere let alone have any chance at all of getting into some sort of elected position, President of the United States is right out. Having to choose between having a live grenade stuffed in your mouth and having a stick of dynamite stuffed in your mouth isn't a choice yet that's exactly what elections have been for decades now. They're not even putting a token effort to try to make it look like it isn't anymore. That, and the utterly ridiculous 2 party system just means that our choices are extremely limited. What's scary most of all is that not only do the people of this the country believe that their vote actually makes a real difference but are divided along those 2 party lines. It all ends up coming down to "REPUBLICANS BAD!!! VOTE DEMOCRAT!!!" and "DEMOCRATS BAD!!! VOTE REPUBLICAN!!!" that everything political ends up becoming. Rather than, you know, going with someone else entirely that actually has a vast majority of good ideas that actually improve our country our choices are between 2 both who we would be lucky if they had 1 good idea for every 100 terrible ideas they have. What destroys all hope in me is the blatant obviousness of all of this and despite that most people seem to still believe that elections accomplish anything whatsoever.


As for alternate energy sources, climate change, all that, if there's anything humanity has consistently proven it's that we as a whole will just ignore problems until they become so big we just can't anymore. The difference between that and every other problem we've solved is if the year or so tops (if that) it would take for us to fix these problems once we got off our collective rear ends and actually tried to solve them is too long for us to not face cataclysm before we can pull it off.

Let's face it, the human race is far far too widespread and numerous for there to be any chance whatsoever of us going extinct short of something that would render the Earth completely uninhabitable near instantaneously. If a cataclysm happens we're capable of surviving at all we will, and after a few decades or at worst centuries we'll pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and go back to exactly what we were doing before it happened.

In short, no. We'll survive no matter what happens, but we won't thrive for much longer.

 

[Elvis Starburst]

Nnnnnnnnnnnnope. I just let myself sit in my own little bubble of a world that only affects me and those around me, and pretend the rest of it in the far off lands of other provinces/countries doesn't exist so I don't collapse under the weight of how much shit is going on. Of course, the world is full of good, and it's not all nightmares and awful like North American media would like you to believe. But for a world that is supposed to be wonderful and amazing, there sure is a lot of crap to weigh it all down. Needless to say, I don't read/watch the news.

You've got corrupt people in the government(s) fighting for every chance they can get to take every right away from its people it can get away with, mega corporations running huge amounts of the world's economy and not sharing a ton of their wealth to benefit anyone but themselves, corruption in politics, an increasingly terrifying level of growth on the internet that has lead to (But is not limited to)... Extremely public levels of racism, sexism, animalistic behaviour, swatting for funsies or to kill the other person, doxxing for the purpose of ruining someone else's life, Us vs Them mentalities fueled further by smaller communities that encourage it, outrage culture, literal fucking Nazis, and so much more. (And if you call right now, we'll DOUBLE the offer!)

I don't even vote. I did it once, never gave a shit to do it again. I don't trust the political system to ever work in my favour. Why would I? The political leaders of each party can spew all the fancy words and flowery nonsense they want of how they wanna change things, but the reality is the world is so fucked with the way it works that I don't have confidence it'll ever change. "But that's what voting them in is for, so they can change things!" Woopie-dingle-fucking-doop, there's enough of a chance they'll just turn around on everything they promised (Or never even get far enough to implement anything they promised) and and screw us over entirely, making my vote end up in the spot of some total asshole. I'd rather not get emotionally invested in a system that I don't believe in.

Not to mention that I'm right smack in the middle of my 20's and I'm seeing a corporate run system that intends on paying me as little as it can get away with, jacking up the price of everything I need to live to the point I'll probably never get what my parents did, all while trying to balance my constantly decreasing state of mental health.

Fantastic

 

[Drathnoxis]

There's too many humans and too many of us taking from the land at the cost of everything else.

You've got that right. By 2027 the world population is estimated to have quadrupled in the past hundred years, since 1927!

[HEADING=2]STOP HAVING SO MANY KIDS![/HEADING]

 

[Marik2]

There's too many humans and too many of us taking from the land at the cost of everything else.

You've got that right. By 2027 the world population is estimated to have quadrupled in the past hundred years, since 1927!

[HEADING=2]STOP HAVING SO MANY KIDS![/HEADING]

So, Thanos was right all along?

 

[Drathnoxis]

There's too many humans and too many of us taking from the land at the cost of everything else.

You've got that right. By 2027 the world population is estimated to have quadrupled in the past hundred years, since 1927!

[HEADING=2]STOP HAVING SO MANY KIDS![/HEADING]

So, Thanos was right all along?

I don't know who that is...

 

[AndreRemmersa]

Great!

 

[Dalisclock]

There's too many humans and too many of us taking from the land at the cost of everything else.

You've got that right. By 2027 the world population is estimated to have quadrupled in the past hundred years, since 1927!

[HEADING=2]STOP HAVING SO MANY KIDS![/HEADING]

So, Thanos was right all along?

Maybe if his plan with the snap would be to cut the birthrate in half, rather then just murdering half the universe. Which ironically would have been far more conductive to his goals and far less PTSD inducing on the entire universe. But that also wouldn't have been nearly as interesting to watch.

Other then scaring certain people who get all pissy when they hear that people aren't having as many kids as they used to in the west. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/us/us-birthrate-decrease.html

THose people know who they are.