I fear this rant may be based on a misunderstanding of the nature of nature.
Nature is, as they say, red in tooth and claw. And that principle extends to the plants.
Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Has Begun According to Scientists
- Thread starter hanselthecaretaker
- Start date
Nature is, as they say, red in tooth and claw. And that principle extends to the plants.
Elon Musk, despite his more funny ancap moments, is like this weird cartoon version of a neoliberal under late capitalism, and by that I think he believes that capitalism works for the benefit of everyone and that a world without a perpetually growing labour supply and consumer demand would be one in which everyone was worse off.
The weird irony of this is that Elon is also massively pro-automation. He thinks that in the future people won't have to work because robots (presumably owned by him and his descendents) will do all the work, and everyone else will just sit around collecting their universal basic income and then immediately spending it on cryptocurrency or something.
I think we've always assumed that human civilization will grow perpetually and that future human or post-human civilizations will be enormous, but I don't think that's necessarily true at all. In the past, populations grew because most people had very little to do with their lives except have children, because people needed children to care for them when they got old, and because for the few people who did have meaningful choices having children ensured the continuation of their status and position when they died. It turns out, when you give people (particularly women) choices about what to do with their lives, having lots of children doesn't actually rate too highly.
I think population decline is kind of a natural and inevitable process at this point, and if our society wants to avoid it for some reason we need to look very closely at how to make having children more rewarding and less challenging.
I think there is a very utopian possible future in which, as you say, a few hundred million people live out their lives on an unspoiled earth, devoting all their time to leisure and intellectual pursuits while leaving the work to machines, and occasionally having a child whom the whole community will have the time and energy to care for and educate.
Sorry, I had to. Its just such a funny expression.
But yeah, probably not good, depending on how you feel about current life.
The unique thing about humans is that we use far more resources than we actually need all while allowing a huge number of our own species to just die of starvation and exposure anyway. Like we're invasive while not being particularly good at propagation relatively speaking. We've destroyed countless miles of perfectly usable land and poisoned water supplies just to store our waste. Then again most other species never introduced a form of "you get to live" tokens.
We're the only sapient species that spends most of its waking time doing shit we don't want to do.
Most of which arguably either doesn't need to be done or straight up shouldn't be done. We invented tobacco lobbyists.
I thought it was a reminder that the mass extinction is still going on cause people seem to have forgotten, but it looks like they are using a new definition that wasn't being met until now.
Same one. Reminder that mass extinctions usually take a while. The Permian-Triassic mass extinction lasted anywhere from 10,000 to a couple of million years, depending on how you measure it.
The fact that homo sapiens are accomplishing a mass extinction in a matter of centuries is astounding(ly awful), let alone a matter of decades.
But then we'll just use more energy, still consuming, growing and out-breeding all other life on the planet. We need to change the whole model of what we're expected to do with our lives away from just beings cogs in the machine of economy and consumption.
Bill Hicks was right. We're a virus with
Oh, and once the universe is about to end, we could engineer it to avoid heat death, and then we could create a universe based on max optimal technology, economy, and changes in tastes which would change the makeup of the economy, or not. Or if there are other dimensions we could dimension hop when one ends or both.
So we are more like a zombie parasite, the virus kills its host.
Probably, but what we need to really think about is our reliance on population growth. I'd rather have a planet with 5 billion people who can live a careless life than a planet with 20 billion people who need to think about everything they consume because the planet cannot sustain that many people.
First the moon, then Mars, then the asteroid belt, then Venus, then Jupiter, either Mercury or Saturn depending on how technology advances due to EMP interference from Saturn, and the fact that Mercury is very hot. Then Uranus and Neptune, then Pluto, and other stellar objects.
Edit: Then Alpha Centauri, then the rest of the Galaxy, then Andromeda, then the rest of the local group, and then the nearest group of galaxies depending on if we can achieve FTL speed.
The spaceship we're already on is the most perfect habitat we can ever know. We literally evolved to it and its specific conditions and location in space. Trashing it then ditching would be our species greatest ever moral crime.
I didn't say we should ditch it, it would be another home, and besides, it won't be there forever.