Although if we are to achieve this, Step 1 would certainly be withdrawing from the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty.
I donāt care about the human race, just my kids.
I want them to live and have happy lives.
Thatās anā¦ interesting perspective. Usually people who say this stuff are on the other side of the climate change ādebateā!
No if the planet is fucked up, my kids will probably suffer. Iām not a man that can live off the land. Iām a city guy. If society collapses, my family is fucked. Super fucked.
Now, my wifeās cousins are all a bunch of handy men that are hunters and plumbers and builders. Theyāll do okay.
So, selfishly, I need humanity to make it through this.
If the oceans die, we all die. And thatās only one possible event that could leads to extinction. Weāre looking at a cascade of failing ecosystems. With all our modern technology, weāve all forgotten that we are part of those ecosystems.
The last time we saw temperatures as high as whatās coming was the end of the Permian Era. That happened over a much, much longer time line and it resulted in the extinction of 70% of all terrestrial vertebrates. We like to think that we have the technology to overcome just about anything that would normally result in extinction but hereās the thing ā That technology depends on functioning economies and civilizations and those are going to collapse well before we reach the extinction phase. Societal collapse within a decade may be pessimistic but societal collapse is an inevitability at this point.
You canāt launch humans into space, or create giant underwater/subterranean cities without an economic model to support those endeavors. War, disease and famine will take a huge bite and those that survive wonāt have the resources to adapt to a planet that is incompatible with human life at a physiological level.
There might be a lot of Campbellās soup cans left over, though.
Kinda makes planning for some far-off āretirementā seem rather pointless. Iām only half-joking when I tell my friends I want to cash out all my investments and just have a blast for the next 10 or 15 years before everything totally collapses.
Anyone ever used to read Wait But Why when Urban used to actually post stuff? Particularly his (excellent) blog on the Fermi Paradox, where he posited that one of the possible reasons we havenāt encountered extra-terrestrial life is because of The Great Filter. IIRC, the idea is it is impossible for any civilization to get to the technological level required for FTL travel, because they end up self-destructing before they reach that point of development.
I always felt humanity was doomed. In fact, I believe we arenāt the first iteration of sentient life/society on this rock, nor will we be the last.
I just always hoped the end would come far after mine own.
What were they like? Where did they live? What evidence is there of their existence? When did they exist? Where did they go?
I know itās been brought up as a thought experiment, and itās certainly an evocative one. But I still feel pretty skeptical that it ever actually happened, kneejerk or notā¦
Iām sure youāre all enjoying the anticipation of catastrophe thatās been rolling along in this thread for the last few days. On the off chance anyone thinks weāll survive a few more years, maybe some seagrass can help.
Great questions all. And answers we likely will never get.
Look, weāre still uncovering archaeological remains from the Romans. And that was 2000 years ago. This planet has been around for billions of years. Who knows whatās buried deeper beneath the crust, or in the ocean depths? If weāre talking about a civilization that predated dinosaurs, itās possible that all detectible signs of that civilization have been erased by eons of time, and who knows what else.
I donāt buy this theory. This wasnāt inevitable, even for us. It is inevitable now but things could have gone a different way. Even before scientists started discovering exo-planets, if you just looked at the mechanisms that formed our solar system, it seemed pretty obvious that the same would apply to most stars which that there are likely a billion trillion solar systems out there. Itās a mathematical certainty that there are tons of other civilizations and it seems mathematically probable that a bunch of them found sustainable ways to reach the space age.
(On the flip side, I think the mathematical probability that any civilization possessing sufficiently advanced technology for intergalactic travel would decided to come to this particular point in space and time approaches zero. Thereās the old saw about putting a pot of water in your front hall, opening the door for a minute, then shutting it and declaring that there is obviously no such thing as lobsters. I think a lobster coming to the pot n that situation is more likely.)
[quote]I always felt humanity was doomed.
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Itās funny, I thought that when I was a kid but it was an irrational belief/fear. I only came back to it based on evidence ;)
[quote]In fact, I believe we arenāt the first iteration of sentient life/society on this rock, nor will we be the last.
[/quote]
Define sentient; Define society. Crows, whales, elephants and countless other species on the planet have sentience, language and society. Civilization on a human scale seems unlikely just based on what we know about evolution and geology.
How long can you really survive in your bunker on that though?
https://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/square_medium/0/31/2753247-cp_60seconds_ql.00_20_23_59.still001.jpg
I love that game.
Sorry, one last grim thought that occurred to me laterā¦
I think what happens in Yemen over the next year is a sneak peak of the fate that waits for all of us if things donāt totally go to shit from stressors before then. (And by stressors I mean things like the effects of the Syrian Civil War on politics in Europe growing exponentially worse as the environment goes to shit in the most unstable regions of the planet.)
First of all, the oceans arenāt going to ādieā. Itās an ecosystem. If it changes drastically, things living there now will die, and be replaced by something else. Life tends to fill any open space.
Humans are basically at the point where we can turn energy into a habitat to live in. Some great ecological catastrophy would result in the death of most humans, but almost certainly not all of us.
We canāt turn energy into food.
Microbial life is probably ubiquitous, but complex life I think is far rarer.
A series of highly improbable events had to occur to sow the environment for sentient life:
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Jupiter forms early and starts migrating in towards the Sun. Had it continued the inner planets would have been flung into space.
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This migration leads to the late heavy bombardment, seeding Earth with its water.
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But Saturn forms shortly after Jupiter and yanks Jupiter back to its current location (gravity is weird!)
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In the meantime, a mars-sized object hits Earth at precisely the right angle to eject enough Earth material to form the Moon but not enough to obliterate it (Venus OTOH apparently got hit with something that nearly stopped its rotation, leading in part to the hellscape it is now.)
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The moon stabilizes the earthās wobble, leading to predictable seasons that allow life to evolve over long timescales.
All that just to get going.
On top of the this, we donāt have a binary star system, weāre isolated from the violent universe (supernovas, hypernovas, pulsars, gamma ray bursts.) It may well be that Earth is the first planet, certainly in the galaxy, to evolve sentient life (homo sapiens nearly didnāt make it either, reduced at one point to a population of 6,000 in East Africa.)
Thatās why what is happening now is all the more tragic. People can have cavalier (and I submit, shitty) attitudes that so what species go extinct, new ones will come along, but none of this had to come to pass. Human beings have made a conscious choice to shit on the planet and all the other living beings on it for short term comfort.
As for āenjoy life nowā, I find that difficult. Itās akin to saying too bad my partner has cancer, Iām just gonna go ahead and ignore that and simply have fun. IOW, easier said than done.
I donāt doubt that, but the question is on what timescale?
Seriously. I donāt really care that a few humans might live eeking out a living by eating lichen and cockroaches millions of years from now vs actual extinction. Collapse of society and the death of billions is bad enough, so Iām not sure why @Timex always wants to point out that someone somewhere will live. Probably. :)