4231

Heat from the sun causing 100 degree plus spikes without AC. But thanks for playing. :)

4232

Just remember, when all seems lost, intellectuals have predicted the end of humanity on multiple occasions. I’m not just talking about men and women standing on the corner proclaiming the end of the world with signs and prophecies. I’m talking about math, starvation, disease, war… We gotta do the best we can as soon as we can, no matter what, but it is not exactly rare for people to believe this is it.

4233

Virtually nothing could destroy the human race entirely.

4234

Although if we are to achieve this, Step 1 would certainly be withdrawing from the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty.

4235

I don’t care about the human race, just my kids.

I want them to live and have happy lives.

4236

That’s an… interesting perspective. Usually people who say this stuff are on the other side of the climate change ‘debate’!

4237

No if the planet is fucked up, my kids will probably suffer. I’m not a man that can live off the land. I’m a city guy. If society collapses, my family is fucked. Super fucked.

Now, my wife’s cousins are all a bunch of handy men that are hunters and plumbers and builders. They’ll do okay.

So, selfishly, I need humanity to make it through this.

4238

If the oceans die, we all die. And that’s only one possible event that could leads to extinction. We’re looking at a cascade of failing ecosystems. With all our modern technology, we’ve all forgotten that we are part of those ecosystems.

The last time we saw temperatures as high as what’s 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 here’s the thing – 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 can’t 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 won’t have the resources to adapt to a planet that is incompatible with human life at a physiological level.

4239

There might be a lot of Campbell’s soup cans left over, though.

4240

Kinda makes planning for some far-off “retirement” seem rather pointless. I’m 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 haven’t 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 aren’t 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.

4241

What were they like? Where did they live? What evidence is there of their existence? When did they exist? Where did they go?

4242

I know it’s been brought up as a thought experiment, and it’s certainly an evocative one. But I still feel pretty skeptical that it ever actually happened, kneejerk or not…

4243

I’m sure you’re all enjoying the anticipation of catastrophe that’s been rolling along in this thread for the last few days. On the off chance anyone thinks we’ll survive a few more years, maybe some seagrass can help.

4244

Great questions all. And answers we likely will never get.

Look, we’re still uncovering archaeological remains from the Romans. And that was 2000 years ago. This planet has been around for billions of years. Who knows what’s buried deeper beneath the crust, or in the ocean depths? If we’re talking about a civilization that predated dinosaurs, it’s possible that all detectible signs of that civilization have been erased by eons of time, and who knows what else.

4245

I don’t buy this theory. This wasn’t 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. It’s 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. There’s 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.
[/quote]

It’s 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 aren’t 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.

4246

How long can you really survive in your bunker on that though?

4247

I love that game.

Sorry, one last grim thought that occurred to me later…

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 don’t 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.)

4248

First of all, the oceans aren’t going to “die”. It’s 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.

4249

We can’t turn energy into food.

4250

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:

  1. Jupiter forms early and starts migrating in towards the Sun. Had it continued the inner planets would have been flung into space.

  2. This migration leads to the late heavy bombardment, seeding Earth with its water.

  3. But Saturn forms shortly after Jupiter and yanks Jupiter back to its current location (gravity is weird!)

  4. 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.)

  5. The moon stabilizes the earth’s 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 don’t have a binary star system, we’re 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 didn’t make it either, reduced at one point to a population of 6,000 in East Africa.)

That’s 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 ‘enjoy life now’, I find that difficult. It’s akin to saying too bad my partner has cancer, I’m just gonna go ahead and ignore that and simply have fun. IOW, easier said than done.