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this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
1991 points (98.4% liked)
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Maybe I've consumed too much sci-fi over the years. I've always thought the primary goal should be that of making this species a space fairing one. Secondary, they to extend the life of this planet as much as possible. It will die one day, that's unavoidable.
At the present, it looks like neither are being achieved. It's all just going to collapse on itself. Maybe the human population 2.0 can resurface and try again after the planet kills almost everyone.
I feel sorry for the younger generation and my peers with children.
Nope, see the problem is that our civilisation has used all the most readily accessible natural resources, oil, copper, tin, iron, coal, gold, silver, etc. The problem now is that if our civilisation collapses and there's a significant loss of technological capacity, any emergent civilisation may never develop the capacity to reach or process adequate amounts to enable a technological rediscovery. Yay.
I disagree, if you've looked at all the advances in technology made over the last 1,2,300 years. If there was to be a great extinction event with some survivors - they'd bounce back relatively quickly.
I disagree, what's different from previous civilizations is our usage of energy. We found fossil fuels which are basically conveniently stored sunlight and we have used this abundance to help ourself to do more while using less stored energy in our bodies.
There isn't that much oil left which especially behaves like miraculous liquid, kind of like magic. Without it our society would collapse and majority of people would be required to go back to fields to grow food.
Any survivors wouldn't have all the currently existing technology as most easily accessible recourses are already gathered. All while current inventions continue to decay and require replacement eventually, leaving behind only mountains of trash.
Yeah you're taking sense. Although in the situation of the population dropping drastically to a core survivor population, you might find there to be less of a limit on resources.
I think that some of those resources would probably continue to dwindle, even if we all just dissapeared today. That's a big part of what's so scary about this. Climate change is progressing beyond what we can "undo". Now, they're also seeing greenhouse gases being released from melting ice and soil. The heating won't suddenly stop if we all died today.
Many living organisms require certain living conditions. Who's to say that this heat won't eventually start to destroy the chances of growing most crops? What if these massive forest fires become a lot more common? How many animal species will die? More floods, droughts, storms, and severe heat events are all on our horizon.
I would like to believe what you suggest, but it might be optimistic at this point. We all need to help eachother to survive this, as an entire species (including the rich people ofc).
metals dont disappear tho, they can be salvaged from the ruins of the previous civilization. but i agree coal/oil are a problem.
Good luck relying on the coin flip that civilisation gets to a point it can make use of those before they all oxidise, metals don't last forever, nor do they maintain the capacity for all applications due to quality.
Yep. I'm a mechanic, no expert of course but what I know from experience? Metals aren't eternal. They rust, they corrode, they oxidize (lol) they break in strenuous (or light) application and just in general aren't guaranteed. Nothing is. Wiring constantly fails. Batteries go dead. To top it off, we don't make things to last anymore. Everything seems to be made to last just until the warranty expires. Personally I consider every single product that isn't built to last as long as possible an utter waste of resources. I think it should be illegal to manufacture items that will only last a short time. Companies use up resources like we have an infinite supply so they can profit. Making vehicles that can hit 160-200 mph that will only ever travel on roads with a speed limit of 70-80 tops should be illegal. Hell, racing in general just shouldn't be legal, wasting all of these previous finite resources to go fast? All that time, all that technology for something useless? It's all so ridiculous.
I work on vehicles/equipment that are 30-50 years old that are much more reliable than the vehicles of the past 20 years. Simpler to work on too. If we ever do truly see Armageddon and lose the world as we know it, people are going to experience hell trying to get vehicles to run. Even the best mechanics I know can't fix many of the issues the new vehicles present without vehicle specific programs that the manufacturers won't release to the public. They're making vehicles/equipment that people won't be able to even use much less repair if society collapsed.
Yet an old truck from the 70's? Almost anyone can learn to work on them and you don't need any fancy tools to get them running. Can do damn near anything you need to with some vice grips, a flathead, a christen wrench and maybe a hammer.
It's getting bad. We would have had enough resources to sustain us for many, many years to come. Silver, gold, platinum? We mined and used most of it for what, jewelry?
Steel, iron etc? Building skyscrapers for millionaires to live in at overly expensive rates?
People are homeless, people are starving, people are living in poverty
And we had all the resources needed for a utopian civilization but traded it all so a small percentage of the population could live like Kings.
I think you're confusing durability for reliability here.
30-50 year old vehicles will go forever, but usually need small repairs fairly often. Modern vehicles will do 200k-300k km with no problems, and then everything bad starts happening, because it's not like anyone maintains them.
So the 30-50 year old ones are more durable, but the newer ones are more reliable. Until they've reached the end of their useful life, that is.
There's also survivorship bias. All the crapily designed cars from 30-50 years ago are long scraped while some of the well designed ones are still around. With "current" cars you see the whole spectrum.
Absolutely. There are entire marques you don't see anymore.
We? It doesn't seem like too many people had much of a choice. ~Strawberry
Oh god I'd never thought about it that way, we really fucked up
Human self-sufficiency in space--- what's needed for any real redundancy-- is for sure >50 and probably >250 years away.
Space settlements are going to need support from Earth for the conceivable future.
Even a destroyed planet from global warming or the middle of the ocean is infinitely more hospitable than the space environment.
On current course, the first planet we'll have to terraform is Terra.
Humans treat this planet like we've got someone else to go.
I've known for decades that we humans are failed species that will eventually go extinct. Tbf, everyone are and new species come and go. It has been quite interesting and often sad watching our overshoot while many people have lived in hubris and thought we'd conquer the space one day.
The Earth is one special place in space where life has been born. I have no clue why that has happened but I'm thankful for having been alive and been able to witness larger life cycle in this planet.
I doubt any species will ever conquer the galaxies. It seems that life consumes energy and uses it to grow until it one day collapses.
Yeah. I was born too late to explore earth, born too early to explore space, but born just in time for dank memes. I'm honestly very grateful for that. We live in a pretty exciting time, as sad as it is that we'll eventually all go extinct.
That "born too late to explore earth" bit hits my heart big time. I've always been sad that we can't do that anymore like we used to be able to. People a thousand years ago could just leave and explore if they wanted, then pitch a tent somewhere beautiful and live there if they chose. If you wanted you could live at the top of a mountain, or inside of a cave covered by a waterfall. Such beauty and freedom. It's sad that a thousand years later, all of our "progress" has essentially taken away nearly all of our freedom in that regard. You never had to be hungry back then, you could hunt or plant food nearly anywhere you pleased. Never had to be homeless, you could fell some trees and build a cabin somewhere beautiful. Now? Most people are fortunate if they can afford a vacation a few hours away once every year or so, if that. There's no peace of mind, we all work work work and scramble to fulfill as many of our endless obligations as possible. Then we retire, if fortunate enough and hopefully don't have to work as hard for a little bit and die. I've always had dreams of sailing the sea and exploring, almost like memories in my mind. Maybe it's a past life, maybe it's memory passed down through my DNA, maybe it's fantasy. I don't know what it is, but I know that it's what feels right to me. Planting down and living in our homes/work almost our entire lives then dying feels so wrong. I care almost nothing about material wishes or monetary gain, but I'd like to be rich in order to travel and feel free.
Some serious rose tinted glasses looking back on history there! At what point in time are you thinking about? For most of history I'd have had fealty to some land owner. I'd say we have more freedom and opertunity to experience the world now than before.
You can still explore the planet for yourself, just because something has been experienced by someone before you shouldn't take too much away from your joy if experiencing it.
A little bit of carbon fiber, resin, and a $30 Logitech wireless controller, and you can explore the bottom of the ocean and see the Titanic up close.
Honestly, I kind of agree. I travelled a little bit here or there when I was younger, nothing too crazy, only been out of my continent once in my life. I'm definitely starting to get a bit more wanderlust, but it's so expensive to travel so far away lol
What is a "failed species?" Do you believe there is a win condition on the universe?
I'm sorry if that sounded too harsh.
I consider finding econiche and surviving in it a win condition. When scaling it to whole universe, it would be being able to exist without consuming and decaying their environment they need for their existence.
Unfortunately, or not, I don't think there is a single species that can live forever. I think all life is based on consumption, one eating something else and growing until it exceeds its limits in environment, after which it decays to meet its carrying capasity.
Eventually sun no longer provides sunlight and plants stop growing. Chemosynthetic bacteria and some fungi may still use some compounds as their energy source, but they have limits as well and eventually all life simply perishes.
So do I believe or think there is something to win? To me simply being alive is a win. The space seems very empty and deadly to me. It's miraculous that we exist, although sad that we are causing extinction event.
Just recently I saw a very interesting veritasium video about entropy. He explains that life acts to increase entropy. Before entropy, nothing exciting happens. After entropy, nothing exciting will ever happen again. But as life causes entropy, that's when the excitement and magic happens.
It's an extremely profound video, and may give you comfort. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxL2HoqLbyA&t=0
I think it's cool that life is technically a natural geological phenomenon, the building blocks of RNA are naturally occurring amino acids that hitch rides on space debris that after interacting with the right combination of other inorganic material creates a recursive entropy system that develops the capacity to comsume other materials to continue the natural chemical reactions that extract the necessary building blocks to sustain itself thus becoming an "organism", basically an organic black hole of entropy, and this chain of chemical reactions eventually resulted in consciousness, then cognizance, and now we're here, a natural geological product of the universe with the capacity to observe and understand itself.
Thank you, it does help
It's not harsh, it's just illustrative of a view.
Feel happy for the thousands or millions of generations who will never have to suffer being born.
Nah, we have already exploited everything that can be easily exploited. Look at the effort we need to get new oil or metal deposits. Humans 2.0 will struggle to build basic machinery.
What? Why??
Because ultimately if we don't leave this rock we go extinct. Guaranteed.
I dunno, man. A species using up all the resources available in its isolated home, only to develop the ability to use those stolen resources to go to other nearby bodies and use up their resources as well... Makes me think of a virus. If that's how our species survives, I'd rather we didn't.
Even if we were able to live in complete harmony with the planet and not exhaust our resources we'd undoubtedly go extinct for one reason or another. I'm not necessarily talking about resources.
But yeah, what you've described is how we're existing at present anyway.
I think that achieving space colonization will only happen if we bring this world to the brink of destruction and the 5 people with all the money at that time decide to spend it all to escape. If we do achieve harmony it'll be after those guys have already left to go destroy another world, and those left behind who survive the millennia of desolation as the world falls apart and puts itself back together again finally get the picture and treat their home with respect. And even then all it'll take is one self-centered, power-hungry person being born for the exploitation to come back again.
The elites that we have are a plague on humanity.
Not who you replied to but I agree with their sentiment and will tell you why.
1: At the rate at which we're destroying it, our planet won't sustain us forever so unless we're going to change our ways which most, especially big corps that do the most damage for profit, won't we need to focus on an exit strategy for the inevitable.
2: The sun will also die eventually of course. Won't be for a long time (hopefully) but that alone means earth isn't a forever solution for us and if we live long enough, eventually we will have to leave.