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this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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No it's humanity's only faint hope, because if we do not stop the capitalists with physical force, they won't stop, they will use their power/capital to further divide us and purchase their own regulators, and with one technology or another they can profit from with "externalities" they don't care about because it's not their problem, they WILL destroy the only habitable world all humans rely on from one breath to the next in their need for mooooaaaaaaar. and let's be honest, if we can't even find homeostasis with this forgiving world, Mars or Titan habitation, worlds where a single mistake means everyone dies immediately, is a bad joke. It's 2024 and 2 lunar landers ended up broken and upside down. Our moon is basically the interstellar equivalent of successfully sucking on a baba. For more than "we did it" ego trips with 5 highly trained people walking a high risk tight rope of death to plant a flag, Earth is all we got without at least a millenium of technological advancement we probably don't have.
We probably won't stop them though. So we'll almost certainly destroy ourselves demanding infinite growth/metastasis on a finite world. Which it sounds like you like, as at least we won't throw an unseemly tantrum on our march to extinction, I do declare. Let it not be said that we didn't practice decorum.
I think this might be what the scientific community hypothesizes as a great filter.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter#:~:text=The%20Great%20Filter%20is%20the,detectable%20extraterrestrial%20life%20exceedingly%20rare.
Maybe when species evolve sapience, they destroy themselves with technologies they are juuusst barely smart enough create, but are still too primitive, selfish, and "duuuuuuuh" to wield responsibly for the collective good. Hence why we don't see a galaxy teeming with signs of other civilizations.
We just made this gasoline shit that makes these wheels go vroom and went to town because fuck it wheee! What could happen?! "herp derp if we didn't humanity wouldn't be 9 billion strong!" Oh you mean our numbers would still such that the planet could sustainably support our species? Can't have that amirite?
Burn it down and build something sustainable is our only slim chance, but don't worry, we'll fail at that too. The Earth will eventually recover and go back to the drawing board though. It's recovered from worse than us, even mistakes of evolution that were worse than us, we're just the inverse of the Permian extinction event, caused by carbon storing trees that at the time had no mechanism for efficient decomposition. I take comfort in that. It almost lets me forgive my species for being the fucking worst, because maybe we're just a fact of a large enough ecosystem over time. You can't blame a metastatic tumor for what it does, it's in its nature.
It must be that I'm just more optimistic than you. In a world with the type of weapons we possess, "burn it down" is giving up. It's the end. There will be no rebuilding. At least not until the tardigrades develop sentience.
Following the capitalists down their road of burning the world for short term private profit, laughing about rebranding the damage they do as "externalities," is also the end, and if we want the truest of ends for our species with no survivors, save a few self burying sociopaths in bunkers watching the last flickers burn out, then we're doing exactly what we need to be doing and we need only watch them do it.
There is no hope in maintaining the current course. None. We have the technologies to destroy the human habitability of our only world, the short term private profit motive to use them with reckless abandon, and no government or regulator they can't buy standing in their way.
The practicing sociopaths have all the keys. What is the defining characteristic of a sociopath? "Benefitting myself will hurt other people? Pfffff 💵😂🖕"
No one is saying that complete change isn't necessary. I'm just saying that we shouldn't respond to our cancer diagnosis by shooting ourselves in the head.
Us hemming and hawing about what parts of this system can be rehabilitated just keeps us indolent and divided, keeps the practicing sociopaths in charge, and keeps us literally stepping on the gas to extinction.
If we want our species to one day, long after we're all dead, have a sustainable civilization on this world, we will have to suffer generationally undoing what has been done a piece at a time. Entire Generations will have to suffer to plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in if our species gives shit one about the survival of our species. We need to shrink our global footprint, we need to have our species as a whole more involved in our food production, we need to stop pretending any of us can live above nature in decadence.
But again, we won't, despite our fictions we have no such nobility, so good luck to whatever sapient species comes after us.