164
Life on earth:
This only fucks Europe, right?
Damn, we actually collapsed our environment in the name of profit. This must be the great filter. Its the enticing imaginary bullshit that leads to total obliteration over advancement. The chasing of made-up dragons to make some nonexistent number rise.
There's a scene in Sagan's Cosmos where he's exploring the possibilities of life elsewhere. He's in the Ship of the Imagination, looking around at various potentials. He runs across one planet teeming with a civilization, from orbit it had even more lights and connections that our own at night. And then the lights suddenly go out. He discusses how even thriving life can suddenly die and speculates on a few reasons why this one might have, like resources or war or whatever. Summary from memory, I have no idea which episode it's in.
In reality it wouldn't be a sudden disappearance, but a longer decay. The lights shutting off was just to illustrate how easy it is to lose something assumed to be permanent. I'd also recommend the beginning of Revolution to get that same surreal feeling, although the rest of the series was blah.
Ah, Cosmos, I remember watching that when I still believed people were creatures of knowledge and advancement. We'll never know any of those things cause we spent the last 50 years prioritizing profit over all else. It didnt have to be like this.
Sagan always said we had the potential to be better, but he was also concerned it was an uphill climb. Where Carlin got angrier with age, I think Sagan would just have been disappointed in us. Especially in the fall back into ignorance and superstition, something else he warned about in The Demon-Haunted World. Every quote you can find from that book is profound, but this one is eerily hard hitting:
“We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”
I don't believe planet self-destruction is the The great filter, just our filter and we failed. In all fairness it's probably the first of many future filters that would have gotten us too.
The irony of filling up my screen with an advertisement as I try to read about what will be the collapse of our civilization is not lost on me.
So, what does this all mean for us? It means we have even less time to get our act together. Reducing emissions isn’t just a good idea — it’s crucial.
Our planet’s systems are interconnected in ways we’re only beginning to understand. If we want to keep things from getting worse, we need to act now. Every little bit counts, and the clock is ticking.
In other words...we're fucked.
Well, yeah.
You were expecting maybe all of the countries of the world to absolve their differences and join hands to defeat the problems of climate change?
Sounds kinda like a fairy tale.
Yes, we are likely seeing the last generation of humans on earth.
We're likely to see a lot of suffering and disruption along with increased mortality, but humans are way too resourceful to go extinct, even with a severe disruption to the climate
We might be able to mitigate some of the effects of we start removing the actual problems people...granted the solution isn't exact 'legal'
I agree that it's going to take popular action to prevent the capitalists from continuing as usual, whatever form this action takes. But it's not going to happen until we're organized and prepared to risk our own safety for the greater good.
But I was told capitalism was the best economic system in the world! Would the capitalists lie to me?
Close your eyes and think of England....
Great Britain will get more than chilly. Arable land was expected to drop from 32% of the region down to 22% by 2080, slashing their economy by a third. If the AMOC is already showing signs of breakdown, that timeline will need to be shortened.
I'm reasonably sure I read a Clive Cussler book with that as the evil villain's plot.
this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2024
164 points (100.0% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
5296 readers
759 users here now
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS