And we’re STILL not willing to reign in capitalism.
We doomed ourselves. My pity is reserved for all the species we’re taking with us in this murder/suicide for short term profit for the avarice diseased. Those capitalists are by far most to blame, but no one that contributes to the capitalist machine, myself included, is without blame for the effectively permanent destruction of our COMMUNal habitat.
Unless you’re an eco-terrorist who has been actively trying to destroy the capitalist machine, the precious few good guys as far as I’m concerned if your goal is a viable habitat for our species at all beyond the next couple decades, we’ve all been seeing this oncomming train heading towards us our entire lives and done nothing of note.
We can’t keep living like we’ve been living, as gluttonous consumers with 78 kinds of plastic packaged cereal made a thousand miles away in any form AND survive as a species, and it’s clear which choice we’ve made. We aren’t willing to live closer to the land, to farm the food our community eats, to live small lives understanding we are subject to earth and not the other way around, so we gotta go so life can go on without us.
Humans are pretty resilient. I don’t think we’re going to go extinct, unless we do the nuclear winter thing, which I personally believe is inevitable on a long enough timeline. Short of that, we’ll see mass death and an extreme decline in quality of life, but we’ll probably, unfortunately, continue on as a species. Either way, we’ll end up destroying this planet eventually. We simply cannot exist in symbiosis with nature.
I’m not really on the fence about the bright vs dark future thing anymore, as you can see by my name. It’s pretty much guaranteed we’ve chosen the dark future option.
Blah blah ecofascist doomerism. We can live harmonically with nature and have for most of our history. Our current consumerist society isn’t compatible with sustainable and responsible practices but that isn’t a forgone conclusion or intrinsic to human behavior. That’s not to say that we aren’t on a bad path, we absolutely are and a great many organisms are going extinct because of us, but ascribing a moral value to our very existence is the wrong move.
Not true. Humans always reproduced to the absolute limit (set by their agricultural technology and the bodies of women). The reason why this didn’t wreck the environment is because that limited population was too small to turn 50% of land into farmland, they didn’t know how to burn large amounts of coal and they didn’t have the technology to produce harmful chemicals.
But i agree that humanity (or any other species) has no value. Saying humanity has value is like saying the white race has value. It’s pure aestethics, it’s not worth it to make anyone suffer for that.
Humans always reproduced to the absolute limit
My understanding is that this is not true. The big factor seems to be infant mortality, as that drops so does the average number of children per breeding pair.
Turns out you are right. At least on the surface.
- While the actual birth rate was 4.5 to 7.5 before 1800, the effective birth rate was about 2.
- Women’s mortality was also not the problem. The probability to die in child birth was '‘only’ 0.5%
But if we dig deeper, we find that only 10% of children made it to their 20s, and the reason for that was famine and disease.
So those that kept the population growing lived under conditions where the reason why their children died was because they could not feed them or keep them healthy. And if we take the 0.5% of maternal mortality, and apply it to those responsible for the population growth (those that made it into their 20s), we get a rough estimate of 50% effective maternal mortality. So it was the agricultural technology in combination with war, disease and child birth that kept the population low.And that’s what i meant: They lived in a situation where 80-90% of their friends had died of famine, disease and war, and under these horrific conditions they still produced 4.5 to 7.5 children per woman, which kept the population growing (slowly). As soon as that limitation was lifted, the population shot up.
Personally, i don’t see any planning in that. They just had as many children as they could before they died, not worrying about how they would feed them.
Human nature is game theory driven by greed. Billions of people are too much chaos.
Only in a social framework that rewards greed. “Human nature” is almost impossible to understand because it can’t be studied with a control group.
Incinerating the planet in the name of profit is a very recent concept.
Capitalism in its current form has existed for the last 2% of human civilization. 5% if you count mercantilism as a form of capitalism. For the vast majority of history, people owned their own means of production.
You are giving our species too much credit. For almost all of our history, we merely lacked the technologies capable of terraforming our planet against us for short term profit.
If the kings and feudal lords of yore had the capability to burn the long term future to goose their short term greed disease hoards, they would have.
We’re a gaggle of monkeys just barely capable, with great effort, of devising tools with complexities and consequences we’re still far too primitive to wield responsibly, nothing more.
I’m of the opinion this is one of those theoretical Great Filters that explains the lack of a loud universe filled with the signals of other civilizations.
Evolution is slow. If complex life is common and eventually leads to intelligence, maybe there’s just a common chasm between when when a species becomes… clever enough, because we’ve proven as a species we aren’t intelligent… To split atoms or otherwise alter the habitat of their world technologically, but still sit biologically in the tribal, zero sum, rival monkeys have to lose so we big win! mentality that is necessary in nature but harmful to a civilization, that inevitably leads to self-destruction.
What was the FIRST thing we sought to do with the awesome power of the atom again? Wasn’t even a hundred years ago. That’s who we are. We could have made a warm light for all mankind, instead we made big boomie boom rival monkey tribe, wheeeeee!
I guess feudalism was technically not capitalism…
It’s gonna be awesome when we’re old and need end of life care and the younger generations are too poor to help us and too stupid to help us even if they weren’t poor.
We’re headed into a very, very stupid and depressing future. And it’s 100% avoidable.
Welcome to COSCO, I love you.
Maybe that was a little too much Patrick
*was avoidable, by taking steps 25-40 years ago. Boomers took us right over the edge of any cliff they could find, again and again.
This is actually optimistic. They think kids are going to grow up.
They think people these days can afford to have kids.
We will have to teach that there are five seasons now: spring, summer, inferno, autumn and winter.
Storm, Flood, Heatwave, Fire, Dust, Blizzard
With our powers combined, we call Captain Pollution.
Naw, where I am we mostly have SMOKE
No really
Smoke is part of every depiction of hell, so ‘Inferno’ is still applicable.
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Thank goodness my second child isn’t due today.
Umm actually this is just woke and we should have more children for racist reasons /s
Tell that to Africans, and to a few South American countries, they are the only ones who are not crashing and have a viable replacement rate above 2.1… and then some.
If you were really concerned about over population that is what one would do, but no one here would have the guts for ideological reasons or for fear of being even remotely perceived as possibly a racist. Despite objective statistics. /s
Where did they say anything about “overpopulation”?
This is depressing but let’s bring your map into context.
Now it’s even more depressing because that means humans have been using children as a tool to create social security, knowing full well that most of them will suffer and die at an early age.
It’s a pyramid scheme played with (literally) innocent people at the expense of an insane amount of suffering and death.
I’m 42 and I’ve been told this like every 5 years or so.
And have you not seen things heading in that direction? I’m 57 and I sure as hell have.
Oh yes definitely I’ve seen it slowly going from bad to worse, I guess i meant to say that I’m tired and exhausted from it. And from no one in power actually wanting to do anything about fixing it.
Fun fact! The people who control who is in power!
The people don’t want change. They want their luxury, their excess. Even at the cost of the world.
Bernie Sanders has been screaming consistently about it for decades.
That’s on the people to vote for people who actually care.
Green parties rarely win, and that’s on us.
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YES WE FUCKING KNOW
Shit, just what I want to read while my girlfriend is in labour.
Just tell her to try and hold things in until tomorrow, that should help.
Congrats!
Thanks!
15/05/25 or 05/15/25 for the Americans is a good day to be boring though.
So uh what do I call what we are living in right now?
The calm before the storm.
What we’ve got now is peanuts compared to what kind of future we’re looking towards.
yay.
We are the extinction event
In an analysis of human exposure to climate change extremes — such as heatwaves, floods, droughts, wildfires, cyclones and crop failures — researchers found that children born in 2020 are two to seven times more likely to face one-in-10,000 year events than those who were born in 1960.
Why pick (great) grandparents as the reference point?
Wouldn’t it be more practical to compare them with their parents?
Edit: the actual study does show comparative data for other cohorts (i.e. every decade since 1960). Unless the average LiveScience reader is in their 60s, they just picked a weirdly unrelatable way to describe the study.
Don’t worry, they are not growing up
Yeah but don’t stop having kids because we need underpaid nursing home staff to work in the hell we made.
almost every parent is irresponsible selfish trash. there’s no need to put a person through a lifetime of pain just so you can have a few years of fun playing mommy.
Wow. You know there have to be people alive to fix this climate problem, right? “Oh, we done fucked the world up, time to species suicide!”
Drink some tea, dude.
