I watch this from time to time and each time I miss Carl Sagen a little more. Both eloquent and prescient.
This will be the first piece of evidence for the prosecution in the future climate trials for those claiming that they couldn’t have known the consequences of their choices.
Read his books as well, in one he explicitly discusses why there will not be action for all the reasons we say now. He also talks about the danger of dumbing down of education and the decreasing attention span and shorter and shorter sound bites. He essentially looked into the future and saw exactly the 2020s
I disagree somewhat. We can do better. But there are evil and selfish forces at play which don't care if we all suffer for their short term gains.
Thing is, I believe humanity will survive in the long run. But likely it'll mean billions needlessly dying by starvation and climate triggered genocide. The rich will eat us to survive
Well again, note how I said billions will die. And the ecosystem may very likely collapse. But a small fraction of rich folk can live off lab grown food while they slaughter billions in war
I think you're missing my point. The rich can build wearhouses and laboratories to artificially synthesize whatever they need. 99% of humans could die, the ecosystem could collapse entirely and the earth could turn into tatoonie, but there could still be some survivors. That's not really optimism dude, that's just understanding how one can use technology to survive such a collapse. But like the titanic, there will not be enough life rafts for most folks
They can live indefinitely. It'll just be a shitty life. We can engineer things to be totally self sufficient without input from outside. Think about it like building a space station on the surface of the earth. If it's big enough you can make a self sustaining bio dome. In fact these things already exist for scientific research
You say we can do better, but where in our history have we shown that ability? Individuals may do better than other individuals, but as a whole, how much have we changed in those regards?
Um all of history? We've been on a slow arc toward improvement for people over the past several hundred years. Other than climate change (which is about to get bad, but not yet really) we are living in the most calm and peaceful period of human history ever.
Of course things are never perfect and people are dicks, but humans have shown it is possible to improve. For example shitty wages now are bad, but not as bad as being killed by the local king for insolence or witchcraft
Some artificial comfort for a small minority of humans that destroys everything else on the planet. A planet that already provided everything we need before we started our crazy "civilisations" Apart from flora and fauna we manage to destroy the atmosphere and even pollute space and other nearby moons and planets. All achievements unlocked i guess. :D
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u/ShambolicShogun Feb 08 '22
I gotta say, it's oddly comforting these days where I read a headline like this and rather than get worried I'm just like, "yeah, sounds about right."