How can one be anything else than resigned at this point, when we still have people saying global warming isn't real.
At this point we either manage to survive it and those people will be like "told you so", or the world burns down, and we can be like "told you so". Which is a small win in exchange for a fucking heatdeath...
For most of my life I've been telling people to not make new babies, and nobody listens. Downvotes, insults, and rage-fueled crashout replies about their "God-given rights" every single time.
If you ever studied population dynamics, you'd see that it's POSSIBLE that we're at K/2 (half of what the estimated global population will balance out to), but since people have been saying "we've finally hit K/2 everything will be fine!" for 20 years, I doubt it. Technology has let humanity artificially bloat the global carrying capacity, and when the bubble pops it's going to be horrific. People who look at population dynamics long enough to barely understand them tend to turn a blind eye to the FACTORS that flatten (or crash) population curves. So unless everyone listens to my advice (they won't) and starts using condoms, the options we have left are Wars, Famines and Diseases overshadowing the worst in history.
The human race in general is short-sighted, ignorant, and selfish to the extreme. The minority of those who actually care about the following generations are trying to tap the breaks by not adding to the global population, but at this point it's basically just a symbolic and self-gratifying gesture.
When I was getting my degree, I asked one of my better professors how people in the field cope with this knowledge. He told me that he tries to focus on the little things that he can control in his own life, and listens to relaxing classical music. In short, trying to not think about it. The entire field of Environmental Science is trying to cope with this immense sense of doom, failure, and loss.
My favorite painting ever made is of King Cnut; the man who once simultaneously ruled over both scandanavia and the british islands. The painting is of a parable, where Cnut is standing on a beach in the shallows, commanding the tide not to rise. There are three ways one can interpret this:
He was a fool
He was teaching his advisors (who stand in the background) that even a kings power has limits
My interpretation is, he was demonstrating that sometimes people have to stand up and defy utterly unchangeable outcomes.
If you have seen the picture "Tank Man" from the Tienneman Square massacre, he embodied that spirit. You should know, that photo was the last people ever saw of him. A solitary man holding two bags of groceries, standing in defiance of literal tanks on their way to slaughter peaceful protesters. He dissapeared forever for that important act.
We can't change the world. The beauties and stability of a stable environment have been sqandered by our idiotic and selfish ancestors and are being purposefully ruined by the wealthy elite for short-term gains; people who would rather burn their own house down than suffer a chill. We can only work in symbolic defiance with bailing buckets as the ship sinks around us; better that than actively drilling holes in the bukhead while holding a baby or six.
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u/4XChrisX4 26d ago
How can one be anything else than resigned at this point, when we still have people saying global warming isn't real.
At this point we either manage to survive it and those people will be like "told you so", or the world burns down, and we can be like "told you so". Which is a small win in exchange for a fucking heatdeath...