One of the most depressing videos I've ever seen is a nature documentary showing a tribe of chimpanzees go to war with neighbouring tribe.
In Terminator 2, John Connor sees two kids squabbling over who shot the other first in their game, and asks the Arnold Terminator "We're not going to make it, are we? People, I mean". Arnold Terminator replies "It's in your nature to destroy yourselves".
With all the conflicts that are currently going upon in the world, I'm not filled with confidence that we'll overcome our instincts, leave war in the past, and achieve a utopian civilization.
I don't think contemporary wars are generally driven by the same instincts as those of chimpanzees. There are lots of reasons to feel doom and gloom but ascribing it to some sort of instinct for war seems misguided.
If you look at humanity on the large scale of things, we haven't been around very long on this planet, just a grain of sand in an hourglass time-wise. 99% of life that has ever existed on this planet is extinct so the odds are we're not going to be around forever.
I think we’re heading for another one because people are unhappy. But we don’t fight as long as things are okay; the post-Cold War “peace dividend” was a wonderful time and we felt no need to ruin it with meaningless aggression. So, do you think another World War would chill everyone out and make the survivors a lot happier? I do think that, but you’re welcome to disagree.
Would humans destroy the whole world and themselves in a fit of aggression? I do not think we would; look up Stanislav Petrov, who received wrong information in the USSR that the Americans were attacking, and had to decide whether to fight back and end the world or to preserve humanity. He didn’t fight back, of course, and the data he was seeing was wrong so it was the correct course of action. I would probably do the same. We’ve had nuclear weapons for 80 years now and still haven’t used them to eradicate the planet.
If Donald Trump won’t nuke Iran, and Vladimir Putin won’t nuke Ukraine, I think the human race will continue to survive the wars it fights.
There is a school of thought that most human traits are both beneficial to our success as a species and have their dark side.
Being warlike, if we feel compelled to be, has enabled us to secure and expand territory, which for most species is the foundation of their existence. And it's one reason why we've been such a successful species that has spread across the globe and to habitats that don't normally support human life. But we're not the only ones. You mentioned chimps. But even cats, both feral and domesticated, who are much more distant from our evolutionary bloodline, are fiercely territorial and will physically fight off any intruders.
It's not as much just human or primate behaviour, but really most higher life forms compete for territory and resources, and violently if they have to.
And despite all kinds of claims to the contrary, most human wars in history have been about controlling resources. It's only very recently that we've given an engagement in a conflict a humanitarian veneer, or one of self defence or whatever else we can claim makes us the good guys and "them" the savages.
Somebody once said that we're just apes with nukes. And that makes us arguably a bigger threat to the wellbeing of the entire planet than any skirmishes between hordes of chimpanzees in the jungle. But it's probably a good idea to understand human wars just as a function of us having bigger brains and intellect than most other species. Chimps fight each other with fists and sticks and stones, while we do air raids on each other and threaten to use nukes.
There will always be survivors to tell the story, sat here now we're expressions of that.
I think the fate of humanity and the universe as a whole is to go through states of growth and decay, neither more extreme than the other and often times running parallel across multiple factors.
Besides, I don't think we need overcome our instincts. Not atleast in the way you seem to describe. Consequential self-destruction is within our nature, but not the only part and not necessarily a bad one at that. Pic related, I'm sure there're more examples.
For a human to be healthy they must practice their nature. This is evident in the competition, aggression and war we see in many sports. Read some Robert Anton Wilson.
>>33741 >we haven't been around very long on this planet
>99% of life that has ever existed on this planet is extinct so the odds are we're not going to be around forever.
I'm probably missing context but I'm tiring of this sort of rhetoric.
For one, on the scale of time nothing has been around for very long. Aren't we coming to learn that time is a concious-subjective experience?
It's within the realm of possibility that some distant offshoot of a horse exists on a planet elsewhere. The universe is fertile, it's within the nature of existence to sustain itself. If Terran Horse type Zeta has to die for that to happen, then energy well spent.
What I think people are saying is that you are not going to be around forever, but it's easier to talk about death from the abstraction of 'us' and 'humanity as a whole'.
Existance either means everything or it means nothing. Time has no determining factor.
I think humanity has a good while left in it, but we do not have strong enough co-operative abilities at a large scale. We co-operate in small groups, tribal units, but beyond that small inner circle we are hostile to others of our own species. I think it would require all of humanity acting co-operatively to overcome the challenges we face, but it is clear at this point we are not going to achieve that within any of our lifetimes- But we are absolutely going to face the issues of climate change and resource scarcity within that timeframe. The more of us there are, the harder it will be to bind all of us together and unite us in purpose.
We will succumb to a slow burning ecological collapse and resource depletion. Like a rabbit population that explodes and out-strips its food source, we will collapse back down to sustainable levels when the hard numbers of food water and air no longer add up, and the social mechanisms we have for co-operation do not adequately adapt to solve the problem. Earth will recover- Earth has thousands upon thousands of years to regenerate, but our population will dwindle to hunter gatherer levels, and if we survive that, it will be as a descendant which is no longer homo sapiens.
I think what's most important in this question, however, is to keep in mind that nature has no morality. The universe has no inbuilt concept of good and evil. No matter how much of a moral absolutist or relativist you are, whether you come from the philosophical schools of Kant or Nietzsche, the concept of morality only exists in our mind. Evolution does not reward good or bad, it rewards survival, and the traits which have served our species so well up until this point are among the same which will be our undoing. We are often far too arrogant in believing we have overcome our natures, that we are above and outside the "natural world" just because we have this biological LLM hallucination of sentience, but we are not, we are just a part of it. A cog in the machine.
Like many thousands of species before us, we will strive, have our moments of glory, our time in the sun, and then meet our demise. Something new will rise in our place. Maybe this time, the infinite chaos number generator of fate will spur their evolution in a direction that favours success in a longer term, and they will branch out into the stars. Or maybe not. Who knows.
Nah we're fine. We treat conflict a lot like shagging, we make a lot of noise about it and focuses a lot in our minds but most of the time we're just dicking about with general monkey business and inventing new things. Even the Chimp War eventually settled into normality. Once those Kahama separatists were dealt with that is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
We're not the most violent apes and there's too many of us to ever die out - wipe out 99% of humanity and it's still 80 million people that will quickly rebound.
>>33745 >We will succumb to a slow burning ecological collapse and resource depletion. Like a rabbit population that explodes and out-strips its food source, we will collapse back down to sustainable levels when the hard numbers of food water and air no longer add up, and the social mechanisms we have for co-operation do not adequately adapt to solve the problem.
>wipe out 99% of humanity and it's still 80 million people that will quickly rebound.
Still depends on how they will be wiped out. A deadly virus or other microbes, yes, those who survive even the deadliest virus will pass their immunity to it on to their offspring. Similar to the way some people survived the plague while about 40-60 percent of Europe's population perished from it.
But if there's a global thermonuclear war, then the kind of environment it leaves behind will not sustain life even for four billion people in the foreseeable future, and maybe not for hundreds of thousands of years. We'll be lucky if a few hundred million of us survive in some less devastated areas. But even they will struggle. Some models predict that even a limited exchange between countries like India an laplanderstan with a few dozen low-yield atomic bombs could lead to crop failures in large areas of East Asia. If you scale that up, then billions who survived the actual hot phase of such a war would starve before long. There are also calculations that if the entire world suddenly stopped producing food, our global supplies would last us up to eight weeks. Yes, you'd have fewer mouths to feed if a few billion people become incinerated, but you're also looking at supply chain disruptions that will almost be unmendable, as well as a destruction of most of those supplies in the first place. In the end, it's not that you'll have to do without your South African grapes in February. But the global distribution of basic foodstuffs like wheat and rice will collapse, on which billions depend directly.
You cannot escape reality no matter how deeply you bury your head in the sand. You can think on that snappy Malthus quip when the famines and droughts start to kick in, and the poor are inevitably left to fend for themselves while the wealthy hog what's left.
>>33748 I was thinking more of an asteroid impact or one of those gamma ray bursts but whatever works really. It's only recently in the history of homo-sapiens that the species broke the 1 million mark and some of us on here are already experts when it comes to keeping it in the family.
So we have the major metropolitan areas destroyed, the end of social organisation, maybe the end of writing, it becomes impossible to farm, the collapse of trading networks etc. but we already had a prelude to that with the Bronze Age collapse in Mesopotamia and things soon enough turned around in the big picture. Yeah it might be more environmentally damaging with a nuclear exchange but our mutant decedents will also have more technology around them, most of the animals around will themselves be descended from animals we find useful and someone will dig up that seed vault because humans will still be living in extreme environments. Every mushroom cloud has a silver lining.
To get to the point, so long as we don't accidentally blow off the atmosphere in the next 100 years it's fine. The nightmare scenario doesn't even send humanity back to banging rocks together.
>>33749 And of course we'll all drown under poo from horse-drawn carriages and the Irish will use their bennies to breed like rabbits until we're all drinking Barry's tea.
This is the problem with extrapolating out into the future, it presumes that nothing ever changes and mysteriously always conforms to the writers worldview but then you zoom out and note the entirety of human history has been on upward trend.
The difference is that it's only in the last couple of hundred years that the upward trend became reliant on sucking dinosaur juice out of the ground and turning it into various plastic tat. What you need to do is zoom out and see that the line was much shallower in angle, and our recent trajectory has been a giant spike. It will level back out to the average; it's just that from this position, returning to the average will feel like an apocalypse.
That's in the optimistic assumption that climate change isn't already too far gone to stop.
I think we did have an Americanlad on here a while ago who was openly climate skeptic. But that was about it. I think he got banned as the mods grew increasingly tired of him. Don't let that skew your perception of the other three lads.
>>33747 >We'll be lucky if a few hundred million of us survive in some less devastated areas.
I actually think humanity should lower it's population to around 200,000,000 through a 1 child per woman philosophy for how ever many generations it would take.
Think about ut, there would be no homelessness, no body dying in famines (assuming we don't destroy the planet), fewer people dying in conflicts, people living in natural disaster prone areas could be evacuated whether it be volcanoes or even an asteroid destined to hit earth, less pollution, greater chance of surviving off renewable energy, and all round less suffering.
The global human population hovered around 500 million for milleniae until about the mid-1700s. Families had up to six or seven children, of which an average of two reached reproductive age. In that sense, from one generation to the next, two parents were replaced by two children, and that didn't really change much for a long time.
Your maximum life expectancy was also much lower. We take old age for granted for us today, as most of us expect to at least live to be 70 or even 80. But 300 years ago, there really weren't many 70 year olds around at all. The only way for you to reach that age was either by sheer luck, as even an infected scratch could kill you well before your time, or you were well off and could afford medical treatment, which most members of the unwashed masses simply could not. And so by the time that your children were having their own offspring, you were probably already on the way out.
Modern medicine, agriculture and industry have enabled us to grow to eight billion and counting. But it always went without saying that that kind of growth would at some point be unsustainable.
In fact, for the Earth to keep producing more natural resources than humans can consume in a given period of time, we'd probably have to cull our population to no more than two billion. Which was about the world's population in the early 1930s.
>>33760 That's just bollocks, Earth can support billions more people than there are now.
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/feeding-10-billion-people-earth-possible-and-sustainable-scientists-say The problems are how sustainably food is produced, and also the wasting of other resources and creation of pollution. Yeah, you could kill all the poors just so a chosen few can live more luxuriously, but aside from being morally abhorrent and unnecessary, it's a pretty fucking stupid suggestion from someone who is likely to be among them.
I can't believe I asked you prats how to reinvent the working class a few days ago, because it turns out you're mostly just Völkisch turbo-totalitarians.
>>33753 >The difference is that it's only in the last couple of hundred years that the upward trend became reliant on sucking dinosaur juice out of the ground and turning it into various plastic tat.
Historically wrong. The boom was especially pronounced in the 20th century but puts the cart in-front of the horse when it comes to the conditions that enabled industrialisation rather than using steam engines to turn kebabs.
>It will level back out to the average; it's just that from this position, returning to the average will feel like an apocalypse.
The average has been a growing and expanding human population but on a much slower timescale. Normally people start the graph with early agriculture that shows the curve but obviously homo-sapiens went from near extinction to a planet spanning range and we've consistently gained pace at shorter intervals. This is the problem with people like Ted Kaczynski, they assume there's some magic way to shut pandoras box or reset to some mythical time when humanity was either in some stable joyous state that doesn't exist or that we can avert an apocalypse by either suppressing humanities ability to influence its environment or outright justifying human culling.
I mean for fucks sake you can see human population start to gather real pace around the 1500s and we were influencing the planet long before then.
>>33761 >>33762 I reckon Dan Zimmer is probably right that the new political axis between trans and post humanism is going to start dominating debates to the detriment of all of us - because who doesn't want to have to deal with techbros and ecopessimists influencing real life with the additional fear that they could even start working together like a horrific game of Alpha Centauri.
https://www.noemamag.com/a-new-political-compass/
>Yeah, you could kill all the poors just so a chosen few can live more luxuriously, but aside from being morally abhorrent and unnecessary, it's a pretty fucking stupid suggestion from someone who is likely to be among them.
Except, it's not the poor who unsustainably use up resources and pollute the Earth.
>I mean for fucks sake you can see human population start to gather real pace around the 1500s and we were influencing the planet long before then.
There are paleoclimatic models that correlate mean temperature increases in the Mediterranean with deforestation that was mainly driven by Greek and Roman shipbuilding and the need for cooking fuel. Much of the Mediterranean coastline was actually holly oak forest until about 1000 BC, when emerging Greek city states as well as Asia Minor cultures and then the early Roman Empire started large-scale logging.
It's also thought by some that the Medieval warm period was at least amplified by human deforestation and agriculture.
>>33766 Something I've wanted to do is to check out the last of the UK's temperate rainforest that used to cover the whole country before our distant ancestors chopped it all down in the bronze age for farming. Although if you really want to look at Britain before humans showed up then you'll have to go look at an ice sheet and wonder at how much the bill must've been back then for the winter fuel allowance.
>>33767 >Something I've wanted to do is to check out the last of the UK's temperate rainforest
There's a lot of it about all over the West of the isles. It's not always easy to access and some of the fragments are barely meters wide.
https://map.lostrainforestsofbritain.org/ It's definitely worth going. All the ones I've visited are incredibly peaceful and lush.
Didn't have that until the Romans. You would probably just give the message to your local druid and ask him to pass it on to the appropriate nature spirit.
>>33769 >>33771 I bet you could find cuneiform winter fuel payments if you looked. Any civilization which is sufficiently advanced in Excel pivot tables is indistinguishable from a gerontocracy.
Well, Romans brought the written language here as far as I am aware yes, also the government structure with which to administrate winter fuel payments. Before that we were a loose collection of various celtic tribal cultures with no central authority or unified taxation structure. It's hard to see how we would have maintained the infrastructure for a means tested welfare state without such pre-requisites.
>>33774 It would've been distributed by your local warlord operating from a hillfort which is the equivalent of your local authority funding it through a council tax. This is slightly different to our modern system of local authorities where taxes go up every year to pay for worse local services.
In the closing narration of Terminator 2, Sarah Connor states: "The unknown future rolls toward us. I face it, for the first time, with a sense of hope. Because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.".
That's from a time of widespread optimism about the world, having just avoided actual nuclear armageddon in real life, with the end of the Cold War. There was a feeling that humans were actually able to go down a different trajectory.
Nowadays, that seems almost fanciful, with the way proxy wars and autocracies and proto-fascist regimes and a worsening climate and environmental crisis threaten to push us over the edge after all at any moment.
No, I'm suggesting that the whole vein of the movie's ending was emblematic of the times in the early 90s when the real world had just avoided certain armageddon, like I said. If you weren't alive then, it's hard today to get a sense of the optimism of the Peace Dividend that was prevalent then. It was all worlds away from the dark cynicism and apocalyptic nihilism that has crept back into contemporary politics and culture the last 15 or so years.
>>33785 >It was all worlds away from the dark cynicism and apocalyptic nihilism that has crept back into contemporary politics and culture the last 15 or so years.
You might want to watch more movies. One of the biggest movies last year was from a comedy franchise about a supervillain who becomes a dad. And the biggest movie was a sequel about a little girl feeling emotions.
If we were back in the 90s you would be talking about grunge music and the crime and drug epidemic.
