251–260 of 384 posts
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So, this sort of thing must have happened in past warm periods. Yet life survived.
Life != human life. That's the fallacy many in the green-movement miss. It's not about saving the Earth, Earth will be largely fine. Climate management is about saving humans .
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It's not a particularly good candidate I would think. For example we know what's happening and could theoretically have stopped it but didn't/don't have the will. The Fermi paradox requires it to be extremely unlikely to survive, but you could imagine scenarios on other worlds where the right kind of political situation was around to stop it.
The problem is that any race gets increasingly powerful as technology and science improve, so it takes a smaller and smaller mistake to end us all. Also, the population of those who are able to end us increases. Right now very few people have the ability to save or destroy us. One day every human might be able to, unless we hand the keys to the robots and we aren't certain how that'll play out. Edit: and we affect ou…
Ironically one of the more likely ways an individual could end humanity (in the future) is via the haphazard or malicious creation of said robots.
If all it takes is someone to execute a bootstrapping process on a large amount of computers, we're in trouble. There's no 100% reliable way to prevent that short of what you said: handing over the keys. It would require the creation of an entity so omnipotent and powerful that it may as well be considered a god.
Another way to look at it is the creation of an operating system kernel for humanity itself, with each individual human being akin to a user-land process.
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How would any of these things end us? We've have world war II. That didn't make a dent in the population. Famine and drought would be localized so we can use international trade to smooth them over, just like we currently do. For long term failures, there will always be other arable places to grow crops, they just might be fewer or more inconvenient than they currently are, and they'll change at an easy human scale s…
I think what the point of the parent is saying is that we have never witnessed the likes of something like this and that our system is more fragile than we think. Previous wars and other events have all been leading up to "the big one". We can see it beginning to happen in what you mentioned above or in smaller instances. Also saying that poor people can just not eat meat or seafood seems a bit distasteful; not that…
WW2 was quite dangerous in the sense, it put a very serious problem in front. Say you nuke a nation, the nation refuses to surrender. The issue is you need to keep nuking till you finish them off. That will not just finish off your enemies but a lot of planet along the way.
Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan#Broadcast_o...
The key in the above statement is : "Should we continue to fight".
Notice how 'continuing to fight' is an option there. This sort of stuff is scary as it is.
You can't exactly defeat enemies by weapons if they refuse to give up. The only option then is continue, you then cause larger damage to the planet and biological species.
I know it's stupid and crazy, but would carpet bombing the arctic work to burn up the methane trapped below the permafrost before it leaks out into the atmosphere and causes worse problems? Or maybe we should send out expedition crews to find and preemptively explode these methane bubbles. Perhaps the way things are going they will become too plentiful to really do anything realistic about it.
Your idea of carpet bombing might just work, provided that the result would produce aerosols that have the similar effect of those produced by volcanoes (volcanic winter)
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> but you could imagine scenarios on other worlds where the right kind of political situation was around to stop it. I can't imagine that. The only evidence I have to date (from a sample size of 1 planet) is that there is next to zero real political will, even if the politicians of the world create additional heat saying they have in fact found the political will.
I feel like your imaginative capacity could stand to be exercised more. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of ways in which intelligent entities could meaningfully differ from us, and which would lead to different political circumstances. And we ourselves are not that far from being able to deal reasonably with problems like this. If nothing else were different about us, except that average IQ were, say, 120 on t…
But, like you say, we don't know we're screwed, so it's a lot of supposition.
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I feel like your imaginative capacity could stand to be exercised more. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of ways in which intelligent entities could meaningfully differ from us, and which would lead to different political circumstances. And we ourselves are not that far from being able to deal reasonably with problems like this. If nothing else were different about us, except that average IQ were, say, 120 on t…
You could liken our situation to yeast in a bottle of wine. Given that comparison, what good would an average 20 iq points do? I don't see how any species could not evolve for conditions of scarcity, and I don't see how sudden abundance wouldn't lead down the same path we're on. If anything smarter would be worse. But, like you say, we don't know we're screwed, so it's a lot of supposition.
If you don't think 20 IQ points make a significant difference, consider some questions: do you believe that the average IQ 100 person is more or less likely than the average IQ 120 person to be concerned about global climate change? What about IQ 100 vs. IQ 80? If IQ numbers have no tangible meaning to you, do you expect the average Walmart shopper to be more or less concerned about climate change than the average graduate student (in any field at all, your choice: agricultural engineering just as much as climatology or gender studies).
After all, this spells doomsday for the upcoming generations, so shouldn't it be the news that should be shown/covered almost everyday on the front page.
The people have the right to know that their children and grandchildren will suffer because of something that is going on right now. I guess, that majority of people, all over the world, are blissfully unaware of this scenario because this doesn't get the kind of attention in the MSM that it should. All they get served is dirty politics and gossip entertainment news.
Maybe people will force the policies to change if they get to know that this will happen.
It seems that most people today think that Terrorism is the main threat to our society, when in fact, Global Warming seems to be the real deal.
Let's say it was found that fifty years from now, an Asteroid would hit Earth. Would the people of Earth react in the same way as they are doing now?
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Because we are not unified and working towards the same goal. Tribalism is our roots and they will be our ends. That is the problem with too many sentient beings-everyone believes they deserve something. Thus no intilligent life unless they are a single entity.
Competition is not the only response to being one entity among many, and it is not even necessarily the most reasonable response. Cooperation is also possible, and it is one of the necessary elements in every human organization, from the family to global cultures. We have civilization because we are to some degree able to cooperate, and if you simply turn up the dial on that trait, it is easy to imagine that other cr…