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Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?

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Re: Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?

#311

Post by marcosdumay »

rtkwe wrote: post #274
marcosdumay wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they modernized farming practices, the rate of deforestation would drop significantly. Ha, that's funny. Europeans have to subsidize their agriculture to compete with Brazil, but Brazilian practices aren't modern? If Brazilian farmers practiced farming in the same way as Europeans do, the country would ban bankrupt.

They have to subsidize because labor and land are more expensive the Europe than Brazil, it has very little to do with how efficient the farming techniques are.

> They have to subsidize because labor and land are more expensive the Europe than Brazil

Yeah, mechanization is lower in Europe... (This is related to the subsides.)

Anyway, those waves of temporary immigrants that every year go to Europe from poorer neighboring countries aren't much more expensive than Brazilian labor.

Re: Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?

#312

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

127 wrote: post #199
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to understand this perspective. The predictions I've seen, even for a worse case scenario, would result in huge levels of sea rise inundating coastal areas, large parts of the Earth becoming uninhabitable for humans, massive ocean die offs, climate-change induced wars, etc. This would quite obviously result in death and misery for billions (again, this is the worst case scenario), but I haven't seen any evid…

The current thought patterns that seem to be the dominant ones for the majority of ordinary people seem to assume that there are no feedback loops or tipping points. While the evidence from other planets directly contradicts this. Also with end of history, I didn't mean the end of the human race. Just the end of the current civilization and possibly written history. Another dark age, so to speak.

> While the evidence from other planets directly contradicts this.

To echo what another reply said, our own planet contradicts the idea that we would turn into a Venus for some reason. In that all the carbon we're putting back into the atmosphere is from organic processes that took it out of the atmosphere eons ago.

So, again, yes, the change will be enormously traumatic for humanity, but I don't see any evidence that written history will somehow disappear, for example.

Re: Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?

#313

Post by bernawil »

ByteJockey wrote: post #203
KineticLensman wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Roman lasted 500 years and got overthrown by the army Byzantium (and the rest of the Eastern Roman Empire) disagrees [0]. They lasted until 1453 - incidentally only 50 years before Columbus sailed. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Empire

Look, I love the Roman Empire just as much as anyone (and get more than a little miffed whenever someone denies that the Eastern Roman empire was legitimately Roman), but it was in no way a democracy.

It's funny -and not counter to your point- but several of the succession struggles that plagued the Eastern Empire are characterized as "almost elections", by historians. Since its inception, the empire never had an official succession system and hence every new ruler was contested. Constantinople was so easily defendable that a popular usurper had great chances of making himself with the throne if he could take control of the capital. More than once, pretenders rose to power by popular acclaim at the hippodrome.

Re: Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?

#314

Post by ByteJockey »

bernawil wrote: post #313
ByteJockey wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, I love the Roman Empire just as much as anyone (and get more than a little miffed whenever someone denies that the Eastern Roman empire was legitimately Roman), but it was in no way a democracy.

It's funny -and not counter to your point- but several of the succession struggles that plagued the Eastern Empire are characterized as "almost elections", by historians. Since its inception, the empire never had an official succession system and hence every new ruler was contested. Constantinople was so easily defendable that a popular usurper had great chances of making himself with the throne if he could take cont…

That's actually kind of a fair point. Another thing to consider is that if you consider only the military (which wouldn't have been that weird for a pre-enlightenment democracy), there are quite a few times during the empire that approached democracy (relative to the time period).

I guess, really, I meant to imply some sort of a modern interpretation of democracy, wherein a single city (or military) voting for the entire empire wouldn't exactly cut it.

Re: Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?

#315

Post by ByteJockey »

Fricken wrote: post #299
ByteJockey wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't talking about sufficiently advanced technology (magic). They're talking about things we can already do, but have serious trade offs. The most common suggestion is to add particles to the atmosphere that reflect sunlight. I think sulfur was first proposed, but I think study of calcium carbonate has been ongoing to avoid the ocean acidification issues that sulfur presents.

The imaginary part is sufficient determination.

My understanding is that the costs are low enough to be done by a single country unilaterally.

At least at first. If we start doing it, and don't reform our ways, it gets progressively more expensive.

Probably a nice stop gap if we ever get our shit together, but are staring down some really bad after effects.

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