111–120 of 327 posts
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Considering where climate change is heading, it's surprising anyone doesn't think this.
Climate change is very real and worth addressing, but it's extremely unlikely to wipe out human civilization. It's just going to be costly and kill millions, not billions.
In the near future it is more likely we will wipe out ourselves either due to Nuclear War, Global Warming, rogue AI or similar, than some hostile alien civilization will get us. It seems that we are those hostile aliens for ourselves.
Do you think there is a "real" (>1% over the next century) risk for humanity to wipe itself out, or just that the hostile-alien risk is way beyond negligible in comparison? Because all current climate doom-erism notwithstanding-- humanity extinction seems impossible to achieve to me via climate change or nuclear war; rogue autonomous self-replicating systems might be a danger, but are too far beyound current tech to…
To avoid an extended argument about all the ways in which climate change will screw things up, let's focus on nuclear war: a nuclear war between, say, India and China would not only wipe out huge swaths of the human population but also ruin the global economy because industries in Europe and the US depend on these countries. And that's without going into the ecological effects of a nuclear war.
The economy relies on layers and layers of extremely convoluted supply chains and can't sustain a loss of even 1% of the human population, let alone 10% or more. The US has only seen a death of around 0.2% of its population due to COVID and is already facing labor shortages in retail. The blockade of the Suez canal was a big concern but imagine the Suez canal is simply gone.
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>because it assumes that projecting power over interstellar distances is easier than defending yourself This seems really obviously true to me. Accelerating a rock to relativistic speeds is pretty easy, defending against a rock potentially coming from anywhere in space traveling at relativistic speeds is extremely difficult.
1) I think you're underestimating the difficulty of accelerating any massive object to relativistic speeds, 2) doing so with enough accuracy to hit a relatively small moving target many light-years away is not exactly trivial, 3) a civilization with the capability to accelerate a massive object to relativistic speeds is probably also capable of building self-sufficient artificial habitats around its star, which is a…
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Considering where climate change is heading, it's surprising anyone doesn't think this.
Climate change is very real and worth addressing, but it's extremely unlikely to wipe out human civilization. It's just going to be costly and kill millions, not billions.
The same idea was in Gregory Benford's novel In the Ocean of Night in the 1970s.
I have a theory that intelligence isn't particularly rare however the rate of development may be. It has long been alluded to in Sci-Fi that humanity's rate of development is fast (Humans vs Vulcans, Halo universe, etc). I imagine that one of the great barriers is that a civilisation with a lower rate of development may stuck in an industrial type era unable to progress before doing irreparable damage to their enviro…
I think that's just borrowed from modern fantasy tropes. How can humans co-exist on anything even kinda like equal footing with centuries-old magical elves, ancient dwarves who know the secrets of the deep, bloodthirsty and strong orcs and goblins, et c? Oh, humans are more flexible (culturally more diverse; more varied from person to person; develop & experiment faster; are more curious; freer from genetic determinism in their choices and behavior), breed faster, or cooperate better.
Usually one or more of those is the answer given, with the specific question being "how can we have interesting and powerful fantasy species/races and still have humans matter in our stories, without every story just being an upstairs/downstairs thing or otherwise having the humans in some plainly-inferior position?" There are other ways around the problem, but that's the easy way out.
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Do you think that most/all civilisations end this way before becoming spacefarers?
I don't think, or rather I hope there are civilization that as a part of their evolution had cooperation, sharing, exploration and innovation embedded as main and prevalent strategies of survival and thriving. I would like to think that there is as in magic fairy tails of old, civilization where good prevails. Where leaders (or what ever mechanism of decision they have) and those in power - are not easily corrupted a…
He can't make such a statement about probability when the circumstances aren't even known.
We don't even know how life forms so how can we even know what the probability of it forming is?
How do we know that probability is high enough that it is very likely to occur? The chances of it occurring could be incredibly low.
Am I missing something, or is this article very narrowly missing the most damning criticism of the Dark Forest hypothesis according to the article's own logic? The first paragraph of the “ Criticism ” section says: > Overall, the Dark Forest Hypothesis has an internal logic and consistency that makes it an appealing (if somewhat somber) potential resolution to Fermi’s age-old question. Unfortunately, it also suffers…
There is no way to underestimate the stupidity of people in groups, and our eusocial stupidity might be unique to our species. If someone knocked on your door, quite unexpectedly, in the middle of the night, can I err on the idea that you would be quite panic-struck? But if humanity got a signal from another civilization tomorrow, do you think it is safe to err on folks being quite happy?
But if a stranger knocks on your door in the middle of the day you might just open up and say "no thanks, I don't want your pamphlet/vacuum/encyclopedia".
I mean, even if a stranger knocks, it seems weird to kill them assuming they're dangerous, even if we have "don't let a stranger in" etched in our collective consciousness.
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Agreed. The great filter and collapse theory in general are fascinating in theory and can motivate some great positive action but they can't undermine the fact that humans beings are doing better than they've ever done in our history by almost every imaginable metric.
Plus humans are extremely adaptable. Even before we invented agriculture, people had colonized the whole planet, except for Antarctica. It would be hard to kill us all off.
This is a strange claim I see repeated over and over, but it has very little evidence to justify it. The only piece of evidence people present is:
> people had colonized the whole planet, except for Antarctica
This is true of a fairly large number of organisms on Earth.
On top of this humans have only been around for ~200,000 years, that's not long at all. Humans have not survived a single mass extinction event.
So far we've seen humans travel around a planet that has been relatively stable for that period of time. There have been plenty of species that have traveled around with us that didn't even need to rely on extra tools, clothing or the use of energy to survive.
Humans share several vulnerabilities with other megafauna that have all gone extinct. A major one is a fairly long gestation, plus small number of offspring per generation. Human young likewise need tremendous amounts of care and energy to raise to mature adulthood. Additionally human have fairly high energy requirements to support their complex brains.
We've seen exponential rise in human population only because humans have had access to excessive amount of non-renewable, high-energy density sources of energy.
It just happens that humans have lived on a planet that has mostly been within survivable temperature changes, with historic climate changes happening on time scales that lead to easy migration. As you pointed out, the one continent that does not have an environment that supports human life remains empty.
Humans can't survive a wet bulb temperature of 35C. Until just recently we never saw that temperature on this planet. As we see more and more places reach that temperature more often, I suspect we'll see how frail human adaptability is.