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I Choose Optimism

secularhumanism.org

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Re: I Choose Optimism

#81

Post by mypastself »

systemvoltage wrote: post #54
adrianN wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economy gets better for more people in more places than ever before. Environmental destruction is also progressing faster than ever before. Many crucial ecosystems are on the brink of collapse (e.g. the rainforests) and we show no signs of intending to protect them.

Media doesn't report good things that happen in the environment. From 2013-2019, they hammered constantly on how the Great Barrier Reef was dying. But, not a peep when they found that it is healthiest its ever been in recent history: https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/parts-australia... No wonder the trust in media has fallen to the lowest. Reuters/AP are informative as a root source, but I have stopped tru…

Wouldn’t environmentalists be opposed to coal as well? Or is it simply that they favor it over nuclear power? I’m not particularly well acquainted with German green parties’ policies.

Re: I Choose Optimism

#82

Post by int_19h »

It's hard to be an optimist when it looks like the years we're living in right now are the same future historians will argue about when deciding whether WW3 "actually began" in 2022.

Re: I Choose Optimism

#83

Post by piokoch »

salt-thrower wrote: post #16
DoreenMichele wrote: post #9

American homes in 1950 averaged 983 square feet; by 2014, the size had nearly tripled to 2,657 square feet. Today, 91 percent of our homes are air-conditioned. This is not actually a good thing. This is actually a problem.

Exactly. The author is living in a middle/upper class suburbian bubble. Bigger and bigger houses that consume more and more resources is a problem, not a sign of progress. It is a glaring sign of the consumerism and resource depletion that is fueling the crisis we're in. There is no amount of renewable energy that will make "average homes are 2,657 square feet and have air conditioning" a sustainable way of living.

"There is no amount of renewable energy" - very true, but that only means that renewables are the wrong solution, if they are not able to provide progress and sustainability. If only we had a magic technology that from a small amount of matter can produce a lot of energy! But wait, we have that, for good 60 years, it is called nuclear energy power plant and works great, but, for some reason some people don't like it.

Re: I Choose Optimism

#84

Post by adrianN »

s-lambert wrote: post #58
goatlover wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would energy usage need to decline when there's a giant ball of fusion in our sky we barely make use of, and when we've just begun exploring space in the past century?

Solar energy isn't free, it takes a lot of metals just to turn solar energy into electrical energy (including batteries for storage) and they don't last forever. Here's a link to a talk from an associate professor doing an estimation of how much metals are needed to switch to renewable energy: https://youtu.be/MBVmnKuBocc?t=2406

Solar energy is the cheapest form of energy we have. Storage is a bit more expensive, but judging from the amount of metals the video proposes they want to go all-in on battery storage, whereas most experts I heard from propose to use hydrogen (or methane) as a storage medium, precisely because the amount of resources it needs are much smaller.

Re: I Choose Optimism

#85

Post by samsquire »

mrtesthah wrote: post #14
samsquire wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society decided we wanted good things and we took action to get those things. I am against poverty and not having things such as electricity and clean tap water, abundant food, education, hospital care, sewage treatment and proper waste disposal. I like these things, they are good. You would be surprised at how sustainable things are by sheer hard work and will. In other words, we get what we cause. The alternative t…

That’s a false dichotomy; we can have all these things without burning down rainforests at a furious pace and filling the oceans with plastic, etc. These things are done out of laziness and carelessness.

I don't think it's false but it might be a dichotomy.

The good things we enjoy are destructive and have externalities.

To offer a solution, if the people who do bad things such as not dispose waste properly or want to cut down rainforests for profit, we need to solve the incentives behind those decisions. Such as universal basic income. Or lowering crime.

Unfortunately poverty is the baseline. In other words you need to expend resources to get resources. I said in my comment things are sustainable by sheer will.

To implement sustainability we need to invest profound amounts of resources and do extreme amounts of work by sheer will to solve the problem. We also need the right people working on these problems. The smartest people from my simple perspective are working on the wrong problems. What we have is an improper allocation of limited resources.

Re: I Choose Optimism

#86

Post by chongli »

s-lambert wrote: post #58
goatlover wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would energy usage need to decline when there's a giant ball of fusion in our sky we barely make use of, and when we've just begun exploring space in the past century?

Solar energy isn't free, it takes a lot of metals just to turn solar energy into electrical energy (including batteries for storage) and they don't last forever. Here's a link to a talk from an associate professor doing an estimation of how much metals are needed to switch to renewable energy: https://youtu.be/MBVmnKuBocc?t=2406

Wow, that was a bucket of water in my face the likes of which I’ve never felt before! We are 100% completely screwed! We simply cannot maintain our standard of living into the future. The picture this professor paints is so incredibly bleak that it puts the war in Ukraine and a potential war in Taiwan into perspective.

Imagine if all the passengers on the Titanic had nuclear weapons. That’s the situation we’re in. And there are no lifeboats.

Re: I Choose Optimism

#87

Post by LatteLazy »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #9

American homes in 1950 averaged 983 square feet; by 2014, the size had nearly tripled to 2,657 square feet. Today, 91 percent of our homes are air-conditioned. This is not actually a good thing. This is actually a problem.

If you just mean from a resource / climate change point of view then that's fine but it's a totally different point than personal happiness, optimism etc...

Re: I Choose Optimism

#88

Post by CloseChoice »

I think it's hard to argue that we DON'T live in an age with the highest life expectancy and material wealth ever (at least for the western countries, but this probably holds around globe). But there are quite a few things we are not good at measuring like mental health, freedom and overall happiness. It the points we can measure are not correlated to the non-measurable points. Though I would deem the non-measurable points even more important.

That said, I always choose optimism over so called realism and pessimism. This optimism doesn't mean that anything changes for the better by itself but that personal decisions can have an impact for the better.

Re: I Choose Optimism

#90

Post by andrepd »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #33

> For most of history, people thought: “The world is bad and, usually, it’s getting worse.” In other words, no longer did humans see themselves as mere pawns for the gods. What? Citation needed. A negative view of individual sin is certainly part of the Christian worldview, but gods are not, nor is an overall negative outlook. The whole point is that God loves his people enough to save them, the Church will expand, a…

If there is a thing that marked the whole span of the Medieval age in the Christian world, from 500 to 1500, is the generalised, widespread belief that the world was about to end. That it was corrupted and degenerated and that the end of the world coming.

No matter what you personally believe to be the message of Christianity, this was the thinking for a huge chunk of Christianity's existence so far.

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