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Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an 'emergency brake'

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Re: Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an 'emergency brake'

#91

Post by graemep »

xyst wrote: post #54
therein wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't quote The Bible often but I think we can have some space for a quote here: "Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?" Matthew 6:26

[flagged]

The reason is that there are huge amounts of religious texts, and what they record people's understanding of the world, grappling with the problems in their lives, and trying to make sense of their experiences: they are about being human.

If you are open minded about/not hostile to religion (in general or a particular religion) you will find a lot of wisdom in religious works. Not just "scriptures" but a lot else, written from ancient times to contemporary.

Re: Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an 'emergency brake'

#92

Post by HPsquared »

ReptileMan wrote: post #86
wayoverthecloud wrote: post #25

When you get caught up on the hustle of modern society and lose yourself in modern technology, it's so easy to forget that you are a part of a larger whole and there is more life on Earth besides human. For some reason knowing that other animals exist just for the sake of existing and even sleep off when life gets harder gives a new perspective. I feel that we humans use too much knowledge and complicate problems eve…

>it's so easy to forget that you are a part of a larger whole and there is more life on Earth besides human. Humans actually utilize quite a big chunk of the biomass.

It depends how you count it, whether you include plants etc. Humans are only 0.01% of all biomass, but humans and livestock completely dominate the "mammals" category.

Funnily enough, the livestock population weighs about twice as much as the human population.

Re: Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an 'emergency brake'

#93

Post by js6i »

wruza wrote: post #83
js6i wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting how people come and mock without having any framework of understanding the thing. It's almost like a lost language. Consider air - it is immaterial, the spirit/principle/reason/meaning/pattern of things. It's also the vehicle for speech, and when we stop breathing it we die. I don't think the quote (or the broader text) means a single concrete thing - it's saying something about how the world works,…

A purpose of a religious text is to control people. They do that through well-known ways. It says “blah-blah, but look at this fallacy you aren’t aware of, so believe in god”, at different zoom levels. Every one of these is trivially deconstructible cause their main target was uneducated masses which had no scrutiny. Those who had it were religiously “educated” and accounted for. Religions that didn’t do that didn’t…

It seems to me that your stand is analogous to anarchists' about law and government. Sure, there's a tyrannical aspect that can get out of hand, but it's far from the whole story.

Re: Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an 'emergency brake'

#94

Post by ffsm8 »

soco wrote: post #84
leobg wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had a very similar thought this morning. With the amount of technology today, we should be the happiest, wealthiest generation alive. My grandmother, born in the 1920s, still experienced hunger as a child, fled from the Russians through the ruins of bombed out cities, and, up until not too long ago, had to make a fire in order to have warm water for the bathtub. But I’ve never heard the word “depression” from her eve…

Maybe it's not about the things we have, but about the hope we have. You run away, you change, you survive things because you have hope in a better future. You even work to make a better future for your kids. You have hope. What hope have those people today?

Or phrased differently: she struggled for her survival. It's a very physical one-off challenge that you can master (or not).

That's inherently very different to realizing that the golden era has basically passed and it's only gonna get worse from here, societally speaking.

None of the inherent issues our societies has had were solved. They've just become worse with every decade, inequality in particular has gotten worse with every technological advance, and it'd expect it to get meaningfully worse with LLMs now, too.

A select few will still get meaningfully richer, but - on average - their prospects for their future are a complete dumpster fire.

You (leobg) are likely right that people a few hundred years ago probably wouldn't have become depressed like Gen Z, Alpha and likely soon Beta too... But they'd probably long since taken up their arms, wiping out a good chunk of the population and consequently redistributing wealth to the survivers. Do you honestly think that'd be better for us?

Re: Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an 'emergency brake'

#95

Post by shiroiushi »

lukan wrote: post #35
shiroiushi wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fool's errand. The trick is to make sure your body is continually controlled by some kind of computer that will wake you up when a set of conditions is met, so you don't need to rely on future humans. You also need to make sure your cryopod is stored someplace where troublemakers won't find it and turn it off. The best thing I can think of is putting your cryopod in a lava tube on the Moon, powered by a smal…

"The best thing I can think of is putting your cryopod in a lava tube on the Moon, powered by a small nuclear reactor or maybe a large RTG." And then hope nothing critically fails for centuries ... Unless we have perfectionized robots by the time you go into the cryopod, you might as well bet on humans. And if we "perfectionized robots", that do not fail all the time, we already would have a very different world.

Robots? We're talking about cryopods here, not something that needs a robot where you need to operate accurately in 3D space. It just needs an electronic control system to monitor conditions and control some machinery, similar to a washing machine or microwave oven.

We already know how to make redundant computer control systems, like for aircraft. It's not that hard. They don't "fail all the time" either. Sure, your crappy Windows computer does, but no one with a brain uses that for anything safety-critical.

Re: Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an 'emergency brake'

#96

Post by NilMostChill »

figassis wrote: post #68
wayoverthecloud wrote: post #25

When you get caught up on the hustle of modern society and lose yourself in modern technology, it's so easy to forget that you are a part of a larger whole and there is more life on Earth besides human. For some reason knowing that other animals exist just for the sake of existing and even sleep off when life gets harder gives a new perspective. I feel that we humans use too much knowledge and complicate problems eve…

We invented technology and methods to make things that are meant to be difficult, easy (like food, transportation, mating, surviving). So now we have to invent more technology and methods to find an equilibrium for the system that we broke and barely understand, so we continue to break it and abstract away the instability, understanding it less and less. I mean, what is the purpose of the stock market? housing/mortga…

- Maintaining and increasing high level wealth, also Control

- Control, also profit

- Control, albeit in a less direct form than housing also data and profit

- The pretense of caring about privacy issues, so politics and control

- Profit/control

If you ask, "why?" for almost anything in today's society it'll come down to money/power, which are functionally mostly the same thing.

Exceptions exist sure, but they are called exceptions for a reason.

My perspective at least, i'm sure others think differently.

Re: Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an 'emergency brake'

#97

Post by therein »

xyst wrote: post #54
therein wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't quote The Bible often but I think we can have some space for a quote here: "Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?" Matthew 6:26

[flagged]

I was born to a mostly non-religious Muslim family in a 99% Muslim country so I am not simply defaulting to my own creed here.

Re: Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an 'emergency brake'

#98

Post by [deleted] »

graemep wrote: post #89
fire_lake wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A systematic study of birds would find that many do indeed starve to death.

So do people - at least those lucky enough not to be part of a reasonably affluent industrial society. You do realise that metaphors are never perfect?

[deleted]

Re: Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an 'emergency brake'

#99

Post by WJW »

leobg wrote: post #79
wayoverthecloud wrote: post #25

When you get caught up on the hustle of modern society and lose yourself in modern technology, it's so easy to forget that you are a part of a larger whole and there is more life on Earth besides human. For some reason knowing that other animals exist just for the sake of existing and even sleep off when life gets harder gives a new perspective. I feel that we humans use too much knowledge and complicate problems eve…

Had a very similar thought this morning. With the amount of technology today, we should be the happiest, wealthiest generation alive. My grandmother, born in the 1920s, still experienced hunger as a child, fled from the Russians through the ruins of bombed out cities, and, up until not too long ago, had to make a fire in order to have warm water for the bathtub. But I’ve never heard the word “depression” from her eve…

> With the amount of technology today, we should be the happiest generation alive.

Only if you think that wealth is what makes people happy, but we just need to take a look at all the unhappy wealthy people all around us to see that that is not the case. Poverty can make people unhappy of course, especially the stress that comes from uncertainty. But prosperity alone is not sufficient for happiness. Generations of social researchers and philosophers have thrown themselves at this problem.

Re: Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an 'emergency brake'

#100

Post by WJW »

ffsm8 wrote: post #94
soco wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's not about the things we have, but about the hope we have. You run away, you change, you survive things because you have hope in a better future. You even work to make a better future for your kids. You have hope. What hope have those people today?

Or phrased differently: she struggled for her survival. It's a very physical one-off challenge that you can master (or not). That's inherently very different to realizing that the golden era has basically passed and it's only gonna get worse from here, societally speaking. None of the inherent issues our societies has had were solved. They've just become worse with every decade, inequality in particular has gotten wo…

Historically, the people taking up arms certainly did NOT distribute wealth if they won. Rather, the leaders of any successful rebellion just became the new elite and the poor remained the poor but with new leadership.
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