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David Attenborough at 99: 'I will not see how the story ends'

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Re: David Attenborough at 99: 'I will not see how the story ends'

#61

Post by Grimblewald »

noisy_boy wrote: post #59
toomuchtodo wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greenpeace used to drop boulders into the ocean to prevent bottom trawling circa 2021-2022. Unsure if they still do. Fairly straightforward to solve for if you’re willing to drop chunks of rock (granite, non reactive) or concrete in the ocean at the right spots. Bans are nice, destructive force against adversaries works better though. Hard to take the selfish out of the human, so you have to engineer systems accordin…

I think it would be a great PR idea for a billionaire to buy a few old ships and use them to drop rocks over the most popular/vulnerable fishing grounds. What happened to rich people who were all not evil?

How do you think billionaires became billionaires? How can you extract a billion dollars of wealth in your life time, or even several generations? Certainly not by creating value. Almost certainly by destroying something else, privatising the profits and socialising the losses. E.g. mining, commercial fishing. Etc.

We will never see billionairs act as a force for good because the current system only allows for evil to create such a level of private capital. I would go as far as to argue such wealth disparity is not natural and is only possible through severe perversion of the natural order.

Re: David Attenborough at 99: 'I will not see how the story ends'

#62

Post by ninetyninenine »

Grimblewald wrote: post #61
noisy_boy wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would be a great PR idea for a billionaire to buy a few old ships and use them to drop rocks over the most popular/vulnerable fishing grounds. What happened to rich people who were all not evil?

How do you think billionaires became billionaires? How can you extract a billion dollars of wealth in your life time, or even several generations? Certainly not by creating value. Almost certainly by destroying something else, privatising the profits and socialising the losses. E.g. mining, commercial fishing. Etc. We will never see billionairs act as a force for good because the current system only allows for evil t…

It is natural. Unfairness is the basis of civilization.

In order to mobilize a group of humans for the common good they must be artificially incentivized to do it as the tragedy of the commons usually prevents people from doing these things collectively. Look up the tragedy of the commons.

But in order for a group of humans to be incentivized like that there must exist an authority with enough wealth to incentivize humans to work collectively like that. That means one authority needs to get unfairly rich. And additionally there must be incentive itself for such an authority to conduct that action in itself. So basically there must be some unfair distribution of wealth for any of this to happen AND there must exist strategies that can be exploited for someone to gain that wealth.

I’m not making this shit up. Literally in anthropology one of the theories about why certain places developed into advanced civilizations or not literally relied on whether or not the currency of the habitat could be used to accumulate wealth. For example fruits in Hawaii didn’t last long enough for someone to become a billionaire but grain in Europe does.

Re: David Attenborough at 99: 'I will not see how the story ends'

#63

Post by croes »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #62
Grimblewald wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you think billionaires became billionaires? How can you extract a billion dollars of wealth in your life time, or even several generations? Certainly not by creating value. Almost certainly by destroying something else, privatising the profits and socialising the losses. E.g. mining, commercial fishing. Etc. We will never see billionairs act as a force for good because the current system only allows for evil t…

It is natural. Unfairness is the basis of civilization. In order to mobilize a group of humans for the common good they must be artificially incentivized to do it as the tragedy of the commons usually prevents people from doing these things collectively. Look up the tragedy of the commons. But in order for a group of humans to be incentivized like that there must exist an authority with enough wealth to incentivize h…

Unfairness maybe be natural but billionaires are artificial.

Re: David Attenborough at 99: 'I will not see how the story ends'

#64

Post by somenameforme »

netsharc wrote: post #52
GoatInGrey wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because very few people are being meaningfully affected right now. For most, climate change exists as an abstract idea and not an immediate, physical problem. It doesn't help that claims like those made by Al Gore about the polar ice caps being gone by 2016 turned out to be untrue. I wouldn't expect society to transform itself if told that an asteroid may impact Earth in eighty years, for similar reasons.

Heck, faced with a rapidly spreading virus that can kill in 2 weeks (for the general public at a very low percentage, for our elderly neighbors a lot higher), a large majority of humans turned to angry denials and conspiracy theories to justify to themselves that "it's not that dangerous!". We are so fucking dead.

When somebody says something isn't that dangerous it always comes with an unstated post-text of 'for an average person of average health.' Each year the flu kills hundreds of thousands of people. As the population ages, and thus has more individuals in senescence where your body is basically just breaking down, that will increase into the millions. But yet it's still not unreasonable to say that the flu isn't that dangerous.

And you might think I'm being disingenuous with these facts and perhaps e.g. all those deaths from the flu are just in Africa or wherever. Whereas in reality it's the exact opposite! Places like the US have a substantially higher than average mortality rate from the flu. Globally deaths are around 700k and in the US it's around 50k. We have 4% of the world's population, but 7% of the world's flu deaths. The reason is because it's not about healthcare, vaccines, or whatever else. It's about the amount of people in senescence.

At a certain age, and the subsequent state of health it entails, lots of things that indeed 'aren't that dangerous' turn into life-ending threats. For some contrast that most aren't aware of, the average age of mortality of the Spanish Flu was 28 - which made it a completely terrifying freak outlier in terms of viruses, which generally affect the very young and very old most severely. Nobody would be saying that the Spanish Flu is not that dangerous in modern times.

Re: David Attenborough at 99: 'I will not see how the story ends'

#65

Post by colechristensen »

create-username wrote: post #11
malux85 wrote: post #4

Nobody sees how the story ends

Our generations of the last 10,000 years are seeing how the story decays. When the food supply was abundant, families would jog every day doing BBQ every night hunting down mammoths We have become red in tooth and claw. At the summit of civilisation, we are alienated with our screens, licking frozen TV dinners in our shared flat while we work hard to support our landlords

As long as we have surviving records people have been saying the past was golden and the present is decay with a long list of the present ills which are the downfall of the glorious past. It's a boring take and has been incorrect for thousands of years and will continue to be. Arguments about how some list of things haven't been on a monotonic increase during the last generation do not refute this.

Re: David Attenborough at 99: 'I will not see how the story ends'

#66

Post by colechristensen »

markus_zhang wrote: post #30

David Attenborough narrated some of my favorite paleontology documentaries.

One of the things I like most about David Attenborough is it never seems like he's reading a script. It feels like he's talking about something he knows about (which he does).

When it comes to the acting or performing worlds, is there a phrase describing this?

Re: David Attenborough at 99: 'I will not see how the story ends'

#67

Post by colechristensen »

mort96 wrote: post #26
hammock wrote: post #17

I’m confused. We are beyond the point of no return when it comes to global warming. Hasnt he already seen how the story ends?

There is no single "point of no return". We have obviously passed the point where bad consequences can be avoided, but every extra ton of CO2 and methane makes things a bit worse. I worry that the sentiment of "we have passed the point of no return" induces an impotent apathy in people, when the truth is that every step in the right direction makes our future a little bit less dire.

Folks are worried about phase change, the flip from one set of patterns to a different set of patters. That is much different than a linear "every ton makes things a bit worse".

There is going to be big fundamental change, but people need to stop thinking about it like "the sky is falling" and instead ask "how are we going to adapt?"

People are going to have to move to where water is available, to where heat is less of a problem, and large scale infrastructure is going to change. A lot of struggle is going to go along with that change but starting to plan now and predict where is going to be habitable and how to prepare for that is what people should be doing instead of the shame and doom.

Re: David Attenborough at 99: 'I will not see how the story ends'

#68

Post by ninetyninenine »

croes wrote: post #63
ninetyninenine wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is natural. Unfairness is the basis of civilization. In order to mobilize a group of humans for the common good they must be artificially incentivized to do it as the tragedy of the commons usually prevents people from doing these things collectively. Look up the tragedy of the commons. But in order for a group of humans to be incentivized like that there must exist an authority with enough wealth to incentivize h…

Unfairness maybe be natural but billionaires are artificial.

Billionaires are the definition of unfairness. And therefore they are natural.

Only From the perspective of civilization, of course, which is only a small fraction of human existence.

From the perspective humanity overall, not only are billionaires unnatural, but civilization in itself is unnatural. Hence all the declining birth rates we see today.

Re: David Attenborough at 99: 'I will not see how the story ends'

#69

Post by vivzkestrel »

The sad part of our human existence is that none of us ever live to see how our story ends. We "spawn" at a random point in time and "vanish" at another. Ageing is being worked on vigorously and while we did change our lifespan from 40 years to 80 years of existence thanks to modern science, in order for us to truly comprehend changes on a universal scale, average human lifespan would need to be 50000 years long. That way you'll see species evolve, continents move, quasars explode, maybe even Betelguese explode?

Re: David Attenborough at 99: 'I will not see how the story ends'

#70

Post by abrookewood »

hermitcrab wrote: post #20

I watched David Attenborough's recent film 'Ocean' on a big screen. The footage of bottom trawling was really shocking. I don't understand how that has been allowed to continue in UK coastal waters, let alone to be subsidised in marine protected areas. Madness. It's like napalming a forest to get a few deer. Thankfully things may be changing: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-proposes-to-ex... Don't know…

That part of the film is horrifying. Like genuinely, sick-to-the-stomach horrifying. I can't believe that anyone would willingly cause that much destruction.
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