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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'

#71

Post by sho »

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…

Has it occurred to you that the narrative you're repeating here is awfully convenient for the elite? Don't question their wealth - don't you know civilization itself depends on it!

> I’m not making this shit up. Literally in anthropology one of the theories

It's a theory, yes. And there's another theory which says that's all BS invented by the ruling classes over time - the church and kings back in the day, the billionaires these days - to justify their otherwise quite unjustifiable positions, cloak them in mumbo-jumbo about natural law or what not, with the goal of discouraging questioning of the status quo.

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

#72

Post by gyomu »

colechristensen wrote: post #66
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?

“Conversational delivery”

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

#73

Post by vasco »

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.

Which virus turned "a large majority of humans to angry denials"?

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

#74

Post by verisimi »

vivzkestrel wrote: post #69

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. Tha…

Yes we die, the body goes. But if there is a further element to the experience - and near death experiences, out of body experience suggest there is - we perhaps do see how the story ends. In fact, this experience might not be the real 'story', just an opportunity of some sort to learn, grow. The point is that although many assume material reality to be all there is, it might not actually be the case.

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

#75

Post by verisimi »

marssaxman wrote: post #36
jcgrillo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we keep at it like we have been maybe there's light at the end of the tunnel for Earth, ecologically. In say 100k or 1M years, after we're long gone and things have started to repair themselves.

This is where I find hope: ten million years from now we'll all be gone, and the earth will be a beautiful, thriving place once again. The short term doesn't look so good, but at least I will only have to watch a few more decades of it.

This is a very macabre position! Your life and other people's lives are a joyous blessing.

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

#76

Post by gorbachev »

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?

Ray Dalio is involved with Ocean research and education: https://www.daliophilanthropies.org/ocean/

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

#77

Post by marcus_holmes »

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…

Stop eating fish. The fishing industry is destroying the oceans.

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

#78

Post by gorbachev »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #18
bayarearefugee wrote: post #2

I think that not seeing how the story ends will be a blessing in disguise. (I do not share his optimism that we fix this, the forces of Line Must Go Up are going to win... at least until we all rapidly lose)

My theory: The forces of Line Must Go Up are going to keep winning. Mitigating the impact of climate change will be part of Line Goes Up. Whether it will be cheaper or more expensive than avoiding it in the first place will remain to be seen (but won't really matter in the end), but we will be facing whatever impacts we will be facing, and we will face them, and we will deal with them. If you have any doubt, look at…

This is not what's going to happen planetwide.

What's going to happen instead is that the rich will mitigate the effects only for themselves.

They will spend a small percentage of their wealth to protect themselves and their property from all the ill effects of climate change.

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

#79

Post by ds_ »

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…

Not sure why you're being downvoted, because you're absolutely right.

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

#80

Post by oporquinho94 »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #68
croes wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like something you just made up. Kind of moot to argue what is natural and what isn’t.

Unfairness or billionaires might be natural or not - that doesn’t mean we have to accept their existence.

You know what else is natural? To die at 30 from dysentery or a broken leg.

Natural is a nonsense category

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