This isn’t an either-or situation.
A better world is possible; and we’re so fucked.
That’s what’s so fucking frustrating about it. It’s not like some meteor is on track to render our planet molten over night - we know exactly the kinds of things we need to be doing. We choose not to. There are warnings of human-induced climate change / global warming that predate any of us posting here. Our response wasn’t to stop the things that are killing ourselves, or even pause or slow those things - we went into a full fucking sprint. Worse than just a sprint… the rate of acceleration is itself accelerating. Even when there’s no actual reason to make it worse, we do it anyway. Look at AI - it’s a fucking blackhole for money and tech resources. We don’t get shit back for that investment, and to the contrary, using it makes ourselves worse on an individual level. All it’s doing is poisoning our air and water, and in exchange we get entry-tier computer parts with enthusiast tier price tags; and lose the ability to think critically. We’re putting effort - like, a LOT of fucking effort - into shooting ourselves in the foot.
A better world is possible. Actually seeing that possibility manifest is being stolen from you.
Don’t worry.
A better world is possible. And going one step further its not just possible, but inevitable.
Unfortunately to get there, about 200-300k years is going to have to pass before the pollutants we’ve dumped into the environment have been sequestered back underground\in the core by whichever plants and microbes manage to survive the next 20-50 years, because even if it’s not looking like we will, some organism will survive us.
Even that isn’t a guarantee. Non-human life is insanely resilient by human standards, but zoom out to literal entire observable universe with its trillions of planets, and so far we have a sample size of exactly 1 that’s capable of supporting life, to include extremophiles. They’ll outlive us for sure, but we have no idea if they’ll outlive whatever downward spiral we’ve set our planet on.
In the context of the universe at large, “life, uh, does NOT find a way!” Life is a statistically insignificant fluke that’s fragile as fuck.
Not only that - but on earth, life has only about a billion years more before the sun renders this planet uninhabitable. Losing hundreds of thousands of years is a really high price even on the cosmic scale.
Even that isn’t a guarantee.
no, it isn’t a guarantee, but it’s likely. moth won’t tell you that addressing climate change isn’t terribly important, or that millions or perhaps billions of people aren’t going to die in the coming decades, but one small ray of hope is that it would be incredibly difficult for us to kill all of us. whether by climate change, or nuclear war, most scientists agree that it is unlikely to mean the extinction of humanity, let alone all life. and as long as some single cell organisms remain, the planet will eventually recover, and life will flourish again.
now, if we don’t address climate change, then millions or perhaps billions of us will die in the coming decades. the grim reality of that, is that killing off that many humans would do wonders to address climate change. many people will starve, but the survivors will inherit a world in which nature retakes what it lost in a world suddenly empty of humanity. even a couple decades in such a world would drastically improve conditions for life.
will that mean humanity isn’t doomed? well, no. everything has an end, even humanity. at some point, we will die off, even if we take perfect care of the planet. but that doesn’t mean that life will end, and I’m sure whatever comes after us will be just as special and amazing and awe-inspiring as we were.
That’s definitely a possibility. I’d guess that once we’re gone, things will improve quite a lot, but I don’t know enough to say that with any real confidence.
What I do know is that life is an incomprehensibly rare exception to the rule. Whether the damage we do is enough to nudge Earth back into the rule, we don’t know. But it is the norm, and we’re definitely not treating life as the rarity that it is. Even the extremophiles have their limit.
A better world is absolutely possible. We just have to get fucked hard enough that we stop messing it up.
I disagree. A better world might be possible in the short term, but it only takes a few generations to forget the motivation to do so. It’s the whole reason history repeats itself.
Anti-vaxers are a great example of this phenomenon. People haven’t experienced how horrible stuff like polio is, so it’s easy for them to dismiss it as not a big deal.
The biggest issue is that there are people with personality disorders who lust for power at any cost, and they’re often charismatic enough to fool enough idiots into going along with them to achieve it.
Add in the fact that most people have no desire to rock the boat as long as they’re comfortable, and you have humanity’s Great Filter.
Sure, we can throw off the chains, but these people will chip away at it for decades until they can do it again. It’s a cycle as old as written history.
I more meant that we’re so fucked that the better world will be a world without humans to mess it up.
Ah, fair enough.
Getting fucked hard enough that the world becomes better sounds like the best possible solution I could imagine.
This is something I struggle with, as I’m an environmental scientist and keenly aware of the state of our environment. Layer increasing resource and food scarcity, and the implacable orphan crushing machine of capitalism, and the picture is bleak.
I am one man, and I can only do so much. The problem is so unfathomably big and complex how can anyone hope to fix it? Any one. That’s the issue. We’re so used to thinking individually and that we are powerless apes in the experiment of our cruel masters. However, apes strong together.
It’s easy to despair; hope takes courage. Hope is stubbornness in the face of adversity. Hope is rebellion.
The Prague Metronome symbolizes something similar.
Maybe a better world is possible because we’re so fucked? Accelerationists rise up! Or trip and fall, I guess
Mine must be broken and doesn’t tilt to the left.
Ha ha ha. Not actually funny though, given you know, things.
