These are rookie numbers, now make it to 10 sigmas. But seriously, the biggest problem is that global warming is happening very slowly (in human years) and we are kind of normalising it and concentrating on more pressing topics.
I guess our kids or grand kids will read in their history books about our ignorance and scratch their heads wondering how stupid we might have been to allow all this to happen. And they will be absolutely right of course.
We are more concerned about our well being and our consumerism while wanting bigger cars, bigger toys, share prices etc. instead of trying to lead a sustainable life.
Indeed. It’s depressing growing up, and the only thing that changes is the severity of the prognosis. We still travel around the world because we’re bored. Hours long roundtrip flights are sold at 20-30 USD, probably because of tourism subsidies. Not to mention the many business trips just to “meet in person”.
We have all this technology to work from home, to reduce our footprint. But, we don’t give a fuck. And this is just travel. Capitalism needs to be curtailed to factor in the long term destruction of the planet, or we’ll head there as fast as profit margins allows.
Will our descendants look open our great works like how we’ve looked at Roman works, in awe of what we achieved with “primitive” tools. Or will they look at it in awe due to not having any understanding of how such a thing was done at all.
Will we have colonized the solar system and left earth to stabilize itself, or will we be back to city states, warring over scraps of land and access to water that is slightly less polluted. Or will it be both? The rich with their space empires and the poor left to fend for themselves amongst the corruption.
Will there be any of us left at all? We could wipe out all human life right now with a bio weapon or nuclear war. We’re like children playing with their Father’s gun, maybe nothing bad happens and we put it back where we found it, or maybe it’s going to be a tragedy. We’ve only had these tools for barely a century, who knows what we’ll do in 20 of those.
It can also be argued that the continued trend of having an increasing human population is only going to keep accelerating the decline of earth’s biosphere.
We’re already seeing an apocalypse in the insects, and that’s going to lead to a decline in plant life.
Our carbon emissions are rapidly increasing ocean acidity and temperature, which will kill off huge swaths of the planktons that produce much of the oxygen we breathe. Biodiversity is approaching mass extinction level lows, and we’re barely figuring out how to slow it down.
I’m sure life on earth will survive it, it survived the impact that killed the dinosaurs, and that was an incredibly rapid change. But human civilization as we know it may not be able to adapt quickly enough to the damage we’ve done.
Humanity may end up as mole people living in carefully life support controlled bunkers if we continue. If earth is nearly as inhospitable to large terrestrial life as mars, what’s the benefit to one over the other? Might as well just leave the earth to the million year process of fixing itself and expand outwards if we can.
Things will grow outdoors, even if they’re not the things we want growing.
We already know where major deposits of natural resources are.
There’s an ionosphere, meaning the surface isn’t bathed in deadly radiation.
Parts of it, such as the poles, will likely remain habitable.
The big issue, though, is that transporting any substantial number people to Mars would require many trillions of dollars of investments in space transportation. It’s just not feasible to ship a large number of people to another planet. Even if we could start a colony on Mars, most of humanity will still be stuck on Earth and they won’t have much interest in supporting a colony on another planet if they’re being left to die.
The thing is that even with catastrophic global warming, earth would still be tons more habitable than Mars. Any structure that could allow survival on Mars would also allow survival on this hypothetical future earth.
We either fix it or we are screwed. So we are probably screwed. Anyone seeking to build a Mars colony as an “escape” would probably fare better building similar stuff in earth deserts, or something somewhat different underwater. Still not the most sane places to go for, but more sane than Mars if the goal is “most survivability”.
I read/watch high fantasy about thousands, maybe tens of thousands, year old dynasties, let alone civilizations, and it just doesn’t even make sense to me. We can barely keep a world system in place for a few decades.
Are today’s history books accurate? History has been used for ages to fuel the country’s propaganda and are rarely if ever critical to some shameful moments of one’s history.
There are some exceptions but they are rather rare I would say.
These are rookie numbers, now make it to 10 sigmas. But seriously, the biggest problem is that global warming is happening very slowly (in human years) and we are kind of normalising it and concentrating on more pressing topics.
I guess our kids or grand kids will read in their history books about our ignorance and scratch their heads wondering how stupid we might have been to allow all this to happen. And they will be absolutely right of course.
We are more concerned about our well being and our consumerism while wanting bigger cars, bigger toys, share prices etc. instead of trying to lead a sustainable life.
We’re fifty years into this. You might be new. Nothing changes except the right-wing’s hypocrisy and idiocy. Nothing. Changes.
Indeed. It’s depressing growing up, and the only thing that changes is the severity of the prognosis. We still travel around the world because we’re bored. Hours long roundtrip flights are sold at 20-30 USD, probably because of tourism subsidies. Not to mention the many business trips just to “meet in person”.
We have all this technology to work from home, to reduce our footprint. But, we don’t give a fuck. And this is just travel. Capitalism needs to be curtailed to factor in the long term destruction of the planet, or we’ll head there as fast as profit margins allows.
A world that lets this happen is a world that won’t have history books in the future, or accurate ones at least
I often wonder where we’ll be in 2000 years.
Will our descendants look open our great works like how we’ve looked at Roman works, in awe of what we achieved with “primitive” tools. Or will they look at it in awe due to not having any understanding of how such a thing was done at all.
Will we have colonized the solar system and left earth to stabilize itself, or will we be back to city states, warring over scraps of land and access to water that is slightly less polluted. Or will it be both? The rich with their space empires and the poor left to fend for themselves amongst the corruption.
Will there be any of us left at all? We could wipe out all human life right now with a bio weapon or nuclear war. We’re like children playing with their Father’s gun, maybe nothing bad happens and we put it back where we found it, or maybe it’s going to be a tragedy. We’ve only had these tools for barely a century, who knows what we’ll do in 20 of those.
Definitely not that. Any technology that would allow us to colonize other planets would be much easier to use on Earth no matter how bad it gets.
It can also be argued that the continued trend of having an increasing human population is only going to keep accelerating the decline of earth’s biosphere.
We’re already seeing an apocalypse in the insects, and that’s going to lead to a decline in plant life.
Our carbon emissions are rapidly increasing ocean acidity and temperature, which will kill off huge swaths of the planktons that produce much of the oxygen we breathe. Biodiversity is approaching mass extinction level lows, and we’re barely figuring out how to slow it down.
I’m sure life on earth will survive it, it survived the impact that killed the dinosaurs, and that was an incredibly rapid change. But human civilization as we know it may not be able to adapt quickly enough to the damage we’ve done.
Humanity may end up as mole people living in carefully life support controlled bunkers if we continue. If earth is nearly as inhospitable to large terrestrial life as mars, what’s the benefit to one over the other? Might as well just leave the earth to the million year process of fixing itself and expand outwards if we can.
Earth still has plenty of benefits:
The big issue, though, is that transporting any substantial number people to Mars would require many trillions of dollars of investments in space transportation. It’s just not feasible to ship a large number of people to another planet. Even if we could start a colony on Mars, most of humanity will still be stuck on Earth and they won’t have much interest in supporting a colony on another planet if they’re being left to die.
The thing is that even with catastrophic global warming, earth would still be tons more habitable than Mars. Any structure that could allow survival on Mars would also allow survival on this hypothetical future earth.
We either fix it or we are screwed. So we are probably screwed. Anyone seeking to build a Mars colony as an “escape” would probably fare better building similar stuff in earth deserts, or something somewhat different underwater. Still not the most sane places to go for, but more sane than Mars if the goal is “most survivability”.
I read/watch high fantasy about thousands, maybe tens of thousands, year old dynasties, let alone civilizations, and it just doesn’t even make sense to me. We can barely keep a world system in place for a few decades.
Have you watched The 100?
Are today’s history books accurate? History has been used for ages to fuel the country’s propaganda and are rarely if ever critical to some shameful moments of one’s history.
There are some exceptions but they are rather rare I would say.
History has always been written by the victors. Next time there might not be anyone alive to write it tho.