“humans will survive for hundreds millions of years. But I’ll be long gone in like 40 and I’ll have gotten everything I every wanted. So change nothing, and fuck you.”
Homo Sapiens may survive for 10 million years, but I don’t think that is where the smart money is.
I maintain that we have a battle of world views going on here. In some ways it’s about the myths we believe in. Most environmentalists believe in what I call the Hobbit Paradigm: we live in a beautiful garden, and if we grounded ourselves in relationships with our communities (including nature) we would have a good and sustainable life. Many technocentrists believe in what I call the Star Trek Paradigm: humans are limitlessly ingenious, technological solutions will save us, and Nature is viewed with an anthropocentric utilitarian ethic.
I do not believe in the Star Trek Paradigm. It’s hubris. I also don’t think it’s a very pragmatic paradigm. We live in a world we evolved to live in. Not worrying about this world because we think terraforming other planets and setting up space bases might be a possibility is not comprehending the Good or risk very well, IMHO.
I suppose a third paradigm is cold-blooded, individualist Realpolitik; It’s a dog eat dog world, fuck you, I’m just trying to get mine as hard as everyone else is. In this case Space Colonisation is just a beard to disguise a callous and usurious relationship to the beings is this world.
That makes the conflict one of story, of myth, which means no one will have their minds changed by facts. They’re belief systems. We need to expose those fundamentally short -sighted or selfish beliefs. We need to tell better stories, and expose the ridiculousness of the other stories.
The issue is once you educate yourself in science and engineering, you realize that teraforming planets isn’t something you just do. And you can’t realistically rely on a technology that doesn’t exist. The real problem here is one of education. The facts and the seriousness of climate change do not support his dumbass argument, and we’ll all be dead by the time everyone comes to an agreement and realizes, oh shit nobody is going to save us from climate change but us.
You can easily be an environmentalist and still believe in the Star Trek paradigm. While we, that is mankind, might have the ingenuity to find technological solutions to most of our problems, we do not have the political or economic systems necessary to actually put these solutions into reality.
Or just that we should start small with the immediate existential threat on the planet that people already are on
also, the ability to do stuff is the ability to make problems. if our societies do not advance at pace with our technology, we will die. see: outside
I’ve heard this phrased as Wizard vs Prophet
https://grist.org/politics/wizards-and-prophets-face-off-to-save-the-planet/
I suppose a third paradigm is cold-blooded, individualist Realpolitik; It’s a dog eat dog world, fuck you, I’m just trying to get mine as hard as everyone else is.
This secret third one is the one that basically everyone has, yeah, it’s pretty depressing.
I dunno, at this point I’m more given to a kind of blade runner, or maybe mad max paradigm, of like. Even if the star trek future is the shit, right, even if they come up with and use terraforming technologies, which we could probably do at least for offsetting carbon emissions if the theoretical short term proposals are anything to go by, we don’t have any real way of understanding what the real knock-on effects of those short term solutions would be. We would probably be just as likely to increase ocean acidification by a couple points in our quest to sequester carbon by dumping a shit ton of iron oxide in the ocean, and then end up killing a bunch of sea life which is connected to everything else. It just becomes a kind of whack a mole style game where you trade one consequence for another at the expense of the environment, and if that ends up happening, I expect pretty quick humanity will attempt to totally shutter off any consequence which might pose a threat to humanity or capitalism, and put them off onto the broader environment instead, and the people who are reliant on those environments to survive. I.E. you get put into a horrible blade runner future, where the survival of humanity isn’t in question, but humanity’s humanity has gone extinct.
There’s also a fourth attitude. We live on a planet uniquely suited to the kind of life it gave rise to, such as ourselves. The climate of it before we began pumping tons and tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere was generally tolerable. Sometimes we had great periods like the medieval warm period and sometimes we had natural devastation like the little ice age. We’re in the process of going from bad to worse and if we don’t let up with our emissions soon we’re gonna have to get a lot better at every form of engineering really fucking fast
we’re gonna have to get a lot better at every form of engineering really fucking fast
Unfortunately that’s what we humans are really fucking good at. Nothing quite like a deadline, a sprinkling of procrastination, and a daunting technological existential hurdle to inspire a half-baked, good enough for now solution.
I figured that both sides are eventually going so far to their side they meet halfway. The good ol’ horseshoe theory.
In this case tech would go so far with genetic engineering while resource depletion forces them to go bio-punk and arrives at basically high tech treehouses.
So… he’ll push for a massive NASA budget increase, right?
No, free market will solve it! SpaceX! (/s)
Politicians are extremely shortsighted. Many cant even see past their own noses
They can track down your money by smell, though
True
Hundreds of millions
Even without climate change I doubt that humans would survive more than 1-2k years from now.
With our advanced weapon technology, and knowing it will only increase, I don’t know if we make it 200-300 more years. Weapons capable of wiping our civilization is probably our great filter.
What about what he said implies he thinks human-caused climate change isn’t possible on Earth? He just thinks it won’t kill us.
People are more than isolated tweets. He’s a man who’s made hundreds of public statements on climate change in the past, only one of which is contained in this tweet.
I just want to point out that there is almost zero scientific evidence to suggest that climate change will cause the extinction of humanity, and substantial evidence to the contrary.
It may make the world a much worse place to live, but the doomers are almost as unscientific as the deniers.
Queue angry buzzing noises.
Even if humans don’t go extinct, surely untold masses will die from food shortages and disasters.
Definitely a possible outcome, unfortunately. Though one that can still be strongly mitigated by immediate and serious action.
Which won’t happen.
It can if we do it ourselves. Leaders have failed us for decades. It’s up to ordinary people to bring radical change.
You’re not wrong at all, humans won’t go extinct. The alarming thing is all the other things which will go extinct or be reduced in number, and the change in water/soil/weather sources obviously. Biodiversity and not having your neighbourhood turned into a desert are pretty important things to like, not have life suck. Plus you know, having access to clean water… humans will keep growing in number (mainly in Africa, probably the opposite in the developed world and countries like China and India though), but in 50 years we’ll all be living like wartorn Syrian children*
*I am not a climate scientist, nor do I have much actual knowledge on climate science, so I do not know which precise flavor of impoverished middle eastern we will become
I don’t disagree at all but this seems to be a common misconception. See the OP from the Twitter thread and the angry bees I’ve enraged.
I think it speaks to how little nuance people are willing to tolerate before they throw a person in the “on my side” or “not on my side” category. And it speaks to how little people actually know about the science behind the activism they’re apparently a part of.
This is the thing for me, everyone who makes that argument is actually saying “a temperature change won’t make us extinct.” They don’t care that we’ll go extinct from the effects because cars go brrrr.
Are you a parody account or just a total moron?
Lol what? Happy to discuss if you want to say something of substance rather than insults.
To be fair… if we did manage to develop terraform-level atmospheric processing, we could set the CO2 level on Earth to whatever we want. Maybe that’s what he was trying to say?
“Surviving” is one thing. Why can’t we also continue to enjoy life like you guys got to do? You wouldn’t have been able to last a day in the world you left for us. Which is why as it got closer and closer to affecting you too, you just pushed harder and harder to keep it away from you, doing more and more damage for the rest of us to feel instead.
Does this guy even understand what Energy is mostly about? What does he want to happen to all of this country’s nuclear infrastructure?
There are more scenarios in which humanity will run itself in to the ground, we could survive for another while but I’m definitely not certain.
