*sigh* I don't believe our species is capable of enough foresight to meet the targets it has set. Changes this slow aren't real to us until we've lived through them - the 'normal' of my childhood doesn't exist, or isn't seen as valuable, or both, by today's youth - their only goal will be the normal of their childhood. Sure, the more scientific ones will understand, objectively, that things used to be better. But not in their guts. Hence you get the Easter Island effect, otherwise known as boiling the frog slowly. (Most people's goals will be limited to something not too horrible, for them, during their own lifetime.)
Then add our compulsion to create hierarchies, and allow those at the top to demonstrate their power by destroying things. And our apparant inability to care about externalities, unless a squad of affected individuals come after us with pitchforks. And our once evolutionarily-adaptive habit of dealing with hard times by trying to wipe out other groups of humans, so as to be among the suvivors sharing the new smaller pool. We're fucked. The only real question is how fucked - i.e. whether we exterminate ourselves and/or sterilize the planet while fighting for the remaining scraps.
I don't know whether or not we're in a chain-of-dominos situation objectively. But it doesn't matter, because we're almost certainly not capable of changing our ways. An eventual new equilibrium might include some of us - still careless about ecology - or not. But I can't see it including humans that don't behave this way, short of some non-human species taking control. And no, that does not mean human-created artificial intelligence.
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dancing_serpent
(no subject)
Date: 2018-08-11 08:07 pm (UTC)Then add our compulsion to create hierarchies, and allow those at the top to demonstrate their power by destroying things. And our apparant inability to care about externalities, unless a squad of affected individuals come after us with pitchforks. And our once evolutionarily-adaptive habit of dealing with hard times by trying to wipe out other groups of humans, so as to be among the suvivors sharing the new smaller pool. We're fucked. The only real question is how fucked - i.e. whether we exterminate ourselves and/or sterilize the planet while fighting for the remaining scraps.
I don't know whether or not we're in a chain-of-dominos situation objectively. But it doesn't matter, because we're almost certainly not capable of changing our ways. An eventual new equilibrium might include some of us - still careless about ecology - or not. But I can't see it including humans that don't behave this way, short of some non-human species taking control. And no, that does not mean human-created artificial intelligence.