I know the real answer is reddit but I really don’t want to go back now that I’ve already grown used to life without it. I was hoping for Lemmy to be a viable substitute but it isn’t. I can see how this place is wonderful for the certain type of person but that person is not me. My experience during the past 6+ months has been a net negative and I’m pretty much ready to move on. I just don’t know where else to go.
It’s like saying we are too stupid to survive.
That is not an unthinkable scenario. The universe is so vast yet there is no sign of life anywhere else. Why? Perhaps intelligent life simply isn’t intelligent enough and they always end up destroying themselves. A so called “great filter”. Is it behind us or ahead? Who knows.
Given the state of our climate, I would say it’s very closely ahead of us, and we are not going to make it. Which is a shame, we are so close.
I don’t entirely disagree
Right now I don’t see how our current society can survive. We are doing nothing at all to stop burning fossil fuels (renewables go up, but so does fossil burning), the richest find more and more absurd ways to waste energy (bitcoin, LLMs), everywhere more and more people go poor even in developed nations (prices skyrocketing, mainly food and rent), and we are just starting to see that climate is starting to change, and not to our optimistic scenarios.
I don’t think we are going to make it.
For me it’s more about the political climate. I don’t see the actual climate change as an existential threat to the human race in a way something like nuclear war, a pandemic, asteroid or AI could be. It’s bad but it’s not that bad. I never really understood why so many seem to think this way when I don’t even hear scientists making such apocalyptic claims.
Maybe I understood the situation too bleakly, but my impression was, that we are losing topsoil (used to grow almost all our food), biodiversity is plummeting (which can trigger chain reaction of massive die-offs), the ice is melting (blue ocean event, likely irreversible) causing billions of people to lose their homes, and depleting aquifies (drinking water). Hotter climate will cause runaway effects, that will multiply all of this, which could lead to decimating most of life in the oceans (food for majority of people), meaning more hungry people inland, politically already unstable, now without soil, water, and getting severe droughts and much more acidic rain. There are possibilities of new diseases appearing from the thawing permafrost, as well as newly mutated ones.
Everything will be made worse by the current trends in politics, but I suspect those politics are trending because some people are aware where are we heading.
Much of those things will to some extent surely happen but despite it still being really bad, it’s still not going to make us go extinct. That atleast is my current understanding of it. The worst case scenario rarely actually happens and given enough motivation we humans are pretty good at problem solving aswell. I have a strong feeling, that if we’re going to end ourselves, it’s going to more or less be an accident and will happen rather quickly. I still tend to be (techno)optimist about it. It’s all I’ve got.
Complete wipe? Certainly not. Reverting our society in standards of living and numbers? Heavily and quickly. People as a species may survive, but will pale in comparison to what we as a society are and can do now. Unless we get cheap fusion power distributed all over the world in the next 20 years, we are gone.
“My ignorance is worth more than your knowledge.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/03/20/climate-change-ipcc-report-15/
“I’ve never understood why…”
And I can bet you never tried to understand.
Nothing in your post indicates an existential threat. Sure some places will become unhabitable but not the entire earth. I also don’t understand why you need to include the passive agressive ad-hominems and belittling tone instead of just making your point. People like you is why I’m considering leaving this platform. You make the experience worse for everyone.
Because you’re a willfully ignorant dolt, that’s why the tone.
Good.
People like you make the world worse for everyone.
So you think AI is more of an existential threat to humanity than climate change? This informs me that you really think some Skynet type of shit is more likely to happen than extreme weather phenomena. Do you know what an ice-age is? Do you have any idea what it means when we don’t have enough water to grow crops? You think Alexa will hunt you down because you programmed it poorly, but you can’t understand why a category 4 hurricane is deadly af.
Please, the faster you leave, the better. Head to Wikipedia to get rid of some of that ignorance. Here’s a few bit of material to get you started.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_rain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drought https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_climate_change
Perhaps you’re more of a… ehm “visual learner”. Here: Here’s a handy flowchart. and here’s some examples in a video form Europe’s climate in 2050
There’s a reason the deserts of our world aren’t populated, and I’m sure you can figure out what that reason is.
“I don’t see an existential threat in permanently and majorly fucking up the only known world to support life” - You
How about “There will always be someone exploiting the system/people”