19
votes
Will humanity fail to get past the great filter?
Link information
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- Title
- There's a compelling reason scientists think we've never found aliens, and it suggests humans are already going extinct
- Published
- Jul 17 2017
- Word count
- 707 words
I don’t think we will.
I’m hopeful that we’ll choose a different direction, and figure something out.
In the meantime, enjoy yourself and try to make people happy. And if we make it past, alls the better!
Further reading on the Great Filter and the Fermi Paradox can be found on Wikipedia.
The link talks about climate change, but there are other issues. Of these others, individually we can handle them... but combined, especially with climate change? To me, it's looking bleak.
All of our eggs are in one basket, and it's only relatively recently that we've seriously discussed colonization. The resources we used to get to where we are now are gone. Forests are getting stripped, animals are going extinct, oil is being depleted and the oceans' capacity to sustain large volumes of diverse life will be limited for the next several thousand years by all the plastic there.
We won't go extinct, but I seriously doubt we'd be able to recover to our present almost-spacefaring state without those resources.
Am I wrong, here? Is there a light at the end of the tunnel my eyes haven't seen?
Right now, we are hoping for a technological solution to our problem instead of actually doing something to stop all this environmental change. So, the way I see it, people will want to act when it's already far too late, which doesn't hold much hope for us continuing as a civilisation.
If we keep up our current strategy of stripping the planet bare of all resources, we may not even leave enough for the next civilisation to get going.
That's an interesting point isn't? We're hoping for a technological solution, but we're not investing in one, not really anyway.
I think that may be because nobody's made the requisite breakthroughs yet. People are working on this, as whoever figures it out will be remembered in the same sentence as Edison or Pasteur. And pretty much every country outside of the US recognizes the danger posed by climate change and the potential for it to be species-ending for us. If the US continues on its trend, I'd expect a breakthrough to come from China.
But it's not the same as an entire nation supporting the moon landing efforts, or on a more negative front, the way people rationed and supported the world war efforts.
Fair point, but we have the Internet now, and 50 years of scientific progress. And there are more people alive now than there ever have been before. I'm not saying that putting all of our eggs in the tech-breakthrough basket, but I'm also not throwing up my hands at the lack of meaningful social, commercial, and industrial change on a global scale to declare humanity irrevocably fucked (which we could very well already be).
Should we be trying harder than we currently are? Certainly. There's no reason to believe that technology will bail us out of this, but we do have science to show that reducing our emissions will have a beneficial effect. But there are people who are blinded by the profit margins and refuse to buy in (people whose footprint is statistically significant). With no mechanism in place to force them to see the writing on the wall, I put my faith in the thing that has brought humanity from just another species of primate to the masters of our domain, recognizing that it is merely faith.
Rather, people will be forced to act. Until then, they're too busy dealing with their own problems and the next election cycle to worry about the world. :/
Such are the joys of myopia and the people in government being too old to really care about future generations (though if they care about about anything beyond themselves and their pocketbooks, it is hard to tell).
I think you might be being a little over dramatic. We have used a-lot of resources, but Earth is still very large and if everything "reset" we would have enough resources to build back up to where we are now.
From a pessimistic point of view many of the animals and habitats that are going extinct arn't beneficial to the success of humans. They're just neat and we want to keep them around. Most all of the animals we rely on have been domesticated. (fish being the big exception here)
Climate change is still going to be an issue, especially if it leads to extensive desertification.
I don't know, bees seem pretty important. And if they all go away, or if they become depopulated enough to not be able to pollinate in a proficient manner, well, it won't look pretty.
I likely am being over dramatic, but I'm aware of it and it's partly why I started this topic. You're right in that a lot of headline endangered species are 'awwwww' inducing, but, as @Zeerph pointed out, some species are critical for ecosystems and their loss would trigger a chain reaction that would be somewhat vexing.
We've made it over 70 years with nuclear weapons. That has to be a good start.
I don't know how confident I feel about that 70 years being a particularly positive sign given how insanely close we have come to full scale Nuclear war on more than one occasion during that period:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls
One event in particular was only prevented by one man, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov.
I would argue that nuclear weapons are obvious in the destruction that they do, while something like climate change is insidious and just sneaks up on you.
The climate has changed and will keep doing so for the foreseeable future, it will be a slow, creeping change until something breaks. Then it will be too late.
I'm sorry to break it to you, but it's always been that way.
Now there's just more people and it's easier to communicate with them
To solve that we'd need a post scarcity society. I feel we're on the verge, but is it soon enough? Possibly, but famines and climate migrations will strike first.
If we don't make it, it's either going to be because we've cooked ourselves to death thanks to capitalist greed, or because we killed each other thanks to conflict resultant from both capitalist greed and nationalist stupidity.
Would you say that capitalism is overall detrimental?
Absolutely, 100%. In a rational economic system whereby production of goods is determined based on what all people need rather than what creates wealth for a handful of elites, none of the major global issues of the present day would exist.
It strains the mind to think of a global scale problem today that cannot in some form be traced back to our obscene, bizarre, and utterly nonsensical capitalist economic structure and the deleterious effects it has on human society.
Even beyond the obvious problems like poverty, warfare, disease, starvation, global warming, etc., capitalism has hideous and insidious effects on human culture (e.g. modern hyperindividualist absurdity in media that is utterly detached from reality), the human psyche (e.g. the intentional mass isolation of humans from their communities, and the alienation of people from their labor), and even the way we perceive and connect with our fellow humans (e.g. the entire concept of commodity fetishism, how we interact with people as they provide economic value to us rather than as full individuals with their own agency).
Kurzgesagt does a great video on The Great Filter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjtOGPJ0URM
I don't think we are gonna make it.