Edit: We survived an ice age and we’re very highly adaptable. Plus, we will hold on to some percentage of technical knowledge that will help us adapt faster.
No species lasts forever—and the faster their environment changes, the sooner their expiration date.
Those other species weren’t the authors of the global ecosystem’s demise, even with an understanding of the situation and opportunity to change the course of events
Not really a fair comparison, is what I’m saying.
Some species are contesting that statement very strongly. Take the horseshoecrab, or the tardigrate or even the cockroach. Humans are known for their fast adaptability, so I’d bet my money on us joining that list.
Take the horseshoecrab, or the tardigrate or even the cockroach.
None of those are species—they’re a family, a phylum, and a (partial) order, respectively. While those clades have been relatively stable morphologically, species within each clade still come and go.
I’m sorry for the confusion, I was using the old housewives definition of species.
No other species are quite like humans though
Meh, we wouldn’t be the first species to be so successful that we kill ourselves off.
Depends on what you define as “lasts forever”. We are direct descendants of some kind of a rodent. Yeah, our species has changed “kind of much” since those days, but I wouldn’t worry about that kind of “expiration”. We are some rodents’ grand-grand-grand-…-grandchildren, and I think the rodent would be very much okay with us not looking very squirrellike, if they somehow was to find out they are our ancestor. They’d love us all the same :)
But of course, in our case, it won’t be that evolution changes us into something else. It’s rather, we will just vault 92’ify ourselves.
When faced with a changing environment, a species has 3 choices: Adapt, Migrate, or Die.
Humans have apparently decided to vault past the first two and just yank that third lever.
I mean, why do you say that? I don’t know if any other species that lives in a greater variety of environments. There are humans living on every continent, including Antarctica. There are humans living with support in space and under the sea.
We have migrated, to everywhere. And we can adapt, to almost anything.
And to clarify, I don’t think we’ll all survive, but I highly doubt we’d all die.
It depends where the hot is coming from. If it’s from inner earth we won’t survive because people can’t survive outside of this planet.
as a species, maybe, as a civilization, no.
Misleading headline. I would wager that 100% of humans alive today will not survive, if we don’t act quickly to resolve senescence.
One half of us die, the other half will be happy with the results. To bad it won’t be those who denied and brought the problem about
the vast majority of humans didn’t survive even before anthropogenic climate change
Democracy and capitalism won’t survive. 100 years from now we will all be north Korea. 1000 years from now we will all live in medieval feudalism.
Worse than medieval feudalism. Lords were expected to look after their vassals.
this but unironically. democracy can only function in a society with good education, otherwise you end up with populists.
and education gets to the people because it pays off for the people economically. you give 12 years of your lifetime, you receive a well-paying job afterwards. if economic growth slows down, people won’t be engineers anymore and people will receive less education, thus weakening democracy.
Plus, we will hold on to some percentage of technical knowledge that will help us adapt faster.
You’re running off the assumption that the survivors know useful information and that theyre also able to utilize that useful information plus be able to source needed materials since they wont have travel
Example: I know I need an antibiotic for my infection but I dont know how to create that antibiotic or how to guide someone on how to make it. If I did know id also have to get lucky that the region I live in has all the materials needed to make it. We source all around the world for our stuff.
Likely humanity will survive but probably wont advance as fast as you think.
Likely progression is simply that food gets expensive, and is grown indoors. Technology doesn’t need to fall, though when slaves are not needed, soylent green is a “utilitarian” use for them under rules based world order. Food capacity and population that can afford to buy it will match. Fewer people does mean fewer iphones, and more expensive at lower scale.
Global warming, even at 5C, is more about increased misery and oppression, rather than mass deaths over a decade. Wikipedia will survive. The AI tech giants chatbots will explain why you need to die or be miserable until you die.
Just for clarification, I don’t think it’ll be fast. It will just be faster than without it.
Also, I think we’ll hang on to a lot because the survivor base will likely be made up of people from all walks of life. STEM Professionals, teachers, carpenters, you name it. And as long as we learned our lesson about religion, we’ll pass that knowledge on.
And stem professionals are also violence professionals (i.e. military and cops)? STEM tends to be very specific in their knowledge base these days. Yeah, they know how to make solar panels, but do they know where to get those materials, how to mine them? Even 80 years ago, it took several teams of hundreds of scientists to figure out nuclear energy. Lose half that team of specified individuals working together and you just have an idea. And those smart individuals gained their knowledge from smart individuals before them, and same for those individuals.
Look at Greek fire or the pyramids for examples of lost technology that 2000 years later, we still can’t figure out. Losing a scientist here or there is generally not that big of a deal, but when you can’t control how many or who goes, you lose control of the knowledge.
You’re running off the assumption that the survivors know useful information and that theyre also able to utilize that useful information plus be able to source needed materials since they wont have travel
I think we’re assuming books will continue to exist.
I think one of the real marvels of civilization is the redundancy of information. For every college course you’ve taken there’s a text book, and there may have been dozens of physical copies of that book used in your class, but also for many other classes at other schools that taught that same subject. There may have been 10,000 copies of that book in circulation across the globe, in many different countries.
It’s not impossible to lose information forever, but we’ve put in some really strong defenses against that really happening. There are a lot of libraries in coastal areas which could flood, or big cities that could burn after wars or riots. But there are also plenty of libraries in small towns, and at high elevations. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe Aspen has a public library for instance, and so do some of the small towns nearby that you don’t know the name of.
The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, he didn’t, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn’t do it. Left to his own devices he couldn’t build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.
-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Arthur Dent realizes that he, as an individual, is pretty useless for improving a society, but he can make a damn fine sammie.
Thanks for the TED talk (really)
That was a delightful video; thanks for sharing
I’m pretty proud of myself as i believe i could at least build a water turbine to produce electricity and light bulbs, at least i know the building plans for them, but i lack the mechanical skills to actually weld together things. but a goldsmith could weld them for me.
I don’t like this shower thought. It puts bad vibes out into the world and I’m not about that right now. Im having a good day for once, lol.
I’m sorry. I promise I’m a big picture optimist, if that helps! 😜
Lol, OK.
What do you disagree with, though?
Humans will perish, as will 90% of life on Earth.
Civilization likely will perish, but i doubt the species will short of a dramatic event.
We are degrading the environment slow enough to adjust.
No, it’s going faster than anything humans have ever experienced. It will take about a million years for life to adapt and evolve.
We survived an ice age, though, and we’re very highly adaptable. Plus, we will hold on to some percentage of technical knowledge that will help us adapt faster.
I think you’re selling us short! 😜
We survived by reverting to areas that were not covered in ice. The areas under direct influence of the ice age did not remain inhabited. We didn’t really adapt. We just had another place to go. In this case, we don’t.
That’s where we disagree. I think there will be small inhabitable areas of the planet for centuries, at least. If not, there are caves. Humans are nothing if not -persistent.-
No we aren’t, we are in the middle of the 6th mass extinction. Its hubris to think humans wont go the way of Neanderthals. Hell, we are actively trying to ignore it and make it worse right now in the U.S.
Mass extinction, not complete extinction.
It’s not hubris. Humans are one of, if not the most adaptable species on the planet. Unless it gets so hot that the caves become uninhabitable, we’ll squeak by.
I see it like this: If there is a way, we will find it. It’s in our DNA.
Foolish boy…
I’d love to see us go the way of Neanderthals!
But I don’t think that will happen. I think we’ll go extinct instead.
deleted by creator
Eventually, no one alive will survive.
My bet for climate change is a massive migrational crisis and wars over resources.
Humankind won’t disappear, not even civilization. But life would probably be shit, and many many people will die.
Life isn’t shit now? Life wasn’t shit in the “good times”?
It may as well still get a bigger shit
Humanity might, but human society and civilization won’t. So what’s the point even?
It was a shower thought?
It just hit me in a sobering kinda way.
No you misunderstand, I’m not saying the thought has no point. I’m saying what’s the point of saying we survive if civilization and Society doesn’t. As Humanity really survived at that point.
[Has] Humanity really survived at that point[?]
Yeah. And probably found a new way to live. Do you consider Humanity to be intrinsically tied to modern society?
How would we know? We have nothing to compare it to.
Let me put another way. In Planet of the apes, the real one, humans are basically no different from animals. They’re like rabbits. They are not speaking and don’t reason. Are they still human at that point? Would we recognize them as such? I don’t know.
I know I’m a misanthrope because I don’t find any silver lining in this truth.
This quote really stuck with me. It’s where I see the silver lining:
“Blessed are those who plant trees under whose shade they will never sit.”
