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Death really is around the corner for chicks in an egg though. Even professional hatcheries supposedly can't manage more than a ~90% hatch rate. The thing that

by rad88 8y ago

Death really is around the corner for chicks in an egg though. Even professional hatcheries supposedly can't manage more than a ~90% hatch rate. The thing that is silly about the chicken's worry (apart from the anthropomorphism) is not that the situation wasn't actually life threatening, but that it is completely out of the chicken's control as an embryo. Pollution and climate change are killing millions. For anyone in the glorious future looking back, I hope they will not be amused at how disturbing that is to us, but instead think, "yeah that was really terrible, thank goodness we got through it".

jerf 8y ago
"Pollution and climate change are killing millions. For anyone in the glorious future looking back, I hope they will not be amused at how disturbing that is to us, but instead think, "yeah that was really terrible, thank goodness we got through it"." How emotional are you about the deaths of Roman soldiers in their fight against Carthage? If you claim anything other than almost total emotional detachment, let me pre-emptively say that I straight up don't believe you, and think you're just saying it for dialectic purposes for the narrow purposes of winning points in this particular discussion, but that in all likelihood it will over a decade before this topic even crosses your mind again, barring perhaps memories of this conversation. Nobody cares. Nobody has the emotional capacity to care that much, because there's too much history, and too much tragedy in it. No, future humans aren't going to be wringing their hands about whatever horrors we may have suffered. There's a certain amount of evidence that WWII has already passed beyond the cultural event horizon where almost anybody has any deeply felt emotional reaction to reading about it, despite the fact its vets still live among us. (Also, this is very much exactly the sort of "but jerf!" I was talking about.) (Also, HN fancies itself rather smart but I gotta say, having discussed this sort of thing now twice in the past couple of days, it does not seem to be populated by people who have any ability to pull themselves out of modern fashions, even hypothetically, even for the duration of a single message. The prospect that people of the future aren't going to look back on us as the Enlightened Ones who had all the answers seems to be something not very many people here can even begin to think. Well... I'll be sure to bring that up with the future when I meet it.)
- rad88 8y ago
  Your premise is a civilization with values that are some extension my own, which considers the environmental recklessness that preceded it as either amusing or necessary. That doesn't sound plausible. I really believe that, but I don't feel emotional about every specific tragedy in recorded history.

by rad88 8y ago

jerf 8y ago

"Pollution and climate change are killing millions. For anyone in the glorious future looking back, I hope they will not be amused at how disturbing that is to us, but instead think, "yeah that was really terrible, thank goodness we got through it"." How emotional are you about the deaths of Roman soldiers in their fight against Carthage? If you claim anything other than almost total emotional detachment, let me pre-emptively say that I straight up don't believe you, and think you're just saying it for dialectic purposes for the narrow purposes of winning points in this particular discussion, but that in all likelihood it will over a decade before this topic even crosses your mind again, barring perhaps memories of this conversation. Nobody cares. Nobody has the emotional capacity to care that much, because there's too much history, and too much tragedy in it. No, future humans aren't going to be wringing their hands about whatever horrors we may have suffered. There's a certain amount of evidence that WWII has already passed beyond the cultural event horizon where almost anybody has any deeply felt emotional reaction to reading about it, despite the fact its vets still live among us. (Also, this is very much exactly the sort of "but jerf!" I was talking about.) (Also, HN fancies itself rather smart but I gotta say, having discussed this sort of thing now twice in the past couple of days, it does not seem to be populated by people who have any ability to pull themselves out of modern fashions, even hypothetically, even for the duration of a single message. The prospect that people of the future aren't going to look back on us as the Enlightened Ones who had all the answers seems to be something not very many people here can even begin to think. Well... I'll be sure to bring that up with the future when I meet it.)

rad88 8y ago
Your premise is a civilization with values that are some extension my own, which considers the environmental recklessness that preceded it as either amusing or necessary. That doesn't sound plausible. I really believe that, but I don't feel emotional about every specific tragedy in recorded history.