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Life... finds a way. Someday, we'll hit a Malthusian bottleneck that we can't innovate our way out of, presumably. However, to date, every time disaster looms
by thrower123 7y ago
Life... finds a way.
Someday, we'll hit a Malthusian bottleneck that we can't innovate our way out of, presumably. However, to date, every time disaster looms, something occurs that kicks the can down the road. It makes it very difficult to take seriously the endlessly repeatedly claims that the world as we know it is coming to an end in the short term - the result of such hysteria seems to be to induce a lot of self-righteous and largely pointless churn, while unheralded technology quietly solves the crisis du jour without fanfare.
- marcus_holmes 7y agoNo idea why you're getting downvoted - this is perfectly true. I guess because people secretly long for the world to end. Rapture, Climate Change, nuclear armageddon, AIDS, Y2K, Peak Oil, take your pick. It's been a constant of life in Western civilisation for the last 50 years at least. There has never been a period in my life when there hasn't been some impending catastrophe that was going to destroy life as we know it. I would blame the media - and that is definitely part of it. But the media only does this because we lap it up. Something about human psychology loves this idea that we're in the End Times.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoMaybe it's the function of development levels we've reached? It's only in the last 60 years that we've reached a level at which we can cause a man-made Armageddon. In the "boy crying wolf" story, the wolf eventually came. > Peak Oil, Climate Change Makes more sense if you consider this (and other related scares) as symptoms of the same phenomenon, which shows no sign of stopping. Let's talk about how we're going to innovate ourselves off the exponentially growing resources -> consumption -> trash pipeline we're running. I don't see much happening that would address it.
- eitland 7y agoMostly agree. However: >In the "boy crying wolf" story, the wolf eventually came. ... and what would have helped the boy was if he hadn't been crying wolf unnecessarily. As marcus_holmes points out there always seems to be something.
- Tarq0n 7y agoAgenda-setting in politics seems to require some amount of crying wolf, paradoxically.
- carapace 7y ago> It's been a constant of life in Western civilisation for the last 50 years at least. A little longer than that. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypse The difference is we didn't have nuclear weapons, genetic engineering, chemistry (for chem weapons), etc. We could actually do it now. "We are as gods and might as well get good at it."
- marcus_holmes 7y agoIt's interesting that the psychology remains the same, even when there was no actual danger.
- carapace 7y agoI think it's a concomitant aspect of civilization itself. I mean, it's only what? 12K years since we started living in towns, right? Despite it's advantages civilized life kinda sucks in general. I think people long for the pre-civilized "Golden Age" and that's the underlying root of the apocalyptic longing for the world to end. (I'm not saying that pre-civilized life was an actual Golden Age, just that it satisfied us on a deep biological level in a way that urban/civil life doesn't.)
- pharrington 7y agoAddressing `marcus_holmes`'s initial prompt in the sibling comment - Malthus simply had no clue what he was talking about.