5 ms·
Humans are in fact, really good at playing god over long periods of time. You can look at any metric of human wellbeing over the past 1000 years and the result
by pembrook 6y ago
Humans are in fact, really good at playing god over long periods of time.
You can look at any metric of human wellbeing over the past 1000 years and the results are dramatic.
Take child mortality for example. In the 18th century, the average family suffered the deaths of 3-4 of their children before they reached adulthood.
Then, from 1800 to 1950, global childhood mortality dropped from 43% to 22%.
Accelerating further, from 1950 to 2015, global child mortality dropped again by nearly 5X to just 4.5%. And it's still going down. [1]
The reasons for this are numerous. Reductions in famine through agriculture, beating disease with medicine, reducing War through economic interdependency, expanding education and access to information through digital technology, etc. While we make mistakes in the short term , in the long term, we tend to get stuff right.
The problem is, we're also really good at getting distracted by bad news stories while missing the big picture. And we LOVE the idea of humans being the cause of the end of the world for some reason. It's the basis of most of our religions.
Of course, the arc of progress is paved with setbacks. But before getting pessimistic and cynical because you read some bad news stories, it pays to zoom out a little.
[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality#:~:text=Across%20the%20entire%20historical%20sample,died%20before%20they%20reached%20adulthood.&text=On%20the%20very%20right%20of,rate%20is%20now%20is%202.9%25 https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality#:~:text=Across%20....
- artificialLimbs 6y agoI suppose if we love the idea of humans being the cause of the end of the world, it is because we are the only thing on the planet capable of causing the end of the world, such as it is. This is the result of science. Maybe you could call it scientism, if one needs something to which to ascribe a bogeyman or create division. I am not ungrateful for our current actualization. Getting here took (and continues to take) tremendous sacrifice.
- stickfigure 6y ago> capable of causing the end of the world I really think you give humans too much credit here. The world has been here for billions of years, and will be here for billions more. Even if we bombed ourselves to extinction, in another million years there'd be little more to mark our passing than some fossils and a few hunks of concrete.
- dorgo 6y agoNaaa, look at what we achieved in a couple hundred years.. And the rate and scale of our "successes" keep increasing (exponentially?). Give us another couple hundred years and I'm sure no fossils (or anything else) will be found. But I think gp meant the end of the world as the end of survivable conditions for humans. Nobody cares if the planet is still here after we are gone.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 6y agoYou seem to focus a lot on fossil fuels. Have you reviewed the latest findings of the IPBES regarding the state of biodiversity? Fossil fuels and climate change are small factors when you consider all things. And the ongoing collpase of biodiversity is far more dangerous today than climate change.
- wildmanx 6y agoWrong forum. The overall consensus here is that everything can be solved with tech.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 6y agoPoor souls.
- Loughla 6y agoYou're ignoring the spirit of OP's statement, and your sort of weird argument always pops up in this kind of discussion. Yes, obviously, we won't blow the absolute planet up. Maybe animals and plants will survive past us in some fashion. Maybe, even if we all die, there will come a day when a new evolutionary tract brings a human-like thing back to the world. BUT the spirit is: >we are the only thing on the planet capable of causing the end of the world, such as it is. Meaning, we are the only thing on the planet capable of willingly causing our own extinction. This, for all intents and purposes, is the end of the world. World, again, in this context refers to humans and the human experiment. I don't get the argument that "oh, you mean the death of all humans, the planet will be fine". How is that better? We still all die.
- StanislavPetrov 6y ago>Humans are in fact, really good at playing god over long periods of time. Hundreds of millions of murdered and poisoned people would likely disagree with you, if they hadn't been murdered and poisoned by humans who were playing god.
- oceanplexian 6y agoLess than a century ago we had a nation-state that believed in Eugenics and actively murdered millions of people under the guise of advancing science. I find it a bit shocking that some people can gloss over that and that somehow we have changed as a species in less than 80 years.
- agogdog 6y agoserious question: has humanity produced any net gains for the environment or any not-human-centric ecosystem? To my knowledge the track record of things we've improved for humans will be much longer... so I'm not sure that's a great comparison to make here!
- swader999 6y agoEarth has greened considerably over the past few decades.
- NegativeLatency 6y agoCan you explain that?
- brabel 6y agohttps://thebarentsobserver.com/en/node/6423 https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/node/6423 "A new study reports continued climate-altering carbon emissions and intensive land use have inadvertently greened half of the Earth’s vegetated lands. Green leaves convert sunlight to sugars, thus providing food, fiber and fuel, while replacing carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air with water. The removal of heat-trapping CO2 and wetting of air cools the Earth’s surface. Global greening since the early 1980s may have thus reduced global warming, possibly by as much as 0.25oC, reports the study “Characteristics, drivers and feedbacks of global greening” published in the inaugural issue of the journal Nature Reviews Earth and Environment. Two of the authors, Dr. Jarle W. Bjerke and Dr. Hans Tømmervik works at Norwegian Institute for Nature Research at the Fram Centre in Tromsø, Norway."
- rcMgD2BwE72F 6y agoA little more green on the surface because we inject a crazy volume of CO2 into the atmosphere. One can also see some good signs when injective palliative drugs into a dying organism.
- EricE 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- 29athrowaway 6y agoRight now, the only thing we are really good at is accelerating our resource consumption at the expense of the destruction of the environment. Humans can get better at building better water pumps to extract water from acquifers faster, but we don't have the ability to put that water back. Once the acquifers run out of water, they're gone in a way they cannot sustain agriculture anymore. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjsThobgq7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjsThobgq7Q Humans can build better farm equipment to increase crop yield, but the stuff we grow our food in, topsoil (soil with microorganisms) will keep dying. Eventually, we will run out of it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PsOJQLxh8k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PsOJQLxh8k Humans can make faster and larger boats that can trap more fish and even process them and can them. But those boats won't put more fish in the sea. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V4D77N3bZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V4D77N3bZc Humans can improve medicine so that life expectancy goes up. But once we destroy the environment those people will not have a way to satisfy their basic needs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8x98KFcMJeo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8x98KFcMJeo As you can see, you are living an illusion. We are just becoming better at accelerating our own extinction. Plus, all of our economic activities have a carbon footprint. Greenhouse gasses increase atmospheric temperature, increasing the rate at which methane from arctic methane permafrost is released, which is itself a greenhouse gas that increases temperature, creating a self-reinforcing effect that will ruin the atmosphere pretty quickly. We are really good at turning the environment into money, but money itself won't solve your basic needs.
- pembrook 6y agoYou may be correct. However, human population will peak in the next couple of decades or so. Combine that with modest future technological advancements and we may easily reach an equilibrium. And even if not, absent humans ever existing, the destruction of all life on earth is still a statistical certainty due to the fragility of earth. So, thinking long term again, we're the only shot life as we know it has at outliving this place. We may destroy earth ourselves before then, but I think the will-they-or-won't-they technological race against time will be more entertaining than if we went back to hunter-gatherer society and waited a few million years for the next asteroid to inevitably end us, no?
- asd4232 6y agoHumans have been pretty good at improving their lives, but not so good at doing it sustainably. I'm not very impressed until we get the climate change under control and build an economy that isn't dependent on fossil fuels.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 6y agoAnd biodiversity collapse (see latest IPBES report) whose consequences will be far bigger and more imminent than the climate change and fossil fuels.
- wildmanx 6y ago> Humans are in fact, really good at playing god over long periods of time. That's some weird god who mostly cares about themselves.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoWhat? Have you read literally any religious texts? That's all the gods do care about if you judge them by their actions in fictional texts.