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Really enjoyed the read, even though I believe such vision of the future is impossible. We'll just return back to the iron age with the end of fossil fuels. Fo

Really enjoyed the read, even though I believe such vision of the future is impossible. We'll just return back to the iron age with the end of fossil fuels. For similar vibes I highly recommend my favorite of such speculations into deep future - The Next Ten Billion Years By John Michael Greer [0] And some encouraging quoutes: >100 years from now >Cornucopians still insist that fusion power, artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration will save us any day now, and their opponents still insist that human extinction is imminent, but most people are too busy trying to survive to listen to either group. >100 millions years from now >They are bipeds, but not even remotely human; instead, they belong to Earth’s third intelligent species. They are distantly descended from the crows of our time, though they look no more like crows than you look like the tree shrews of the middle Cretaceous [0]: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-09-05/the-next-ten-billion-years/ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-09-05/the-next-ten-b...

hansbo 4y ago
Reading things like this gives me chills. The idea that we as a species, and especially our lives as individuals, are such tiny specs in the timeline of the universe is obviously true but feels emotionally absurd.
- lloeki 4y ago
  > It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. - Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994 Full text, narrated by the man himself: https://youtu.be/wupToqz1e2g https://youtu.be/wupToqz1e2g From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. And another one, again narrated by Carl Sagan, kind of looping back to The Last Question: https://youtu.be/o9tDO3HK20Q https://youtu.be/o9tDO3HK20Q We were hunters and foragers. The frontier was everywhere. We were bounded only by the earth, and the ocean, and the sky. The open road still softly calls. Our little terraqueous globe is the madhouse of those hundred, thousands, millions of worlds. We who can not even put our own planetary home in order weaven with rivalries and hatreds; are we to venture into space? By the time we're ready to settle even the nearest other planetary system, we will have changed. The simple passage of so many generations will have changed us. Necessity will have changed us. We're an adaptable species It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths, and fewer of our weaknesses. More confident, farseeing, capable, and prudent. For all our failings, despite of our limitations and fallibilities we humans are capable of greatness. What new wonders, undreamt of in our time, we will have wrought in another generation? And another? How far will our nomadic species have wandered by the end of the next century? and the next millenium? Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds through the solar system and beyond will be unified by their common heritage, by the regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the universe come from Earth. They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of our potential once was. How perilous our infancy. How humble our beginnings. how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.
willis936 4y ago
Why bet against optimism? If you're right you and everyone else is better off. If you're wrong it doesn't matter because you and everyone else will be dead.
- Ambolia 4y ago
  A collapse can mean many things, not just that we will all die. It may just means that 80-90% of the population will have to work in food production.
- freiherr 4y ago
  That bet doesn't really have any high impact on my personal life. It's just what I consider the most likely scenario. Other than that I live in a normal pragmatic way as a programmer even though I don't believe the tech I work on is going to save the world or allow us to conquer the stars or whatever. And we're all gonna die eventually.
tristanho 4y ago
The very first prediction in this piece is wrong: > Business as usual continues; the human population peaks at 8.5 billion, liquid fuels production remains more or less level by the simple expedient of consuming an ever larger fraction of the world’s total energy output, See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consumption#/media/File:World_energy_mix.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum... But the entire piece is premised on mistaken philosophy, an irrational belief that progress has to stop for some particular (unjustified) reason.
- Ambolia 4y ago
  Lack of cheap energy seems like a very good reason. It remains to be proven if renewables snd nuclear will really be able to replace cheap oil when pish cones to shove, and parts of the overall process aren't supported by oil indirectly.
adrianN 4y ago
The iron age turned almost all trees into charcoal before we figured out how to make steel with fossil coal. But luckily today we know how to live without fossil fuels at a much higher level of comfort than the iron age.

hansbo 4y ago

Reading things like this gives me chills. The idea that we as a species, and especially our lives as individuals, are such tiny specs in the timeline of the universe is obviously true but feels emotionally absurd.

lloeki 4y ago
> It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. - Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994 Full text, narrated by the man himself: https://youtu.be/wupToqz1e2g https://youtu.be/wupToqz1e2g From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. And another one, again narrated by Carl Sagan, kind of looping back to The Last Question: https://youtu.be/o9tDO3HK20Q https://youtu.be/o9tDO3HK20Q We were hunters and foragers. The frontier was everywhere. We were bounded only by the earth, and the ocean, and the sky. The open road still softly calls. Our little terraqueous globe is the madhouse of those hundred, thousands, millions of worlds. We who can not even put our own planetary home in order weaven with rivalries and hatreds; are we to venture into space? By the time we're ready to settle even the nearest other planetary system, we will have changed. The simple passage of so many generations will have changed us. Necessity will have changed us. We're an adaptable species It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths, and fewer of our weaknesses. More confident, farseeing, capable, and prudent. For all our failings, despite of our limitations and fallibilities we humans are capable of greatness. What new wonders, undreamt of in our time, we will have wrought in another generation? And another? How far will our nomadic species have wandered by the end of the next century? and the next millenium? Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds through the solar system and beyond will be unified by their common heritage, by the regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the universe come from Earth. They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of our potential once was. How perilous our infancy. How humble our beginnings. how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.

willis936 4y ago

Why bet against optimism? If you're right you and everyone else is better off. If you're wrong it doesn't matter because you and everyone else will be dead.

Ambolia 4y ago
A collapse can mean many things, not just that we will all die. It may just means that 80-90% of the population will have to work in food production.
freiherr 4y ago
That bet doesn't really have any high impact on my personal life. It's just what I consider the most likely scenario. Other than that I live in a normal pragmatic way as a programmer even though I don't believe the tech I work on is going to save the world or allow us to conquer the stars or whatever. And we're all gonna die eventually.

tristanho 4y ago

The very first prediction in this piece is wrong: > Business as usual continues; the human population peaks at 8.5 billion, liquid fuels production remains more or less level by the simple expedient of consuming an ever larger fraction of the world’s total energy output, See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consumption#/media/File:World_energy_mix.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum... But the entire piece is premised on mistaken philosophy, an irrational belief that progress has to stop for some particular (unjustified) reason.

Ambolia 4y ago
Lack of cheap energy seems like a very good reason. It remains to be proven if renewables snd nuclear will really be able to replace cheap oil when pish cones to shove, and parts of the overall process aren't supported by oil indirectly.

adrianN 4y ago

The iron age turned almost all trees into charcoal before we figured out how to make steel with fossil coal. But luckily today we know how to live without fossil fuels at a much higher level of comfort than the iron age.