4 ms·

I doubt that having children answers the big existential questions anymore, if the planet is probably going on fire during the lifetime of the next generation.

• bowsamic 3y ago
  That’s a good point and is a reason why I think it’s no longer true. Is the suggestion that when I have children I will not worry about their fate? I’m existentially worried about my own fate due to climate change (will economy explode in 20 or 40 years?) This, along with the stress of no family support and wife working, is the main pressure to not have kids for me
• doublepg23 3y ago
  What would've happened to humanity if we had that same outlook during every hardship that faced them?
  • chowells 3y ago
    Why is humanity important?
    • anonzzzies 3y ago
      It’s a question I would like to ask Musk; some of his words and actions say humanity is the most important thing there is and the rest that comes out of him say he doesn’t actually care. I wonder which it is. But humanity is a blib on a tiny ball. Easily missed (well, incredibly hard to spot) in our own quadrant of the galaxy.
      • card_zero 3y ago
        Size is irrelevant, a cow is much larger than you, but you are important.
        • anonzzzies 3y ago
          By what definition? And to whom? To me? Surely not to you?
          • card_zero 3y ago
            "Humanity is a blib on a tiny ball, easily missed" echoes this exert from Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot", which I will now fisk: https://www.planetary.org/worlds/pale-blue-dot https://www.planetary.org/worlds/pale-blue-dot Here he makes an emotive argument based on the completely unsurprising fact that our planet, when seen from a very long way away, looks very small. The meaning of the text is somewhat ambiguous. I think it's about 88% crap. > every human being who ever was [... blah blah blah ...] 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. What exactly is he saying by putting "superstar" and "supreme leader" in quotes there? > The Earth is ... very small Yeah, so what. What's the relevance of this observation about distances? Does it have some bearing on important people? Is empty space more important than superstars and supreme leaders, just because there's a lot of it? Granted those people are generally awful, but the explorers and inventors (who didn't get scare quotes, but are spoken of in the same breath) are, I think, worth more than vacuum. > Think of the endless cruelties ... how fervent their hatreds. Sure. But in comparison, think of all the things cold empty vacuum doesn't do, because it can't, on account of it being nothingness. > Our posturings, our imagined self-importance Look, shut up, Carl, you're beginning to annoy me. If people want to posture as more important than 6 billion kilometers of nothingness, I have no problem accepting that. A movie star may be a jerk, but I still rate a celebrity higher than a distance. > the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe I mean, "privilege" doesn't really come into it, there's nobody arbitrating this. But in so far as anything matters, we matter. For a start, we are matter, which is more than can be said for mere space. > point of pale light ... lonely speck ... great enveloping cosmic dark ... obscurity ... vastness STFU, Carl. Stop boggling your mind just because sizes are big. Yes, it's called "measurement", you should be used to it by now. Exactly what point are you making? > 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. See, this is a good point. This paragraph is the only good one in the whole passage, and it deviates somewhat from the rest of it. Here he's telling us to be careful about life-preserving properties of the planet, and, in due course, to colonize the solar system so that we don't have all our eggs in one basket. But everywhere else he's just saying "yah, you're all a bunch of poopy stuck-up big-heads, think you're important, but I got a photo taken from 6 billion kilometers away so that beats anything you can do". But it doesn't. > ... the folly of human conceits ... One interpretation is that he's saying that conceited people, leaders and so on, are dangerous, and might wreck the joint due to not considering the "there is nowhere else" fact. I can go along with that. But this is mixed up with a general idea of "human hubris" (compared to who or what other, more humble beings?) and a bombastic, tedious assertion that we just don't matter because we aren't extremely large. > 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. I mean, OK. But everybody subsequently has picked up this ball and dunked it into a net marked "humans are terrible", and that's not correct. Humans and their material culture are the only interesting thing we know of, really, in terms of physical objects. Humans and life on Earth, but mostly humans, and definitely not balls of gas or space rocks, or mere space, because there's no knowledge out there that we know of.
    • card_zero 3y ago
      Well, you know, values. What are your values? Whatever they are, probably humanity ticks a lot of the boxes, which are probably not ticked by tapeworms or wombats (even) or icy rocks floating in space. Or maybe you just have one core value, like knowledge: it's still humanity that's best equipped to sustain or further it (until we get deprecated maybe). Or maybe you don't have any values, in which case, fair enough, good point, fuck it.
  • john61 3y ago
    One of the hardship nowadays is that there are too many people. Therefore having children contributes to extinction of humanity.