Are we haggling over the wrong things?

Sometimes I really wish this forum were moderated...how does such an informative, intellectual discourse also have comments about roundabouts in MT and US corn yields since 1860?
 
Sometimes I really wish this forum were moderated...how does such an informative, intellectual discourse also have comments about roundabouts in MT and US corn yields since 1860?
Because WTF are we actually going to do about it?

Nothing. We're going to do nothing about it.

We can't even agree to have basic land zoning laws for the betterment of all (including wildlife), how in F are we going to do anything about population control?

It was a great article, but it's sort of irrelevant.
 
Not a chance you will get the the majority of the population to agree to population control lol. Look how that worked out for the nazis.

I dont know the answers here but nuturing and selectively breeding humans to control population is not the answer. Just asking for problems. Eventually we expand beyond this planet, Probably not in our lifetimes but eventually it will happen. Or we turn into that planet in starwars that is just one giant city.
 
Not a chance you will get the the majority of the population to agree to population control lol. Look how that worked out for the nazis.

I dont know the answers here but nuturing and selectively breeding humans to control population is not the answer. Just asking for problems. Eventually we expand beyond this planet, Probably not in our lifetimes but eventually it will happen. Or we turn into that planet in starwars that is just one giant city.
Neither of those are likely outcomes. We all die from a real pandemic of an actually deadly disease, everyone you love and care about dies and you die, or someone decides to use a nuke again and (again) we all die.

All being relative, probably not quite all. But those that remain may wish they had.
 
Not a chance you will get the the majority of the population to agree to population control lol. Look how that worked out for the nazis.

I dont know the answers here but nuturing and selectively breeding humans to control population is not the answer. Just asking for problems. Eventually we expand beyond this planet, Probably not in our lifetimes but eventually it will happen. Or we turn into that planet in starwars that is just one giant city.
What if we made it random? Or what if we just institute "Logan's Run" rules. (google it for those who are still in their diapers and have not yet seen this movie).
 
Neither of those are likely outcomes. We all die from a real pandemic of an actually deadly disease, everyone you love and care about dies and you die, or someone decides to use a nuke again and (again) we all die.

All being relative, probably not quite all. But those that remain may wish they had.
I mean, the whole thing was pretty unlikely from the start.
This is a pretty cool feel good story I’ve been binging the past few of days since I realized I didn’t know the revolutionary war from thanksgiving.




 
I enjoy the posts and have many of the same thoughts as others. I appreciate those who can articulate it much better than I. But even if we solve the population issue, colonize other solar systems, build intergalactic spaceships, etc. etc., we will still have to deal with the inevitable heat death of the universe.


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What if we made it random? Or what if we just institute "Logan's Run" rules. (google it for those who are still in their diapers and have not yet seen this movie).

Random is no good. What you need is a vendor who creates a waiting room that you can log into at 9:30 a.m, then assigns survival numbers at 10 a.m. for everyone. The system will inevitably crash due to anticipated demand though.
 
I enjoy the posts and have many of the same thoughts as others. I appreciate those who can articulate it much better than I. But even if we solve the population issue, colonize other solar systems, build intergalactic spaceships, etc. etc., we will still have to deal with the inevitable heat death of the universe.


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According to this very interesting article, once we reach the heat death of the universe, time will also stop because it will just be an even randomness of moving particles.


 
According to this very interesting article, once we reach the heat death of the universe, time will also stop because it will just be an even randomness of moving particles.


Right, but that's LONG after our sun explodes. That just ends us, and our solar system.
 
Right, but that's LONG after our sun explodes. That just ends us, and our solar system.
If humans are still around by the time our sun explodes (a billion or so years from now), we will almost certainly have the ability to leave our solar system, terra form planets, create worm holes, download our minds into a more secure form, etc. In the ultra long run, humans may be animals best hope.
 
A lot of these conversations sure sound like angst over the fact that we’re all gonna die someday - just extrapolated to a larger scale. The strangest part, as I wrote earlier, is some seem to roister in that fact. Whether it’s guilt-as-fetish or Larping only time will tell.

I am more interested in timelines. We should strive to address things based on a combination of what is more likely to happen first and what is more likely to have the largest impact. I Think we should also be interested in predictions and checking them against reality as time progresses. Telling us that someday something is going to happen isn’t particularly meaningful to most, and the urgency will likely never come as the things we are whinging about here - overpopulation- will have these devastating results in particular places on earth first and be localized and not, at least initially, planet wide. We are both clueless and brilliant and there are still oceans between us, though we do all rely on the same imperiled oceans

Solar flares, asteroids, pandemics, AGI, nukes, climate change, overpopulation, Yellowstone going off, etc - all seem to be legitimate risks to humanity.

Of that list, some aren’t particularly predictable, but most could be better prepared for. This is where I insert my own weird. For the last few days I’ve been fiddling around with and reading about ChatGPT AI bot. Just a little better, and The Implications feel insane, and seem to be the precursor to something like an incredibly immediate threshold, and move AGI or whatever this technology becomes to the front of the line of shit we should worry about. Talk to or read from those folks whose expertise it is though, and they sound religious, and maybe it is - another common thread with all of these “enders” and their experts. And that’s not to say they’re wrong.


There’s a lot of commenters on here smarter than me, and I’ve gone off the rails from the initial issue of overpopulation, to some thing I think is more pressing - that being this incessant nihilism all of these problems can seduce us with. If we even have a slight chance of navigating some of these things, this sort of defeatism will be the only thing that necessarily guarantees our defeat.

Or, maybe it’s as simple and childish as the fact that most folks are capable of enjoying movies that end. And all movies end, so don’t interrupt my flick with a proclamation that the credits are going to run soon. Could be that too.
 
An aspect of this that I think is really interesting is how recently in the past essentially all of humanity was struggling to survive. Living to adulthood is presently an expectation for a large proportion of the globe. The cultural impact of generation upon generation clawing just to essentially live long enough to reproduce is colossal.
 
If humans are still around by the time our sun explodes (a billion or so years from now), we will almost certainly have the ability to leave our solar system, terra form planets, create worm holes, download our minds into a more secure form, etc. In the ultra long run, humans may be animals best hope.
Uh oh BooBoo. NASA thinks otherwise 😳

 
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