A little bet.ter all the time (can’t get noo worse)🎶
I’ve seen this argument so many time… It’s not going downhill, we are just getting older, we understand the problems of the world better, we are more informed, we watch the news and we start to have that nostalgia feeling that it was better before. It was not ! The world is getting better for so many metrics, sure there are issues, there always has been, it’s not perfect. Sure there are localized places where it’s temporarily getting worse ( the US might currently be living through a rough time, but it will pass).
Overall, it’s getting better all the time. We are currently living the best time in history so far. Millions of new stuff to discover, infinite access to the cumulated knowledge of mankind. More democratic country than ever, famine is getting down overall, health is getting better too. Poverty is decreasing too.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t do anything to try and make it even better, we definitely should do everything we can, there is still a lot to do to make it the best world possible. But please stop with this constant whining about the past. It was not better, you simply didn’t know any better in the past, and your memory of the past is tainted because your brains actively choose to erase bad stuff and only remember good stuff (this is a real human brain unconscious behaviour, look it up).
We’re running out of water for agriculture. The zoomers may be middle aged, and the alphas, adults, when the climate crisis fully catches up with us. And if the human species is lucky, it’ll happen first in the US or Russia or one of the old-guard powers, and the new order can use their renewable energy surplus to create new desalinization technology.
But current estimates (by those few climatologists willing to say other than it’s going to get very bad. ) estimate the upper limit of the sustainability projections are a global population of about a billion people, if the international community chose to act today on all fronts. (Obviously that’s not happening in the US, or in autocratic regimes, who imagine – falsely – they can create a self-sustaining colony on Mars – we’re a century or more from that).
That is a best case scenario unless we discover some miracle technology.
All other scenarios get worse than that, from a population in the hundreds of millions to human extinction. There is a ray of hope near the bottom, since Homo Erectus had at least one period of tens of thousands of years with a population under 10K before they would populate the world again, until they were out-competed by other hominids (e.g. us. Homo Sapiens). So we might have a tiny society that survives for an eon, but don’t expect any culture (from wet burritos to Beethoven’s Fifth to the 道德經) to survive. And a fuckton of science will have to be rediscovered.
So seriously bad shit for all of Human society is, at this point, for all intents and purposes, inevitable.
🎶It’s get.ting bet.ter all the ti-i-ime
I have to admit. it’s getting bet.ter
A little bet.ter all the time (can’t get noo worse)🎶
I’ve seen this argument so many time… It’s not going downhill, we are just getting older, we understand the problems of the world better, we are more informed, we watch the news and we start to have that nostalgia feeling that it was better before. It was not ! The world is getting better for so many metrics, sure there are issues, there always has been, it’s not perfect. Sure there are localized places where it’s temporarily getting worse ( the US might currently be living through a rough time, but it will pass).
Overall, it’s getting better all the time. We are currently living the best time in history so far. Millions of new stuff to discover, infinite access to the cumulated knowledge of mankind. More democratic country than ever, famine is getting down overall, health is getting better too. Poverty is decreasing too.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t do anything to try and make it even better, we definitely should do everything we can, there is still a lot to do to make it the best world possible. But please stop with this constant whining about the past. It was not better, you simply didn’t know any better in the past, and your memory of the past is tainted because your brains actively choose to erase bad stuff and only remember good stuff (this is a real human brain unconscious behaviour, look it up).
We’re running out of water for agriculture. The zoomers may be middle aged, and the alphas, adults, when the climate crisis fully catches up with us. And if the human species is lucky, it’ll happen first in the US or Russia or one of the old-guard powers, and the new order can use their renewable energy surplus to create new desalinization technology.
But current estimates (by those few climatologists willing to say other than it’s going to get very bad. ) estimate the upper limit of the sustainability projections are a global population of about a billion people, if the international community chose to act today on all fronts. (Obviously that’s not happening in the US, or in autocratic regimes, who imagine – falsely – they can create a self-sustaining colony on Mars – we’re a century or more from that).
That is a best case scenario unless we discover some miracle technology.
All other scenarios get worse than that, from a population in the hundreds of millions to human extinction. There is a ray of hope near the bottom, since Homo Erectus had at least one period of tens of thousands of years with a population under 10K before they would populate the world again, until they were out-competed by other hominids (e.g. us. Homo Sapiens). So we might have a tiny society that survives for an eon, but don’t expect any culture (from wet burritos to Beethoven’s Fifth to the 道德經) to survive. And a fuckton of science will have to be rediscovered.
So seriously bad shit for all of Human society is, at this point, for all intents and purposes, inevitable.