It keeps blowing past already dire estimates. Even our scientists no greedy fuck sociopath with power actually listens to understandably keeps underestimating the breadth and depth of what our reckless, thoughtless growth is doing to our only fishbowl.
It couldn’t be any clearer that our species has absolutely no idea what we’re doing, and is overtly hostile to voices of reason calling for homeostasis/equilibrium over proudly reckless growth/metastasis on a finite world.
Honestly, I think this may be one of those great filters that explain why the galaxy isn’t teeming with the signals of advanced civilizations. A species gets just barely smart enough to devise technological conveniences, but is still too bone dead stooooopid to even consider heeding the potential ecological consequences of their use/overuse of those technologies on the habitat they’re wholly dependant on. Hi, we’re humanity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
https://youtu.be/UjtOGPJ0URM?si=R3BoMou_zOXgeIf3
As someone who loves the messages and hope of Star Trek, it’s become abundantly clear to me that, in our current form, we’re never going to spread meaningfully off this rock. We couldn’t even stop fucking up the ONLY optimal, friendly habitat in the cosmos that we will ever know. One that only requires “stop being greedy fucks and stop shitting where you sleep.”
Yeah, we’re going to establish multigenerational colonies of dozens/hundreds on worlds where a single meaningful fuckup means everybody dies instantly. /s Have you met us?
Was looking for the line where they say “it won’t” but it never came 😅
“The world as we know it” has already ended as a result of climate change. Every year is record weather events. No matter what we do, the next 50 years will be devastating. We as a species will probably survive, but without some drastic actions right now, we are already doomed to struggle for a long while. It was never promised that the end of the world would come in an instant. We will slowly raise global temperatures, melt ice, raise seas, worsen storms, alter habitats beyond what their inhabitants can withstand. We’ll contaminate water and air. Ocean pH will plummet, killing a substantial amount of marine life. Plants will struggle to grow which will impact our food and our food’s food. Mass migration of most animals (including humans) will cause scarcity wherever they flee to. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see wars fought over drinkable water by 2050. We will see global economic collapse and desperate, opportunistic warfare. Human population will crest and fall; this is the beginning of the planet finally starting the healing process, but it will take probably 100 years or more to feel that because of such momentum.
I’m not sure that “the world will end during my lifetime” but I’m sure that I’m not evil enough to bring a child into this world right now just for them to suffer and starve and fight a futile fight. Humans had a pretty okay run up until industrialization and capitalism started systematically rewarding the worst behaviors.
It was wonderful. For a brief time, we generated a lot of value for the shareholders.
“The planet is fine. The people are fucked.”
Climate change will directly kill some people due to heat. Far more deaths will come from fights and wars and from lack of food and water.
It’s almost like “the people” are part of what people mean when they talk about “saving the planet”
It’s almost entirely what they mean, if not completely.
Humans largely don’t give a shit about the planet, only themselves, despite having the capacity to be better. To me, that almost makes what we are reaping eyes wide open, after eviscerating entire ecosystems (and other humans who lacked net worth or a flag, especially the ones whose culture lived in sustainable harmony with nature, they had to die) to build strip malls to feed our beloved sociopath’s greed disease feel fair to me.
Oh woe is us! The droughts, the hurricanes, the famines, what did we do to this planet to deserve this?! Fuck them animals we’re taking out with us by the way, the ones we didn’t already drive to extinction bulldozing the rainforest and the like, but oh woe is us!