frumpykvetchbot posted:

Maybe we're serving as sort of a textbook example of how the Great Filter works in practice.

The only species and cultures among species embracing tool usage to the point where they figure out electromagnetics and combustion engines, will also have something inherently wrong with their brains; they'll be greedy and short-sighted and bereft of caution; they'll have sort of a dunning-kruger effect going that convinces them of their cleverness while denying them wisdom and perspective to know what a loving colossally stupid idea it is to gently caress up the entire planet for a few hundred years of excess.

All these doomed species tinkering with pandora's boxes know is they're cleverer than the next-cleverest things around them. They'll give themselves self-flattering taxonomic labels like "reasoning starfish" or "sapient apes" to set themselves over all other forms of life on their planet, as moral underpinning for the savage mechanized consumption frenzy leading to the inevitable extinction event. These blips only last for very little time in geologic terms, and so all you're left with is interesting strata smudges and maybe a few faint electromagnetic echoes slowly propagating across the galaxy, signifying absolutely nothing and without the faintest chance of detection in any of the other blips because they happen so infrequently and last for so little time each.

naem posted:

nothing left of humanity but a spurt of 4g Verizon satellite dick pics from 2013, echoing across the galaxy

Jack Trades posted:

Why do you think all the rich people are so loving eager to leave the earth in the dick shaped space rockets lately?

Vegetable posted:

What's really stopping us from building a massive loving glass dome and just keeping ourselves cool with a big AC

frumpykvetchbot posted:

SilvergunSuperman posted:

Does this goo-math check out?

frumpykvetchbot posted:

Cosmik Slop posted:

My working theory is a sort of modified Gaia theory. The planet, aware that its long-term chances for survival are nil due to inevitable solar expansion, rolled the dice on the production of a species that would someday possibly be capable of interplanetary survival. There was also the chance that the sentient species would screw the pooch and bring life as we know it to ruin, but since planetary death would be occurring *anyway*, it was better to roll the dice and see. Time will tell if the Earth gets another shot at this plan after the moronic thinking apes are finished cooking themselves and everything they have.

Sentinel posted:

The biggest we're hosed must be even if all 7-8 billion of us all died or hosed off right now there's still what? 150-250 years before the system begins to visibly right itself?
Just 2-4 Gens living a brighter future underground in Vaults that definitely don't even remotely technologically exist.
We might be hosed but were dragging every gorgeous godamn creation the bizarre riot of life graced our world with. And all 4 billion years of its history.

All for Air Conditioning, Gasoline and any plastic we've ever touched.
I hate it. I hate how most of my interaction with humanity at large always feels like you're the smart kid on the group project stuck doing all the work because everyone else is too dumb and yolo's out.
Sorry SA but this is why i drink at night.

Brutal Garcon posted:

The current climate fuckling is not plausibly going to kill all, or even a majority of, humans, and it's definitely not going to wipe out all life on Earth. It's a real problem, a real big, important problem, but don't lie about it. Also plastic's a different problem.

Anyway, solutions. Renewables are nice, but other than geothermal (which isn't practical in most places) they're too intermittent to be our only source of power. Energy storage could fix this, but a) there aren't enough places for pumped hydro on Earth, and they have their own environmental problems b.i) we don't have enough battery manufacturing capacity to do it that way within a few decades and b.ii) with current tech that would involve strip-mining a bunch of places for however many billion tonnes of rare metals that would need.

Luckily, there's a way of producing power that needs fewer mined resources per joule (by a couple of orders of magnitude) than fossil fuels, produces no greenhouse gases at all, and has a safety record comparable with solar power. But hippies are more afraid of neutrons than mass extinctions.

Khanstant posted:

suns gonna swaller up this dumb rock in 5 billion years, nothing that happens here matters