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Rime posted:Absolutely, any attempt at organized revolt against the money and power which is currently responsible for destroying the foundation of our very civilization is entirely fruitless. There is zero chance of success by any metric, and those involved will end up slaughtered / imprisoned while being resoundingly portrayed in the media as addled terrorists with nebulous agendas. Not even martyrdom for the greater good of humanity is a possibility at this stage. If humans were at all capable of such things, our current crop of petty dictators would already have been taken care of. So, basically: "Give up, we're all hosed, everything is useless, nothing matters." That's your advice?
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Apr 25, 2017 03:02
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ChairMaster posted:There's no right answer to that, some people give a poo poo about things outside humanity to different degrees. Some people care about the suffering of animals but think it's okay to kill and eat them humanely, some people think it's wrong in any form, some people don't care at all. It's not a question of science, it's philosophical. It's up to you to give a poo poo or not what happens to the planet when we're all dead. Well, even if you care about the existence of terrestrial biota more than you care about the wellbeing of humans, the existence of the human race should still be an instrumental goal in your value system, if not an ultimate goal. The reason for that is because Earthly life, barring the existence of humans, only has another 400 million - 1 billion years before the planet is cooked. But if humanity does exist and can thrive, prosper, invent superintelligent AI to colonize other planets, or whatever, we could secure the existence of Earthly life in the cosmos for billions or even trillions of years. It seems rather pointless to me to care about life without having some form of continuity plan (in the form of sentient life that can further our values and goals) in place.
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Feb 25, 2018 01:12
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Evil_Greven posted:Shore is a very long way off, and the falls are ever approaching: I know this is pretty off-topic, but I think that's a beautiful image, and initially mistook it for an album cover. It could totally be an album cover, guys!
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Feb 26, 2018 02:50
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ChairMaster posted:The planet's got an expiry date of a few hundred million years when the sun gets too hot for photosynthesis to work. Whether or not another intelligent species could do as well or better than we did is not an easy question to answer, seeing as we don't have anything to compare it to other than ourselves. It's unlikely that they'd have much of a fossil fuel reserve to jump off of, so who knows? Also, who cares? That's just science fiction distraction from real life. It's not important and never will be unless some alien species shows up some time soon and saves the world, but I'm not counting on it. Also we're probably not going to go extinct anyways, it's unlikely. I don't think that speculating about the nature of the Great Filter is a science fiction distraction from real life. In fact, I think it might be one of the greatest and most important philosophical questions of our present age. Please bear in mind that I'm not a frequent poster on D&D, just a compulsive lurker. I'm sorry if I may sound naive, but the views that I'm about to write are formed in response to the sentiments of most people who discuss politics here. I don't mean to claim that I have all the answers, or that my thoughts are the correct ones. But I think that recent events in politics have really informed a realignment of my thoughts, and I want to share them. It's a thought that has been forming in my mind for a while now. I'm just going to use your post as a launching-point. It takes the form of promoting a fundamental realignment of our priorities, and is informed by a perspective on time -- Deep Time -- that I picked up in my undergraduate years studying Earth and Planetary Science. It's this: I think we occupy a unique position in the history of our planet. We're the first sentient species that has been able to develop a kind of "perfect recipe" for creating a civilization that can extend beyond the boundaries of our survival framework. We developed metacognition, tool use, cooperative group behavior (eusociality) and language, which allowed a kind of positive-feedback cycle that brought us to the point where we find ourselves today. Many other species have some of the characteristics, but not all of them. Corvids, chimpanzees, dolphins, and elephants will never be able to understand that the world will someday be unable to support life, and cannot reorient their behavior towards the long-term survival of all earthly species. We can. This means that, uniquely, humans are capable -- if we can muster the political will -- of acting to protect not just our own existence, but the existence of multicellular life in the cosmos. The long-term unsustainability of the planet Earth's ecosystem vanishes before the possibility of a technological civilization capable of perpetuating it outside of the terrestrial gravity well. Let's look at it from a risk-management perspective. What we need to do is reorient our thinking towards the management of existential risks. Why? Because we cannot be assured that in the future a species will evolve that will have all the characteristics that we do. Logically, if we value the continued existence of life in the cosmos, we should therefore value our own existence. Along the same lines, we can't be assured that, should a major civilizational catastrophe bring down our present global civilization, a future human civilization will ever reach our present level of technological development. So one must conclude that we ought to value the state of our present global civilization and its technological, cultural, and philosophical endowment as well. All this is to say that I think that we should promote the philosophical value of perpetuating a future for multicellular life as long as thermodynamic potential gradients in the universe make it possible. If we realign our perspective to encompass the broad goal of life's continued existence as being the highest priority, I think that most of our most cherished progressive moral goals could easily be justified under the broader philosophy. Anyway, sorry to ramble, but I just wanted to get my thought out there, and I didn't know of a better thread to put it in, and was afraid of starting a new one entirely. 
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Oct 9, 2018 00:20
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I majored in atmospheric science in my undergraduate days, where I learned about the Carbonate-Silicate cycle and how CO2 gets removed from the atmosphere long-term. Anyway, the other day I was sort of idly pondering, and came up with an idea for carbon capture. I'll throw it out there, as I'm wondering if folks more knowledgeable than I have already pondered and dismissed it as impracticable or unworkable. My idea is -- what if we could grind up a huge amount of silicate rock into small pebbles or sand, and put them into rotating hoppers or drums of some kind. These rocks would be constantly washed by aerated water droplets, mimicking the natural action of rain forming carbonic acid in the atmosphere. You could power the drums with renewables or nuclear power or what have you. Construct thousands of such devices across the world, in great big "farms". The idea behind this lies basically in accelerating a natural process, by increasing the surface area of the reactant, and by ensuring that the reaction is constantly happening. Would it work? Or would it still be too slow for what we need?
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Nov 16, 2018 16:00
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