is it possible to be truly optimistic after ~10k years of human history?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > is it possible to be truly optimistic after ~10k years of human history?

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

OwlFancier posted:

Probably the one before the nuclear war or climate change induced worldwide crop failure or both.

Yeah, the primary issue with the "but this is the best time to be alive ever!" nonsense is that the modern socio-economic/geopolitical landscape now operates on extreme Quidditch rules: running up the score on human rights, clean energy, and less wars will have amounted to jack poo poo once the Golden Snitch of runaway climate change and/or nuclear holocaust is grabbed. Maybe also if some sci-fi silliness like a global sterility plague like Children of Men happens, but that's of course super unlikely especially compared to the first two scenarios.

Point is, if we get "blown back to the stone age", we're probably not ever going to be able to get back anywhere near the current industrial-digital golden age we currently enjoy, simply because the resources we needed to get here won't exist anymore because we exhausted most of them the first go round. Thus, humanity won't die out, but will instead limp along in a permanent lovely pre-industrial feudal state until the planet literally becomes incapable of sustaining human life in the far, far future.

I suppose you could take comfort in that idea, but that level of eternal inescapable suffering makes me believe "out with a bang" total extinction would be the kinder outcome of the collapse, personally.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2018 00:58

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 16:50

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

I find it darkly amusing the longer we go without ending our global civilization, the worse we actually make it if we really do end up pushing the button, simply because we're more and more extracting (and wasting) finite resources, and entrusting more and more of our hard copy knowledge to increasingly fragile and short-lived mediums that require increasingly specialized and sophisticated tools to even read as time goes on.

Icarus seems more and more apt with each passing year.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2018 01:39

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

What are my winnings if I wager on pessimism instead? I'd like to know all the payout possibilities before committing to my bet.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2018 20:55

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

glowing-fish posted:

So far, am I the only person to notice one problem with the original post, even with the post title?

What does 10,000 years of human history mean? If you take "history" to mean "written history", then its too much, because I think the general consensus on that is somewhere around 6,000 years, maybe a bit longer for proto-writing. If you are looking at urbanization or agriculture, then probably 10-15,000 years is a good estimate. But people are much older than that: modern humans are 100-250,000 years old.

We don't have a lot of evidence for what human's were like before the beginning of writing and a consistent archaeological record, but the date of when different technological advances were first recorded keeps on getting pushed back. There is no particular reason to doubt that people of a quarter million years ago, or 100,000 years ago, had the same sort of complicated cultures and ideas about the world as we do. I mean, yes, obviously without written language and permanent structures, and the populations of urbanization, people were different, but they were still people. And the fact that we are all here is evidence of this: the way that hunter-gatherers emmigrated out of Africa means they weren't just wandering around looking for the next berry bushes. Take the emmigration to Australia, for example: as far back as 60,000 years ago, people had enough social cohesion, and enough technology (in the form of boats able to cross the ocean) to settle Australia. There might be some discussions about the archaeological record, but humans have been doing things proactively and adjusting to change easily 10 times as long as the time between now and the building of the first pyramid. There has been climate change and population bottlenecks before.

If anything, knowing how long people have been around, and how much we have already adjusted, makes me feel a lot more optimistic.

Given how brutish, short, dim and miserable such an existence was, the prospect of humanity having to make a permanent return to that way of life I personally consider horrifying rather than uplifting.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2018 05:24

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

God, I really would really like modern media to stop romanticizing pre-industrial and post-apocalyptic societies. We need more Threads these days, and less Fallouts. If we really want people to make the effort to right society away from its current self-destructive path, then maybe we should stop giving them reasons to think life after electricity and penicillin might not be so bad for them.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2018 05:44

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

I mean, everyone is obviously still miserable, but significantly, measurably less so than centuries past. That just means there's always going to be room for improvement, not that our spear-poking ancestors had some secret to happiness and well-being that's been lost with our Enlightened understanding of the world. Hell is having tasted the fruit of Paradise, and knowing you'll never get to taste it again, after all.

We have one chance to make this Industrial-Digital Enlightened Human Civilization experiment a lasting thing, and we're squandering it. The notion that our past is condemned to be our future, and the realization that there's realistically nothing that any of us can do to stop it at this point was my final push into full-on :matters:

nihilism, on a societal level at least.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2018 06:38

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

Except those effects of climate change also ratchet up tensions and make the possibility of nuclear war more and more likely with each new conflict, especially since the situation with North Korea over the past few years have all but put a stake in the heart of non-proliferation as a realistic aspiration for nation states and currently nuke-less powers start the arms race again to have their own seat at the big boys' table like NK has achieved.

Not to mention the direction of the much lauded tech industry products is so far geared to entrench the interests of the rich and powerful, and mass microtarget individuals to strangle actual threatening movements to the elite in their crib. When it's not used to simply inflame divisions anyway, of course.

It's not just this or that particular situation in a vacuum that will doom our civilization, it's the comorbidity of several seemingly unrelated crises that I don't think we can truly correct in time for that will be our collective downfall.

Kerning Chameleon fucked around with this message at 14:22 on Sep 8, 2018

# ¿ Sep 8, 2018 14:16

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

On the other hand people have been claiming the end is near for thousands of years and have been consistently wrong every single time.

OwlFancier posted:

Well, no the end absolutely did happen for a shitload of people, arguably almost everyone, throughout history.

Yes, the European Invasion was definitely not the end for Native Americans. I mean sure, 90%+ of their population was wiped out, their culture annihilated, their former homes ransacked and paved over for resource starved colonists, and the "lucky" survivors got to become ethnic miniorities in their own drat homes... but lighten up guys, at least it wasn't the end for the entire human race, right?

Or the Black Plague. Sure, it brought the continent closer to actual extinction than even the world wars, and stunted any hope of social or educated progress for a whole century... but hey, they bounced back right as rain once they found a couple of continents' worth of near totally untapped resources, right?

Or the original loss of the Golden Age, the Bronze Age Collapse. Sure, a dynamic and cosmopolitan pan-Mediterranean civilization, full of sophisticated trade and vibrant culture, was so thoroughly snuffed out we don't even have enough surviving records to say what the gently caress even actually happened beyond wild educated guesses. And sure, the Mediterranean basically went through their equivalent of the dark ages for several centuries before civilization could really arise again. And yeah, that's because nobody could make bronze anymore and it took that long for people to be able to find and utilize iron instead. But hey, it's not like that much science, culture, and philosophy could have been lost, right?

We have never before the last century had the power to depopulate the entire globe, either all at once or gradually, and there is no iron equivalent of oil and coal we could hop over to when those run out in a setback society.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2018 16:45

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

Mulva posted:

They make pills for what is wrong with you, you know that right?

e: Like that's not so much a personal attack as it is the only reality I know how to respond to here. "Well obviously I see everything in the most miserable light, even when I actively have to re-frame reality to fit my downer worldview, but maybe the problem is everything else", said nobody without chemical problems, ever. At a certain point maybe you aren't pessimistic, maybe you are just broken.

My apologies for, after years of trying to live the delusion, I can finally clearly see and, more importantly, accept the world as actually it is, not as the desperate try to lie to me and themselves about how they wish it was.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2018 22:45

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

Mulva posted:

The counter-point is that nothing you are saying is useful or productive to a society or a person. So....why care about your viewpoint?

Like lets say everyone thought like you, what would you imagine is step two of this process?

I mean, my personal step 2 is "stop throwing your short life and limited resources away on lost causes and focus on living your own life best you can". Which in my case is just refocusing my efforts on projects to better myself and my immediate family's security and comfort but would provide little if any benefit to other people beyond that.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2018 00:24

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 16:50

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

Mulva posted:

Nothing you've said delineates that or provides the tool to measure it, but it's absolutely the viewpoint of people that don't care about the distinction in the first place.

So what you are saying is that the people that think like you and try to be productive are less effective than the people that think like you and are selfish?

I mean combine that with the only other person in this thread that champions a viewpoint somewhat like you just actively admitting to giving up on change and I stand by my original statement: There's nothing useful for society in that viewpoint.

I'd rather be correct and die miserable and impotent, than to live on believing in and laboring under the lie of false hope. I consider knowing and accepting the truth more important than anything, even mutual survival or happiness, no matter how painful or despair-inducing it may be. To do otherwise would go against everything I believe in.

If that kind of thinking is what ultimately results in the self-destruction of human society, then so be it.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2018 01:15

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > is it possible to be truly optimistic after ~10k years of human history?