Existential and Global Catastrophic Risk

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A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

First of all, this thread takes me back. It's like a 2014 D&D thread or something. :v:

Like, it actually asks the reader to consider things from a more meta/philosophical perspective.

DrSunshine posted:

It's important not to imagine some kind of climate switch flipping in a year, resulting in a tide of billions of brown people -- I would imagine this is what right-wing ecofascists might picture. Instead, the answer is probably more prosaic. There would probably be some form of large, international cooperation to build and accommodate an influx of refugees, at the same time as international aid to focus on building and making robust systems to adapt within those affected areas. It's not something that will be done immediately, like a giant airlift, but a gradual emigration over several decades.

This seems... optimistic. Europe was brought to a breaking point when about 300k refugees arrived, and "Let them drown in the Med" is gonna be the majority opinion next time around if it isn't already. Compared to that, even a gradual emigration of the likely number of refugees is gonna seem like a flood. Frankly, I'd be surprised if Europe could deal with internal refugees alone without the EU breaking down, and those are gonna be far fewer in number and not as obviously foreign. The most likely compromise is gonna be maintaining freedom of movement internally in return for the EU army to expand into the most well-armed border patrol force the world has ever seen. Likely funded by completely withdrawing foreign aid.

Of course, it's not like Europe (or America) is the sole source of progress and competence, the response to the COVID pandemic indicates about the opposite. Europe can't even deal with a recession, it's not surprising it's loving up the response to coronavirus too. I guess what I'm getting at is; it's good that a lot of non-Western governments are relatively competent and serious, because the countries best situated from a purely climatic perspective are basket cases, completely unable to comprehend the idea of any sort of large-scale risk. Like, if you put that diagram/graph from the OP in front of a bunch of Western politicians I'm not sure most of them would even understand it, or be able to add additional issues to it, like their world view was essentially post-catastrophic threat. Or the existential risks would be poo poo like universal healthcare and taxes.

# ¿ Oct 17, 2020 16:01

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 08:15

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

DrSunshine posted:

Well, bootmanj did write "So if we get climate change right as a species" so I took that as a cue to take the speculation in an optimistic route. I understood that as meaning "Assuming we make the changes necessary to mitigate civilization-level risk from climate change, what are the kinds of changes that might need to be made to adapt to a future environment where many presently-inhabited areas become uninhabitable?"

I still hold out hope that large-scale systemic changes (eg revolution) are possible to make the paradigm-shifts required to undertake civilizational risk mitigation strategies that will enable us to pass through the birthing-pangs of a post-scarcity society. I suppose I am an optimist in that regard. For this, I look to the example of history: social upheavals have happened that have enacted broad-scale changes in societies almost overnight. Societies seem to go through large periods of stability, punctuated by extremely rapid change, and studies have indicated that it only takes the mobilization of 3.5% of a society to enact a nonviolent revolution. And what is a government, society, or economic system anyway? It's simply a matter of humans changing their minds on how they choose to participate in society - a matter of ideology and belief, of collectively held memes.

Nothing physically or physiologically dooms humanity to live under late-capitalism forever. As a materialist, and someone with a background in the physical sciences, I tend to view what we are capable of in terms of what is simply physically possible. In that respect, I don't see any real reason why we cannot guarantee a flourishing life for every human being, equal rights for all, and a prosperous and diverse biosphere. That may require moving most of the human population off world in the long-term and transforming the earth into a kind of nature preserve, which, I feel, would accomplish what the anti-natalists and anarcho-primitivists have been advocating all this time, without genocide.

I found a section of that book, the part dealing with Burma/East Timor/the Philippines, kinda interested in seeing the rest of it. I am admittedly more inclined towards the violence side, so I have some suspicions about the methodology/analytical framework which the book is based on*, but I feel like giving it a shot. It would certainly give one a reason to be slightly more optimistic for the future.

*Deliberately shoddy science to support the establishment is not exactly unheard of, though it probably is significantly easier as an economist.

DrSunshine posted:

EDIT: To get back to the subject of your post - that's a great observation! Indeed, the future may rest with Asia and Africa, peoples who were once colonized by the West rightfully reasserting their role in history. Too often even leftist environmentalists in the West bemoan the impending doom of the world's brown peoples, who inhabit the parts of the world that will be most affected by abrupt climate changes that are already in the pipeline, without realizing that the leadership and citizens of the so-called "developing world" are well-aware of the problems that their nations face, and are currently working hard to address them endogenously*. It's a kind of modern, liberal version of the "White Man's Burden".

"It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to ~~capitalism~~ the West as the driver of history�

DrSunshine posted:

*For example, see how China is rapidly increasing the number of nuclear power plants it's building. While supposedly-advanced nations like Germany are actually increasing their CO2 emissions by voting against nuclear power and trying to push solar in a country that gets as much sunlight as Seattle, WA!

We're all about symbols and mysticism here in Europe.

# ¿ Oct 17, 2020 18:12

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

DrSunshine posted:

I want to return to this point and piggyback off of it into something I've pondered about. Here's a possible Fermi paradox-adjacent question that I don't think I've seen stated anywhere else. It has a bit to do with some Anthropic reasoning.

So, many of those in the futurist community (Isaac Arthur et al) believe - as I do - that the universe in the long tail end might be more habitable or have more chances to harbor nascent intelligent civilizations than it is in the early end. This is out of sheer statistics: an older universe with more quiet red dwarf stars that can burn stably for trillions of years gives many many more chances for intelligent life to arise that can do things like observe the universe with astronomy and wonder why they exist.

So why is it that we observe a (fairly) young universe? As far as we can tell, the universe is only about 14 billion years old, out of a potential habitable range of tens of trillions of years. If the universe should be more amenable to life arising in the distant future, trillions of years from now, then the overwhelming probability is that we should exist in that old period, than it should in just the first 14 billion years of its existence.

This brings up some rather disturbing possible answers:

1) Something about the red dwarf era is inimical to the rise of intelligent life.

2) Intelligent life ceases to exist long before that era.

And a related conclusion from this line of reasoning: We live in the temporal habitable zone. Intelligent life arises as soon as it's possible: something about the ratio of metallicity in the 2nd or 3rd generation of stars that formed after the Big Bang, the conditions of stellar formation and universe expansion, etc, makes the period in which our solar system formed the most habitable that the universe could possibly be.

The above conclusion could be a potential Fermi Paradox answer - the reason why we don't see a universe full of ancient alien civilizations or the remains of their colossal megastructures is because all intelligent civilizations, us included, are around the same level of advancement and just haven't had the time to reach each other yet. We are the among the first, and all of us began around the same time: as soon as it became possible.

Given how short human existence has been, this seems kinda unsatisfactory? Unless the necessary advancement required to actually make contact is far far far beyond all the technological development humans have gone through since the invention of writing, so massive that no civilization has managed it yet, then even just a small head start in a cosmological sense should have pushed some to already be there. Imagine another sun, with another Earth, an exact mirror to Earth but it is 0.01% older. The human civilization on that planet, if it still survived, would be nearing half a million years old at this point. The time scale of civilizations is basically so short on a cosmic scale that just minor differences like some stars being a little bigger and others smaller would result in insurmountable differences in the ages of the civilizations that would arise around the new stars formed after the first ones blew up.

The same short time frame might be part of the explanation though, if you assume a civilization can become advanced enough that it stops being detectable, or at least not detectable by civilizations who themselves haven't yet decided that not getting found is the smart move. The Great Filter might just be filtering out species that can't adequately plan and protect themselves, and thus we don't see them. Like, if your civilization is all about infinite growth, expansion, and domination, then you might destroy yourself in very short order and thus the chance of being detected is infinitesimally small. If on the other hand you've conquered those tendencies, your civilization could decide that just trying to keep your head down while living in virtual reality would be the smarter move, just living around some red dwarf soaking up the sunlight while trying to limit the signal of what you're doing to the rest of the universe.

# ¿ Jan 31, 2021 20:44

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