Comment on It's been downhill since 2020
BlueMagma@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
🎶It’s get.ting bet.ter all the ti-i-ime I have to admit. it’s getting bet.ter A little bet.ter all the time (can’t get noo worse)🎶
I’ve seen this argument so many time… It’s not going downhill, we are just getting older, we understand the problems of the world better, we are more informed, we watch the news and we start to have that nostalgia feeling that it was better before. It was not ! The world is getting better for so many metrics, sure there are issues, there always has been, it’s not perfect. Sure there are localized places where it’s temporarily getting worse ( the US might currently be living through a rough time, but it will pass).
Overall, it’s getting better all the time. We are currently living the best time in history so far. Millions of new stuff to discover, infinite access to the cumulated knowledge of mankind. More democratic country than ever, famine is getting down overall, health is getting better too. Poverty is decreasing too.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t do anything to try and make it even better, we definitely should do everything we can, there is still a lot to do to make it the best world possible. But please stop with this constant whining about the past. It was not better, you simply didn’t know any better in the past, and your memory of the past is tainted because your brains actively choose to erase bad stuff and only remember good stuff (this is a real human brain unconscious behaviour, look it up).
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
We’re running out of water for agriculture. The zoomers may be middle aged, and the alphas, adults, when the climate crisis fully catches up with us. And if the human species is lucky, it’ll happen first in the US or Russia or one of the old-guard powers, and the new order can use their renewable energy surplus to create new desalinization technology.
But current estimates (by those few climatologists willing to say other than it’s going to get very bad. ) estimate the upper limit of the sustainability projections are a global population of about a billion people, if the international community chose to act today on all fronts. (Obviously that’s not happening in the US, or in autocratic regimes, who imagine – falsely – they can create a self-sustaining colony on Mars – we’re a century or more from that).
That is a best case scenario unless we discover some miracle technology.
All other scenarios get worse than that, from a population in the hundreds of millions to human extinction. There is a ray of hope near the bottom, since Homo Erectus had at least one period of tens of thousands of years with a population under 10K before they would populate the world again, until they were out-competed by other hominids (e.g. us. Homo Sapiens). So we might have a tiny society that survives for an eon, but don’t expect any culture (from wet burritos to Beethoven’s Fifth to the 道德經) to survive. And a fuckton of science will have to be rediscovered.
So seriously bad shit for all of Human society is, at this point, for all intents and purposes, inevitable.
BlueMagma@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Yes, the climate crisis is a huge problem, probably the biggest mankind has ever faced. Everyone should do everything they can to try to minimize it (I sure am).
You’d say it started going downhill in 2019 or 2016 ? /s
There is good news though: climate literacy is going up, more and more people realized everyday throughout the world. It hasn’t really reached the political level in most countries but I see a trend of countries taking more and more action against climate change. Of course we are not there yet, but we could be in the future. This is not to say that “the climate” is not worsening, but there are improvements here and there. I truly believe humanity will make it, likely not with the same population count but still. Life on earth is almost guaranteed to survive, it has lived through worse than that. It has to get worse for people to really realized and act against it.
Climate change is one thing, but it’s not “ALL”, there are many metrics by which the world is getting better all the time.
All in all though, and I think it’s the most important: doomer talk is not helping at all, it demoralises people, and it prevents them from acting, if people believe we are done for, why would they make any effort ? Why would they try to fix it ?
Seeing the strong word you have about the climate crisis, I can only imagine you are doing everything you can to minimize it, are you ?
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
Everything I can is scant little. But some people object to my removing my footprint entirely. While I separate out my recycling from my landfill, perhaps you can explain how I can better encourage multinational corporations to consider sustainability as something other than a marketing tool.
Yes, we have bacteriaphages which serve as treatment for XTR Tuberculosis, but things like this do scant little for people who are infected as autocratic interests work to dismantle the global disease control state. Yes, young people are better learning left-wing politics as our education systems in the US are being systematically dismantled around such efforts.
I am sure you can find small ways things are improving. After all, we are closer to manned Mars expeditions even if they’re decades away. We are closer to fusion power even if it’s still approximately the same thirty years away it was in the early 1990s. There will be a point we can stuff hydrogen into a power plant and get a net energy output by fusing it into hydrogen, but that is a long way away, longer than our time left if our international community doesn’t take immediate action.
But yes, I’m bitter. In the 1980s when I was a student and young worker I was expected to give 110% (despite that is oxymoronic, it was the rhetoric of the time) and since then I learned that our leaders, our representatives, our officials don’t even bother to act like adults while holding office and allegedly conducting their duties.
We are watching the decline and fall of civilization. USSR went, now the US, and the EU and China stages are already destabilizing, and that’s not merely from climate change, but our refusal to distribute political power.
So I can’t be entirely sure, my friend, but it appears from over here, from my (granted, cynical) eye that you are missing the forest for the trees.
The climate crisis is only the first of great filters humankind is imminently careening towards and has yet to show effort towards navigating. We are rapidly turning into the example for future intelligent species of what not to do… assuming they can discover that example from the geological layers, determine how we killed ourselves and then actively choose a reasonable response where we failed to do so.
But I don’t say this as a doomeristic / beatnik approach. I’m saying this as a sober assessment. We’re not going to get to enjoy the benefits of 2020’s era progress for very long, assuming we can hold it as autocrats wreck all we’ve wrought for their own personal gain, and the world literally burns.