Wouldn't that mean, then, that most all "doom and gloom" we get today is as irrelevant as those of old?

They didn't have nukes or climate change back then.

Human nature + escalating technology is the scary formula we are exploring today.

The plague killed way more people than nukes ever did, and there was no way to stop it until people understood what spread it. Of course technology has bright sides as well. Without medicine and many other discoveries we would not be where we are today.

> The plague killed way more people than nukes ever did

No one is worried about the number of people who have ALREADY been killed by nukes, they are worried about the number of people who might be in the future. But I suppose I fundamentally agree with you. I think we may have more to fear from scientifically engineered diseases than we do from nuclear weapons.

Exactly. Every people in their own time considers their time as the most important, crucial and urgent. they consider past times as less important.

If you observe this then you can see that in the future people will look back at now and think the same. history tells us the same thing. it's human nature to think that doom and gloom now is much worse than before, simply because we are in this moment and without perspective.

But that's not what GP was saying.

We, today, have the ability to dictate what others tomorrow over- or under-appreciate as doom and gloom. Whether there is a cognitive dissonance is irrelevant, but what actually happens is very much only avoidable going forward, not looking back.

In the same context, The debate between Malcolm Gladwell and Matt Riddley is an interesting one http://www.munkdebates.com/debates/progress

The problem would be even higher by a seemingly dormant disease agent, which first infects nearly all of humanity and then wents time delayed into action.

Nobody suspects the flue.

The variance of the fat-tailed distribution of casualties of nuclear warfare post-M.A.D. is much higher than during WW2, and is may be more prone to inadvertent unintended catastrophe than an epidemic now that we can research them, but that's also unforeseeably variable.

> The plague killed way more people than nukes ever did

Yeah, but without bacteria we wouldn't be where we are today. Whatever that means.

I would not identify rather specific technologies accelerating the reach of the dysfunctional into "technology in general", just like I wouldn't lump together the bacteria that caused the plague and those that live in my stomach.

Yesterday's risks were exogenous. Few were existential.

Today's are engogenous. Several are existential.

Erm, endogenous.

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They had climate change, and it was one of the main reasons "barbarians" migrated, and Rome had fallen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Ancient_Rome#Enviro...

I think if anything, the talk about moral decline can be ignored completely. It seems people have been complaining about moral decline since earliest written records.

Alternatively, it does decline and raise, in cycles, and the complaining may be what helps it raise.

I don't think so, but a regular decline isn't impossible.

Didn't consider that, thanks. Yeah, it works as a possible explanation, though I don't buy into it either.

Even the talk on moral decline has declined. I remember in my youth we where mor meta..

Were they irrelevant? -- I see plenty doom and gloom in my history books and, hell, twitter feed.

It was just a few decades ago that 80 million people died in a single war.

yet the world did not end. Countless prophecies aboutvthe absolute apocalypse have gone and passed. So yeah it is by large irrelevant.

Their world did end for those 80 million people.

If most of society dies in pain and hunger to climate change, would the survivors say "bah, just more fear mongering"?

For me, humanity is the sum of human experiences, not the mere presence of the species. The end of the world being relative and analog.

> Their world did end for those 80 million people.

The world did not end for the other billion on Earth living at the same time. You can't just throw figures like that without putting them in perspective.

This sum is already negative, btw. And it is hard to tell whether it is still negative or just negative. Few happy areas may put you into "it's everywhere like that" dream. But it's not, most species are simply present to supply to someone.

9 million already due of hunger every year, what is the world doing about that presently?

A lot. Billions of dollars are spent to combat it and research on food and agriculture to solve hunger has been going for years.

>The vast majority of hungry people live in developing regions, which saw a 42 percent reduction in the prevalence of undernourished people between 1990–92 and 2012–14.

http://www.worldhunger.org/2015-world-hunger-and-poverty-fac...

> 9 million already due of hunger every year, what is the world doing about that presently?

Most of it is because of conflicts. Poverty is decreasing fast across the globe and there were relatively a lot more people dying from hunger in the 80s.

It's not a given that it did not end... think to yourself what would happen if Nazi Germany had developed a nuclear bomb ahead of the Americans?

If even the US government couldn't resist obliterating 2 cities in Japan with Nukes can you imagine what the Nazis would have done? There would have been zero consideration for the loss of human life, possibly large areas of continental Europe and the US would have been bombed.

I think "the world did not end" meaning "it never will despite what's been said and done in the past" is a really dangerous miopic notion

I don't think there was economic in massive nuclear bombing, NWs were and are mostly psychological. E.g. the absense of nuclear bombs didn't stop "even" US from grilling Tokyo urban areas with incendiaries with total death toll equal to those in Hiroshima + Nagasaki. Yeah, it could be done much faster with modern delivery systems, but we also have lots of effective non-nuclear mass- and precise-destruction weapons today.

In the end, though nazis didn't value non-arial lives, they were no idiots. Why would they destroy cities and pollute areas supposed to be the part of Reich? The end of the world is both hard and unprofitable. "Nazis would" is a scary tale nicely covering the actual face of war that always remained the same.

What is really scary today is that some countries develop supreme air/space control systems, so those in the club become immune to any sort of dialog.

> I don't think there was economic in massive nuclear bombing

There was no economic in V1 and V2, yet they did it, harming themselves economicaly more than they harmed the targets.

Additionally they knew losing WW2 is existential threat for most of them. If they could destroy London with one push of a button - they would.

> It's not a given that it did not end... think to yourself what would happen if Nazi Germany had developed a nuclear bomb ahead of the Americans?

Nukes at the time were still weak weapons. You could inflict a lot more damage (and a lot more damage happened on Tokyo and many other Japanese cities) by regular firebombing. You did not need nuclear bombs to inflict catastrophic loss of life.

Now when it came to thermonuclear weapons, the magnitude is entirely different, but that only occurred many years later. It would never have occurred at the time of WW2.

You just made me realized that this sentiment of pending apocalypse is maybe exactly what drove humankind forward along the past.

It just look like the notion is always morphing from generations to generations : the flood, the plague, the apocalypse, the nuclear winter and now climat change.

From biblical hazards to scientific hazards, maybe humankind is finally like the high school student who only work great when under heavy pressure for it's exams.

And maybe just maybe this is how you can best reconcile science with religion because no matter your beliefs, this is a test for all of us... Are we making enough "good" around to deserve joy for us, our children and all they children after them?

of course the world ended at the time. but the end of something is the beginning of another.