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Re:Alaska’s Permafrost Is Thawing by jandrese on Friday August 25, 2017 @01:02PM (#15100143)
I don't buy it. Even if we do fuck this up royally and cause a mass extinction event (which seems increasingly likely), humans will survive. There may (probably will) be a loss of population, but it's the sort of thing humans can definitely recover from given time. At the timescales of the Fermi Paradox this shouldn't be an issue. It's barely a blip.
Re:Alaska’s Permafrost Is Thawing by zzalpha on Friday August 25, 2017 @01:08PM (#15100205)
The Fermi paradox still applies if, every time society reaches a point of advanced development, it sets itself back to the stone age by triggering an extinction level event.
Re:Alaska’s Permafrost Is Thawing by jerf on Friday August 25, 2017 @01:49PM (#15100607)
The problem with this answer to the Fermi paradox, along with many others, is that it can't just be "very likely". It has to be essentially 100% likely. And while I'm sure a lot of people are ready to believe "very likely", "literally zero civilizations out of millions manages to survive ecological catastrophe", despite those millions of civilizations having fundamentally different mental architectures, ecologies, circumstances, time scales, and difficulties in spreading out into space is really a tough sell. You're really telling me the sentient Bee People of Madeupertrus XIII, whose singular queen dominates all decisions on the planet in the universal hive mind, couldn't figure out they needed to stop burning anthracite coal if they wanted to live?

Personally, I think "it's just inevitable that all civilizations die from ecological collapse" takes some of the emotional frisson out of the doom and gloom as well; if it's just that inevitable, you can't really blame anyone, can you? If it's inevitable, it isn't really "fossil fuel's" fault (after all it is likely that many civilizations never even had fossil fuels, or lacked an oxygenated environment or similar that makes combusting them so easy), or careless use of farm land, or anything else... it's just the inevitable workings of the impersonal universe.

As with many other putative answers to the Fermi paradox, I don't think this one is powerful enough to explain it.

Re:Alaska’s Permafrost Is Thawing by minikites on Friday August 25, 2017 @03:06PM (#15101259)
>despite those millions of civilizations having fundamentally different mental architectures, ecologies, circumstances, time scales, and difficulties in spreading out into space is really a tough sell

Absolutely, which is why I said "an answer" as opposed to "the answer".

Re:Alaska’s Permafrost Is Thawing by Broken_Hippo on Friday August 25, 2017 @08:40PM (#15103413)
Only, we won't be going back to the stone age. Ever. Even if the tech is wiped out.

We know all this stuff is possible and it is unlikely that everyone that knows something will die, just as it is unlikely that all print resources will be taken away.

Cars and cell phone towers will still likely exist. Televisions, radios, computers. The remains of power plants will stand.

We'll continue to wash our hands after shitting because we won't lose germ theory.

Sorry, but there is no going back to the stone age. At worst, the tech of today becomes the goal of humanity after our numbers rebuild.

Re:Alaska’s Permafrost Is Thawing by jandrese on Friday August 25, 2017 @01:16PM (#15100311)
So the solution to the Fermi Paradox is that nobody ever learns from their mistakes?
Re:Alaska’s Permafrost Is Thawing by zzalpha on Friday August 25, 2017 @01:27PM (#15100405)
We can't learn from our own mistakes now.

What makes you think, 2,000 years from now, our ancestors will look back and a) remember what happened accurately, and b) learn from it?

I can imagine someone in the future saying "No man, that wasn't humanity's fault... the earth just goes through natural cycles. Or maybe it was just the sun."

In short: I think you're denying our contemporary and historical reality if you think that, in the future, we'll do any differently.

Edit: As an aside, I want you to reflect, for a moment, on our ability to understand human society even just 500 years back. Even at a time with decent written records, there's still entire disciplines focused on trying to understand how those people worked and lived, and enormous amounts of disagreement on the same.

Now imagine we fast forward, say, 2,000 years after we've destroyed modern society and started to rebuild in earnest. An enormous amount of information about who we are is now locked up in optical, magnetic, and solid state storage, and the technology to read that information will be destroyed right along with the rest of us. Much of the rest is stored on paper that doesn't have the long-term archival properties of something like vellum.

Why do you think our ancestors will understand us any better than we understand people in the middle ages?

Re:Alaska’s Permafrost Is Thawing by PoachedSausage on Friday August 25, 2017 @01:17PM (#15100323)
Unfortunately we only get the one free gift of fossil fuel energy accumulated over millions of years.
Re:Alaska’s Permafrost Is Thawing by jandrese on Friday August 25, 2017 @01:20PM (#15100345)
Insuring that we don't make the same mistake again? Development would be slower if you have to start with renewables, but it's not blocked entirely.
Re:Alaska’s Permafrost Is Thawing by PeterisP on Friday August 25, 2017 @01:36PM (#15100501)
There's some historical arguments that without fossil fuels, the industrial revolution doesn't happen and we'd never get beyond that block.

I.e. if man/animal labor is more effective than crude machines, then societies never make mass investment into crude machines and don't prepare large numbers of people working with said machines, so there's no stimulus that might ever reach fancy machines that might be actually useful. We'd have the same fate as the medieval Chinese society, which invented lots of nifty tech centuries before Europe, but didn't go beyond that to the industrial revolution for social reasons until the progress elsewhere forced the social reasons to change.

Re:Alaska’s Permafrost Is Thawing by echlebek on Friday August 25, 2017 @01:43PM (#15100553)
I think the consensus is that the industrial revolution would have been impossible without fossil fuels.
Re:Alaska’s Permafrost Is Thawing by jandrese on Friday August 25, 2017 @05:24PM (#15102382)
It would have been impossible to power steam engines with wood instead of coal? I get that it is less efficient, but wood burners certainly existed back in that era. Every train would have needed a balloon funnel and there would have been far more significant logging operations and probably deforestation problems, but it doesn't seem completely impossible.