You can look at any metric of human wellbeing over the past 1000 years and the results are dramatic.
Take child mortality for example. In the 18th century, the average family suffered the deaths of 3-4 of their children before they reached adulthood.
Then, from 1800 to 1950, global childhood mortality dropped from 43% to 22%.
Accelerating further, from 1950 to 2015, global child mortality dropped again by nearly 5X to just 4.5%. And it's still going down. [1]
The reasons for this are numerous. Reductions in famine through agriculture, beating disease with medicine, reducing War through economic interdependency, expanding education and access to information through digital technology, etc. While we make mistakes in the short term , in the long term, we tend to get stuff right.
The problem is, we're also really good at getting distracted by bad news stories while missing the big picture. And we LOVE the idea of humans being the cause of the end of the world for some reason. It's the basis of most of our religions.
Of course, the arc of progress is paved with setbacks. But before getting pessimistic and cynical because you read some bad news stories, it pays to zoom out a little.
[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality#:~:text=Across%20....
I am not ungrateful for our current actualization. Getting here took (and continues to take) tremendous sacrifice.
I really think you give humans too much credit here. The world has been here for billions of years, and will be here for billions more. Even if we bombed ourselves to extinction, in another million years there'd be little more to mark our passing than some fossils and a few hunks of concrete.
BUT the spirit is:
>we are the only thing on the planet capable of causing the end of the world, such as it is.
Meaning, we are the only thing on the planet capable of willingly causing our own extinction. This, for all intents and purposes, is the end of the world. World, again, in this context refers to humans and the human experiment.
I don't get the argument that "oh, you mean the death of all humans, the planet will be fine". How is that better? We still all die.
But I think gp meant the end of the world as the end of survivable conditions for humans. Nobody cares if the planet is still here after we are gone.
To my knowledge the track record of things we've improved for humans will be much longer... so I'm not sure that's a great comparison to make here!
The sun will destroy earth in 2-5 billion years. But before then, an asteroid will likely destroy all most/all life on earth in the next couple hundred million years or so. And before that, a super volcano will likely destroy most/all of the animal and plant life on earth.
Assuming human technology advances fast enough to avoid catastrophic climate change and MAD succeeds at keeping us from destroying the earth ourselves , we're the only species that has a shot at making any "not-human-centric ecosystem" survive beyond earth.
(ignoring any life that may exist outside our solar system)
Of course, 22 Billion years from now the entire universe might die and kill everything anyways, but we may end up giving Bambi & friends a few billion years of existence they wouldn't have otherwise had. So I'd call that a net gain.
Maybe we should focus on the pressing and critical issues instead of worsening them in the hope that a distant event could justify our suicidal behavior.
But if this modern narrative of "We've angered the gods!" makes you feel good, I'm not sure anything I can say will refute your certainty about our coming doom.
One can also see some good signs when injective palliative drugs into a dying organism.
People acting like climate change is some ending event always seem to utterly discount human ingenuity to overcome problems throughout history.
The real issue with effective problem solving is make sure you are solving the right problems.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-cl...
"A new study reports continued climate-altering carbon emissions and intensive land use have inadvertently greened half of the Earth’s vegetated lands. Green leaves convert sunlight to sugars, thus providing food, fiber and fuel, while replacing carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air with water. The removal of heat-trapping CO2 and wetting of air cools the Earth’s surface. Global greening since the early 1980s may have thus reduced global warming, possibly by as much as 0.25oC, reports the study “Characteristics, drivers and feedbacks of global greening” published in the inaugural issue of the journal Nature Reviews Earth and Environment. Two of the authors, Dr. Jarle W. Bjerke and Dr. Hans Tømmervik works at Norwegian Institute for Nature Research at the Fram Centre in Tromsø, Norway."
Is plastic waste good or bad for the environment? Is more forestation a gain or a loss?
Such question cannot be answered without factoring in a human perspective. (Or some conscious things’ perspective, but either way, “the environment” has no perspective as it has no goal or objective)
And even if not, absent humans ever existing, the destruction of all life on earth is still a statistical certainty due to the fragility of earth.
So, thinking long term again, we're the only shot life as we know it has at outliving this place.
We may destroy earth ourselves before then, but I think the will-they-or-won't-they technological race against time will be more entertaining than if we went back to hunter-gatherer society and waited a few million years for the next asteroid to inevitably end us, no?
[Citation needed].
People have been saying this since the 18th Century, and yet we continue to find ways to support our growing population. There’s enormous swathes of the Earth that remain untouched and unused—the carrying capacity of the planet is much higher than our current population level.
What resources? Pick any resource... fossil water, topsoil, fish, oil, etc. It's the same situation no matter what resource you pick. Plus, we have built a dependency on many non-renewable resources.
By that definition, we are already beyond carrying capacity.
Every population that grows exponentially will double over a period of time. The last doubling that starves everyone off has 50% of available resources left.
How fast does humanity double?
1950: 2.5 billion
1986: 5.0 billion
2017: 7.5 billion
2050: 10 billion
Spreading shit like "you are about to starve in a few decades" is dangerous, as it also gives the wrong idea of some very real resource concerns.
The real danger is preserving and defending the irrationality behind the status quo.
While rational people care about the environment, irrational self-centered people celebrate Burning Man, travel around the world for conferences that could be done online and buy thousands of single use plastic items for Halloween only to throw them away the next day.
Reduce, reuse, recycle. In that order. Take the environment into consideration when making decisions.
Everyone knows what they have to do. Fucking do it.
No more fucking unjustified air travel (is your family dying? no? then don't fucking travel), excessive packaging, single use plastics for non medical reasons, stupid events that can be done online, no more snail mail spam. No more bullshit.
Did you travel to an exotic destination this year? I don't fucking care. I do care about the environment though.
Send polluters to jail, ruin them economically, shame the fuck out of them. Your value as perceived by society should not be how much you pollute or help destroy the environment.
Fuck marketing, fuck buying shit you do not need, fuck the narcissism and vanity. Live within fucking environmental budgets.
Are you aware that there were cultures here in the Americas that were able to preserve the environment intact for 10,000 years?
Ironically, the new arrivals here claim that Native Americans were somehow unproductive and mismanaged their territory with inefficient farming practices. Well, those claims will not age very gracefully once all the aquifers are pumped dry and soil finally becomes sterile in a few decades. All of it, in about 500 years. Good job.
None of the "advancements" you mention are actually necessary, or can actually be called advancements. For something to be called an advancement it would need to be better that what preceded it. How is precisely a global clusterfuck/extinction event better than what existed before? How can being decades away from total ecological collapse be better than living in a fucking paradise full of biodiversity in perfect ecological balance?
The only advancement necessary to achieve sustainability is keeping your ego in check and have a reciprocal relationship with nature.
Go to an Indian reservation and listen to the people who managed to survive here for 10,000 years without causing a cascading ecological disaster. Try to understand the philosophical differences between your culture and theirs, and understand which of those differences cause you to destroy the environment instead of preserving it for future generations.
Your extrapolation is a bit like https://xkcd.com/605/
Believe whatever you want, really. You seem to be in denial about all this because your lifestyle requires everyone to believe shit is OK. It is not OK.
And because it is not OK everyone will eventually pay the price of not working together to avoid a cascading environmental catastrophe. Namely war and famine.
The unpopularity of my responses here really reflects how abstracted from reality people are these days.
And ~10 billion is where humans will stop growing (at least, will stop growing exponentially/explosively). IIRC this is mentioned in this talk by Hans Rosling: https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_best_stats_you_ve...
Which makes it, cynically, sustainable. When every country is growing out of a control, that's a worldwide disaster. When a bunch of countries are growing out of control... that's a local disaster. There's a reason we have countries/states/defense mechanisms.
1. The net world population is going up. Any non-zero growth rate will eventually saturate the planet.
2. We are already beyond capacity. Even if we kept the current population level for 100 years, we would still run out of resources.
3. The countries that slow down their growth tend to get more economically developed, causing each person to boost their resource consumption.
In 4-2-1 families (Chinese one child policy), the one remaining person consumes far more resources than the 6 ancestors combined.
There's a huge difference between "saturating" 10 years from now or 1000 years from now.
And population growth has slowed down to a crawl. It's enough to bring just a dozen, or less, countries out of poverty to achieve basically zero growth.
> We are already beyond capacity.
We are not.
> causing each person to boost their resource consumption.
Overconsumption is a problem, and should definitely be solved.
It might. But it's nowhere exponential, or even linear.
Hundreds of millions of murdered and poisoned people would likely disagree with you, if they hadn't been murdered and poisoned by humans who were playing god.
That's some weird god who mostly cares about themselves.
This is an oversimplification. If used as a limited last resort it can do more good than harm (which is why e.g. the WHO still recommends using it). DDT is very effective and has certainly saved a lot of lives by preventing malaria infections. But if used carelessly it can do a lot of harm, and various groups of experts who have studied the question have come to the conclusion that its use should be dramatically curtailed, and replaced where possible by other methods of malaria control.
DDT causes fertility problems, birth defects, cancer, etc. to humans, as well as environmental damage.
(Malaria also kills a ton of people, and we should be investing more resources in fighting it, ideally without resorting to heavy DDT use.)
I am not a medical expert, just passing along what I have read.
I wish I could pin down the reasoning to explain why I feel this is wrong, but intuition is the only thing I have to go on, even as heavily discounted that is in this day and age.
Mosquitos are horrible little devils, and we swat every one we can and destroy their habitats when we find them. Glad to see you at least have a seed of skepticism in you. Humans are notoriously bad at playing god.