Don't worry, we can fix that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
We can continue to exist and learn without killing off the planet.
There is no natural state as defined by hyper static equilibrium. Only brief moments where we purport to control it — building up a chaotic momentum beneath it.
Chaotic on the long timescale, but pretty stable given the much shorter timescale of known human history.
At one scale, it's chaos. 1 or 2 scales up or down (in time or in space) it's stable. It's like that all the way up and all the way down.
Oh, and not only are the scale levels not just spacial or temporal but both, but the number of levels is itself non integer.
But the point is that even chaotic systems often display order if you find the right place or perspective to stand and look.
You can't say "it's not stable". Not ever. Rocks aren't stable over aeons. Galaxies aren't. Protons aren't if you wait long enough.
But it is often possible to measure the rates of change and of complexity and say, look, given greater levels of complexity, then lower rates of change will probably hold...
Even given a famine or a plague that's currently devastating one region.
One way you can play with a real chaotic system is to build one of the circuits in jc sprott’s papers and vary the control variable. You’ll see at some values of your control an “orderly” progression of the response variables, and at others a difficult to predict progression.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
A lot of the series is about the belief that we could, with technologies predictive powers & neoliberal market ethos... And how it doesn't pan out. We have "New Economies" greatly bloom in the world. And about how instead we got the 1997 Asian financial crisis. We thought we were taming market complexity (via in part neoliberalism weirdly) but turns out not so much. We have the rise of cybernetic thinking & Limits of Growth (& it's limitations in assuming we cannot change human behavior).
"Sure everything is trending towards shit, but we're humans, we can definitely go create some genius machine that will fix this, right"
Curtis rarely comes out and makes broad conclusions, but the watcher is definitely left with impression of absurd hubris & folly & chaos-triumphant, in AWOBMOLG and in much else of Curtis's excellent excellent catalog of contemporary history documentaries.
Indeed; his films (and their titles!) are oblique and suggestive. They are about politics, but it's very hard to discern his own political posture clearly. I wonder what kind of a man he would be to meet.
Just my take, but I think the core concept is really that there is no one actually genuinely leading, no one left with a compelling believable vision in any position of power, and that total power vacuum keeps letting mad scenes play out across history.
The need for hope, to show a willingness to go in authentically good direction at scale, is a fuel that powers the public spirit, and we keep suffering long eras where it's simply unavailable.
PS: Not suggesting anything about climate change, I'm just amused the comment parent makes.
The moment when, after many years of hard work and a long voyage you stand in the centre of your room, house, half-acre, square mile, island, country, knowing at last how you got there, and say, I own this,
is the same moment when the trees unloose their soft arms from around you, the birds take back their language, the cliffs fissure and collapse, the air moves back from you like a wave and you can't breathe.
No, they whisper. You own nothing. You were a visitor, time after time climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming. We never belonged to you. You never found us. It was always the other way round.
Margaret Atwood
Its a broader perspective that come with age I'm guessing.
Did you forget to update it?
Fill the room your in with dead-body clones of yourself, it will probably take well over a hundred.
Collect all the humans on the surface of the Earth, they'd all fit inside Rohde Island (thanks XKCD). Humanity is a tiny fraction of the mass and surface area of the world.
You've been alive for less than 100 years and only seen, heard, touched or felt the smallest fraction of the surface of the Earth. Met a tiny fraction of the people.
Time wise you're limited to 80? years of cognizant thought. Maybe 90? Humans have been around for thousands of years, and earth has been around for billions.
Yet, we as humans claim parts of nature as our own. My land, my country, my trees, my pet rock. All those things aren't yours and never were.
The poem just imagines what would happen if nature suddenly decided to reclaim what was always hers.
I feel like having Atwood, Ballard & Curtis in a thread deserves some kind of commendation.
What about the millennium or two prior to that, though? Hundreds of species have gone extinct since around 1900.
Lol, no.
Today is not in any way more/less special than any of the preceding 350million years. We obviously know more, because today's animals don't need to be dug out from the ground as fossils.
[citation needed]
I suspect it was considerably more diverse pre-humans. This millennium (i.e. 1KY), no.
1000 millennia ago, 1MY ago, yes.
At the same time I think it's also worth pointing out that earth has likely never had as diverse an ecosystem as it has this millennium. The tree of life has become incredibly wide & complex.
The naturalist tendency doesn't have to be as static as portrayed here. Nature itself is such a dynamic & changing system death & population booms chasing each other around wildly. What, I think, is so scary about right now is how in jeapordy so muchife seems. Insects & birds are disappearing at mass scale. Large life is hunted to breaking points. Many animals lack for habitat and access to essential food & water.
We see strictly worse coming & that has built a fervor for the worlds we are actively losing/destroying.