Human Extinction Scenarios

flawed superintelligence is gonna be so pissed that we didn't give it any credit.

cheetahs can go way faster than that...they shoulda been more realistic w/ the name

9-9-9 tax proposal = proof that humanity is living in a simulation

― Clive "The Chip" Crinkly (King Boy Pato), Sunday, April 8, 2012 4:51 PM

For real if you set all the taxes in Sim City 2k at 9% you were made for life.

gray goo is: a bunch of tiny self-replicating nanomachines endlessly self-replicate while consuming the matter around them in search of resources for self-replication, and their numbers grow exponentially until eventually the earth is covered and then devoured by a gooey (apparently) swarm of nanomachines

also while checking that i discovered a widespread convention i was unaware of

Denial-of-service attacks in the virtual world Second Life which work by continually replicating objects until the server crashes are referred to as grey goo attacks.[11] This is a reference to the self-replicating aspects of grey goo. It is one example of the widespread convention of drawing analogies between certain Second Life concepts and the theories of radical nanotechnology.[12]

I thought Colossus The Forbin Project was pretty awful. But I did like that they tricked the omniscient supercomputer into looking away by faking being a couple in love, and then convincing the computer they needed some privacy while making love, during which time they plotted its demise.

― and i don't even care, similar to how a badass would respond (Abbbottt), Sunday, April 8, 2012 8:02 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I guess I just liked its unrelentingly bleakness - from the word go, things get worse and worse for our heroes and there's just absolutely no hope. Also, the evil computer's voice is pretty cool.

I would have voted genetically engineered biological agent. My personal fave 'whimper scenario' is Vonnegut's Ice 9. I have been hunting for some not too heavily academic non-fiction about past extinction events and got recommended Tony Hallam's Catastrophes and Lesser Calamities: The causes of mass extinctions. It's mind-blowing that our pre-human mammal ancestors somehow managed to cling onto life during some monumental double dip apocalyptic events.

Lolled all over again at most heinous fart

A good recent review of evidence for the end-Permian extinction event (the big one 252 million years ago. Siberia covered in lava, CO2 skyrockets, global warming, ocean thermal stratification, photic zone anoxia, widespread purple sulfur bacteria, hydrogen sulfide releases choking coastal dwellers and destroying the ozone layer. Nearly everyone dies.

Also,

These emerging insights from geology, geochemistry, and paleobiology suggest that the end-Permian extinction may serve as an important ancient analog for twenty-first century oceans.

Excellent, thanks.

It seems counterintuitive with the current population level, but I’m starting to think evolutionary self selection/declining fertility rate is the real elephant in the room. Could get really ugly.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-world-might-actually-run-out-of-people/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ImRyPymRAM

Surely climate change is a more pressing issue, even if you assume that the authors' projections are correct?

That’s the conclusion Canadian journalist John Ibbitson and political scientist Darrell Bricker come to in their newest book.

A journalist and political scientist are not my go-to experts on the reproductive behavior of humanity over the coming centuries. Human populations have suffered steep declines in the past, but it's always because of resource depletion, famine, war or disease, never because of evolutionary self selection/declining fertility rate.

“In roughly three decades, the global population will begin to decline,” they write. “Once that decline begins, it will never end.”

I think the first sentence of this summation of their thesis is likely correct, but due to increasing climate change leading to famine. The second sentence, um, "never"? O rly? This reads more like clickbait than respectable demographics.

Yeah, except it mostly makes sense. Fact is, in most ways, having kids is not directly beneficial to the person who has them, so once we have options, we exercise them. Making 2.1 babies per uterus is a pretty onerous standard when we have our own stuff to do. We also currently have a lot of magical thinking where many with no intentions to procreate are super concerned about climate change for the sake of all those kids other people must be having. But not themselves. Population is already declining almost everywhere where options exist, and options are obviously good, so that’s a problem. A problem we’re currently solving by propping up the stability of those nations with a morally inconvenient resource - a surplus of people born in other places that mainly exist because their parents had less reproductive freedom. That’s one of those other vertical knowledge mistakes people make - that immigration happens for generous, sharing reasons. Not really. It’s a dynamic that functions on the reality of coercing their bodies to create new humans in lieu of our own. Self extinction seems like a big price to pay, but many are more than content with their decisions so what can you do? So looks like the choices are going to be to perpetuate reproductive inequality in the name of population maintenance (kinda evil), or somehow start motivating more of the free (which should be all of us) to choose it. Something we are failing at so far. So I dunno - it only takes a generation or two for a collapse to manifest. Seems pressing enough. Religion will present some kind of countermeasure, but humans have a pretty sketchy track record there. Maybe we can rely on robots and grow just enough new babies in tanks. A foolproof plan.

Controversial thoughts maybe? Climate change is real though. Maybe things will work out.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53409521

fwiw I was on the ‘we are obviously overpopulated=doom!’ train until sort of recently, but I changed my mind in the face of new evidence.

Oh and!!! Another possible complicating or mitigating factor is if science really is as close to artificially extending human life as they seem to be. A lot of new breakthroughs regarding cellular aging announced in recent years, a bit hush hush, just here and there. Rightly so because the implications are massive.

one reason why it's kinda hard to take this seriously is that the rate of change has accelerated so much that it almost seems impossible to predict what life will be like in 2035, much less 2100. I'm 35 and it feels like I've lived through more societal and technological change than there was in like, the entire Renaissance era. to put this in more broad ilxor terms I remember buying an iPod at the age of 18 and thinking it was the final frontier of music. about 5 years ago I was using it at my desk and someone said "holy shit, you still have one of those? do you just like vintage technology or what?", which caused me to realize that I hadn't actually seen another iPod Classic in years. now no one can make fun of me for it since I don't really go into the office anymore!! things have changed so much!! (the iPod still works, by the way, gotta hand it to Apple for that one)

that said despite all this technological change human beings are kind of a static thing, and as I start to get more into history (both in a broad sense and within my own family) I realize that people don't really change that much. hell just the other day on Wikipedia I saw a drawing that had been saved from a 7-year old from like 1400 and it drove home that kids back then were kind of the same as kids today. my son is very similar to me personality-wise but he exists in a world that is just so incredibly different than what I grew up in, so it's really been fascinating to see him navigate that. I think that's significant here because child-rearing is the one aspect of human life that really can't be streamlined or optimized or crowdsourced. kids are always gonna need more time and attention than you feel you can give them. "stay at home parent" is the one occupation that will exist through all of human history.

Since life expectancy in the USA has dropped recently, shocking demographic experts who had never seen or contemplated such a thing, it seems premature to predict huge advances for anyone here, except perhaps the 1%.

Some of the comments on the bcc article linked above are so self-loathing/human hating that I could envisage many of those people pushing the nuclear button just to be rid of themselves and everyone else.

The problem with this is that it takes development as a good thing, perpetual growth as a necessity, and current patterns of consumption as ever-increasing. We need fewer people, less growth, and less consumption.

I agree. The system is unsustainable, and it’s breaking, but maybe just not how we thought it would.

i look forward to seeing how this works out

Ok so apparently this take is one of Elon Musk’s talking points, so that gives me pause. Still, what if it’s just his pro capitalism motives that are wrong.

https://www.techopian.com/thanos-was-wrong-about-population-but-so-is-musk-suggests-famous-economist/

This article disagrees with both scenarios, but then doesn’t really seem to find a compelling reason to believe that humans will just choose a path of equilibrium, aside from stating that societies who achieve it are the best. The one example of a success story they offer is Costa Rica. So I looked up Costa Rica’s projections, and unfortunately they don’t paint a picture of stability but instead follow the same declines.

I am extremely skeptical of overpopulation language when wielded by space-colonization enthusiasts.

Like, "omg there are too many people on earth that's why we need a Mars colony" is not a resource-neutral strategy given the resources we burn on building spaceships'n'shit.

Like, have you seen Mongolia? Wyoming? Iowa? Saskatchewan? There's tons of places with almost nobody there.

It'd be way easier to make sustainable human habitats in Wyoming than to terraform the fucking moon - Wyoming already has an atmosphere and plants and such.

Fortunately or unfortunately, people don't want to live in Wyoming. People overwhelmingly want to live in, or near, cities. That's why it's so freaking expensive to live in Brooklyn or Berkeley or whatever. People keep voting with their feet. We could try listening to them.

Fast forward to space colonies as a method of alleviating earth overpopulation: you're just relocating the problem. Imagine the coolest possible Mars colony, I betcha people will mostly want to live near the Martian PleasureMall, not out harvesting the ice rings of Xenion 47, or in the Martian hinterlands.

eating frozen yogurt at the martian pleasuremall

No, you have it backwards. He doesn’t believe we have an overpopulation problem. But his motives are more like we need more people just to colonize Mars n stuff.

More drones! We need more drones! Now, work faster, you fuckers!

I'd like the rest of the day off... Baby Diego's has death affected me more than I expected

eating frozen yogurt at the martian pleasuremall

Underrated Pulp single

lol

this was typed at the us politricks thread, but i decided it didn't belong there at all, and i wanted it to go somewhere, so here i am. the topic was the sense of impending doom/extinction overwhelming some people, so:

it seems like previous societal collapses have primarily been resolved by movement/relocations. with so many people alive, and with so many powers and forces placed very emphatically upon preventing movement, it's hard for me to avoid fearing that genocides, intentional famines, or regional nuke attacks will become ever more the technique of choice.

after reading bloodlands, then watching the past year in ukraine, it's hard to avoid super doomy feelings. i hear those idaho christian fascists.

as a result while i know extinction by climate is out there as possibility, i cannot stop worrying about what i perceive as a more imminent and likely intermediate zone.

i got here found YMP's pulp joke and had a good real laugh, i needed that.

climate change is making all those things more frequent/likely though

the number of people alive isn't the problem its it's the fact that the people responsible for climate change are already exploiting, enslaving, incarcerating, starving, drowning and shooting those least responsible (the vast majority of the planet) and are actively preparing to ramp this up with little to no pusback on the level of national or international politics

*pushback

climate change denial these days is acknowledging the problem and refusing any solution other than more capitalism and more nationalism

The leading climate deniers switched to “climate change may be real but of course there is nothing we could or can ever do about it” about 15 years ago, the rest of them are still catching up

Xpost don't forget magic technology that the smart people will surely come with any day now, so no need to worry.

(sometimes more precisely formulated as magic geoengineering that will definitely not make things worse and is definitely not just a play for enormous contracts for the relevant firms/industries.)

Tbf that “magic technology” isn’t just some kind of pipe dream, there are a lot of things happening which would’ve seemed impossible not that long ago. I’ve heard a number of climatologists say things actually looked a lot more dire 10 years ago

The thing about magic climate technology is that it's the only solution to climate change that I see any chance of actually working (a slim chance, with probably many unintended side-effects), because governments and corporations will never do anything serious to actually try to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

I don't think that's exactly true, virtually every major country on the planet has pledged to massively reduce emissions in the next 30 years and I feel like they're not all just gonna....do nothing

(also oil is rapidly reaching the point where it's getting prohibitively expensive to extract compared to renewables so maybe there isn't really a choice here)

Sorry to be that guy but keep smoking that hopium.

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/02/us-coal-use-on-the-rise-but-renewables-continue-rapid-growth/

https://www.greenpeace.org/eastasia/press/7488/plans-for-new-coal-plants-in-china-rebound-with-8-63-gw-approved-in-the-first-quarter-of-2022/

https://m.timesofindia.com/business/india-business/indias-coal-demand-to-top-1-billion-tonne-in-2022-push-net-zero-goals-further-away/amp_articleshow/88346693.cms

Feels like I missed a major country? Oh there it is.

https://www.reuters.com/article/indonesia-coal/update-1-indonesias-2022-coal-use-for-power-generation-set-to-rise-3-idUSL1N2S609P

What’s the fifth biggest country in the world again? Oh shi-

So so glad I missed this creep when he made his cameo tho.

We also currently have a lot of magical thinking where many with no intentions to procreate are super concerned about climate change for the sake of all those kids other people must be having. But not themselves.

Reminds me of the quip about how every political philosophy is based on the ideal tribe size, and libertarianism reduces the tribe to the isolated nuclear family.

Personally I’m not completely devoid of hope but it’s becoming increasingly clear that only a global revolutionary progressive movement can stave off climate catastrophe.

oh I'm not fooled into thinking everything is heading the right way but I don't think it's incorrect to say things have progressed quicker than expected? when Inconvenient Truth came out there was this sense that renewables could never progress fast enough in the next 15 years to make a dent which is clearly not the case anymore

also the fact that you can sheer a sheep many times but only slaughter them once (sorry there is probably a better metaphor for this). the powers that be are not going to be insulated from the consequences of climate change, not if it has a catastrophic effect on those of us who actually provide profit and pay taxes. it is obviously gonna go down in a similar fashion to Covid - there will be a ton of pain and suffering but ultimately I feel like whatever the bare minimum is we'll find a way to do it

I'm not sure even economic rationality will always overcome the inertia of established power structures whenever they don't align (we would have less uneven development otherwise) but that's more likely to force change than appealing to morality which has been a disastrous strategy for environmentalists. otherwise we need a revolution or something. which would be hard and unpredictable and brutal and we're disorganized and they have most of the guns and it could easily backfire make everything worse for everyone so idk. keep voting for some suits to keep doing nothing I guess

imo the core issue was that the environmental consequences of using fossil fuels were and still almost entirely are externalized. privatize the profits, externalize the costs. and even on the demand side, the costs are externalized to everything on the planet. in other words, they should have put a price on carbon back in the 1980s. some people have been trying to do it since the 1980s, ha. god damn, whatta world.

but if they put a price on carbon that comes close to capturing the environmental costs of fossil fuels, then shit would get way more expensive. and we can't have that. ever. so instead we've spinning our wheels above a canyon for pretty much my entire life

xps the powers that be are as insulated as they can be in their compounds- they will be affected eventually but they can kill a lot of people first. sadly a lot of people who aren't rich are more excited about the opportunity to oppress and eliminate surplus populations to reduce competition than in the kind of solidarity that would require upending these structures which provide them with whatever meagre oppressive powers they have. I wish I knew the solution but I'm sceptical of it just being tech, especially tech that still requires hyperexploitation of global south workers to even exist

I'm not sure even economic rationality will always overcome the inertia of established power structures whenever they don't align (we would have less uneven development otherwise) but that's more likely to force change than appealing to morality which has been a disastrous strategy for environmentalists. otherwise we need a revolution or something. which would be hard and unpredictable and brutal and we're disorganized and they have most of the guns and it could easily backfire make everything worse for everyone so idk. keep voting for some suits to keep doing nothing I guess

― Left

my feeling is that a lot of people look at radical change and focus a lot of attention on revolutions succeeding, and when i look at radical change what i see is the old ways of doing things failing. the awful shit oligarchs and established power structures are perpetrating isn't exactly new. what looks new, from my perspective, is the absolute _chaos_ surrounding the repression and systemic violence they're putting into practice. oligarchs, of course, can victim-blame all they like, but it's starting to be more and more readily apparent that it's them, not us, who are unpredictable and brutal.

Chaos rewards the polluters in the short term though. In terms of revolutionary change, it doesn’t have to be violent. It doesn’t necessarily even have to be systemic change immediately but otherwise it would require an almost paradigm shift in terms of people’s attitudes. It’s been done before (at the national level at least) but true odds are slim for a real global nu enlightenment.

I don’t think deterministic attitudes towards the owning class are especially helpful. This moment requires some alliance of liberals and leftists, obviously in that case the owners will have to be split. Monbiot may be tiresome these days with his puritan mindset but he did nail it with this 🧵

3. Broadly speaking, there are two main types of capitalist enterprise. One seeks an accommodation with the administrative state, and benefits from stability, predictability and regulations that exclude dirtier and rougher competitors. It can live with a thin form of democracy.

— George Monbiot (@GeorgeMonbiot) November 20, 2020

tl;dr:

4. The other is raw, unrestrained accumulation, which sees democratic constraints as illegitimate. Only “the market” is a legitimate forum for decision-making. As Peter Thiel, echoing Hayek, insisted, market freedom and democracy are incompatible.https://t.co/HtTmIgg4VZ

— George Monbiot (@GeorgeMonbiot) November 20, 2020

I don’t think deterministic attitudes towards the owning class are especially helpful. This moment requires some alliance of liberals and leftists, obviously in that case the owners will have to be split. Monbiot may be tiresome these days with his puritan mindset but he did nail it with this

― recovering internet addict/shitposter (viborg)

kinda funny you say that, i wrote a long post which said basically the opposite of what you're saying here and deleted it as not being really relevant

you talk about revolutionary change and you talk a paradigm shift and then you talk about alliance with liberals. i don't know who monbiot is, i don't really hang out on politics/Discourse threads here, so i'll try to give you the tl;dr re: my perspective. basically i got a lot more in common with left than i do with whatever the heck it is you're talking about.

i'm a trans woman. i experience my existence as a revolutionary act, an act of radical liberationist subjectivity which is fundamentally incompatible with liberal capitalist norms. what kind of paradigm shift are you expecting? whose paradigm do you expect to shift? sure, i'll be glad to ally with liberals, just as soon as they stop being liberals. otherwise, all i'm doing is sacrificing my actual allies in favor of an "alliance" with a group whose values are merely procedural, and not just that, procedural values which put me at a structural disadvantage!

i'm not interested in strategic concerns. i'm interested in continuing to exist in a world which is structurally hostile to my existence.