Human Extinction Scenarios

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.

to me, the soul of revolution is not violence, but _non-compliance_.

I think the most elegant, graceful decline would be by choice; couples decide not to have as many as two children but are free to have any number, including zero or as many as twelve. If they have none or less than two, it might be for any number of reasons, e.g., giving way to other species.

I think the most elegant, graceful decline would be by choice; couples decide not to have as many as two children but are free to have any number, including zero or as many as twelve. If they have none or less than two, it might be for any number of reasons, e.g., giving way to other species.

― youn

i'm sorry i just don't understand what you're talking about here. i don't. what does choice _mean_? "giving way to other species"? like, it's within my power to _choose_ whether or not the people in power _choose_ to genocide any number of other species? i mean i got some friends who are big on the church of euthanasia, that lady chris and all, and i just don't _get_ chris. the entire purpose of my life as a trans woman is to survive, and she's saying the human species should go extinct?

i fucked around with antinatalism. i like cioran. i think he's funny. i think he's wrong, but funny. the human _species_ is outside of my purview. my "choice" about whether or not to reproduce is less about humanity and more about _me_. having opinions about human extinction was an excuse. why didn't i reproduce? because i was horribly abused as a child and because i didn't want anyone else to go through what i went through. because i didn't truly trust myself to be a good parent. because living in a failing capitalist society means i don't have the _ability_ to provide for any children i might have.

one of my friends is a mom and i am so fucking happy for her. she went through a lot to have that child, delayed her transition for years, and her child will never know her as anything but her mother. and she had that opportunity because the country where she lives, they _covered_ that, they _supported_ her in her ability to inseminate her wife, _paid_ for her sperm preservation and ther fertility treatments necessary, and i'm really happy, in america, i have a really good insurance plan. they paid for my genital reconstruction surgery, and it's been really amazing, but having a _child_ is never something that was financially within my reach. existing, for me, meant giving up on even the _theoretical possibility_ of children.

and theory, y'all are talking _theory_ here, as if societal collapse is a _theory_, as if societal collapse and human extinction are the same thing, as if the end of capitalist ethnostates is the literal end of the fucking world, and whenever someone like me points out that it's not, people tell me how many people will die, as if i don't know, as if people like me aren't the ones with our heads on the chopping block, as if we're not already fucking dying, as if the "genocide" y'all are so afraid of isn't what we have to live with on a daily fucking basis.

i mean i do all this mindfulness work, i work to exist in the present, and the present _really fucking sucks_, but i do it anyway because it's the only place i _exist_, it's the only thing i have any _control_ over, it's the only way of living that has any fucking _meaning_ at all. and the meaning it does have, it's a lot, it's amazing, it's wonderful, it's horrible, it's being _full_ of everything, all the things, and i should worry about whether or not humanity goes extinct? that's not fucking up to me.

it's not up to anyone here, either. quit worrying about whether humanity has a future and start fucking _living_.

whatever the heck it is you're talking about

The analysis I presented was straightforward enough, seems safe to assume your dismissive attitude stems from your own intransigence.

But sure let’s run with this. Given the actual global political reality the best hope given your obstructionist posture would be for Russia to take over Europe and uh for conditions to become so depressing in the richest countries that they enter a terminal demographic decline? It could work.

I’m getting the dawning realization that it’s actually a good thing that metastasized music boards aren’t running the world right now. Things could somehow be much much worse! Give us a shot, we could really make it happen.

Taking sides: graceful elegant decline vs last great hurrah of living it up and bowing out fast

GWAR’s ‘This Toilet Earth’ vs Stars of the Lid’s ‘And Their Refinement of the Decline’

I’m getting the dawning realization that it’s actually a good thing that metastasized music boards aren’t running the world right now. Things could somehow be much much worse! Give us a shot, we could really make it happen.

― recovering internet addict/shitposter (viborg)

um, i _don't_ rule the world, i don't live my life by being like "what would the ruler of the world do?" and then doing that. you think _i'm_ ignoring the underlying political reality? here's the underlying political reality: _you don't decide what happens_. none of us do. if people want to think about what they'd do _if_ they were the ruler of the world, what's the _best way to do things_, i mean i guess there's a place for that, but i have limited time for your cosplay apocalypse when my lived experience is the people who actually _do_ rule the world actively working towards the extermination of people like me.

oh hey, I’m actually still here? (and have been for two decades so not sure what the unkind creep/cameo comment was about) I do now regret trying to publicly work through some thoughts I was having on this topic. I spend a lot of my irl time isolated from intellectual debate, so reached out clumsily and probably worded some things poorly. But it doesn’t matter.

Will say that theorizing about this stuff is not necessarily removed from being personally invested in it. If you plant and nurture a garden, you also do well to anticipate the weather.

Will say that theorizing about this stuff is not necessarily removed from being personally invested in it. If you plant and nurture a garden, you also do well to anticipate the weather.

― Kim

i mean i think that's a good analogy! some people like freak out and stress about the weather and like who does that benefit? every time there's sprinkles on the forecast people are like "SNOWPOCALYPSE" and they run out and strip the shelves bare of paint thinner because the world is going to end, now's our last chance to buy paint thinner. yeah, i get it, winter is coming, maybe preparations can be a little bit more practical? also where i am i'm in the middle of a fucking blizzard right now and i don't give a shit about the fact that winter is coming, i'm sorry, i'm kinda busy here. and i point that out and people get all mad and are like, well, if you had your way, it'd be winter _now_. uh, what?

quit worrying about whether humanity has a future and start fucking _living_.

What does start fucking _living_ consist of though ? What do you do differently ?

― Luna Schlosser

that's a good question, it's different for everybody of course but here's some of what it looks like for me

i do a lot of work on healing trauma, with a heavy focus on healing guilt and shame. lots of mindfulness practice, circle of control stuff. i had a lot of issues with rumination and spiraling, getting into patterns of intense anxiety about things i couldn't actually do anything about. refocusing those worries into the things i _could_ affect and control has given me agency over my own life, rather than making me feel like a pawn of enormous forces outside my control.

i've also become a lot more focused on local community. a lot of the past year i've been working on building up a discord for trans folks where i live. it's only a really really small subsection of all the trans folks where i live, but i think it's been really healthy and rewarding. community is really important for trans folks but online trans communities aren't always the healthiest places - particularly on corporate social media sites, there's a focus on Discourse, which means conflict, and personally i try to minimize conflict where i can.

of course that doesn't mean that i _avoid_ conflict - i mean, this is a conflict right now - but when i do so i try to do it in a way that builds empathy, being honest and vulnerable rather than making with the zings. zings are entertaining in the short term, but in the long term they do tend to hurt other people, and that's more important to me than the transitory entertainment they provide.

minimizing conflict is another use of mindfulness practice for me - a lot of times people will say things that will get me upset and i have learned to kind of sit with those feelings and let them pass before i make a rash and hasty response.

when i talk with other people, i've moved away from centering rhetoric in general to trying to listen to other people and engage with them on an emotional level. i think a lot of times when people talk they get hung up on theory and i'm a lot more interested in how people are feeling, in providing care. providing care is really important to me. it's one of the ways i find meaning in my life. i was suffering a lot, and there were other people who took the time to help me, to care for me, to help me understand things about myself, and i just try to pass that on, to do the same for other people in any community i'm a part of.

as a result of my decentering of rhetoric, i don't engage a lot with political threads, and this seems like basically a political thread. when i do, what i try to do is reframe the conversation from abstract ideas to concrete, real-world experiences. mainly i draw this from my lived experience as a trans woman, because that's the concrete, real-world experience i have. at the same time, i try to take care to not universalize my own experience, to try not to set out my particular experiences as normative in any way.

i strongly believe that the way people think about "politics" is broken, not just in terms of structural systems of oppression but in the political norms we've internalized, what we see as "political" and "not political". i agree, actually, with viborg that what's needed is a paradigm shift. for me, that paradigm shift consists of moving away from a politics based on abstract universal ideals and towards a politics based on solidarity, on acknowledges the differences in our lived experiences and working to ally with each other for our mutual benefit.

the strongest and most profound political act i have undertaken, an act i continue to replicate on a daily basis, is my existence as a queer person. it's hard to explain how deeply this has affected me, how deeply my experience as a queer person has _changed_ me. of course, it's not my _responsibility_ to, but you asked a sincere question and i want to answer it to the best of my ability.

there is something incredibly powerful and transformative about being an out queer person. for me to exist, i first had to throw out a lot of the assumptions i'd made, and for me, my political assumptions were liberal. the beliefs i'd been taught, the beliefs i'd tried to put into practice as a "cisgender heterosexual man", had _never_ really served me, had _never_ really been to my benefit, and when i came out as a trans woman, i found these political norms to be laughably inadequate. a _lot_ of trans and queer people are strongly leftist, are avowedly anticapitalist, and i think cishet liberals maybe don't understand why that is, don't understand the damage their ideals have done, the ways in which queer people have performed, in many cases continue to perform, self-erasure in order to accommodate these ideals. don't understand the way the norms they seek to defend promote and perpetuate these broken, toxic ideals. liberals are willing to acknowledge our right to exist, but _not_ to cede the power of self-determination to us. recognition of us is, it is clear to many of us, a privilege, one that can be revoked at their pleasure. liberals see themselves as our protectors, the ones who carry the burden, the ones with great power and great responsibility, and _nobody_ can carry that burden, _nobody_ can live up to that responsibility.

i've put down the burden. i've given up trying to "save the world". my life now is focused on taking care of myself as best i can and caring for the people i am in community with. that's _really really different_ from how i lived my life before.

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

As mentioned passim I visited Greenland in May, and I remember that the in-flight magazine was unusually upbeat about climate change:
https://i.imgur.com/gBresVj.jpg

I guess the lesson is that one man's meat is another man's mustard, or mookie. I can't remember how the saying goes. From what I remember Greenland itself would be largely unaffected by a rise in sea levels. If the massive ice sheet melted it would be disastrous for the rest of the world, but without the weight of the ice Greenland's interior would rise, albeit on an enormously long timescale. Of course the ultra-rich will probably ride it out in mega-yachts, which might explain why they're so willing to plunge huge amounts of money into something that depreciates so badly.

The isolation really brought home how unlikely human life was. The birds and animals I saw in Greenland had been around longer than us, and they hadn't developed writing; the dinosaurs that preceded them didn't develop writing over the course of hundreds of millions of years. We alone developed writing, and by extension a means whereby the dead could communicate with the living. That was our triumph over death.

My hunch is that in the far future we will end up like the Inuit, roving bands scattered in the temperate zone, hoarding rubber and glass. I remember an old book called Man Plus in which a man is surgically engineered to survive on Mars, but that's not a feasible solution to the problem of life in a world too hot for life. In the long run all life on Earth is dependent on the sun, which has a finite amount of fuel. We might put off our date with the inevitable by relocating to Mars, but that will be the end of us. The stars themselves also have a finite amount of fuel, so long-term survival in the physical world is impossible.

My suggestion is that everybody have a go at The Talos Principle. It's a puzzle game, but the storyline is unusually melancholic. It deals with the extension of humanity and its attempt to cast a light into the future so that something survives.

The choice was about how many children to have. The elegance and grace was about being free to choose. Giving way to other species was wondering about what happens when one is not present and imagining one's absence.

were sorry I thought of them together