Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment

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I've worked for Wal-Mart, McDonald's, Burger King, and Carasim Coffee, for service industry jobs.

Sure - the individual odds for the poor are lower - no antiviral drugs (which may or may not work), lower nutritional status (a disadvantage for viral disease). But as a group, the masses often beat the classes when it comes to pandemics. Simply more of them. It's somewhat similar to k vs r ecology:

Ok

When's the next virus epidemic coming?

Right now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-GaRKDsz-Y

Well, that sounds convincing. The question to me is: why? Just *what* was wiping out these people, apparently all over the world, at such a young age?

A hunter-gather should be 10 times fitter that a typical sedentary person. They live a less sheltered life, presumably inheritance should mean that those with immunity to the diseases of the environment should survive to pass on their resistance. Given that the 2 biggest killers of the industrial world are heart disease and cancer, both directly linked to the excesses of our lifestyle. And not far behind we have suicide and road accidents. None of these would be a factor in the life of a H-G.

Something really doesn't add up here. Look at the ageing process. At 33.5 most of us are at our physical peaks. Were the H-Gs all old and wrinkly by then? Do they have a totally different ageingcurve to modern people? Or is it solely disease and accident that reduces their lives? Surely at 33.5 we are MOST able to fight off diseases and predators. Could it be that 33.5 is the life expectancy of a H-G who comes into contact with diseases of the industrial world, but has no access to the medicines?

I'm intrigued to know the full story behind that figure. Very easy to say 'disease', but it's well known that when the Europeans went to the New World, it was the foreign diseases they brought that decimated the locals. A society would naturally and relatively quickly develop immunity to the diseases of their natural environment.

Also, of course, life expectancy is not the argument here. It is the destruction of 'mind' and 'environment'.

The figure is a mean; most/many of deaths were in early childhood ( birth to 4 years) , which brought the figure down.

Super efficient natural selection; wiping out weaker/non-resistant members before they could pass on their genes, rather than after they had!


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Yeah, I figured that out just after posting. So the weak ones die before passing on their genes. Sounds like a perfect long term strategy to develop a strong species.

Must say I doubt the usefulness of a statistic that states an average life expectancy of 33.5 even though hardly anybody actually dies at that age. As useful as the fact that the average human being has one testicle.

The figure is by itself a little misleading, but it is the standard way of reporting life expectancy. Either way, people dying very young isn't generally viewed as positive, and indeed our life expectancy from birth still outstrips their life expectancy from age 15 by 20 years or so. The health advancements in the past hundred years are staggering.


Not really. Peak is more like mid 20s.

My experience with advanced age H-G's is pretty much nonexistent, but the aging patterns were likely very different I would guess. For example, a Neanderthal (life expectancy 20 years) specimen I had to examine in a class once was a toothless mess, and he died in his 40s. Not a perfect comparison, but suggestive I would say...

ManErg,

You are right - lifespan is not the issue.

The increase in lifespan has existed for how long - and at what cost?

Increased lifespan of 60 - 75 years has barely existed for about 50 years.

Increased lifespan of 60 - 75 years has come at the cost of environmental destruction.

And just wait for two decades. Industrial Society is going to collapse like a house of cards. Human lifespan is soon going to return to pre-industrial level or it might even become zero.


We are living on a small planet - which is just 40,000 km in circumference. If we indulge in overactivity we destroy the ecosystems - we destroy the very things that have created and sustained life on earth.

Humans have spent more than 99% of their time on earth in non-industrial societies.

Industrial Society has destroyed necessary things for making unnecessary things.

Industrial Society has destroyed animals, trees, air, water and land for making consumer goods.


We should live a simple life - we should destroy ecosystems for our basic needs of food, clothing and shelter - not for producing consumer goods.

If we continue with the present lifestyle it will be the end for human race within the next two decades.

This planet was created for millions of species. Human overactivity has decimated most of the other species. Humans have polluted/ killed air, water and land. Humans are going to face the consequences very soon - the punishment is coming - and the human race certainly deserves it.

sushil_yadav

Consider the locusts, how they destroy whole fields of vegetation, do they not survive?

It may be a mistake to think that our activities, or our effect on the planet, are unnecessary, wasteful, or catastrophic. I said somewhere else that if locusts looked around them, from their point of view, ( a limited one, as ours is) , it might seem as if they wrought destruction, laid waste to the universe each time they finished stripping a few acres of bush/field, but oddly enough it is not the case.

And how would you decide what is "necessary"? It may be that many or all of the things that have been mentioned/referred to in this thread as unnecessary etc are necessary to restore/create/maintain some more important balance of things. How on earth could we know, in a universe the size of this one, ( ourselves equivalent proportionately to locusts in a field) what is ultimately useful?

Why go back to something that has been done already?

.

With technology we can learn more than we ever could, create ships that can traverse the solar system, and halt pathogens that were killing people for centuries. What is it that you condone; standing still for the sake of simply living without any ambition of moving forward? As someone else said, you're using a computer, to which you responded that the world was already this way so it isn't your fault. But you're using it, so you're condoning it. If you truly believe in what you preach, then buy some cheap, obscure rural properties and live off the land, nothing is stopping you.

I don't mean to come off as abrasive, but I'm tired of people's elitist anti-industry attitude when they feed off of consumer culture just as much as anyone else. And keep in mind that you don't have to think in extremes; there is, after all, a middle ground between greedy consuming capitalist and hippie luddite. You can care about technology and progress while still being considerate of the environment. As a matter of fact, some of our most cutting edge scientific research is concerned with developing alternative and safer means of energy production.



Industry, as a whole, is good. While environmental regulations need to be put in place and more care needs to be given to the natural world around us, it is industrial competition that keeps our economy going and move our technology forward.

Going back to "simple ways" is a bad idea that is way too unrealistic to ever be implemented. However, I propose the opposite notion: let's pour even more research into technology that will lend itself to cleaner, cheaper, and more efficient forms of energy.

People usually died of plague, leprosy, rabies, smallpox, etc long before they had the chance to get cancer or heart disease.



The peak is more like early 20s (and yes, at this age people are most able to resist diseases, accidents, famine, etc). Most people in preindustrial societies either died in infancy or usually lived well into adulthood. 33.5 is the average, not the most frequent age of death (school-level statistics: the mean is usually not the same as the modal value)



Some immunity does develop, but sometimes pretty limited - for example, smallpox was pretty deadly to Europeans, though not as much as to New World people. There are plenty of ancient diseases for which humans have little natural resistance, such as rabies.

Our selfishness and failure to evolve spiritually to match our technological progress spells disaster.

OP more or less correct in general tone and conclusions. Industrial society or technology per se isn't the problem. Human nature itself is the problem. Intelligence is a curse only when it is misappropriated. You may have said somewhere (did you?) that intelligence can also be lovingkindness or wisdom plus compassion, in which case it would be properly used brain power.

Time does seem to be running out for "life as we know it". Those capable of progressing in terms of spiritual maturity may survive to exist in a slightly modified form of homosapian, perhaps with a more enduring body relative to what remains of our planet......while those failing to do so will simply not progress in like manner. A person first has to wield power in order to misuse it. Most of those capable of progressing to the next level never had much power to begin with and if they had the odds favor they also would have misused it because that is human nature.

How we propell our bodies through this living existence revolves around the intent of our hearts. If there is a personal god, which is highly doubtful, it probably only cares about that core intent. Whatever our thoughts and productive endeavors have been won't matter all that much except in that they served to bring about self-annihilation. Which it seems was your point all along.

For he to whom much is given, much is expected ..<---or something like that

Personally I would question everything that I was taught in history class in school, and that includes how long people lived a thousand years ago..

Yeah, minus the mystical crap, I agree entirely

(format t "Nice knowing you, ~{~a~^, ~}." everyone)



Not very long.

I haven't seen the schedule, but I'll tell you when I know.

The 1917-1919 influenza pandemic killed more people than WWI. Some similarities to the genome in the H5N1 avian flu that has been popping up around the word for the last few years, but not even Lord Bayes knows if that will catch fire and go human to human. Our modern ventilators at hospitals are great, but there are barely enough of them in normal times, certainly not enough for a pandemic.