Why it’s time to think about human extinction | Dr David Suz

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David Suzuki talking about the urgency of the current moment in environment and economics:

Yet our extinction would be the biggest save for the planet.

If we're collectively that dumb that it needs to happen - sure. If we can realize our situation and have the sort of deep collective reaction to certain doom on a set trajectory, the way Daniel Schmachtenberger suggests, it's probably the better alternative to aim for.

Figure this too perhaps - there may be a reason why nature is turning sunlight into information in the way it is and in a lot of ways we're the current peak of that reaction. From the physics of information perspective are we doing something with that which benefits the broader system? I don't know the answer to that for certain but it's still an important question.

So.... Sidenote on the DDT story/Silent spring: before DDT, Malaria was endemic to the US.
Yes, we are better off for having used DDT.
But I guess that's the whole problem - progress at the expense of the planet now and no life at all for our children vs. losing lives to malaria etc. now, but keeping the planet inhabitable.

... what bugs ne is that there's no good ideas on how to create a world that doesn't rely on exploiting the planet - John Locke wrote that the wirld is there to be exploited by the industrious, and Marx wrote that the world is providing us with gifts of nature....
I can't imagine anything but a totalitarian dictatorship with radical rationing of everything for everyone and a planned economy to create an economy that's not based on exploiting resources to the fullest.
Maybe something akin to the chinese social credit system is a way to incentivize sustainable behaviour. Not that I'm advocating this, but I fear individualism is in serious trouble

The only other way I can imagine this ending well is us having such technological innovation that we bring the number of people needed to work down to near zero. It's as if we need the life/work situation of poverty without the poverty. The idea would be that the need for 'fripperies' for the sake of making something, anything, to make a profit and keep the workfare state going would need to be truly obsolete, and then by that point we can work on building high quality durable goods, with the point of them lasting up to a century or more without needing to be repurchased. I think that's about the only time where you in some sense could have a socialism-like system function without it going truly downhill, going broke, or needing to flex imperial muscles to make up for shortfall.

endtime-propaganda



//crypto trolling

Sure there are: humility and reverence. We just need to remember that our existence doesn't mean the world exists for us. We were given a miracle and treat it like a Happy Meal.

what do you mean by remember? -
to me, that implies that there once was a time in which humans lived in harmony in a stable environment.
But really, "nature is", in the words of Hal from Malcolm in the middle, "things eating things". Looking back at history, there's instable climate, and once humans enter a place, say, Australia, the numbers of large animals radically decline.
Large carnivores and disease kept humans in check, but there was no time, ever, in which humans didn't do everything in their power to consume and procreate.
We should however learn from viruses and our intestinal microbiome: if either of them is out to kill humans, they also kill their host... so... it's not that we need to remember, it's that we need to learn something completely new!

When we go extinct I will be happily dancing like this while it happens.