• experbia@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I’m convinced this is a major great filter event for all intelligent species. “Can the natural consolidation of power and resources in the world be sufficiently counteracted to avoid massive cataclysmic population crashes?”

    • Jaytreeman@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Civilizations collapse because of environmental overshoot. Every other civilization has been in relatively small geographic locations.
      Whoever thought this globalization thing was a good idea was incredibly short sighted.

      • irmoz@reddthat.com
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        1 year ago

        We have the technology to overcome these hurdles. Just no politician wants to dictate that we do, because no business leaders will have it.

        • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 year ago

          Do we?

          Setting aside the issue of people who would refuse to go vegetarian, getting everyone on the same page politically, etc, we’re at the brink of environmental collapse (at least the food-chain is) and the IPCC models of keeping warming under 2°C rely on wildly optimistic predictions about our future carbon capture abilities with basically no basis in our present reality.

          And that’s not even getting into how hopeless our ability to mine enough minerals to replace all current electrical demand with renewables. We’re talking trillions of dollars, the biggest project in human history. And that doesn’t account for how our electricity usage grows year over year.

          On top of all that, the plankton in the oceans are dying off right now due to acidification. Without plankton, the oceanic food chain collapses. Without the ocean we’re all fucked, oceanic life is most life on earth.

          The best case scenarios here involve billions of deaths.

            • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org
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              1 year ago

              I may have misunderstood what you meant to say, in that case.

              Was I wrong in thinking you were saying that we could avoid mass death/collapse? Because mass death seems inevitable even if we all got our shit together, that was what I meant with my last comment.

              Were you saying “humanity can survive despite billions of deaths because we have the technology”?

              I guess in that case we do agree.