Edit: We survived an ice age and we’re very highly adaptable. Plus, we will hold on to some percentage of technical knowledge that will help us adapt faster.
Democracy and capitalism won’t survive. 100 years from now we will all be north Korea. 1000 years from now we will all live in medieval feudalism.
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If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis that all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.
Richard Feynman
So, if, during the apocalypse, you have access to a means of passing on a message to the poor bastards who have to live in the New World, it should be this:
“Everything is made of atoms”
My bet for climate change is a massive migrational crisis and wars over resources.
Humankind won’t disappear, not even civilization. But life would probably be shit, and many many people will die.
I think a lot will depend on whether nuclear wars break out but yeah, even in the worst case scenarios I don’t see civilization dissappearing entirely. And honestly it all kinda makes sense to me. Nature has to regulate itself somehow. If one species becomes too dominant things get tipped out of balance. If you have an infection because an organism that is usually present in small numbers on your body has turned predatory and is growing beyond sustainable levels you develop a fever until things are back to normal. It’s the alternative to dying. (Matrix Elrond had it right)
Misleading headline. I would wager that 100% of humans alive today will not survive, if we don’t act quickly to resolve senescence.
The majority of humans won’t survive the next 100 years, because almost nobody lives to be 100.
Do you mean that the majority of people currently alive will die due to climate change?
Do you mean that humanity’s population will drop by over 50% and will not recover?
Do you mean that in the future, the majority of deaths will be due to climate change, even in 200 years from now when the new (much hotter) equilibrium will be all anyone has ever known?Plus, we will hold on to some percentage of technical knowledge that will help us adapt faster.
FYI, http://collapseos.org/ is planning for this eventuality.
Sent from my TI-84+
“The planet will be fine. We’re fucked.”
— St. Carlin
St. Carlin
100% . I love to see it!
Him and Buddy Christ
When we experience and maybe survive the next mass extinction, its going to be vastly more difficult to reindustrialize / redigitalize even if knowledge persists because we’ve already extracted the most easily accessible materials from the earth and extracting resources is becoming increasingly difficult.
If you know how to build a battery but you cant build the machines to get the lithium, you just cant build a battery. But I suppose over time we’d find better ways to recycle.
Some humans will survive but, with the state of the world today, I think we’re already pretty close to losing our humanity.
Eventually, no one alive will survive.
Bit heavy for the shower.
Let the shower wash away your tears…
I want a refund on this “no tears” baby shampoo. Didn’t do a damn thing for my depression.
That would belong on Twitter, if it was 10 years ago and not full of nazis
I think we do Mastodon now
It’s where I go to cry when it’s not raining. :(
It just hit me in a sobering sorta way.
I don’t see how, thoughts have no weight whatsoever. Unless you weigh the mass of the chemicals and the electrical impulses involved.
I don’t care if I don’t survive but I’m taking a couple of polluters with me lmao
Plus, we will hold on to some percentage of technical knowledge that will help us adapt faster.
You’re running off the assumption that the survivors know useful information and that theyre also able to utilize that useful information plus be able to source needed materials since they wont have travel
Example: I know I need an antibiotic for my infection but I dont know how to create that antibiotic or how to guide someone on how to make it. If I did know id also have to get lucky that the region I live in has all the materials needed to make it. We source all around the world for our stuff.
Likely humanity will survive but probably wont advance as fast as you think.
The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, he didn’t, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn’t do it. Left to his own devices he couldn’t build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.
-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Arthur Dent realizes that he, as an individual, is pretty useless for improving a society, but he can make a damn fine sammie.
That was a delightful video; thanks for sharing
Thanks for the TED talk (really)
You’re running off the assumption that the survivors know useful information and that theyre also able to utilize that useful information plus be able to source needed materials since they wont have travel
I think we’re assuming books will continue to exist.
I think one of the real marvels of civilization is the redundancy of information. For every college course you’ve taken there’s a text book, and there may have been dozens of physical copies of that book used in your class, but also for many other classes at other schools that taught that same subject. There may have been 10,000 copies of that book in circulation across the globe, in many different countries.
It’s not impossible to lose information forever, but we’ve put in some really strong defenses against that really happening. There are a lot of libraries in coastal areas which could flood, or big cities that could burn after wars or riots. But there are also plenty of libraries in small towns, and at high elevations. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe Aspen has a public library for instance, and so do some of the small towns nearby that you don’t know the name of.
Likely progression is simply that food gets expensive, and is grown indoors. Technology doesn’t need to fall, though when slaves are not needed, soylent green is a “utilitarian” use for them under rules based world order. Food capacity and population that can afford to buy it will match. Fewer people does mean fewer iphones, and more expensive at lower scale.
Global warming, even at 5C, is more about increased misery and oppression, rather than mass deaths over a decade. Wikipedia will survive. The AI tech giants chatbots will explain why you need to die or be miserable until you die.
Just for clarification, I don’t think it’ll be fast. It will just be faster than without it.
Also, I think we’ll hang on to a lot because the survivor base will likely be made up of people from all walks of life. STEM Professionals, teachers, carpenters, you name it. And as long as we learned our lesson about religion, we’ll pass that knowledge on.
And stem professionals are also violence professionals (i.e. military and cops)? STEM tends to be very specific in their knowledge base these days. Yeah, they know how to make solar panels, but do they know where to get those materials, how to mine them? Even 80 years ago, it took several teams of hundreds of scientists to figure out nuclear energy. Lose half that team of specified individuals working together and you just have an idea. And those smart individuals gained their knowledge from smart individuals before them, and same for those individuals.
Look at Greek fire or the pyramids for examples of lost technology that 2000 years later, we still can’t figure out. Losing a scientist here or there is generally not that big of a deal, but when you can’t control how many or who goes, you lose control of the knowledge.
It depends on which kind of climate disaster we’re facing. If it’s reversible over the next million years, humanity as a species should be fine. The population would be cut down to just a tiny fraction, and the survivors might have to start from pre-industrial tech level.
If it’s irreversible, and the Earth becomes a Venus like hellscape, the whole planet should be pretty much sterilized. Good luck surviving that.
