Comment by baxtr
12 days ago
"The end of humanity" has been proclaimed many times over. Humanity won't end. It will change like it always has.
We get rid of some problems, and we get a bunch of new problems instead. And on, and on, and on.
12 days ago
"The end of humanity" has been proclaimed many times over. Humanity won't end. It will change like it always has.
We get rid of some problems, and we get a bunch of new problems instead. And on, and on, and on.
Russell's chicken (or turkey) would like a word.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_illusion
I love that you brought this up.
Chickens are killed ALL the time. It’s a recurring mass event. If you were a smart chicken you could see that pattern and put it into a formula.
In contrast, the end of Humanity would be a singular event. It’s even in the name…
And that is fiction / speculation in comparison. It’s not backed by any data. Human survival over 300,000 years by contrast is.
I mean it’s fine to dream things up, but let’s be fair and call it what it is.
On the other hand, species go extinct with increasing regularity.
The frame is not from our view. It is from that of this singular chicken who has only ever known its keeper's care. As that chicken, we simply do not know if Christmas will ever come.
The collapse of civilizations has happened many times. Today, all of humanity is bound tighter than ever before. In the latter half of the last century, we were on the brink of nuclear war.
New things are happening under the sun every day. If we were that exceptionally smart chicken you describe, then we have reason to expect Christmas.
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One thing I've wondered about is:
Suppose a civilization (but not species) ending event happens.
The industrial revolution was fueled (literally) by easy-to-extract fossil fuels. Do we have enough of those left to repeat the revolution and bootstrap exploitation of other energy sources?
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The point of that thought exercise is to show that reasoning by induction is flawed. As best I can tell, you discount it with further induction.
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298,000 of those years didn't have toilet paper. It was utterly impossible for a single person to "end humanity" even 200 years ago; now, the president can do it in minutes by launching a salvo of nukes. Comparing the present moment to the hunter/gatherer days is preposterous.
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Erm, humanity is experiencing recurring mass events right now.
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What, you weren't alive when the last mass extinction event occurred? Why didn't you communicate or at least write the last handful down or something? Aren't you smarter than a chicken?
It's funny that you think we know what happened to humans anymore than a chicken knows what happened to chickens.
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It only has to be right once. Humanity won’t end until it does.
Humanity may end if someone else goes to the top of food chain.