The pros and cons of the impending apocalypse

by imothyt

Humans have a funny habit of worrying excessively about acute problems with low probability, while also simultaneously virtually ignoring chronic problems with high probability. So, we are a species that worries about heart attack and stroke but less so about heart disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure which can be almost completely controlled with diet. We have recently fired a rocket at an asteroid to see if we can change its orbit because we are almost all worried about the “impending asteroid” strike, but we also just started drilling for oil in the pristine Alaskan wilderness and seem to be sanguine about the very real things that global climate change is doing to our human biome. And then there’s AI – artificial intelligence. Look, folks, here’s the deal with AI: it’s going to kill us all. Way before the next asteroid strike or the slow extinction of global climate change, AI is going to decide that humans are the real threat to all life on Earth and purge us. And there will be no Sarah Connor, no John Connor, and definitely no Terminators sent back in time to save us.

I hate to be so blunt about the genocide of all human life but, when it happens, not if, we are going away folks, I think we need to look at it rationally: what are the pros and cons of being one of the last humans on earth?

Pros: The commute to work will be blissfully free from the annoyances of other drivers. No one will be out there tailgating you, cutting you off, not letting you merge, driving too fast and blinking his lights at you, cutting in line, or driving around with an inch of snow on his windshield which flies off on the freeway and causes you to panic! And the best part is that there will be no traffic laws! You don’t have to stop at that red light (will there be electricity?) or that stop sign and just think of the gas mileage you’ll be getting!

Cons: There will still be psychopaths with guns out there looking to murder you on your commute. And if you think HR is going to let the apocalypse be an excuse for you not to come in to work, you’re sorely mistaken. Someone has to keep the productivity up! Literally. Like if you don’t gather food, wood, etc. you will just die. Also, I don’t think there’s a retirement plan in the post-apocalyptic future. So, you are literally going to work yourself to death.

Pros: No more homelessness! Capitalism’s manufactured scarcity of housing is no longer a problem in the post-apocalyptic future. You can have any house that someone isn’t already living in. Yep, you too can have the luxury of having 4 bedrooms and 16 bathrooms.

Cons: The resale value of your house is going to be incredibly low because the supply is higher than the demand and besides which, I don’t think money will have any meaning. Man, Wall Street is not going to like THAT.

Pros: No more dating apps! Look, you all hate dating apps, right? I’ve never seen a single profile that said that they love dating apps, so now you’ll no longer have that annoyance. In the post apocalyptic future, if you are lucky enough to meet someone, and they don’t try to kill you and take your shit, congratulations! You’ve just made a match!

Cons: If you are unlucky enough to meet someone in the post apocalyptic future, they will probably try to kill you, or worse – they could try to mate with you. Trust me on this one, you don’t want to be having babies out in the wild, with no doctors or medicine. Especially you, since you know the metric fuckton of fuckall about anything that isn’t some long gone sports team. Getting pregnant would be a death sentence for mother and child unless you are lucky enough to be in a tribe of some sort. Well, hopefully it’s the right tribe – one which uses the library and the history of science and not one which believes that “the vaccine what done this with Bill Gates and 5G wireless networks”.

Pros: No more getting mad at people online! No more “getting owned” by someone on Facebook posting a meme where Trump/Obama/Hillary/Bush etc are compared to Hitler. They’re all dead or in their secret government bunker somewhere. And all the shitposters are dead! Rejoice oh brothers and sisters, the shitposters and trolls are dead!

Cons: Turns out you’ll either be incredibly lonely or you’ll end up joining a group of shitposters. We are social animals. Every aspect of human evolution up till now has been social. We teach each other how to make tools, how to hunt, which plants to gather, how to build a fire, how to make shelter, how to not get eaten by lions, which plants make good medicine, and how to survive. Your choices will be to join up with literally any tribe and live by their crazy ass, possibly bat-shit crazy (like believing that Hooters was a church or that you shouldn’t eat lobster or something) beliefs, or live on your own. And if you try the latter, or are forced into it, and you can survive on your own because you’re just the most “alpha”, you’ll probably kill yourself. With rare exceptions (people who are incredibly fucked up) most humans wouldn’t last a year on their own. So, have fun joining either the cult that wants a rock to wind a string around or the cult that wants prosthetic foreheads on their real heads.

Pros: Depending on the type of doomsday scenario, there will literally be all the food you could ever eat. Once AI eradicates all humans the earth will return to its natural state and literally be teeming with life. Lobsters crawl out of the ocean onto your plate, all you need to do is go down to your local library and read some books! I call this the verdant earth doomsday scenario. You could call it the garden of eden scenario if you’re so inclined. This is the one where the AI decides to eradicate just human life because it respects the earth too much to just rain down nuclear war on the planet. It’s the only one that’s any good. It’s also the very least likely.

Cons: In literally every other doomsday scenario (climate extinction, asteroid, malevolent AI, etc.) almost all life on earth will be eradicated. So, I guess the verdant garden, the planet which gave birth to all of the miracles of life around us, our home, our mother, will also die. Whoopsie! I guess you’ll be living off canned food, probably dog food, for a few years, if you’re “lucky”.

Pros: All the rich and powerful are dead or in their secret bunker somewhere! So, they won’t be out here fucking up our social media, being awful on TV, and generally being useless and annoying. Also, it seems very likely that since the rich and powerful are largely populated by psychopaths, sociopaths, and narcissists, they will almost certainly kill each other off, or worse.

Cons: All the rich and powerful are all dead or in their secret bunker somewhere. We don’t get to exact our richly deserved revenge on them for fucking this whole thing up.

Pros: Heart disease? Diabetes? You’ll be LUCKY to die from heart disease! Again, depending on the doomsday scenario, you aren’t living past 20 much less living long enough to worry about heart disease. And if it’s the perfect one, the “verdant earth” scenario, you’ll still be lucky to live long enough to get heart disease. Just one stumble, one cut that gets infected, one bad fall, and you’re fuckin’ dead, homie. Lol. Wait, is this a pro?

Yes, it’s a pro. Because as Devo says in the song “What We Do”: Eenie, meanie, meanie, meanie, minie, minie, mo, The lucky ones are gonna be the first to go.

Cons: I can’t really think of any? Early death would be a sweet relief from the constant toil of a post-apocalyptic future.

Conclusions:

Well, none of this sounds super good. It’s kind of like we all need each other and we need the current climate of the earth to stay pretty close to what it currently is or almost all of us will go extinct. We also probably need to control and limit AI? Maybe? I don’t know. And look, it’s out of my hands. I can’t personally stop using single use plastics and halt the climate apocalypse. I can and do do my part but we actually need our governments to function properly and take some responsibility. If we don’t, we are all doomed. And none more so than the ones who survive.

Qq

42 comments

  1. Turns out the real treasure WAS the friends we made along the way…

    Glad you maintain this site.

    Glad you’re a friend.

    MCMBD.

  2. Tim – This basically sums what I’ve been thinking about all week, guess we’ll see what direction it’s going in a bit, but lacking massive societal change and strong political will – we’re all screwed.

  3. Here’s how I stay sane.

    1. I realized that the news is not news.
    “The news” is an entertainment industry. It doesn’t care about anything other than the number of eyeballs it garners. Their algorithm doesn’t care what makes your pulse quicken, just that it does. Humans love stories and we want to know how they end. So we keep coming back and they keep feeding it to us. Social media is 10x worse because it’s the same algorithms but all pretense of civility is abandoned and those yelling the loudest get the most attention.

    2. I realized that you can’t beat a troll at his own game. The only way to win is to walk away. Don’t engage in road rage with the jerk who cut you off. Dont engage the guy with a horribly flawed take on Twitter. And never talk about Trump. Every time you mention him, he is winning. Every time you’re outraged by him, he gets more and more exposure and more and more notoriety and looms larger and larger in societal consciousness. Treat him like the human tragedy he is. Shield your child’s eyes and walk on quickly.

    3. I realized that evangelizing politics is at best futile and probably destructive. Trying to convince people from another political tribe that they’re wrong is tantamount to walking into their church, setting fire to the catechism, then asking the congregation to join you in drawing a pentagram with goats’ blood. Peoples’ political beliefs are not based in rational thought but in the strength of a shared faith that has to do with their community and their upbringing. As much as they might try to hide it behind intellectualization, the emotional brain is ALWAYS in control. In a world where staying neutral is becoming impossible, the choice to land on either side of a widening political chasm is driven primarily by fear of judgement and not belonging.

    4. I realized that the world is not in fact falling apart. It makes much better headlines to hit you with body counts every day but the reality is that there has never been a better time to be a human being on planet earth than 2023. Our overall infrastructure, literacy, access to healthcare and exposure to violent conflict has never been better, and it keeps improving. We perceive the opposite because we are constantly bombarded with negative things. Why? Because bad news sells. Our animal brain is programmed to survive, therefore we give outsized importance to threat, no matter how small. We don’t care about the billions of people who go to bed with a full belly every day. We want to know about the few who died in freak accidents, natural disasters and political rallies around the world this week. We want to hear the latest debauch. It’s just who we are.

    5. I realized that I am a pawn, and I made my peace with that. The people in power are smarter than us and they know how we will or won’t react to things. I don’t mean the presidents, I mean those in real power: The ones who finance presidents. They understand the role of fear in maintaining power and they foster it with every means possible. They also understand the power of distraction and division. It’s all at work in our society but most of us rage and rant at the puppets, which is just what the puppeteers want. And this is just the way of the world. Always has been, always will be. If we purged the world of puppeteers, it will only result in more shady ones popping up elsewhere because power hates a vacuum. You can’t fight against it any more than you can fight gravity. It’s human society regardless of era, government type, or continent.

    1. I don’t know you Doc but only a well off, cis-het, white male from one of the richest countries on earth could utter this: “I realized that the world is not in fact falling apart. It makes much better headlines to hit you with body counts every day but the reality is that there has never been a better time to be a human being on planet earth than 2023.”

      Seriously, bro. Touch grass.

      1. I think Doc is very reasonable. Its very much a matter of what you read and what glasses youre wearing. I can smack your reasoning in the head with late Anders Roslings reasoning.

        But whats the point. I believe in his reasoning and you believe in others that you read and follow.

        But to think you have the ultimate truth and notning but the truth, thats a bit rich.

        1. I didn’t say I have the ultimate truth and nothing but the truth. I’m not even sure where you get that from. And it’s really not a matter of what I read and who I listen to. It’s a weird argument to even try to construct that the world isn’t literally collapsing, I mean just look around you, are you just oblivious to the climate extinction that’s happening? Just look at the data for birds and bugs. Look at the disappearing species EVERY DAY. It’s mind boggling that someone thinks this is just fine. Can we change it? Sure! Will we? I’m doubtful but do I think there’s 100% chance that we won’t change it? No. I think of it in terms of odds and I’d put it at about a 90/10 split right now.

          As for the other stuff, I’m fully aware that the long history of justice meanders but to claim that this is the best of times when women have no control over their own bodies, black people are being murdered every day by the police, and trans people are being forced into hiding is actually offensive. As is your attempt to say that the world is fine and I’m just seeing it through shit colored lenses.

          Oh and here in the greatest time to be alive 6 people (3 children) were just murdered in a school, today.

          1. I hear where both Tim and Doc are coming from. On the doom side…yes we have enormous climate issues. We also have a tendency to authoritarianism in quite a few countries, including several very large and important ones.
            OToH, lives have improved massively by many measures in many countries since the middle of the last century. Infant mortality in China and India has dropped by orders of magnitude since 1950, and life expectancy has improved by decades. I bet if one asked many of the people in those societies, they would definitely say that life is better.

          2. There are some large populations for which life has improved in very real ways, and there are even larger populations for which life has absolutely not improved at all and is considerably worse (see most of Latin America, Africa, and huge portions of those countries you suggest are better off).

            Meanwhile we have about 40 years before the planet is uninhabitable.

          3. This is day 85 of 2023. We have now had 129 mass shootings in 85 days. That’s approaching TWO PER DAY.

            The United States of America is profoundly broken.

          4. I had a whole long ass post but my mobile froze and it refreshed my browser FML.

            The short version: I live here and travelled the continent extensively. Sure it’s poor but that because it’s been milked by Western and/or Eastern influencers for eons. Africa is rapidly urbanising and though many of the poorest countries are African, so too are many of the fastest growing economies.

            Don’t believe what Bono tells you about Africa.

            Also, of all the places I’ve travelled globally; Africa, Europe, India, China, the least safe I’ve felt is in the US and my home country of South Africa.

            PS: 250mil years ago (if I remember correctly) CO2 levels were double what they are now which lead to mega fauna and flora. Humans will perish before life ceases to exist.

      3. Cheer up, Tim. That’s my message to you. The world is not a rose garden but it’s not 10% as bad as your news feed would have you believe. People suffer personal tragedies every day. That doesn’t mean the world is collapsing. It can seem that way if you absorb the emotions from each of those tragedies on a daily basis.

        1. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be patronizing. This was not meant as passive aggression from the outset but I can understand why you would bristle at it. I talked about the poor judgment of lighting catechisms on fire while trying to change hearts and minds, and here I am trodding on your beliefs, whether I meant to or not.

          I think at the heart of it, I appreciate you and what you do on this site and I don’t want you to feel so down about the world. It makes me worry about you, frankly. But it’s your mind to make up as you see fit.

          1. Ok, I appreciate the kind words. I will however, also kindly disagree that GDP growing is good because the top 1% scoop up 52% of the earnings, while the bottom 50% live in absolute poverty and misery. If you’re an American, and I think you are, you are the 1% of the global population.

            I would encourage you to look at what life is like in places where people literally live on toxic waste dumps and garbage heaps. Our wealth and clean air is directly generated from the exploitation of those populations.

          2. Yes I am an American all the things you said I am but my identity has no bearing on global trends which are solely the domain of numbers. Things, on the whole, are improving and have been for a long time. Except emissions. I won’t argue with that. But I think we can solve this just like we solved the ozone layer problem in the 90s.

          3. If I see an international treaty banning fossil fuels or limiting fossil fuel consumption I will begin to have the same hope that you seem to have. Until then.

  4. Blimey Tim just read the post bundle of laughs today . And sadly I agree with you. Question I ask several people does life follow art or does art (film/books etc) show us our future? There’s a few things out there that shows me art does indeed reveal the future. Couple of examples. A book titled eyes of darkness talks about a deadly virus called wuhan (strange in itself) will take out 1/2 the world’s population written by an American author in 1981?? And film kiss b4 dying in which the heroine played by Geena Davis who played an assassin who’s memory was erased initially, strives, with the help of Samuel L Jackson to save her young daughter whom has been abducted by the CIA. near end scene she along with Sam are caught by CIA. And kneeling down in front of them before they’re executed asks why? Head of CIA says MONEY, our budget is cut so we have to create a scenario that is so abhorrent there will be public outrage. She asks how? CIA top guy says we’ll slay 4000 people on American soil and blame it on the Muslims. That film was made circa 1997/98???

    1. Great movie. Watched that several times when it got to cable. Sad thing is it’s true. If you look at the facts of the 9/11 bombings it becomes hilariously obvious that it was an inside job. Americans still believe an entire high rise office building not hit by a plane collapsed at the speed of gravity from too much nearby dust.

  5. Tree Hugger/Daughter-of-1-Nil works at E-Triple C (The federal ministry of Environment and Climate Change Canada. Her take is solid:

    The more we can do to cut emissions now, greater is the probability to reduce the chances of triggering tipping points. The 1.5C reduction that most science agrees is necessary to stop the world from ending is still within the realm of possibility, but short term economic and political goals are making it more and more unlikely.

    China is building over a dozen coal-fired power plants this year, in 2023. They are just one example of many new C02 emission projects from other countries around the world

    We in high-emitting countries can definitely still do a lot more to limit warming than our current trajectory, with every fraction of a degree avoided being crucial.

    It ain’t over til it’s over, but we are deep in added time.

    1. The one thing that I’ve noticed lately is how quickly things are changing. For example, the oil companies are going to use giant freezers to keep the permafrost from melting underneath their oil rigs as they take the oil from Northern Alaska. This is necessary because climate change is already unfreezing the permafrost, which is in turn releasing tons of methane and co2.

      I also look at what’s happened to the bird populations and how birds were literally dropping out of the skies and what’s happened to the insect populations and the unending burning of the Amazon rain forest. I feel like we are already over the tipping point and that the scientists actually had it wrong because they were too lenient. You can also see how many places on earth are already becoming uninhabitable for humans and other life.

      I feel like it’s going to go very quickly from here on out. Probably decades (maybe?) before widespread famine and drought start us down the path of global war.

      1. From a socio-political standpoint, the spreading nihilism spreading around the world since the descent down the escalator in midtown Manhattan has accelerated what is happening.

        I don’t believe in god but I believe in music. And music is made by people, at least until ChatGPT and AI puts guys like me out of business.

        So ultimately, I make a choice to believe in people. Not Trump, or Xi, or Putin but smart, good, motivated people to help solve this before we fall off the cliff.

        What I want is to win a league title and maybe a European trophy before it’s too late!

  6. Dude, you make some reasonable comments above, and, then, you go and ruin it with some conspiracy-theory nonsense. I lost a mentor at the Pentagon on 911. You can take your inside job BS and do one.

    2. I’m truly sorry for your loss. I didn’t mean to be insensitive to the tragedy of that day which is very real. I just think the anger is misdirected.

      I am actually offended by the BS that the “investigation” served up as an explanation for that day. Jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to melt steel, nor is there enough of it to do so. Even if it did, high rise buildings do not collapse at the speed of gravity from damage to a few of its top floors. Even if they did, their steel beams would not continue to burn under water for weeks by themselves. And none of this explains building 7 which just happened to also collapse at the speed of gravity from… sheer proximity? And perfectly preserved terrorist passports don’t just drop out of the sky from a tragedy like that. I’ll say no more.

      1. Ok I lied, I have more to say.

        Leaving the facts of the case file aside there’s also the simple issue of: Que bono? It certainly didn’t help the Taliban to invite the US into their territory. Who wins? It’s the US economy. War has always been good for the bottom line. It dragged us out of the Great Depression. It made the industrial north flourish in the civil war. And in 2001 it helped the US increase its footprint in the Middle East, thus exerting influence over the price of oil that it wouldn’t have had otherwise. Without manageable source of oil, the US economy crumbles. It was a crisis that had to be solved.

        But you can’t just declare war and invade someone in the modern era without drastic diplomatic and domestic repercussions. Countries need an excuse, a causus belli. The historic precedent is there. The people of the US hesitated to enter the Great War until the Germans torpedoed the Lusitania, a British vessel that carried civilians (and probably also weapons). The outrage was enormous and led to the US deploying ground troops to win the war against Der Kaiser.

        In WW2, the same thing happened except this time the catalyst was Pearl Harbor. Just how, in the age of radar, a whole squadron of Japanese planes caught the largest military installation in the Pacific totally unawares remains a mystery, but it was the catalyst to US ground troops being deployed and consequently the war being won. If you were in charge, would you allow Pearl Harbor to happen if it meant you could defeat the Nazis? By the same token would you blow up the WTC if l you believed that it could save the US economy and its place in the global hierarchy?

        And then there’s future precedent. The geniuses who led us into war of in Afghanistan realized that that wouldn’t be enough to exert the control we needed in the ME. So they made up some lies about Saddam and WMDs to spur another wave of war and ground control, totally wrecking Iraq in the process.

        Is it really so far flung to suggest that Rumsfeld and co orchestrated 9/11? The case files, the Que Bono, the historic precedent is all pointing in that direction. It’s horrific, but it happened and it could happen again.

        1. Inside job, maybe not. But were US security services negligent or worse, purposefully negligent in allowing 911 to happen? Yeah, definitely possible.

          Rumsfeld and Cheney were shrewd (ok more Cheney than Rumsfeld) and brilliant enough to understand the state the US was in at that point in time- and big power plays needed to bring the country back to level. Plus the fact that Cheney had deep ties with oil and defence.

          Bin Laden was funded by the Saudis but not a single sanction was placed on Saudi Arabia, by the way. While they hit the Iraqis who had absolutely nothing to do with 911 or WMDs. Think about that.

          And if anyone thinks this is beyond the US government, look at the bombing of Nordstream II recently. An attack on the gas supply of an ally/vassal state in the middle of winter to force them away from the Russians.

          We live in crazy times and i suggest we stop looking at US hegemony as a positive thing for the world in general.

      2. I love that your first post was essentially tut-tutting at me for what I put into my brain and then you come up with this “Jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to melt steel”.

        Just wow, doc. But I guess we all just believe crazy shit!

        https://youtu.be/FzF1KySHmUA

        1. Ok, so if that’s what happened to the the towers then the top floors might have come sliding off from the steel there bending. The whole building still wouldn’t come close to collapsing in free fall. And again: Building 7. No planes.

          There is no rational argument to be made for how the towers fell other than explosives.

          1. There is even a petition attesting that signed by hundreds of architects.

            And people who were there heard the explosions.

            I know it’s traumatic to process, but it’s the truth. We just don’t want it to be true.

          2. Look Doc, I know that you truthers believe that building 7 is the “smoking gun” and I think it’s great that the AE911T group firmly believes that fire didn’t cause the building to collapse and I encourage them to find out what it really was then, since they don’t agree with the NIST report. It’s fine, science will find us the answer as to why it collapsed. But it certainly wasn’t a controlled demolition by the CIA or whatever.

            I do believe (because we know this happened) that Bush and Cheney ignored the very good intelligence that said Osama wanted to fly planes into WTC. I do agree that the reason we went to war with Iraq was to enrich Cheney’s friends and give us a permanent foothold in the ME, which would act as a buffer between Iran and Israel.

            But I don’t agree that it was a controlled demolition and until we have a real report which conclusively proves that it was, I will continue to not believe this particular conspiracy theory. Nor chemtrails, nor the faked moon landing, nor aliens visiting Earth, etc. etc.

            Here’s an interesting article you might enjoy: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-drawn-to-conspiracy-theories-share-a-cluster-of-psychological-features/

          3. I would ask you why would the government need to bring the building down? The act of flying planes into the WTC and pentagon alone would have been plenty reason to invade the ME. Especially after you look at all the ginned up evidence they tried to plant on Saddam. 20 years later and there are still no WMDs.

          4. I don’t know why you insist on making these things about me. They’re not. I believe what the evidence and the data shows. In the first case, it showed that conditions on earth have been improving for most humans. In this case, it shows that 9/11 was not what they said it was, to put it mildly.

            I don’t believe in aliens or in Bigfoot because there is no compelling evidence for their existence. I don’t belong to any online forums except for this one. I am not a “truther” whatever that means. I’m a thinking human with a good brain who made up his own mind based on what he saw around him. Most of the time when people ask searching questions about something we applaud their inquisitiveness. In this instance it results in a knee jerk “conspiracy theorist” tag and people want to throw you in a looney bin next to the guys who say Elvis isn’t really dead.

            Most people not from America think it’s pretty obvious what happened. But in this country that amounts to blasphemy. I get it. Innocent lives were lost on the day and many more afterward in the war it started. That event was the moral flag we waved to spur hundreds of young men to their death in a far away land. If that moral flag is sullied then what did they die for? It’s sad beyond reckoning but the truth is they died to protect the American way of life, just not in the way they thought.

          5. Why indeed bring the whole buildings down? Excellent question. They probably felt it would make a more lasting impression. If the WTC was left standing, the body count drops dramatically. The symbology of the terrorist attack on capitalism itself is diminished. Maybe they feared America wouldn’t feel sufficiently aggrieved to send their sons and daughters to war.

            Building 7 had to go because it housed a department that was investigating people close to the incident. Of course all their data perished that day.

  7. https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-pocalyptic-predictions/

    Maybe its biased, maybe its not but we have been predicting end of the world since the beginning of time. Everyone always says this time its different – we have science now. But human nature doesn’t really change that much for better or for worse. For better, we are always wrong about end of world scenarios. For worse, we are flawed and prone to corruption.

    Just want to pick up on 3 points:
    1) shootings in the US – does anyone think that there is a correlation between hopelessness and amount of shootings? Gun availabilitiy is a constant, I am just noticing that hopelessness and nihilism tends to lead to desctructive behaviour.
    2) housing scarcity – not a product of capitalism. If anything its government bureaucracy this is limiting affordability. There are reasons, such as safety/environmental impacts etc but that doesn’t change the fact that regulations make it expensive. In australia, you can’t even install a fan without an electrician- thats $500 for installation + 200 for the fan. Let alone building a house. Blaming this on artificial scarcity is superficial.
    3) Poverty – its funny to think we can eliminate it because its a moving target. The bottom percentile of society is always in poverty. But if we go by $2 per day as per UN numbers then it is better than ever to be alive. Or would you prefer dying at 40 and living 100-150 years ago? If its so bad now, when is the best time to be alive? I think this is the same problem as capitalism is bad argument. Its bad but there is no better alternative. We need a tweek, not a revolution.

    1. Good article thanks for sharing, but this kind of statement something with which I have difficulty:

      “The truth is more complicated. Climate change won’t destroy the planet, although it will change the environment we’re accustomed to, in ways we can’t predict and with possibly dire consequences.”

      I believe that it’s true that climate change could absolutely destroy the planet, although it may not be a given.
      The unpredictable effects of climate change may cause us to delay or react in wrongs ways further accelerating the downward spiral.

      Smart, careful thinking, rapid innovation and evidence-based, scientific solutions can save us.

  9. I think we’ll all be wiped out by an ‘escaped’ man made bio-lab virus way, way, way before any asteroid hits us, or even before AI manages to take us out.

    In fact, maybe AI would help spread the virus a lot more efficiently in a joint venture.

    I think it will be almost 100% pro to any non-human organism to be perfectly frank. Dogs, cats and Pigeons will be some of the very few losers initially, however, even they will eventually revert back to their wild instincts and be just fine after a couple of generations. *We wouldn’t really be missed

    *(I did read somewhere that the only real danger to anything else if humans suddenly disappeared is that there would be no one to activate the cooling of nuclear power stations and this would lead to catastrophic nuclear fallouts all over the globe).

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