this post was submitted on 12 May 2025
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It's ironic when you think about human history .... at one point in human development, there was a population bottleneck where there were only a few thousand individuals that we are all descended from. It basically means that we owe our present world to the survival of a few thousand people.
Now it seems our species will die out because of the greed of a small percentage of our population.
We came into being because of a few .... and we will die out because of a few.
Pretty much no serious authority on climate predicts that global warming will lead to human extinction. The collapse of what we know as civilisation, perhaps, and even some kind of mass death event, but our species outright ending? Zero chance. Not to say that those who endure as a relict population upon an overheated, polluted, and scarred Earth will be having a great time or anything
That few is still 800 million people. Basically anyone in a developed country.
I think of us as the golden billion. With the consumption still growing, mostly with China's help.
Oh my god you just blew my mind. The US is about 340m people.
I don’t think climate change is going to mean annihilation of the human race on its own. It depends on what the people do when faced with famine on a mass scale. Water wars leading to nuclear annihilation would do it, but there also could be multiple revolts and power struggles over the world. Depending on how those go it could put us into something positive. Not without untold suffering though.
ngl if humanity gets though the next 100 years, I kinda doubt we can all go extinct from then on.
The damage we are creating will take thousands or millions of years to undo .... so the trajectory of problems is bad right now, will get worse in the next few decades and stay that way for a few centuries. That is if we don't figure out ways to make things even more worse.
And if we do get to the point of nuclear war and the inevitable nuclear holocaust after, it will take us a century to survive that, then centuries more to recover from the damage it will cause.
I do have hope that as imaginative and creative beings that we are, we may figure out ways to survive through all that.
However, I am also realistic and know how ignorant and depraved we can become in the face of disaster and our own mortality.
We've survived natural disasters in the past that were no fault of our own.
We don't know if we can survive disasters of our own making.
I don’t really like the rhetoric of “we” are doing this. The rich, the warmongers, the imperialists, the capitalists are the ones doing it to us and the world.
No raindrop feels responsible for the flood.
Terrible metaphor for this when the vast majority of this “flood” is being created by a small minority of people.
A billion people isn't a small minority. You and me are part of it.
"We" is a relative term when I use it here ... I don't mean specifically you ... or me ... I mean the majority of people everywhere in the world who actively don't do anything as a collective to stop all this insanity and just go about perpetuating the system that is slowly destroying all of us.
It'll create a new bottleneck for sure, but I expect there to be a few communities built up by the richest of the rich to survive with as much comfortable as possible. A large number of the survivors will be their serfs, essential staff to maintain their comfort in exchange for a chance to survive.