"humans will survive for hundreds millions of years. But I'll be long gone in like 40 and I'll have gotten everything I every wanted. So change nothing, and fuck you."
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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Homo Sapiens may survive for 10 million years, but I don’t think that is where the smart money is.
2015:
Like other Republicans, Paul would repeal Obamacare, partially privatize Social Security, move Medicare to a " premium support" system for future retirees, and block-grant Medicaid and food stamps. But he's also proposed budget cuts of 20 percent or more to NASA, the National Institutes of Health, the FDA, and the EPA — and cuts of 60 percent or more to the National Science Foundation, State Department, and Interior Department, among many others. Plus he's proposed eliminating the Departments of Energy and Education entirely. "It's the most detailed expression of what a libertarian approach to budgeting would look like to date," Matthews writes.
Off to a great start!
I'll ask that guy, if I ever want to make a country as shit as possible for everyone but the rich.
The rich don't stay rich without peasants to work for them and buy their shit. If everyone else dies or leaves, the rich are in trouble too.
That's why they're so keen on AI
Leaving likely won't be much of a problem since you won't have enough money to leave either. Dying on the other hand....
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Yeah, start terraforming other planets please... but don't use money to do it, I want the money. I'll give it to my friends instead, but please go terraform other planets for me.
Other than Mars, I'm curious as to what other planets (plural, his words) he thinks could be terraformed. Venus is too damn hot, mercury is too close to the sun, and the rest are gas giants.
Is he proposing to colonise planets beyond our solar system?
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No, see, he gives $1 billion to his friends so that they can put $1m toward terraforming other planets
"Libertarian": zero mention of the DoD budget.
Dude is not a libertarian, he just likes to think he is. He's just another "small government" republican.
DoE is responsible for maintaining american nukes, military is not having it
I love that you don't even have to specify which department of "E" that is, you need both for that purpose
So... he'll push for a massive NASA budget increase, right?
No, free market will solve it! SpaceX! (/s)
I maintain that we have a battle of world views going on here. In some ways it's about the myths we believe in. Most environmentalists believe in what I call the Hobbit Paradigm: we live in a beautiful garden, and if we grounded ourselves in relationships with our communities (including nature) we would have a good and sustainable life. Many technocentrists believe in what I call the Star Trek Paradigm: humans are limitlessly ingenious, technological solutions will save us, and Nature is viewed with an anthropocentric utilitarian ethic.
I do not believe in the Star Trek Paradigm. It's hubris. I also don't think it's a very pragmatic paradigm. We live in a world we evolved to live in. Not worrying about this world because we think terraforming other planets and setting up space bases might be a possibility is not comprehending the Good or risk very well, IMHO.
I suppose a third paradigm is cold-blooded, individualist Realpolitik; It's a dog eat dog world, fuck you, I'm just trying to get mine as hard as everyone else is. In this case Space Colonisation is just a beard to disguise a callous and usurious relationship to the beings is this world.
That makes the conflict one of story, of myth, which means no one will have their minds changed by facts. They're belief systems. We need to expose those fundamentally short -sighted or selfish beliefs. We need to tell better stories, and expose the ridiculousness of the other stories.
The issue is once you educate yourself in science and engineering, you realize that teraforming planets isn't something you just do. And you can't realistically rely on a technology that doesn't exist. The real problem here is one of education. The facts and the seriousness of climate change do not support his dumbass argument, and we'll all be dead by the time everyone comes to an agreement and realizes, oh shit nobody is going to save us from climate change but us.
We can't keep astronauts aboard the ISS indefinitely, even with constant restocks from Earth, and we're supposed to go even further out of our orbit to the moon or Mars and they're going to be fully independent? Why not save the cost and try to make a human terrarium here on Earth?
edit: not arguing your point, just extending it a bit.
Yeah, I won't knock people trying to leave the earth. I work in space stuff, and I would love nothing more than to see us realize multiplanetary habitation. but I definitely think we need to be good stewards of our planet. We don't exactly have a plan b. And realistically, we may never have a plan b. Science is hard.
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I gotta imagine making the Sahara Desert habitable is a lot easier than making Mars habitable. The Sahara at least has breathable atmosphere, a 24 hour day, solar intensity that our plants are well adapted to using, and is relatively close to resupply from population centers on Earth.
And Sahara was a jungle pretty recently.
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You can easily be an environmentalist and still believe in the Star Trek paradigm. While we, that is mankind, might have the ingenuity to find technological solutions to most of our problems, we do not have the political or economic systems necessary to actually put these solutions into reality.
Or just that we should start small with the immediate existential threat on the planet that people already are on
also, the ability to do stuff is the ability to make problems. if our societies do not advance at pace with our technology, we will die. see: outside
I've heard this phrased as Wizard vs Prophet
https://grist.org/politics/wizards-and-prophets-face-off-to-save-the-planet/
There’s also a fourth attitude. We live on a planet uniquely suited to the kind of life it gave rise to, such as ourselves. The climate of it before we began pumping tons and tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere was generally tolerable. Sometimes we had great periods like the medieval warm period and sometimes we had natural devastation like the little ice age. We’re in the process of going from bad to worse and if we don’t let up with our emissions soon we’re gonna have to get a lot better at every form of engineering really fucking fast
we’re gonna have to get a lot better at every form of engineering really fucking fast
Unfortunately that’s what we humans are really fucking good at. Nothing quite like a deadline, a sprinkling of procrastination, and a daunting technological existential hurdle to inspire a half-baked, good enough for now solution.
I figured that both sides are eventually going so far to their side they meet halfway. The good ol' horseshoe theory.
In this case tech would go so far with genetic engineering while resource depletion forces them to go bio-punk and arrives at basically high tech treehouses.
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Politicians are extremely shortsighted. Many cant even see past their own noses
That's not true, that's simply what they want you to believe.
They know what they're doing, they know it's not in our interest, they play dumb and the uniparty marches on.
Hundreds of millions
Even without climate change I doubt that humans would survive more than 1-2k years from now.
The only way humans' progeny will exist for millions of years is if we manage to make it through the great filter and spread out to other planets, assuming we can find planets suitable for open-environment habitation.
We're quite good at making more of ourselves than is sustainable, so the only way of keeping ourselves going that long is to spread out.
Of course by then I'm sure several new species of humans will have emerged.
Overpopulation doesn't usually lead to extinction. Mass die-offs sure, but not extinction.
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To be fair... if we did manage to develop terraform-level atmospheric processing, we could set the CO2 level on Earth to whatever we want. Maybe that's what he was trying to say?
That's not true. That's like saying "If we had refrigerators, we could keep food good forever". As you know, food in the fridge can still go bad, because no technology is perfect. I think that terraforming technology will be an extension of techniques we can use on earth today, like controlling emissions. And that saving earth from apocalypse is the best possible practice we could have for fixing other planets. There is no magic "fix everything" button. Even with the right technology, you still have to do the work. Today, we have the right technology to save Earth, and what determines the continued survival of the human species is whether it is capable of doing the work.
The reality is that Republicans cannot determine any difference between surviving and thriving.
If you start with the assumptions that Earth is regulated by YHWH by divine intervention and that all other planets are gifted to humanity by the same to do with as we will, this absurd belief follows naturally.
"Surviving" is one thing. Why can't we also continue to enjoy life like you guys got to do? You wouldn't have been able to last a day in the world you left for us. Which is why as it got closer and closer to affecting you too, you just pushed harder and harder to keep it away from you, doing more and more damage for the rest of us to feel instead.
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