Comment by agentultra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by agentultra | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I don't believe that the next ~200 years will be anything but catastrophic for life on this planet. I'm not hopeful that we can "solve" climate change or avert catastrophe. As I understand it we're in the early phases of a sixth mass extinction event caused by many factors. Most of them anthropocentric.

The only thing we have power over now is determining how severe the building catastrophes will be. If we can mobilize radical efforts in the next ~4 years we may avoid the worst case scenarios. But that doesn't mean we'll be hotly anticipating the next smart phone and enjoying next-day delivery in thirty years. There will still be mass extinctions, large swathes of the surface of Earth will be inhospitable to humans, we will live with constant wildfires and super storms... regardless of what we do now.

I'm not a gambling sort of person so I don't plan on getting lucky. It sure would be nice if some genius out there invents a technology that magically reverses everything. However that's not a likely outcome.

I think we need to look forward to surviving. It's not going to be pleasant but I do remain hopeful that it will be possible.

I am now remembering that book by W. Heisenberg "Das Naturbild der heutigen Physik," which talks about how Physics and Mathematics overcame the Cartesian mindset. I think that Cartesian mindset needs to be questioned more than ever now that we need to come up with unprecedented measures against all odds. For example, I see modernity as being predicated on this platonic notion that we humans have our minds separate from the material world, and from these minds ideas emerge, including the ideas about what we should aspire to. There is little regard for the way in which technology tends to be a tool for us to indulge in our more basic impulses (unless, I think, one works in PR). I refuse to say primitive because the impulses I am thinking of are more of the nature mentioned by Veblen when he talks about conspicuous waste. So as a result of this tendency, we are in this paradox, in which technology actually seems to be shrinking our possibilities (I think David Graeber mentions this in another context), and the world is turning into a monoculture both literally and metaphorically. The result is less resilience in the face catastrophe and less capacity to adapt in the face of energy shortages, because the complexities that allowed for adaptation (different ways of living, biodiversity, crop diversity) have been steadily eliminated. There are also economic impulses behind this, related to the process of commoditization, and the reliance on debt. The first is seen as good because allows creating economies of scale. The latter makes scarcity be a good thing, because if things are not scarce enough then they cannot be converted into enough money to pay debts. Hence, people worry about employment and growth. Environmental degradation never subtracts from growth, and neither do chronic diseases.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com