772
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by kinther@lemmy.world to c/world@lemmy.world
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] Zron@lemmy.world 19 points 11 months ago

I often wonder where we’ll be in 2000 years.

Will our descendants look open our great works like how we’ve looked at Roman works, in awe of what we achieved with “primitive” tools. Or will they look at it in awe due to not having any understanding of how such a thing was done at all.

Will we have colonized the solar system and left earth to stabilize itself, or will we be back to city states, warring over scraps of land and access to water that is slightly less polluted. Or will it be both? The rich with their space empires and the poor left to fend for themselves amongst the corruption.

Will there be any of us left at all? We could wipe out all human life right now with a bio weapon or nuclear war. We’re like children playing with their Father’s gun, maybe nothing bad happens and we put it back where we found it, or maybe it’s going to be a tragedy. We’ve only had these tools for barely a century, who knows what we’ll do in 20 of those.

[-] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 14 points 11 months ago

Will we have colonized the solar system and left earth to stabilize itself

Definitely not that. Any technology that would allow us to colonize other planets would be much easier to use on Earth no matter how bad it gets.

[-] Zron@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago

It can also be argued that the continued trend of having an increasing human population is only going to keep accelerating the decline of earth’s biosphere.

We’re already seeing an apocalypse in the insects, and that’s going to lead to a decline in plant life.

Our carbon emissions are rapidly increasing ocean acidity and temperature, which will kill off huge swaths of the planktons that produce much of the oxygen we breathe. Biodiversity is approaching mass extinction level lows, and we’re barely figuring out how to slow it down.

I’m sure life on earth will survive it, it survived the impact that killed the dinosaurs, and that was an incredibly rapid change. But human civilization as we know it may not be able to adapt quickly enough to the damage we’ve done.

Humanity may end up as mole people living in carefully life support controlled bunkers if we continue. If earth is nearly as inhospitable to large terrestrial life as mars, what’s the benefit to one over the other? Might as well just leave the earth to the million year process of fixing itself and expand outwards if we can.

[-] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Earth still has plenty of benefits:

  • Things will grow outdoors, even if they're not the things we want growing.
  • We already know where major deposits of natural resources are.
  • There's an ionosphere, meaning the surface isn't bathed in deadly radiation.
  • Parts of it, such as the poles, will likely remain habitable.

The big issue, though, is that transporting any substantial number people to Mars would require many trillions of dollars of investments in space transportation. It's just not feasible to ship a large number of people to another planet. Even if we could start a colony on Mars, most of humanity will still be stuck on Earth and they won't have much interest in supporting a colony on another planet if they're being left to die.

[-] jj4211@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

The thing is that even with catastrophic global warming, earth would still be tons more habitable than Mars. Any structure that could allow survival on Mars would also allow survival on this hypothetical future earth.

We either fix it or we are screwed. So we are probably screwed. Anyone seeking to build a Mars colony as an "escape" would probably fare better building similar stuff in earth deserts, or something somewhat different underwater. Still not the most sane places to go for, but more sane than Mars if the goal is "most survivability".

[-] blazeknave@lemmy.world 10 points 11 months ago

I read/watch high fantasy about thousands, maybe tens of thousands, year old dynasties, let alone civilizations, and it just doesn't even make sense to me. We can barely keep a world system in place for a few decades.

[-] blazeknave@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago

Have you watched The 100?

this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
772 points (98.6% liked)

World News

39262 readers
2579 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News !news@lemmy.world

Politics !politics@lemmy.world

World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS