• flandish@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    world’s been on the brink of ending my entire 45+ years. Kinda hope it happens here.

      • FerretyFever0@fedia.io
        0·
        3 months ago

        As of right now, climate change and pollution are legitimately unfixable problems in my opinion. Everything else could hypothetically be fixed (although most of it probably won’t be), but those two are really going to fuck us over.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          climate change and pollution are legitimately unfixable problems in my opinion

          The Late Devonian mass extinction was likely caused by the evolution of oxygen producing plants. This fundamentally altered the chemistry of the atmosphere and kicked off the Hangenberg event which is estimated to have killed half of all life in the world’s oceans and around a quarter of all life on dry land.

          Incidentally, the sudden and massive spread of plant-life during this period is responsible for the rapid accrual of fossilized carbon that has become the fuel we’re currently killing one another to secure.

          Everything else could hypothetically be fixed

          We can’t ever really go back. We can update our social responses to climate-wide events. But industrialization isn’t just going to stop happening even if we check our fossil fuel consumption habit. Humanity’s propensity for engineering our surroundings to meet our comfort needs is an unstoppable evolutionary tendency. That’s not something we can ever “fix”. Pandora’s Box was opened millions of years ago. We’re going to have to play this hand out until we hit another ecological balancing point.

              • TotallynotJessica@lemmy.blahaj.zoneMEnglish
                0·
                3 months ago

                The “ruling class” of today rely on the vast pools of labor that constantly increase with food production and industrialization. If something ever killed a significant percentage of the world and reversed population trends, they’d have much less leverage to continue their way of life as they do now. That doesn’t mean things will be good, but there can only be so much cannibalism before it is no longer in a ruling elite’s self interest.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        Its a slow burn.

        “The world is ending” is easier to accept than “The world has always been a hard place and also I’m not getting any younger”.

        Easier to believe you’ll live to see the end of the world than that the world will keep spinning without you.

          • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            3 months ago

            Most of us will probably not live to see the end.

            There is no “end” to live to see.

            things are about to get a whole hell of a lot worse

            I get this line every fucking day on here. It really seems to deny the reality of the post-industrial era. One of shrinking poverty, enormous surpluses, and a backbone of infrastructure that benefits the entire planet.

            Like Kromptkin recognized over a century ago, we have already won as a society and a species. We just need to recognize it and dole out the winnings equitably. What Westerners see as a terrifying decline arrives just as much of the Eastern Bloc and the Global South are finally cashing in. And much of what Westerners dread is this equanimity - this international muscle enjoyed by nations not in the privileged Early Adopter group taking a slice of the pie they thought was always going to be theirs.

            And even then it isn’t really bad news for Westerners in the aggregate, because so much of that pie was going to an elite plutocracy in their own backyards.

            What people in the US and the UK and Germany and Japan are coming to terms with is the dead-weight loss of their own monarchies. Whether they choose to carry this baggage into the 22nd century will determine how they end up living. But the days of colonial extraction are closing. The Free Lunches paid for with the surplus labor of East Asia and West Africa are coming to an end.