Same, if we can’t even, in actions not rhetoric, start from a baseline of “we’re all in the same boat, we all have needs and seek happiness, how do we maximize everyone’s well-being to facilitate that?” then we’re still just savage animals wrestling in the dirt, but with the dangerous capacity to devise technologies for selfish ends we aren’t wise/evolved enough to truly appreciate the consequences of using.
“According to The Atlantic, an asteroid that weighs more than 1.7 quadrillion metric tons could sterilize Earth by raising the temperature of its water above 100°C. This asteroid would be 10–1,000 times heavier than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and would be between 60–96 kilometers (37–60 miles) wide.”
The Atlantic article itself is paywalled, but yes, and it’s entirely dependent on the mass of said Asteroid.
Maybe the 10 commandments posted in every Louisiana classroom will stop the asteroids.
Whenever I dare to hope about the lofty, admirable star trek future, I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren’t up to the task for anything more than a token selfie by the best dozen humans we can possibly produce with great effort and training.
As a species, we aren’t going to spread out there. Still too primitive, and probably too self-destructive to make it out of this phase of evolution. This might be one of those great filters scientists postulate as to why there aren’t signals from innumerable civilizations out there.
We aren’t even capable of caring for one another, let alone the EASIEST to maintain, most naturally human friendly habitat we would ever encounter in the cosmos as we evolved to fit it. No airlocks, the air/water/waste recycling was already fully automated, all we had to do was not recklessly grow/metastasize to the point we strain the absolutely massive system out of greed and glut, and stop carelessly shitting where we sleep. We all know how that’s been going since we figured out how to make dead animal poison rocket us accross town.
Master space? Master planetary defense? We can’t even defend this world from our own habitual consumerism. We’ll be lucky if we aren’t scattered tribes living near the old hardened structures of the before times for emergency shelter from the new normal weather events in a hundred years. We’re already starting to argue over the resources it’s taking to rebuild population centers from the current new normal. We have played pretend we were since human civilization began, but we are NOT and never have been this world’s owners or masters, and we are still very much its subject.
And Reminder, what we’re doing and have been doing in decades won’t be undone for millions of years. The Earth is a self-correcting system, and the damage we’re doing is inconsequential to its 3.8 billion year old, beautiful story of life growing out of every crevice, just not on a timescale humans can benefit from or even truly appreciate.
I, for one, would like to hear Elon beg.
Oof. Oligopolies/duopolies shouldn’t exist, but here we are.
If by mankind you mean about 30kish sociopath families on the backs of billions and to the detriment of the long term climate our only habitat, then sure.
And to be fair, those 30kish sociopath families would largely agree they’re the only mankind that counts.
Sorry about my gutter trash mouth btw, I’ll work on that.
I have just come to acceptance with who we are, and enjoy the accidental poetry of our reckless worship of greed/gluttony/growth/metastasis being our, accelerating going by the latest science still going on deaf ears, end.
I also enjoy all the very corporate culture like bargaining that’s going on with cold, hard, unflinching physics. Oh we won’t make our non-binding emissions goals and grid standards, so we’ll just roll those back, the climate will understand!
We’re tackling our own self-inflicted, reverse terraforming climate disaster with the stages of grief because we refuse to stop and change how we live to find homeostasis with this world, so this isn’t going to end well, and just like with clean coal/corn ethanol/plant a tree offsets/planet scale carbon scrubbers and all the other private profit driven snake oil “solutions,” we aren’t going to science up a magic bullet to save us from the epically irresponsible actions of our epically irresponsible species.
Unlike a lot of sectors though, Airbus knows what they’re doing and is a high profile alternative, and unlike the US, hasn’t yet completely internalized our sociopathic greed disease to our degree, despite the global economic pressure we inflict on other nations encouraging them to betray and cause harm to their own societies and citizens if it means an extra nickel of short term private profit.
Don’t worry though, the UK has fallen to the greed disease, and our capitalists are bribing and coercing their way eastward, and they won’t stop until they either are physically stopped by something like climate change, or successfully make the world forget that Economies are lowly tools that are supposed to exist solely to benefit the people of the society they are a lowly tool for.
Imagine what Native Americans must think of such depictions.
Remember, small impressionable children, oligarchy and rigged market capitalism is the only way, everything else is evil and anti-freedom, and remember to compete against your fellow Americans to try to get more than them!
For our next lesson, critical thinking and reasoning! Just kidding, we don’t do that here. It doesn’t help to make you better laborers.
And now onto history, open your textbooks to page 33:
Our captured Gov’t: You go to prison…unless you’re very wealthy of course, this is America after all.
Then we’re happy to negotiate, settle, reduce, and otherwise facilitate your repayment in a way that’s convenient for you and your tax litigation team, sir!
Fuck it, if we’re dumb/selfish enough to be doing this, let’s get it over with.
Good luck dolphin people! My only advice, if you have any dolphins incessantly trying to claim more resources for themselves than all the other dolphins, beat the ever loving shit out of them and nip that in the bud.
Covid kind of disillusioned me to the whole “all humanity needs is a common enemy/suffering to get right” concept.