Malaclypse, on 11 September 2016 - 08:27 AM, said:
Azath Vitr (D, on 11 September 2016 - 06:35 AM, said:
Malaclypse, on 11 September 2016 - 06:22 AM, said:
Gorefest, on 05 September 2016 - 01:08 AM, said:
Again, I don't buy it. Any nation out for whole-scale destruction is going to be isolated and pounded upon by other nations. Any group of individuals out to cause large-scale mayhem will want to preserve themselves and therefore make sure that at least some people survive. And finally the suicidal nutcases are usually isolated incidents or loners in which case they lack the scale and impact for wholesale destruction, or it is organisations like ISIS who get fanatics to blow themselves up but the people behind it want to live to see a new world and they need people for that. Nuclear bombs will leave survivors, deadly viruses will leave survivors. Nobody is going to willfully destroy a planet that they themselves are on or if they do they lack the followers to achieve a global impact. 100% termination of the species is simply not realistic. The only way to manage that is through a cataclysmic event (big rock from outer space or sun collapse) or accidental termination such as destroying the ozone layer. And even in the latter event you'll probably have some underground survivors. Or some sort of sterility virus, but again with the current state of human medicine we may even be able to find a solution to that.
You don't understand people. We are eminently capable of destroying this place and if you imagine otherwise, you are fooling yourself. I think it might be useful for you and I to have a private conversation about this because I know where you're coming from, it's nice to believe that the people around you would make the right choice if they were pressed but, with Brexit, we know that's not the case. A racist underclass has been created in both the United Kingdom and America - well to be honest, it's always existed in America and if you can motivate those people to vote you get Trump and it's madness.The current political strife in America is deliciously similar to the most outrageous Roman political antics from history. I would giggle my ass off if Trump waded into the ocean with a squad of Navy SEALs and ordered them to conquer the sea. That's how fucking crazy it has become down there. We tend to get Cascadian Americans which is a blessing because they tend to be forward-thinking liberals and we get along just fine. Gorefest, honestly, you just lack a firm grasp of the facts but I forgive you for that. If you feel that you have a position that you can defend then we should continue via PM. Nothing would please me more. All of my best friends have given up, quite frankly and I crave fresh meat.
Just as past near-extinction-level events caused rapid human progress (see
https://en.wikipedia...astrophe_theory for example---or the Black Plague) in the past, they suggest the potential for vastly accelerated development of transhumanist adaptations (if they aren't happening already in private).
It's highly unlikely that *all* human life would be wiped out in a single moment (or even one fateful, classic, tragic day: "Le jour n'est pas plus pur que le fond de mon nu coeur"). Therefore:
https://www.youtube....h?v=JzSMjSxM5Vo
Jesus water-walking Christ! And people call me crazy! A natural catastrophe is one thing and is likely subsumed by your tidy little theory but a human-caused catastrophe is decidedly not. I sense a willingness to engage on your part which I respect but this is too juvenile an idea to take seriously. Also, an asteroid could finish us all so the only interesting and important thing is to get off this rock. Anything else is just waiting to be victim to cosmic happenstance.
Would an asteroid kill everyone instantly? Or even within a day? Perhaps if it were the size of a small moon; otherwise, no.
After the initial impact (with its attendant earthquakes, volcanic erruptions, and fires), what will end up killing most people is starvation.
But we have produced ridiculous amounts of food, and even if all the non-perishable food ran out, we can produce sufficient food without sunlight (or soil (hydrophonics), or workers (automation, crude AI)); we can produce artificial sunlight using nuclear energy.
There are already many old fall-out shelters from the Cold War. They can be improved on for other doomsday scenarios. Especially if the alternative is imminent death.
So some of the super-rich would survive in their shelters, while almost all the rest of the animal and plant life died. (Some people with access to non-perishable food may survive. The harsh conditions could drastically increase the rate of natural selection, and motivate technological innovation---relative to whatever technology they have left and can power. Just like what happened when that supervolcano errupted about 70,000 years ago, blotted out the sun, and killed almost all humans.)
Currently, transhumanism is being held back by:
- Government regulations on "unethical" human testing
- Fear of being a test subject because of possible negative health consequences (like death)
- Funds and technological / scientific labor being devoted to trivia or to other questions
Against the pressing threat of near-future extinction, these concerns would seem trivial. Transhumanism could flourish underground, among the offspring of the super-rich. Meanwhile, a perhaps smaller number of lucky mutant poor people would be rapidly evolving (if not transforming into birds...) to continue living even after all the available non-perishable food runs out.
But false vacuum decay could wipe out all life (on Earth) at any moment:
'The walls of the true vacuum bubble would expand in all directions at the speed of light. You wouldn't see it coming. The walls can contain a huge amount of energy, so you might be incinerated as the bubble wall ploughed through you. Different vacuum states have different constants of nature, so the basic structure of matter might also be disastrously altered. But it could be even worse: in 1980, theoretical physicists Sidney Coleman and Frank De Luccia calculated for the first time that any bubble of true vacuum would immediately suffer total gravitational collapse.
They say: "This is disheartening. The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in a new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it.
"However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some creatures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated."'
https://cosmosmagazi...ate-catastrophe
What about human-caused catastrophes? Which ones are you referring to? Airborn pathogens? If they don't kill everyone almost instantly, some (most likely super-rich) people will survive, even if they have to wear something like space-suits to walk on the surface. Massive nuclear war? Unless it literally destroys the planet itself, refurbished and technologically improved fall-out shelters would suffice (and, as with asteroids, the same impetus towards technological adaptation and transhuman experimentation would hold... and it might even be better for any people who can survive outside the shelters, if the radiation increases their rate of mutation and allows natural selection to happen much more rapidly... though the more likely, and epochal, benefit is the move towards transhumanism).
Malaclypse 
worrywort, on 14 September 2012 - 08:07 PM, said:
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