Sort-of memes that are cracking you up at the moment

Perhaps consciousness is an evolutionary dead end? Would our extinction be less likely if we didn't have it?

Our extinction is a certainty either way. I don't think consciousness has much bearing on the matter. The extreme adaptability of humans is likely to defer their extinction as a species, but not by a significant amount on the geological time scale.

geological time scale

But the timescale that matters is the lifetime of those we care about.

I think it will happen well before we can get to Mars or somewhere habitable without a dying sun. Space exploration is a dead end.

1 Attachment

Sort-of dead ends that are cracking you up at the moment

Existential crises that are cracking me up.

Existential crises that are cracking you up

1 Attachment

Existential crises that are cracking me up.

We're going with the floe.

Existential crises that are cracking me up.

Cracking up like the East Antarctic ice sheet, am I right?

Making our planet completely uninhabitable for all human life, isn't quite the same thing as unihabitable for all life. Life is amazing, it will find a way to survive , it's just ego on our part to think if we go, it all goes. It the great scheme of things humans could mearly be a footnote in the story of this planet.

Millions of years from now super inteligent cockroaches will be digging bit of us up and wondering how we managed with so few legs.

.

1 Attachment

the timescale that matters is the lifetime of those we care about

People who are alive today will all be dead soon.

Making our planet completely uninhabitable for all human life, isn't...

...as easy as you think. Humans are very adaptable and omnivorous. As long as something is alive on earth, there will be people around to kill it and eat it.

So good

Wonder what the range of survivable temperature for humans is like compared to, say, cockroaches. Seems like it’d be a lot narrower. Although we have the ability to use technology to create artificial environments I suppose.

It's a pretty varied planet and we survive in some of the hottest and coldest parts of it, but surviving and flourishing are quite different.

I’ve been to Finland and those fuckers aren’t flourishing.

.

Yup

1 Attachment

Wonder what the range of survivable temperature for humans is like compared to, say, cockroaches. Seems like it’d be a lot narrower

Without heating or air conditioning, it's not great, but just clothing and shelter which we've had for many millennia are good for -40°C to +40°C. Cockroaches are rubbish at low temperatures, you can kill them in a domestic freezer. Some invertebrates can survive excursions down to -80°C, but actually living requires temperatures well above freezing.

You could definitely eliminate all further anthropogenic effects on climate by killing all humans, but that may not be the most palatable solution politically.

Jared Diamond shared a theory in Guns, Germs and Steel that the mini ice age in the sixteenth century was caused by the deaths of 95 percent of the inhabitants of the Americas from diseases following Columbus, leading to widespread re-vegetation that caused climate change. That may have been discredited now.

Some invertebrates can survive excursions down to -80°C

I read that theory in the Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/31/european-colonization-of-americas-helped-cause-climate-change Great connection to the freezing of the Thames

Genghis Khan killed 10% of the world's population at the time, causing climate change for a couple of hundred years. Climate hero.

Jared Diamond … may have been discredited now.

This