With an unstoppable global warming, overpopulation, and food and water shortages.

[rjsquirrel]

125. Who said it will all be ok?

Everyone of us is going to die. Many bad things will happen. Life will likely continue to evolve unless we manage a major nuclear conflagration before civilization fades away.

In a biologist. My perspective is millions of years, not the historian's centuries. Being ok or not doesn't enter into my thinking. It was not ok for dinosaurs when emergent species figured out how to steal their eggs or when a giant meteor caused a global climate event. It was great for us hominids though, if you take the long view.

We are animals with big enough brains that we think in abstractions we can communicate. That makes us think we can divert the natural history of life on earth. That's pure hubris at epochal scale.

Animals exist to reproduce. We are in effect hosts for parasitic genes. They don't care if we live or die or suffer or exult, just as long as we make babies.


Your explanation for the childbirth question is charming. You're saying that for millions of years, hominids (or for a few hundred thousand years, Homo sapiens) only kept having babies because women didn't have a choice to practice birth control?

There is no stronger human drive than the reproductive drive. I'd be curious if you have had children because any parent knows this and wouldn't trade parenthood at any cost. And that is most of humanity through most of our history.