This US summer is 'what global warming looks like'

[caseymoz]

111. Mice certainly knew their space was limited.

If evolution didn't equip mice for that environment, it hasn't equipped us for this one. Nothing in our natural history prepares us to confront worldwide resource depletion and environmental catastrophe. Consider human beings have an equal drive to reproduce, by accident if no other way. In other words, reproduction is a drive that usually will thwart our minds' decision to stop it.

And if it weren't the love of money, it would be something else. Even with the love of money, it wouldn't have mattered if during the Green Revolution we controlled our population. However, instead of stopping our population there, humankind did what it did every time it escaped a crash prior. We increased our numbers. We took more food and turned it into more people.

Believe me though, if it weren't greed, it would have been something else. The drive to reproduce is just that strong, even if some individuals and even nations can succeed for a while, it will be thwarted. The population that won't reproduce gets overrun by immigration of a population that will.

We can be very intelligent about seeing what the problem is. Unfortunately, the part of our brain that sees it is subordinate to the part that controls behavior. What we lack is anything that gives us the ability to socially organize on anything like the scale necessary. Nation-states aren't cut out for it.

So, it won't matter what you come up with as a solution because it has to be cooperative and coordinated. Our natural history has left us just as deficient for it as the mice were.

I get angry at individuals or groups who won't even consider the problem possible, like the Koch brothers or Rush Limbaugh. I'm being part of the problem, however, if I despise all humanity for it, especially when it doesn't match my POV. That is: if humankind fails and dies out, it's because we weren't capable of succeeding. My best hope is for a die back and "bottleneck" which selects for a human descendant which can organize more effectively against the problem. Homo Sapiens Sapiens haven't shown the ability to do it. We might be confronted with a "bottleneck" or it might be extinction where the even the fittest don't survive.

Two things failed in the twentieth century which put us in this position: space travel and fusion energy. Every view SF writers up to the 1960s had of future society involved those two coming through. Unfortunately, both have proved far more daunting than we thought.

Have you wondered why we haven't heard from intelligent extraterrestrial life, yet? Maybe this is the problem that gets all of them. If that's the case, its unsolvable.

On you're final point, if it's a matter of us saving our nests, why wish for the destruction of humankind? That's what you started out saying. You've backpedaled. I can't see what you've said in this latest post as reconcilable with what you said before, which sounded for all the world like a prophet calling down God's judgment. That especially doesn't make sense when you don't believe in God.