Environment & Energy
In reply to the discussion: Are We Heading Toward Extinction? [View all]paleotn
(17,781 posts)We intentionally degrowthed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Can you imagine what would have been left if we, Germany and Japan possessed nuclear weapons? Then the Russians unintentionally degrowthed Pripyat with roughly the same technology. Then there's the litany of Russian bio weapons accidents.
The thing about technology is, its impacts and dangers are not linear. They're exponential. From our ability to build and manipulate structures on an atomic level with nanotechnology to our ability to rapidly and drastically re-code life with genetic manipulation, the power is immense for both good and harm. And it's the harm that will wipe us out eventually. Couple human foibles with immense power to do harm and the law of large numbers and it becomes nearly inevitable. In my mind, we've simply grown too smart, too fast without evolving in ways that mitigate the potential harm of all those smarts. As recent events have shown, we're still extremely tribal and a tribal, warlike species has no business wielding this much power...if said species expects to survive long term, i.e. millions of years like many far less intelligent species on this planet. That intelligence may be an evolutionary dead end. Species that evolve in that manor, like lemmings, inevitable plunge off the cliff. While horseshoe crabs still live and reproduce in roughly the same manor since the Paleozoic.