this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2024
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Ah, Cosmos, I remember watching that when I still believed people were creatures of knowledge and advancement. We'll never know any of those things cause we spent the last 50 years prioritizing profit over all else. It didnt have to be like this.
Sagan always said we had the potential to be better, but he was also concerned it was an uphill climb. Where Carlin got angrier with age, I think Sagan would just have been disappointed in us. Especially in the fall back into ignorance and superstition, something else he warned about in The Demon-Haunted World. Every quote you can find from that book is profound, but this one is eerily hard hitting:
“We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”
Just read it a couple of months ago and it was these little nuggets that kept hitting me hard leaving me like what's-his-face when he saw the statue of liberty in planet of the apes. We had a nice thing going.
Carl Sagan
And any other species' chance. Given the expected lifecycle of the Sun that will affect the habitable zone we're in, we have just under a billion years to go before the planet becomes unlivable by anything. Is that enough time for life to start over from some point and try again? Presuming minus a hostile period of time while Earth finds a new environmental balance, which always takes a while.
I think for whatever odds there are out there of other planets that can have the right conditions for life to become intelligent and expand further, they get one shot at it. If there were alien observers they've probably stopped by now. "That went like usual. Got close, but they did the typical mistakes."
There's also the argument that developing our civilization was only possible due to easy access to fossil fuels. We've now burnt all the easily accessible ones, so any future civilization won't have them.
We climbed up, burnt the step ladder behind us and are now jumping off the cliff.
True except for coal, there's a hell of a lot of still accessible coal. Coal is limiting of course and dirty. There's also other resources like metals that we jump started society with that were easily obtained, even picked off the ground, and now are either buried in landfills or merged into alloys that even our technology can't separate or reuse well.