faetal on 10/11/2016 at 09:13
Here is a good example, right after a wall of text where I detail in many steps how humanity could potentially go extinct in a rare scenario after ME event:
Quote Posted by Starker
I'm still not buying it. We might lose access to some knowledge, but it's not that hard to copy things by hand even if all computers stop working for some reason and we can't make any more. And we, uniquely, can alter our environment in large scale. We don't just know how to grow and store our food, we know how to cultivate it and change it to our liking. We can make plants more drought resistant etc...
And all of this after I've detailed that such a scenario precludes our ability to harness our technical advantage.
demagogue on 10/11/2016 at 09:27
Richard Posner wrote a book on regulation of low probability-massive destruction disasters like asteroid impacts or inadvertantly creating a blackhole with a particle accellerator, etc (there were like 10 of them, a chapter for each), how to budget for preparations & do things now to implement then, etc. It's also already a big part of humanitarian law & policy that would be scaled up. Like the 2005 Indonesia or 2011 Japan tsunamis involved total destruction for bounded areas. Imagine upping the scale to entire countries.
It'd give you an idea of what the survivors would practically need to do. I think people are more inspired by postapoc fiction than the humanitarian policy academic literature anyway. But in the field it's things like making sure your refugee tent camp is built on a slope since there's no sanitation infrastructure (water needs to naturally flow out), clean water source is the most important thing, then you gotta ration it & follow a WASH system, and administration has to be set up properly... Lots of things we already have experience with.
Anyway, I thought the purpose of this thread wasn't to talk about the actual likelihood of extinction but vicariously toy with the idea of what a relief it'd be.
faetal on 10/11/2016 at 10:04
Maybe, I was just expressing one idea, not requesting that no one express another.
I definitely would have been 100% accommodating of people changing the topic, but I didn't hear any "hey faetal, you didn't understand what I meant, I was saying...", all I got was "but wouldn't X happen?". Which I then answer to everyone's apparent dissatisfaction. I think I was having one conversation and other people wanted to have another, but neglected to actually say that.
Chade on 10/11/2016 at 11:37
Quote Posted by faetal
First of all, just to clarify, my premise is that I think it is
possible for humans to go extinct within a few thousand years after a severe enough ME event. If so, do you believe that under
every scenario, humans would
always be the last species standing?
Well of course not. I mean, there are scenarios in which every single post I have ever written on this board are written by Renzatic's pet turtle walking over his keyboard. I might be prepared to say that would never happen, but would I be brave enough to say that would
never happen? Probably not
But ignoring the ridiculous for a moment: while I do understand humans wouldn't always be the "last" (more reasonably: one of the last) large (I keep using the word large) species standing, it's clear that our estimate of the probabilities is different, and you have brought up some possible causes for human extinction which I would not have thought of.
Vivian on 10/11/2016 at 11:42
There is a bunch of interesting-looking stuff people have said in this thread that I just haven't had time to read through properly, soz. I will try harder.
faetal on 10/11/2016 at 11:46
Quote Posted by Chade
Well of course not. I mean, there are scenarios in which every single post I have ever written on this board are written by Renzatic's pet turtle walking over his keyboard. I might be prepared to say that would never happen, but would I be brave enough to say that would
never happen? Probably not
But ignoring the ridiculous for a moment: while I do understand humans wouldn't always be the "last" (more reasonably: one of the last) large (I keep using the word large) species standing, it's clear that our estimate of the probabilities is different, and you have brought up some possible causes for human extinction which I would not have thought of.
Bear in mind, I purposely asked two questions in the extreme to calibrate where we're at before talking about what you actually want to talk about. It's about setting limits, not forming the meat of any discussion.
If you haven't studied biology, then I'd say it's always a possibility that those who have will think of things you haven't, because there is tonnes of stuff which can't just be intuited or extracted via teleological means.
But that's why it's cool to have the discussion. I'm always interested to talk to people with knowledge outside of my areas because I end up learning stuff - see Vivian's bit about bipeds versus quadrupeds. I now know something I wouldn't have otherwise.
Starker on 10/11/2016 at 12:21
Quote Posted by faetal
Here is a good example, right after a wall of text where I detail in many steps how humanity could potentially go extinct in a rare scenario after ME event:
And all of this after I've detailed that such a scenario precludes our ability to harness our technical advantage.
Why don't you quote the whole post? For example the part where I say:
Quote:
Now, if things got so bad that everyone would be starving to death at the same time and we even run out of soylent green, sure.
I am not arguing that humans will never go extinct. I'm saying that I don't buy your ideas about the complete collapse of civilisation and the extent that we lose of our knowledge. Also I think we are way less helpless than you suggest. This isn't about the validity of your idea, it's about the specifics of it.
I even asked you whether you think that the complete collapse of civilisation is necessary for your scenario, but you never got back to me on that.
faetal on 10/11/2016 at 13:18
I honestly thought the Soylent Green part was self-contained and not really in the flow of the rest of what we were talking about - it wasn't a dishonest omission.
Either way, I'm not trying to discredit anyone or cast aspersions, just trying to outline why I was hammering home the "it's solely the worst case scenario" line.
I have listened carefully to all of the responses and responded with clarifications, expansions of topics and re-formulations of what I've been trying to get across.
With Vivian, this trended to a point of convergence, with the others, it seems we're not even trying to have the same conversation. If that's the case, then just say so - I don't mind. I genuinely thought that the responses to my posts were related to the topic I was discussing, which is a pretty logical assumption.
faetal on 10/11/2016 at 13:21
Quote Posted by Starker
I am not arguing that humans will never go extinct. I'm saying that I don't buy your ideas about the complete collapse of civilisation and the extent that we lose of our knowledge. Also I think we are way less helpless than you suggest. This isn't about the validity of your idea, it's about the specifics of it.
I never suggested we were helpless, I suggested that in certain ecological conditions, we could be out-competed. Same goes for every other species on the planet. Consider that most of the life on earth which has ever existed waent extinct at some point. We think this planet is ours, but really we're just passengers. Life goes through phases punctuated by extinction events. Neanderthals went extinct because we outcompeted them. If a better hominid came along, same could happen again, although given the space we fill, they'd probably have to have fucking superpowers or something. That said, if there were better hominids right after a mass extinction and there was more space to fill, we could certainly be the next Neanderthals.
Quote:
I even asked you whether you think that the complete collapse of civilisation is necessary for your scenario, but you never got back to me on that.
I probably didn't respond because I had already answered that implicitly by outlining scenarios where we wouldn't have access to our historical knowledge. If you want a more explicit answer, then yes, I think that the collapse of civilisation (probably need to slap a definition on that so we're talking about the same thing) would almost certainly come before a decline into extinction.
faetal on 10/11/2016 at 13:52
Yes, that's something I've maintained throughout the thread. It's a really difficult topic to wrangle because of the way that the human brain is wired to view time. People can "imagine" what a year feels like, but try to imagine what ten feels like and it starts to get more abstract. Then try to imagine what 100 feels like and you're way past your own current lifetime and into really murky territory. I would think that in my imaginary scenario containing the conditions for humanity's extinction, the process would probably take tens of thousands even - possibly even hundreds of thousands. All depends on what the disparity is between what we need and what is available, versus the strength of the competition. Trying to imagine this length of time is basically impossible, so trying to imagine how things happen on such a timeline ends up as something wholly abstract.
Imagining how humanity would cope in the immediate aftermath of catastrophe is simple and is the subject of much fiction, but imagining how the overall survival of humanity saddled with disadvantages it didn't previously have in continually harsh conditions populated by other species with advantages they didn't previously have (and as previously mentioned, these can be subtle things, such that you might not even notice the changing ratio of numbers during your own lifetime), and you could have the recipe for humans just dying out, like many species do. A few people have told me not to underestimate humans, but I'd level the same caution about underestimating every other species on the planet who may not be as smart, but have a host of different tricks for having made it through the gene grinder.
