• frank
    15.8k
    This thread is branch of another thread whose topic is more limited. The conversation picks up with frank suggesting that thousands of years from now, our kin might find traces of our world and start the exciting journey of discovering what their ancient relatives built and what it might have meant to us.



    And then one fine century someone will start digging in the right place to find us, and they'll be soooo amazed.
    — frank

    They might be digging with their dextrous six (or horrors, eight) legs. Smart spiders discovering cans of RAID™ designed to kill their forebears. Arachnid rage would incite a pogrom against the intellectually sophisticated, and dexterous rat species, the mammalian princes of the future. — Bitter Crank

    I've thought of that. It's moved into orthodoxy (I think, someone correct me) that our atmospheric composition is the result of a ginormous bloom of cyanobacteria. We flourish in a world they permanently altered with their waste products. So what might grow up out of our waste? I wonder if it might be the octupus.

    We are headed for extinction. It's just a question of when. And this is my question for you: what does it mean to accept that? — frank

    That is a profound question; it's probably worth a thread of its own, but in that thread we would be back here in a flash, so... there is that.

    I'm sort of, kind of, in a way reconciled with my own death. On most days I don't welcome it, but death is our common and inevitable fate. Death could have come decades earlier, so... I'm grateful to be alive today.

    I feel... "sad" isn't the word; I feel a great grief that our species might (could... probably will? definitely will?) become extinct. Of course, eventually we would be extinct no matter what--but the extinction related to the dying sun is too far off to worry about. An extinction in the next 500, 1000, or 5000 years--or next week--is grievous unto despair. It is grievous to hear of the last of another ancient species dying, and we do not hear of the thousands of "the last of their kind" that die every year.

    There is no protector in the universe charged with preventing extinctions. There have been 5 mass extinction events on this planet that we can't be blamed for. It is likely that mass extinction events occur every day somewhere in the universe. So, that's just...
    — Bitter Crank

    I think 100 million is the number scientists give to the date when this planet will no longer be able to sustain animal life. If we survive that it will be as residents of outer space. Science fiction has been exploring what that would mean for a long time now. But once we're there, the whole issue of endings will be altered. By hanging out near a black hole, one could essentially jump forward in time.

    What I am doing is trying to find a stress-relieving context in which to fold our own species-death. So far I have not been successful. — Bitter Crank
    Could you expand on that?
  • Nils Loc
    1.4k
    Assume it has happened before and it will happen again.

    If there is nothing it is like to be dead or asleep, there is bound to be a another self-aware substitute inquirer with an inquiry, even if what is doing the inquiring is a non-biological replicator or an arachnid prince, pauper or a sleepwalker.

    Why should this state of being be statistically impossible? This is likely the only kind of state that is possible, which is to say that all states of being are reductively equivalent in terms of "being" at all.
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    We, humans, are the guardians of the planet. We've been asleep for a long time. The alarm has just gone off. Are we late or can we still make it?
  • RosettaStoned
    29
    I am a very negative person, so I'm probably not the one to do this, but here's my two cents: Lets say that we have an early death. In the next 1,000 years, the Homo sapiens sapiens species will not have any living members. Life on Earth, after this, will do what we should do when we encounter a travesty or the like - move on. The Earth will forget about us, and life will move on. Our death will not be a negative ultimately. It could, in fact, be a good thing if you think about it the right way. Also, if we go extinct when the sun dies out, then all the other species will die, too. so our death can't be a bad thing, because there isn't anything left to be bad to, and it's not even our fault.
  • BC
    13.6k
    What I am doing is trying to find a stress-relieving context in which to fold our own species-death. So far I have not been successful.
    — Bitter Crank
    Could you expand on that?
    frank

    I suppose Jews and others, contemplating the unfolding Holocaust of which they were the designated victims; or Aboriginal peoples watching their homelands slip away from them and become someone else's homeland -- all these people may have felt a profound grief of not merely dying, but dying and knowing they were the last (or nearly last) of their kind.

    Some deaths are more final than others. A person dying who departs from a thriving community knows that he follows others, and believes that others will follow him into the grave, and many more will live on.

    It would be a far greater sorrow to know that my death, or yours, moves the counter one space closer to "zero" of people surviving, and that there will one day be no more of our kind. In epidemiology there is a "Patient Zero" who begins the chain of transmission, and there is a last patient when the epidemic is over. In our supposed extinction event, there will be a "Last one", after which there will be none.

    Now at 7+ billion, soon to be 8 billion, worrying about extinction may seem unhealthfully morbid.

    I read a book, "Uninhabitable Earth" which doesn't claim that we will become extinct (on an uninhabitable earth), only that our species could be extinguished, and sooner than we might think possible. I'm not recommending the book. There is nothing new in it, and the author isn't claiming that we have 10 years left, or 25 or any other number. ONLY this: Given enough bad luck, given enough bad decisions, given enough environmental policy paralysis and inertia, given enough unfortunate synergies, given enough unforeseen disasters and misfortunes, we could arrive at the point where our goose might be cooked well done, and we would join the mass extinction sooner than we thought.

    Our demise is neither a slam dunk nor so unlikely we don't have to think about it. It's only a distinct possibility in the cards. We are not dealing and there are a few rounds to be played. Time will tell.

    The author's main point is that we have not accomplished much of anything in terms of reducing CO2/methane emissions since we discovered how badly things could turn out severel decades ago.
  • BC
    13.6k
    Our death will not be a negative ultimately. It could, in fact, be a good thing if you think about it the right way.RosettaStoned

    Well, Mr. or Ms Negativity, our passing may or may not be tragic, but what about all the other species? Looked at in the right way, the passing of monarch butterflies, or lions, or whales, or eagles, or snails, or orchids might be truly tragic.
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