Quote:
Originally Posted by undeaf
A blip? We're a fs**ing barrel of white out. And we're not going anywhere. It took us tens of millions of years to stop being a machine mindlessly reacting all the time, to stop going with the flow whether or not that got us anywhere, we've been hanging on by any trick we could pull for a long time, and we're not about to let that all fade into nothing just because someone's guilty conscience wishes it so, not without one hell of a fight.
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You sound pretty confident there, like it's impossible for an entire civilization to be wiped out over night. Sure, we've spent millions of years evolving into a species that is able to go against the grain of mindlessly reacting to our environment, but on the other hand, for those hundreds of millions of years, we weren't doing much damage on such a global scale. In the past couple hundred of years, we've started seeing the results of our greed and in the past 20 or 30 years we've done irreparable damage to our planet.
Sure we can fight the good fight against something that we've been reminded all too many times in recent years is far more powerful than we are, or, as Curt has pointed out, we can continue trying to make money and live in a culture of consumption which is a fairly recent trend in the grand scheme of the planet and doesn't appear to be going away any time soon.
I think it's funny how there are people who can still look at the facts and scoff at the situation as being not that big a deal. Like the other half of the world is just making this stuff to scare people into what: consuming less? Who's to benefit financially from that? No one. Maybe there actually are people who have done the math and don't expect a big paycheck in return. These people are telling us that there are far fewer polar bears today than 30 years ago. They're saying that the ice caps are melting, glaciers are receding and that things are only going to get worse.
I think the facts are indisputable and that if there are too many people sitting around today saying "oh, it's not so bad" our species won't have much time left to live. I'm not saying we'll be gone in 50 years, or even 500. But we ain't going to be here for the hundreds of millions of years that previous inhabitants of this planets were.
I agree with the suggestions above about living a more simple life. It's hard to look at ideas like "boil less water when making coffee" as having any sort of significant impact on climate change, but then if 6 billion people all cut down on some of the excesses in life, then maybe it could happen. I just don't don't feel that's a very likely situation.
Oh shit, that was way too long, no one's going to read it. Oh well, this thread was doomed from the start. Not a popular topic on these forums.
