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  • I disliked the books and haven't tried to watch the show.

    But I think I disagree that our civilization is no longer capable of solving it's own problems. Rather, I think our civilization is going through one of the crappy parts of common cycles that civilizations go through. Frighteningly, this part usually comes right before really scary crappy parts.

    Civilizations aren't static and the patterns don't always happen the same way, but I think we can predict that

    1. Things get really shitty. People pull together for survival and build to a place of stability and prosperity.
    2. The rich and powerful (being short sighted idiots just like the rest of us, but ALSO insulated from and out of touch with reality), start looting society for their own selfish, short term benefit. This destabilizes the institutions and systems creating the stability and prosperity. The population at large doesn't really understand what's happening or why, but they DO know that while they're still relatively comfortable, they're scared and they don't like it. They get more conservative and eventually turn to fascists, strongmen and authoritarians to try to get stability back.
    3. This doesn't work out. It exacerbates the existing problems, makes things even more scary and less stable. Eventually war and rebellion break out.
    4. When the dust settles, things are really shitty. People pull together for survival and build back to a place of stability and prosperity.

    These steps aren't exact. They're trends. Lots of things can disrupt them (including famine, plague and barbarian invasions). But in step 1/4, we (humans) are actually REALLY good at collectively solving problems. In step 2 we're TERRIBLE at collectively doing anything. In step 3 we (collectively) are trying to solve all the WRONG problems... then back to step 1/4.

    We seem to globally be right at the tail end of step 2. Which SUCKS.

    tl:dr; This has all happened before and will surely happen again. Hostile aliens are just a modern take on the "barbarian invasion" disrupter. Beware of strangers bearing gifts.

  • Context: An eco-terrorist organization that's a fifth column for an alien invasion made this statement

  • I'd disagree. If you look at the problems which create existential problems for "our civilization" (more on the scare quotes in a minute), the list is pretty short.

    1. Nuclear war - This is existential to both civilization and to humanity as a species. Fortunately, this one is pretty easy to forestall: don't fucking do it. And that's actually been working out OK for the last few decades. For as insane of a system as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is, it's also been pretty successful. Once every nation knew that using nuclear weapons in war meant everyone loses hard, they never got used again. Prior to that situation, they got used. And, there is no reason to believe that the US wouldn't have used them again, if the USSR didn't also have their finger on The Button. Sure, universal disarmament sounds like a better solution, but that also assumes everyone is willing to act in good faith. Just one bad actor and that all falls apart. And you can pretty much assume that there will be plenty of bad actors.
    2. Climate Change - Depending on how bad this gets, it might rise to the level of "existential threat". But, most of the currently likely outcomes are probably not. This isn't to say they aren't bad and really horrific for a lot of people. But, even looking at something like a 2C rise over the next century, it's probably not going to cause the outright collapse of most major countries. Anyone not living in the US, China, India or a Western European country is fucked. Water shortages and famine in Sub-Saharan Africa are going to rise to levels completely unprecedented in history. But, from a question of "will society collapse"? The answer is "probably not". Though the surviving societies will only do so by accepting a mountain of corpses on their doorstep. And even some of the major countries might end up collapsed due to resource wars.
    3. Astronomical Events - Throwing this in to avoid the "but actshuly" responses. Yes, if we suddenly discovered a big ass rock headed our way, we're likely fucked. Also, if we get caught by a massive gamma ray burst, we're all gonna get turned to jerky. But, these are so low likelihood events as to not be worth worrying about.

    Other than that, there isn't all that much which could really wipe out all civilization, everywhere, at once. And this is where I get back to those "scare quotes". We don't really have one single civilization on Earth. We have a bunch of them which interact in lots of ways. While that interdependence does make things a bit fragile, it also means that there is a higher degree of redundancy. If the US went tits up tomorrow, it would have some major impacts on China, India and Western Europe. But, each of those areas has a reasonable chance of adjusting and and continuing on. There may be a lost decade or three while supply chains adjust and new infrastructure is built out, but there is nothing wholly unique to the US which couldn't be replicated elsewhere. And depending on how the US failed, the useful bits of the US economy might well be able to be rebooted by someone else. Again, there is probably a lot of death on the table, the US is a major food exporter, after all. But, China already has a history of weathering millions of people dying to famine, I'm sure the PRC government could figure out a leap forward. An with such useful farmland in the US, one would expect farms to pop back up and get producing pretty quick. Maybe not at the level of output which the US currently has, but if we've killed off half or more of the US population, then we have a bunch of useful farmland with a lot less people to feed.

  • We can solve problems, the status quo is just to profitable for those in power. Don't you find it strange how the status quo persists despite both mainstream political parties running a Change candidate for president and winning? (MAGA is the shitters form of change, just in the wrong way)

    Clearly the people are looking for solutions, even if they don't know the answers.

    Consider watching a video on first past three post voting. If we change how we vote in each of our individual states , people can vote for 3rd parties and still have their vote count if their preference didn't win. No spoiler effect!

    • Aren't we in the USA already at >200 electoral votes total that have pledged to put all of their votes towards whoever wins the popular vote? That said, I would expect a more serious resistance as it inches closer to where it might actually make a difference.

      Also, I realize that isn't quite the same thing as fully moving away from a first past the vote system, but it is a type of reformation and it does help get away from the electoral college system in particular, so seems somewhat related.

  • I'd argue that our civilization is more capable of solving it's own problems than it ever has been, just because we are are far better at identifying them, communicating them to the rest of the world, and analyzing the effects of what we try. Just because we have not solved all our problems does not mean that people in years past would have been able to do so and we've somehow lost that ability.

  • It's both capable and willing, the problem is that not everyone agrees with the solutions being used. And so they say "we're doing it wrong" instead of "I think we're doing it wrong."

    • I mean, not everyone agrees what the problems are. We can't even approach talking about solutions until we settle on the problems. And that problem seems to be getting worse.

111 comments