Slashdot Mirror
Stephen Hawking Asks The Internet a Question
An anonymous reader writes "Dr. Stephen Hawking received about 15000 answers to a question he posted 2 days ago on Yahoo Answers. His question was 'How can the human race survive the next hundred years?'." I imagine you can do better than 'It Can't.' How would you answer Dr. Hawking's question?
We have to stop being a desposable consumerist society. I.e. we have to live more simply. Now I'm not saying that we all need to be organic gardeners who tailor their own clothes and live directly off the land. I'm very much a metropolitan technologist, but I think that consumption purely for the sake of consumption is our biggest problem. The real question is if the market can correct this or if the market will dig such a deep hole that it doesn't react until the shit hits the fan.
Whether intentional or not, a huge reduction in population
would do the trick.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
good ol' pandemic. A real nasty beast of a bug.
Kill off a couple billion, and we'll be good to go for a while.
What?
A little Cold War, depending on technology to overcome our shortcomings, and a fair amount of luck.
Humans are like cockroaches. We've infected every corner of the globe, and we're not going away. However, if we are to survive and prosper for the next century and hopefully longer, there's going to be some big changes. My boyfriend and I were talking, and following the depletion of oil resources (and not before), we'll see a massive centralization of cities, mostly on coasts, and a move towards renewable energy sources. Cars will never go away; they have too much momentum (no pun intended). But when this happens, we'll see much more of a community feel, as everyone will be in much closer quarters. The massive towers in Dubai and Kuala Lampur (sp?) are good examples of this, and will propogate into the next century as we won't have the finances to get around. Cities like Los Angeles will become a thing of the past, as it will no longer be feasible to have your suburban house with a white picket fence. With this, we'll see a lot of changes. Society will be permanently altered. But as Gloria Gaynor said, "we will survive". If we want to extend ourselves to Mars and the moons of the gas giants, we'll need to perfect the biodome, to be able to live independently. Interstellar travel is out of the question, and always will be. We should give up on it and focus on going to Mars, Europa, and some of the other moons. -sigh-
I don't thin there is any way we will be living in space in the next 100 years. Also, I don't think moving is the solution to our problems.
I don't see us all moving to other planets, moons and space communinities, I just see an extension and survival of Man through that avenue. This planet will be exhausted at the rate of consumption.
It's like the drug addict who thinks that moving away from the city will solve their drug addiction. The problems we have aren't a result of where we live, but how we live.
And it's energy, per capita, which is mostly How We Live. It isn't just the SUV guzzling gas, but the appliances at home and all the goods we purchase which require energy to manufacture, package and distribute. The USA is consuming commodities at a blazing rate, but China with it's vast population will match that in short order. Economics will play a part, as China and India consume more goods and energy the costs (as they are already doing in most goods) will rise and reduce consumption simply because people won't be able to have it all anymore, but choose from fewer things which are important to them. The big adjustment is going to be when petroleum runs scarce. Everything will change as the cost of petrol increases. Sadly, there will also be increased competition for land as is expected much low lying lands will flood thanks to the warmer climate.
Be wary. Wars are waged more over competition for resources than any other reason.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I work with criminals and with those accused of crimes. Most of the violent crimes stem from a lack of humility on the part of the accused. Many assaults stem from someone calling someone a name or talking poorly about their life situation (be it money, race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, etc.). Many arguments stem from this same cause, wars start in this manner and hatred of one another also stems from people not being about to accept another's viewpoint and exercise a little humility.
We as a species need to stop taking everything so seriously. If someone calls you a Jerk or an Ass, well then get over it. If someone speaks poorly of your office, take it in stride. Stop focusing on the little things so much.
Lastly, we need to settle our differences upfront and in an urgent manner. Holding grudges never leads to anything good. Throughout the course of our existence as a species we have seen that slavery, poverty, starvation and famine, greed and tyranny have all lead us down the wrong path. Many have benefited from all those situations but many more (countless more) have been wronged. Had we offered our food, our money, our help, our humanity to those in need early on we would probably never be having this discussion. The only reason for this question to be asked is that there is a problem, a problem of great magnitude. If we would all take a step back and attempt to work our differences out in a peaceful manner, questions of this manner will not exist 100 years from now.
In classic Slashdot form I need to nerd this up a bit, so here is a quote that we can all appreciate. "They are a great people, Kal-El; they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason, above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you, my only son." The human race does not need a super-being savior (not yet anyway) we need to lead ourselves to a better existence.
Tell me about it, I work at a university. Most of the PhDs here can hardly walk and talk at the same time. Somewhere along the line in pursuit of their degrees, common sense is traded in for academics...
"But this one goes to 11!"
The question is not "survive?" Humans as a species are pretty bombproof and there will almost certainly be humans around several hundred years from now regardless of where our madness takes us, even if they're starveling primitives.
The question is: How do we survive over the long term (100Myears+) WITH TECHNOLOGY AND KNOWLEDGE INTACT?
Yeah, but sooner or later, one of them will be right
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
The only difference between then and now is that our toys are bigger and shinier.
Agreed, but this is a rather important difference in regards to Hawking's question. Our big shiny toys put unprecedented powers of destruction in the hands of very few people. We are quite capable of destroying ourselves now in a way that would not have been easy in the past.
Take that situation, and add in the gradual ending of cultural isolation (is there any culture in the world that is isolated any more?) -- we may see conflict on a scale we have not seen before as regional ideologies which are incompatible compete for precedence.
I think part of what needs to happen (and probably will happen) is a psychological evolution. It seems to me that our current self concept is rather narrow - we tend to think of people in our country or religion as a priveliged ingroup. We think of ourselves as separate from the environment. The self needs to expand to include more. Religious and cultural dogma need to loosen their grip on the minds of so many individuals.
The number one problem we have today that gets in the way of world peace is religion. The number one problem we have that gets in the way of sustaining our existence is consumerism. Beyond curbing these two major problems we will only make existence miserable for the next 100 years. And we will survive for at least the next 100 years, but who knows how long it will take for the earth to come back to balance... /gam/
"In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they are not."
Since birthrates are already too low to sustain growth in the countries with the most wealth it seems that if we spread the wealth we kill two birds with one stone.
- people-population-growth-rate
Do you have better data than these?
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/peo_pop_gro_rat
Its basically the former Soviet Union people that are decreasing in population because they drink too much, and the women are wise enough to not want to fuck them anymore. Aside from that, we are growing!
Supposedly, human population is going to stabilize in 50 or so years with something like 10-14 billion people.
I don't feel like looking for the nationmaster stats now, but the "greying" of the world bothers me more than people not sustaining a population.
What are we going to do when most of the population is over 80 years old?
we've survived so far without answering this question.
i suspect that by each of us trying our damndest to survive until tomorrow,
we have a good chance at another 100 years.
that's probablly the same as an old bagle maker told me. cave men
didn't survive by eating what was good for them. they survived by
eating what didn't kill them immediately.
"As for birthcontrol - why (unless the couple is not ready for children yet..)?? Space is just that - space, lots of it. With asteroid belt having an entire planet disassembled into small nice pieces with huge surface area."
Space is not the only requirement for human life. You also need an extremely small temperature window, oxygen, water, some companionship, and a wide enough range to keep from going mad.
We live in a virtual paradise, a cornucopia of vast amounts of various chemicals and elements. Time was, people could make a living just by consuming what they happened to find while wandering around tails in the woods.
Space is mostly just that -- space. There's nothing out there that we need. The fact that we haven't justified the cost of space expeditions by mining or retreiving tells you something about the value of raw materials out there. Even if there were, say, a pocket of mineral in some asteriod, one mineral does not satisfy the various material needs of human civilization.
To successfully colonize space without the colony being totally dependant on Earth, we would need to find a planet that has some 3 billion years of evolutionary history that created a wide array of raw materials. We can build cities out of hydrogen, sulfur, or nickel.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
and you'll find a huge disparity between the 5-10% or so at the top of the comfort scale, and the rest. Right now the Western world (most of the US + Canada, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea and the Commonwealth) comprises that 5-10%. Guess what? It won't stay that way for too long, it never does. The best you can hope for is a good five hundred to thousand year run, and I think Western civilization might be nearing the end of its spectacular five-century sprint.
Pick any period in human history, and you'll also find a large number of people actively working to cause the end of their particular civilization.
Why is Iraq's fabled "land between the two rivers" a dry dusty desert?
Why is North Africa, the ancient Mediterranean's breadbasket and father of great cities, hardly able to grow enough food to feed its own populations?
Why did the Chacoans up and suddenly disappear after claiming so much of the harsh American Southwest for their cities and farms?
Why did the ancient Mayans leave their cities that required so much labor to construct in the middle of a jungle?
Humans can have an amazing impact on their environment, but it's easy to forget that while we appear to be the masters of Nature. But the two work on completely different timescales.
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK
Maybe, up until this point, man could not survive without religion. Marx proposed as such and considered God the ephemeral parent of an immature society. Thus maybe the fact that religion has not gone extinct is an indication that society would be far worse without it. Perhaps a world in which people cannot police themselves needs a "god" and fear of eternal rebuke in order to keep them in line.
For the record, I'm not religious or even a believer, but I do think that much of human civilization follows a similar paradigm to evolution. Things exist for a reason - or did anyway... because they served a function. If religion is this opiate that the masses need, and it is abolished, what do we replace it with? Meds?
un burrito me trampeó.
that's my whole point, the more prosperous a country becomes the population growth slows down, it's like economic birthcontrol
It has more to do with religion and woman's changing role in western society then economics. Religious people have a lot of children, if you don't believe that, pick out religious sub-groups in the US and look at their birthrates (IE in Utah I think the birth rate is 3.2).
You want to slow the birthrate of a country down? Take religion away from them and allow women (or encourage women) to work.
The counter problem is that we have different religions that are willing to kill huge numbers of other humans if they are not a member of the same religion.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Most of the issues and coping strategies folks have been bringing up are reasonable, albeit relatively short term concerns. It appears to me, however, that these concerns miss the point - a 100 year timeframe is much different than a 20 year one.
...
I suggest that the human race will survive the next 25 years or so by muddling along in its time honored traditions barring, of course, some unforseen global catastrophe. Problems like overpopulation, environmental degredation, warfare, disease, global warming - these are serious problems but problems the human race has shown itself to be capable of dealing with as long as one is not overly concerned about collateral damage. And when looking at something like the survival of the human race, a few billion here or there kind of falls into the noise.
Considering the longer term (25-75 years out) future of the human raises some more interesting concerns
One of the questions I find compelling is how human social, cultural, political, and economic networks will survive and behave in a post-scarcity economy. For about 15 years the inflation adjusted costs of manufactured goods has continued to decrease. Just in time manufacturing, custom fabrication, these trends all point toward a transition to an economy based on 'how to do/build things' rather than 'things' alone. I have yet to see any cogent model of how human networks will adapt to this transition, and I therefore belive that this transition has the potential to be quite disruptive.
Another consideration is how the definition of 'human' may change as a result of technological progress and environmental demands. If anything, I suspect that the answer to the question 'how will the human race survive the next 100 years?' is, in the long term, quite simple.
Change what it means to be human.
Terrifying, and extraordinarily difficult to predict, but in the long run the *only* way species survive is by changing - and the potential for that change to be mediated by technology in humans drastically accellerates the potential timeframe. Some relatively simple changes are already filtering into human culture almost invisibly - laser eye surgery, fairly serious cosmetic modifications, cochlear implants, hair transplants, hair removal, sex reassignment, prosthetics, longterm drug therapies, gene therapy; I could go on and on.
Sometimes the only way to solve an intractable problem is my changing the terms of the problem itself. Just as Alexander the Great trumped generations of philosophers by cutting the Gordian Knot in half instead of untangling it, it may be that the only way to truly insure the long term survival of the human race is by changing what it means to be human.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
The issue is also not intelligence, but responsbility and action. I feel that "hoping our children are smarter" is just a nice way of "passing the buck". By doing nothing now, our procrastination is only making it more difficult for our children to solve the problem (if we leave it to them). Action needs to be taken by us now, or it will simply be too late.
While birth control isn't something that sounds like a great idea, it unfortunately is the biggest things we can do. Each of us (and our partner) would have to limited to having 1 or 2 children (to replace us when we die, or to replace only one of us, lowering the population). As it stands now, our agriculture system can't feed the people that live here now (and no, that isn't just because the rest of us are spoiled, there simply just isn't enough). If the population continues to grow, it is expected to reach 9.1 Billion by 2050.
Honestly, the only way I see our children (and their children) surviving the next few hundred years is if major changes take place, otherwise we don't have a hope in hell. However, I'd like to end on an optimistic note. Think of what we have created in the last hundred years, then 50 years, then 10, then 5. 100 years ago human flight was an amazing breakthrough, 50 years ago exiting out own atmosphere was a breakthrough, and now we have seen the land of the nearest planet. I feel we are at a pinacle point in our existence, where we are advancing exponientally. While we still have alot to learn, we are an amazing species, and I remain hopeful that there are those out there who are working to make a difference, and change things, as well as people out there who are willing to make a change.
Fractured Element
We have to stop being a desposable consumerist society. I.e. we have to live more simply. Now I'm not saying that we all need to be organic gardeners who tailor their own clothes and live directly off the land.
Then what, precisely, are you saying? It sounds to me that you want people to live a diminished lifestyle compared to the one that they're currently living. You've excluded the organic farmer lifestyle as too extreme, so the lifestyle you imagine that other people should live is somewhere in between. What is it? It's important to answer this question because accusing people of "consumerism" is hiding what you're really intending, and what you're really intending is for people to live a diminished lifestyle.
It's harder to say that, isn't it? What *precisely* do people have to give up for your morality's sake? Some things that you think are "excessive" are going to be "necessary" for other people. Wouldn't the organic gardner consider your lifestyle "excessive"? Why would he/she be wrong about that?
I think that consumption purely for the sake of consumption is our biggest problem.
There is no such thing. People don't "consume" merely for the sake of consuming it. There are many possible reasons behind this hated "consuming". For example:
* Hunger
* Convenience (e.g. choosing fast food (I call it fake food) as opposed to something "better")
* Status
* Pleasure
* Envy
The morality of each of those motives may rightly be questioned (yes, even hunger, you cheeto-eating, lard-bellied, WoW-playing dweebs!), but there is no "consumption for consumption's sake".
The real question is if the market can correct this or if the market will dig such a deep hole that it doesn't react until the shit hits the fan.
It sounds to me that the shit hitting the fan means the same thing as living a diminished lifestyle. Perhaps you are suggesting that we diminish everyone's lifestyle or else everyone will live a lifetstyle even *more* diminished than what you're suggesting? That may very well be true, but we need specifics and discussion instead of the guilt-trips and empty rhetoric you provide. Obviously we humans are going to run out of petroleum one day, and we will *all* live crap lifestyles if we don't have a replacement for our energy needs. How will the trucks get food on the shelves of grocery stores without gasoline?
Then again, there are some people who think that humanity is just plain evil. I think those people are using this discussion to further their repugnant goal, and I don't think they belong in the discussion at all.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
the "social, political, and environmental chaos" he refers to is absolutely nothing new. The only difference between then and now is that our toys are bigger and shinier.
Nope - there's one other enormous difference. In the past, there was always someplace for advancing technology to revolutionize. Technological advancements occured locally, lead to population growth, and the overpopulated colony spread to relatively inefficiently used lands, applied their new technology, and took over (or failed in many cases, like Greenland). In the past one or two hundred years, this changed. Today, technological advances hit the entire planet pretty quickly. The most efficiently harvested parts of the planet are only maybe twice as efficient as the least so, and "efficient" is used here in the short term sense - many highly productive areas are actually being overharvested like the US Dust Bowl was.
So what? So this - we're still programmed to reproduce at the rate that was efficient when there were new lands to conquer. But there aren't any dramatically inefficiently harvested (food and energy) lands left to take over and revolutionize. Interestingly, some evidence is beginning to show that the rate of reproduction actually adapts to the changing viable birth rate faster than mere evolution can explain. So maybe we will actually curb our growth fast enough to avoid a really big change, but the world wars you mention are a sign that it hasn't been changing fast enough to avoid violence yet. Look at it like an ant farm, and it appears that right now today the powerful ant colony is reducing the population of the less powerful ant colony to allow the powerful ant colony to continue to harvest resources that are in the weaker colony's part of the terrarium.
Good? Bad? Not really my area of interest.
So the question, more specifically, is, "Will we reduce birth rates, increase death rates, or colonize points in space other than those on the surface of this slightly squashed sphere?" Chances are it will be some combination of those three, so then the question becomes, "How would we like to, and how can we, steer the direction of increased death rates, reduced birth rates, and non-earth-surface harvesting?" Heck - you've probably seen it in Civilization or StarCraft or whatever - you want more units, you need to take over new territory and harvest the stuff.
For a good right-of-center economist's view of one of the issues, check out The Coming Economic Collapse. It helped me confirm that it's not just lefty FUD.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
As long as it really IS cheaper to be wasteful, then that's exactly what people will continue to do! And that also illustrates the fact that things aren't nearly as "dire" as some of the environmentalists and promoters of "less technology/simpler lifestyle" want you to believe.
... yet. When the landfills realy DO get filled up enough though, you'll see this change itself without any legislation or govt. incentives necessary.
At some point, our tendencies to embrace the disposable, short lifespan consomer goods will lead us to a situation where they're no longer the cheaper option and *that* is when you'll see change come about.
It's fine to preach about how much stuff we're tossing into landfills and trying to guilt people into changing, but all that does is push back the timeline a little bit on when it won't make economic sense anymore. A real *solution* can only come about when the best choice really becomes conservation.
Let's take, for example, recycling of glass bottles. Right now, it uses *more* total energy/resources to recycle them than it's worth. There are places that accept glass containers for recycling (though you won't get paid anything for dropping off the glass), but they're typically profitable only because of government tax breaks and subsidies. Glass is largely made up of sand, and we've got no shortage of sand. Meanwhile, think of all the diesel fuel or gasoline used to transport the waste glass around, etc.
As another example, cellphones. Currently, there's just no compelling reason for most people not to toss out an old one and get a new one (often free with a phone contract!) every 2 or 3 years. Totally wasteful and pointless, really -- except for the fact that you pay so much for the usage of the device, it makes little sense to put all of that towards some beat-up, feature-lacking phone that's starting to fall apart on you. The whole business model encourages the disposability of the hardware. It would change if consumers started getting rewarded for turning in their old phones for credit. The question is, are old cellphones really worth enough to make this a profitable option for cell companies to offer it? Apparently not
Excellent post.
One problem with your post-scarcity theory: it won't last. The world population is expected to double over the next 100 years. I'm not sure technology will be able to deal with the scarcity issues that quickly. Especially for things like clean water, oil, and land. I expect there to at least be some serious wars as these resources become more scarce.
I'd also like to mention humanity's penchant for powerful people to create scarcity in order to increase their power. While technology has helped us counteract that nicely over the past 50 years, I'm not confident that it will continue to do so long term.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Terrifying, and extraordinarily difficult to predict, but in the long run the *only* way species survive is by changing
Just how "long" a run are we talking here? 100 years is not all that long as far as evolutions is concerned, barring sudden epidemics and the like. Some species have been pretty much the same for millions of years, and they don't even have access to technology to help them along. I'm sure that future scientific achievements would very likely lead to changing the definition of what it means to be human, but I don't think it would be necessary to survival of the species. With sufficiently advanced technology, any environment short of a black hole (and maybe even that some day) could be modified to fit the current humans. The human race could conceivably even survive the destruction of the universe by hopping dimensions or something.
But a world-wide thermonuclear war in the near future would of course bring all this crashing down. It wouldn't kill everyone, but enough to set civilization back quite a bit.
How is that any more arrogant than theists who believe that they know what goes on AFTER death (for which there is absolutely zero proof), so much so that they often come to your DOOR on the weekend to try to convince you to go to their cult meeting? On top of that, they also have the audacity to believe they know exactly how the universe started, and logic be damned. I wouldn't be talking about arrogance if I were you.
For the record: I am an athiest (as if you couldn't tell from the content of the post, but you never know with some people).
Sorry to sound spiteful, but I get so tired of people infringing on my right to what I see as reality.
Yes, I believe there is a God. I wake up, and I feel like I'm staring him in the face all day. I can't give you any more evidence for God than I can give you for myself as a true consciousness. But instinctively I know God is with me just as I can say, "I am".
If that somehow makes me crippled in other people's eyes, then so be it. But God is a part of me, and to deny that would be to deny who I am.
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
That and there is an imbalance starting of men vs. women. If I recall the episode of 60 mins right I believe it was 56% to 44%, and growing.
The one child policy = chuck the baby girl down a well because ancient custom says boy must be first born.
So there are a lot of teens hard up to find the chicks.
least that's what my forced to sit on a plane for 8 hours with nothing more to do than watch 60 min addled brain remembers
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Alright, this comment of mine was silly.
I believe in God, obviously, so I was set off a bit. I shouldn't really care, though, how other people think. Actions are what matter, after all.
I do agree that religion is foolish; I see it as a way of objectifying God, reducing him into an idol, a utility. And as a utility, religion is indeed unnecessary.
God is just a part of me, though. I don't know WHAT he is as much as WHO he is. He's at the core of who I am, and to deny God would be to deny my own existence. I don't feel any handicapped by this any more than I feel that breathing or a pulse is a handicap, or that my love for my wife is a useless reliance and a weakness.
God and I are good friends. He communicates with me on a daily basis, using events in my own life around me as his vocal chords.
And I doubt mean to make it sound as if I have a special connection that elevates my status, because the way I see it, God is not above me or you. There is no hierarchy, so there is no elevation of status through association.
It's merely an instinct. I tried denying it for years, but I eventually had to come to accept it as intrinsic to who I am. That's the kind of creature I am. Perhaps you are just different sorts of creatures.
I see the scientific, testable aspect of God as being Love. That we can all share, despite our internal universes that define who we are.
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
Muslims Vs. Sikhs
Muslims Vs. other Muslims
I sense a pattern...
"May evil beware, and may good dress warmly and eat plenty of fresh vegetables." -The Tick
I don't know for a fact if 56%/44% is accurate, but I know there's an imbalance. It might be that severe. The key datum for demographic projections is female fertility, so fewer women can have a severe impact on the size of the next population cohort. China will certainly be seeing some much slower future growth.
Next question: Is this good for China? Ask me again in 20 years.
...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
Female literacy is one of the key factors in determining birth rates.
Increased female literacy allows women greater access to information on birth control and also higher statuts in society leading to greater control over reproductive decisions. To reduce population growth teach girls to read. This is an abstract of a study discussing factors impacting birth rates such as female literacy. Here is a little bit more info.
"I'd like for religious people to point out one single thing that religion is needed for, I haven't found one single thing."
I will give you a personal reason, if not for believing in god I would be a violent criminal.
I don't see anything wrong with raping someone, or stealing from them - after all they are just a bunch of meat, with no real existance - they sure think that they are real, but what do I care? They are just a bunch of nerves blinking, no different then a computer. So what if I hurt them, they'll die eventually, and then it's gone, so who cares.
I might as well make myself happy.
But, then there's my religion which says that people have souls, they are real, and eternal. And their soul is no different from mine.
So only because of that I don't behave that way. In fact I'm one of the nicest people you'll ever meet, going far out of my way to help people, because it matters - they are real, and what I do for them actually help a real person, and not just some walking protein.
I hope you don't think I'm a troll, because I'm quite serious. I do know that I'm not the only one who feels this way because I've had other people tell me similar things. I don't know how many people would admit to it though.
I'm usually pretty impressed with athiests who control themself, but at the same time I think thier stupid. Why would they do that? It gains them nothing at all, so they lived a miserable life, and died, seems like dumb thing to do to me.
And don't give me noncense about how helping people is the best way to live a happy fulfiled life - you are just prooving my point, if you are only helping people because it helps you, then you are doing exactly what I said: living for your own pleasure. I just so happens you are helping people along the way, but that's not why you are doing it.
Human lifespan just isn't the only metric of a planet's viability. Long-term survivability demands that resources consumed be renewable. It also means that we need to pay attention to the biosphere, because our monocultures of lawn grass and crops and animals simply don't have the viability in the long term. We only get by with it right now because we're burning through millions year of surplus solar energy in the form of petroleum right now. You have to be on your toes not to be feeding, indirectly, on oil through the products of industrialized agriculture.
The worst destruction is definitely in the third world, where cash crops that the industrial world demands and the chemicals used to grow them destroy the soil, and people move on to destroy more land. We haven't solved the problem. We've just swept it under the rug for a while.
In the meantime, scientists are saying that the rate of extinction of species on this planet is catastrophic and fits the parameters of a mass extinction. Loss of biodiversity means loss of evolutionary potential, and hence survivability.
We can do a lot to fix it, but until serious ecological responsibility becomes ingrained in our society, I don't see how we'll prevent a disaster that might even reach into air-conditioned Western suburban homes.
Exactly.
It's not spirituality that's killed anyone, or even faith in God. It's blind faith in humans that say they know what God wants.
No one should ever listen to anyone who says they know what God wants.
Which, in the end, is why I have to go with Jesus on this whole 'religion' thing. Read what he said, and you'll notice he wanted you to do two things: Love God, and love everyone else. That's it, those are the only things you should do in the name of his religion or even not do in the name of his religion.
Yes, Christianity ended up with a lot of trappings of Judaism and Roman pagan stuff, and Paul was pretty wacked in the head on some stuff. But it's not Paulianity or Judairomanchristianity. Don't confuse the message with the way the message was presented 2000 years ago.
Every single thing Jesus said boils down to 'love everyone, including God'. He doesn't say to follow anyone on earth, he has some things that would be useful, like 'feeding widows' and 'don't pretend to be pious and lord it over people', but he's pretty clear this should follow logically from 'loving everyone', and they aren't 'rules'. Any action is okay as long as it is based in love of everyone, or at least not based in hate or jealous or an opposite of love.
But, like I said, don't believe me. Read his words, the ones that managed to make through the distortion of the sect wars in the early church. Everything else about Christianity is just tacked on garbage. Especially anything Paul wrote about sex.(1)
And, yeah, I know it's a bit odd to say 'Don't ever listen to anything anyone says God wants you to do' and then say 'But here, listen to what this guy said God wanted you to do'. That is what you call 'faith'.
And I've got no problem if someone wants to love everyone as themselves for some other reason, or even no reason at all, or want to called God 'Allah' or 'humanity' or 'nature'.
1) Why did I single Paul out? Because he was writing to Romans who would attend church on Sunday and then go to an orgy dedicated to a Roman God on Monday, and people like to translate the word he used that means 'sexual immorality' as 'fornication', which it often is a metaphor for worshipping idols, or even worshipping idols via sex, so a lot of his condemnations seem a lot broader than they actually are. Also, he disliked sex in general and was apparently afraid of women with any power, neither of which have anything to do with anything Jesus said.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
OK, I'll bite.
Atheism is, in my opinion, a higher evolutionary state than theism. If you want to talk about progress, the secular, scientific worldview has brought us all kinds of advancements in virtually every aspect of life. Scientists, not priests, discovered electricity, developed antibiotics, found a way to travel to the moon; the list goes on and on. If you look back at human history, religion has generally been the biggest impediment to scientific progress. Its main use was (and continues to be) as a device allowing a select, manipulative few to gain control over and wealth from the gullible masses. Religion has had a role in almost every war in human history, and there's been a clear trend over the past few centuries: The more secular a country is, the less likely it is to go to war.
It's popular among secularists these days to placate believers by saying that science and religion can coexist, but I don't believe that's true. The progressive believers, those who no longer believe in stoning disobedient children to death, for instance, are deliberately ignoring a portion of what they consider to be the word of God. The extremists, on the other hand, may find themselves at odds with the modern world, but they're the ones who are truly being faithful to their beliefs.
I'd also like to add that the human mind has the capability to convince itself of the veracity of some incredible horseshit--look at Scientology, for instance. Heaven's Gate? Jonestown? These people were all sure they were right about the nature of the universe, just as you appear to be. The only difference between your beliefs and theirs is that yours are more widespread.
Take a step back and look at the modern world objectively. Religion threatens us in a very serious way. Islamic terrorism is a threat now, but it's nothing compared to what it will be when nuclear weapons technology becomes more advanced and widespread. It doesn't help that the world's only remaining superpower is being run by what the Muslims (and some of us) see as a villain straight out of central casting.
Believing in God, in my opinion, is no different than believing in Santa Claus. It may be comforting, but no matter how much you want to believe it, a fat man in red is not going to make presents appear in front of the tree in your living room. The world would be so much better off if people would just see it for what it was.
Hey Devnull17,
I think you have a wrong idea of religion. I know you got that from the majority of the people that believe that way.
But religion is associated around spirituality and love and faith. These are three things which make one's life peaceful, meaningful, and end up making the person more happy with himself and with others... thus spreading the happiness.
I come from India, and our Hindu religion is also a covering over the inner spirituality that is sometimes lost on the outside. But, look deeper and you will find the true essence of religion.
I see some DavidTC give an insightful post on how Christianity's better part is what Jesus himself said, which was to love god, and love everyone.
You could also look at Buddhism. Give me an example of how Buddhism caused any wars? And even Hindu religion has been mostly war-free, never did it pro-actively took on war!
I have found a solution to Riemann's Hypothesis, but have run out of spac