[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', ' ')dehumanize the third World dwellers as Ibon suggests, and allow them to starve via their inability to buy the expensive fuel that the Americas, Europe, and Australia can afford.

[KaiserJeep]

Ibon, no offense intended, I was fatigued and in pain, forgive my words, please. I hope you are correct about the third world, but the UN has pretty wide bounds on future population estimates:


My impression is that the human civilization pretty much lives or dies based upon what happens in Africa:

A world map showing global variations in fertility rate per woman, according to the CIA World Factbook's 2013 data.

I believe the first world countries will fare better than you do, I guess. For one thing, as the population falls the need for mining pretty much is ended by recycling. I do not believe we ever lose technology or knowledge once we have acquired it. We will remain a race with a worldwide internet, communications including HDTV, and space travel. I believe we will consume less but work longer for what we do buy.

[kanon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', 'L')et me say this: I do not believe - regardless of the incentives to do so - that any of the Earth's humans will modify their cultural norms. Those are the things we have traditionally gone to war to preserve.

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', '
')I know you all like Shark Fin plots, they are indeed dramatic! But what if having fewer kids coincided with having fewer resources and increased or at least somewhat preserved relative standards of living?

Kind of my "use less to afford more" theory expressed in the larger picture?

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', 'I')bon, no offense intended, I was fatigued and in pain, forgive my words, please. I hope you are correct about the third world, but the UN has pretty wide bounds on future population estimates:

[Pops]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ibon', 'W')e have lost our dignity as a species. Will constraints win it back?

[h2]

http://science.time.com/2013/07/23/reve ... tmosphere/

KaiserJeep, who I have gotten to like (when he talks about what he knows, electricity) seems to be dead set on committing the classic engineer's error, of leaving what he knows for parts unknown, without realizing he's doing that.

This is of course why people who study serious philosophy learn about this mental error very early on.

The space travel thing has nothing to do with an open or closed mind, john michael greere has dealt with well over the years (endless articles he's done on that, interesting for reality based views on that, not so much for fantasy based attachments):
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ ... space.html
one example.

Since the faith based notion that we can move into space is based on no fact or actual data, it can't be argued rationally, particularly since we now know roughly exactly what living in space requires, having done so for a few decades off and on, and what is required is in reality simply spending billions of currency units to move earth ecosystems into temporary orbit, very temporary.

We can't be outside the protection of the earth's magnetosphere very long or solar radiation will fry us, mars is a basically a dead world, and much as I love Edgar Rice Burroughs mars series, the sad fact is, there is truly nowhere else for us to go.

So that brings you to asking the simple question: given an engineer who will talk intelligently about the realities of the North American grid, focusing people's minds on the REALITY, not the fantasy, of that grid, and he did that very well in a recent thread, how can that same mind then turn around and focus purely on fantasy and self delusion? I'd say the answer can be found in kp's ongoing suggestions that it is us who are not keeping open minds (that is, refusing to engage in his fantasy world). Which is common, we accuse others of doing what we do. That's for example why republicans in general are so fond of going on and on about the entitlement society, they see only what their minds are, not what is real, that is.

The other glaring unexamined bias here of course is a fundamental humanism, which leads a mind to conclude that it is better to generate and sustain more humans at all costs today than to drop populations so humans can also live tomorrow, along with the remains of our fragmented and destroyed ecosystems.

Humanism of course is a pathological mental disorder, formed as humans began to dominate their ecosystms via farming and stored wealth, which lead to large scale hierarchical societies, which love this philosophy (it's why the romans had no trouble integrating christianity, and why the chinese liked Confucianism, which is just another form of humanist thinking in the end, minus the jesus fairy tale), I believe it only comes about when the fundamental daily experience of our animal tribe is only interacting with itself, not larger nature. I personally find humanism based views to be about as narrow boxed as it is possible, since they are profoundly false when viewed at biologically, or even from any real ethical position, so to talk about keeping an open mind when so uncritically repeating the most deep set bias of our industrial culture, well that's a profound mistake, being fooled by our deepest ideology, which goes unquestioned by all but the most actually critical, and it's why we study serious philosophy and anthropology, to avoid making exactly that mistake.

The key delusion of course in such a "debate" is that we are going to plan rationally anything at all, given there is no actual historical example of that happening, that's pretty far fetched.

Heraclitus so many years ago put it so well, humans aren't rational, there is reason only in what surrounds him, so to speak, more or less that's the quote off the top of my head.

The key here, to avoid this type of mental glitch/error in reasoning is to learn how to identify where the boundary of what one knows cuts off, and where speculation begins. Failure to learn this always leads to foolish mental errors, without exception, a process described so very well in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, something that should be, were it not so impossibly hard to read for laymen, required reading for all engineers and scientists, since the errors in reasoning outlined can be seen anytime that reason leaves the bounds of experience, at any level.

Of course, the entire thread starter is pointless in the end, humans are just going to burn the fuel they need to maintain their illusion of the life they need, we'll push the population numbers high enough until that peaks due to hitting resource constraints, then a long readjustment to sustainable numbers will occur, and that is not the result of any plan we make, it will all be delightfully irrational, and will probably look just like today, huge areas destabilized due to drying ecosystems and overpopulation (aka, the mid east today), other areas doing reasonably well, a plague here, a famine there, it won't really look that different from what we have today.

Since a reasonably short tour of real anthropology literature will show you just how radically fast human culture can change, and adopt as 'what has always been true' something new within a generation, there's no need to worry about our culture changing, it will change, that's a given. We won't know how it will change, but it will change. And that change is not painful, really only the old, and about to retire, lol, get so stuck in their ways that they view such changes as unthinkable, and impossible, when the young just toodle along, growing into the new world without really even a question or hiccup.

Of course, at this point, I believe the only actual reason for people to refuse to face global heating by CO2 and methane releases by humans is a profound attachment to a way of life probably paid for directly by something that profits from that way of resource exploitation (the old TOD quote they used to play, a man doesn't tend to question the source of his money, or the world view required to sustain that source), I no longer find it even worth addressing such absurdly irrational and faith based views any longer, I follow the real science, like at:
http://www.realclimate.org/ or any other serious climate research source.

Likewise, any actually serious book being written within the last 10 years that touches on ecology or ecosystems, and anyone actually involved with that type of research, always deals with the fundamental real changes ongoing, since they are dealing with them, just as KP deals with the reality of dealing with power grids. And without exception, ALL books I've read that deal with such matters discuss agw as a fact, not a debate, because they SEE it first hand. This is particularly true in ice bound regions like high altitudes, and northern/southern regions. When you read serious work, you realize that there is actually zero real debate anymore, and any apparent 'debate' is now exclusively being funded by energy companies and other industry that doesn't want to deal with the externalized costs that are going to kill us all in the end if we don't stop it soon. That's greed, hubris, pride, arrogance, sloth, gluttony, just like the real ethical church teachings, for example the cardinal sins, warn us so severely about. And here we are, pathologically rewarding such failure and weakness when it should be condemned. We've known this is a problem a long time, and it's why all real ethical systems note that these are our real weaknesses, and to guard against them.

We decided to ignore this advice and try a different idea, reward these severe sociopathic behaviors, and then see what happens. In our future, we won't be doing that again since we won't be able to, thankfully, now that we're reaching the end of all easy to access resources, that is going to put a real hard limit on what future cultures and empires can actually do in practical material terms, ie, stone and wood and light metal use will probably be about it, which is fine, that's a good way to live anyway, better than ours in general I think, ours being highly artificial and out of touch with natural flows and processes, it's no wonder we need massive amounts of drugs to cope with our world, that's to be expected when any creature pulls itself out of gods creation and tries to pretend, the height of hubris, that it itself is nature and god and all must bow before it. That's a one way ticket to failure, as has been noted for thousands of years by men FAR wiser than us.

This being science, and not faith based truth systems that refuse to actually change views based only on belief and confirmation bias, obviously the research adapts to new data, which in general of course points to worsening of scenarios, and moving towards the worst case lines that have been modeled, not the middle or best case, the 'truth' will change as all science does, to adapt to new data and more solid hypotheses and theories.

The absurdity of maintaining a humanist belief system, aka, every human that we can produce should be produced, and kept alive, even if it dooms the planet and us to near annihilation, I find just simplistic chatter that translates deeper hardcore material parts of our culture into ideas that can be communicated albeit without any real meaning, by minds that simply refuse to actually examine their cultural conditioning. Then we have guys like Ibon, who clearly do in fact have a clue, and are willing to face that reality. Few and far between, which is why we are in trouble, not enough people willing to questioni and look outside the box they live in. With kp, for example, the attempt to suggest that those who are actually looking outside the box, and seeing the world, nature, ecosystems and ecologies, are not, that's just comical. But no surprise, since anyone with such poor reasoning skills could likewise be expected to point to economic bias from agw reasearchers (who are actually the heros of today, trying to save us from ourselves against a vast pressure from hugely powerful economic forces), so clearly shows a total failure of reason: simply put: if economic bias influences views, then the largest socio-economic forces (oil, gas, coal, and the entire system of resource exploitation and control, and not by chance, wealth distribution) clearly create the largest bias, by MANY orders of magnitude. The failure to note this obvious logical error shows clearly that it's not reason at work. This is why we study logic in school, to avoid making such stupid statement and such blatant logic errors, but sadly, we don't study logic, so we make such absurd comments. Since this is such basic logic, it's easy to see that when someone repeats that nonsense, there is no actual reasoning going on, since as soon as the premise of money influencing interests is accepted, then the greatest spending and money clearly influences the most greatly, aka, global warming denialism. This has to me always been one of the most absurd notions promoted by those who refuse to deal with data and information, aka, denialists, and it also clearly exposes the total failure to actually engage in critical reasoning, rather preferring to repeat what they are told to repeat without any actual critical thinking, that's what followers and sheep do, not what smart people do, personally I'd be deeply embarrassed to do such nonsense, and I certainly would not try to be proud of displaying such ignorance in public, but that's life on the internet.

Most real scientists in the real world are truly horrified by what they are finding in agw research, when you read the real stuff, which is all around you so the only way you can't find it is if you are involved in serious data filtering and simply refusing to read anything real at all, because, of course, it contradicts a blind and faith based world view that is somehow supposed to be 'thinking outside the box'. this is just downright pathetic when viewed intellectually to be honest, but sadly in the US it's become something of the norm.

I view this as a necssary part in the change process, in my opinion, human tribes formed and led to several key adaptions, if you think of a tribal band, say, 50 people, one or two people 'led' it, maybe 3, these people were tasked with the core interactions with the ecosystem and ecology and polis around them, aka, other tribes. This is why when you visited another tribe, the chief or whatever would great you, it's why you went to the shaman or medicine man/woman for various other issues. The rest of the tribe basically followed along, basically conservative in view, ie, not doing different than what they were raised with. The leaders, when it came time to change, would lead that change, and then the followers would adapt to the new reality. If you read particularly ethnographic research and study from the time of when the First Nations in the new Americas were adapting to the euro presence, the speed with which they culturally adapted was astounding, their myths etc were modified almost in real time to take into account these new realities. But you'd have to actually have looked into such things to have an idea of them, but that's not convenient if the goal, as it appears to be with KP, who I like when he talks of what he understands and knows, is to not actually change your own views of reality, but rather confirm them by ignoring data.

But on the bright side, it frankly does not matter at all what our older generation think, they are done, like it or not, and the world we will live in in the future is made by the young, who are flexible, adaptable, and open to new ideas, even if that new idea is a world without growth and where capitalism has to modify itself to deal with a situation where growth is not a possible situation materially speaking, and the fundamental 'matter' of our existence in the end is what is going to define our ongoing cultural development.

I expect no rational handling because I've looked at history, and given we have taken on an economic system where resource destruction is top dog, it's unlikely it will suddenly get smart and stop, but material reality will force change, it's irrelevant what we think or do, if say, florida floods and gets smashed by the newly coined cat 6 or cat 7 storms, people aren't going to be living there. And if California's drought turns out to be a reaction to climate change, it's irrelevant what we dream, or how we try to delude ourselves, california will not be producing food like it does today, nor will it be supporting the populations it does today, that's not a talking point, we need water to do those things, and we don't talk water into existence. Just ask the people in the mideast about that, Syria had drought for a couple of years before their wars started, and that's not a coincidence, their system wast starting to fail, farmers were losing farms and going to the cities, which increased pressure on the government, which failed to deliver, which created war, ongoing, That's how real change with material foundation looks.

The notion of space stuff is just absurd, juvenile fantasies that clearly allow kp to pretend that things have an out when the real solution is changing our lives, but as we age, the idea of dropping our attachments to our ideas and houses and cars grows ever that more difficult..

As always, rockman inisists on being the exception that disproves all these rules, being clear on reality yet working in the oil patch etc, which is why I wish we could just draft him to be our next president.

[h2]

By the way, someone upthread asked ibon for a 'link' to where he got his ideas from. Just to bring some internet confused people back to reality, when you get 'educated' by 'studying' serious 'research' which involves reading heavy duty 'books' you then form 'concepts' which allow you to at least attempt to talk coherently, and to reason. I can point you to a wall of books, which is itself cutdown from 3 walls of books, which slightly summarize where personally I got my views from, and Ibon can too it's fairly obvious because he actually has a clue about this stuff, which you generally only get from researching it.

Here's the trick: go from secondary to primary sources as often as possible. Reading an idiot who does not understand Kant to learn about Kant does not trump reading Kant, for example, since if you repeat what the idiot said, you'll be wrong, but reading a good person who does can be helpful, as a specific example. Some primary works must be read to understand the concept since they themselves are what allow you to actually form and grasp that concept. This is, for example, how KP learned electrical engineering, by reading the primary data on physics etc, but what he fails to grasp is that he has NOT done that work for other areas he is so deluded about. As I said, a typical engineering error, I see it all the time. Not only engineers, but they are particularly prone to it. Verify your sources, ignore all corporate/industry funded stuff, which in things like agw is easy because all the real stuff more or less is studying reality, and the fake stuff is trying to deny it, so that's easy now. If you find you are selecting the flawed flaky stuff while pretending that means you are being 'critical' that means you are actually unwilling to change your bias and are simply selecting work that confirm your bias, aka, confirmation bias. This means you are failing to be critical, not that you are being smart and critical. This is a common error you see agw deniers make for example. People who are interested in holding their beliefs select 'truth' to confirm the belief, people interested in reality follow reality. Reading a flaky flawed secondary source person like Jared Diamond is sometimes ok if they do good research and don't have confirmation bias, which he does, but you also want to read enough primary sources to learn what they look like, and what they sound like when you follow the logic. That lets you then select decent secondary sources, like 1491, because you have some standard of judgement.

Books trump links usually I find, your local library if it has good staff will often pick really good non fiction books for example, though they tend to be light on primary source works, you often have to go to university libraries for that stuff.

Just because something is a book however doesn't make it useful, there are tons of worthless books written in a pseudo-science style, anything on global warming denial, creationism, etc, can show you how that looks. All of them, like conspiracy theory, will always try to connect dots that don't exist, or that are unrelated, cherry pick data, do logical leaps that defy logic, but in an often tricky and dishonest way, creating a sort of convoluted mess that is really only designed to spread what is called Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (fud), not to actually talk about reality. When you read stuff about reality, it's usually quite clear and logical, since they don't have to distort reality to try to match what the thing they are trying to demonstrate, you know, like proving that Satan placed the myths of christ figures that were a long tradition pre christ in order to fool the faithful into thinking that christ was not just another in that line of myths, no, this time it really was different. After a while the mythical view takes hold and the church no longer needs to talk about that point, since everyone forgot about the earlier stories. The catholic church really did that, by the way, it's a good example of this type of practice. Or you can point to the horribly convoluted books published when Galileo or Ptolemy published their works, trying to prove that no, really, if you apply perversely sick logic you actually can try to pretend that the sun rotates around the earth. Needless to say, back in those days, people with critical thinking skills were gobbling up the new, better theories of astronomy, and those without them, were buying and dutifully reading the nonsense that was spread by the church and other bodies to try to pretend that their words were true when they were not. Just like today big money gets stuff published trying to pretend that the source of their wealth isn't doing what it's doing.... and the non critical keep buying them, reading them, then repeating them while saying how 'critical and skeptical' they are being, which is really beyond funny.

[h2]

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ ... de_18.html

By the way, Greere really nailed the complex issues of today, without falling into simplistic viewpoints, he's been getting better at that lately by the way. This week's talks a lot about science, people's views, why they are holding them, etc, and it's quite coherent, but won't work well if you are trying to look only to confirm one or another polarizing bias. Good stuff, I recommend it, a lot of people at these forums would really benefit from reading these guys, you could skip a lot of the steps and intellectual errors I think, and move on to actually doing whatever you're doing to do in the end.

[ralfy]

If lower birth rates are due to higher standards of living, then resource and energy consumption may keep rising due to the latter. If there are more than enough young people, then population keeps rising even with lower birth rates.

Finally, average ecological footprint has already exceeded biocapacity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... _footprint

but the latter will have to rise if higher standards of living are achieved by more in the same population, while the latter per capita will drop if population keeps rising and environmental damage takes place.

[Ibon]

Skepticism of one's own supposed objectivity is a great starting point in the inquiry of truth.

I think it was Stephen Jay Gould, an evolutionary biologist and paleontologist who first introduced me to how even evolutionary science has often been vulnerable to bias due to cultural norms. It is not a big step from there to start to look within at ones own narrative and ask oneself how your set of beliefs might be skewing the data. Unlike in Stephen Jay Gould's time, today we have the internet where ones delusion can find an easy echo chamber.

A good place to start with is pondering on how each generation creates a collective set of narratives that defines how they see the world.

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('h2', '
')
Humanism of course is a pathological mental disorder, formed as humans began to dominate their ecosystems....... I believe it only comes about when the fundamental daily experience of our animal tribe is only interacting with itself, not larger nature.

[onlooker]

Wow, some truly brilliant analysis by H2 and Ibon of both our flawed evolution to the present as well as what will force us to take the right path into the future. Yes Humanism being our self-centered narcissism has skewed our prudent reasoning and logical abilities so as to allow us to rush headstrong into a truly precarious set of predicaments confronting humanity. Also, if I can add our hierarchical mode of organization has contributed in our faulty evolution. As our population grew we should have understood that it was extremely important to have truly democratic and representative societies. The disconnect between living with foresight and restraint and not has occurred to the greatest degree in the elite and wealthy who have run things on Earth for quite some time. They have shown a marked penchant for greed and lust for power which in turn has made them oblivious to the longer term consequences. They of course have had a disproportionate bearing on our trajectory as a species because of their leadership positions. Well, that is all the past now. It is absolutely correct that the forces that will shape and mold humanity from now on will be impersonal and not open to negotiation. We will adapt where and when we can or we will perish. My view as to what our prospects are is that in the near term it will be very difficult however I do see the light at the end of the tunnel because from the ordeal which we will collectively experience, what humans remain will be far more wiser, prudent and in general averse to the vices or sins H2 referred to, which are some of the 7 deadly sins that the Bible refers to.

[KaiserJeep]

I read it all, and thought about it. Now I have to say, you still should choose, either be a champion of humanity or the planet - because you will make better life choices if you understand the nature of the choice.

Everybody who owns an oil-powered vehicle, uses coal-generated electricity, and lives in a house with natural gas or LP or butane has effectively made the same choice I have consciously made: trash the planet and save the people. You either support people or you would snuff the humans for the sake of the planet. There are no other choices, face up to the truth.

We have a few deluded Earth Firsters here in California, I'm sure they are elsewhere as well. They are hypocrites, driving to their targets and using gasoline for arson, etc. But they are living their beliefs, just as are those crazy Sea Shepherds on TV down in the Antarctic, trying to save the whales. (Which does not mean that I too would not expose/kill/discredit any eco-terrorist I came across, I would.)

A few of us make a conscious choice to support humanity. The unaware do this without thinking.

The hypocritical do this while professing to care about AGW, the Ecology, the planet, and (frequently) their fellow humans.

Note that whatever your beliefs, it makes sense to minimize your impact on the planet - and thus allow more humans to live here. As long as you understand that is what you are doing - and if you believe that you have another motive, you are probably wrong. One exception would be conserving your money - so that you personally can trash the Earth for a longer period of time, or buy that new sports car with the big engine and trash the Earth faster.

No, I don't want to hear about your lifestyle or the idyllic rural environment you live in, or that obscenely expensive bicycle with carbon fiber and exotic alloys, that you ride through that termite heap of a city you live in. By the way, congrats on trashing a beautiful and unspoiled part of the planet when you committed the ultimate and most selfish act of building a Doomstead. I am sincerely glad I figured this one out before I committed the same sin. Yes, I may still build a Passive House - for entirely selfish reasons, and only if I can't find an energy-efficient home readymade.

I am sure that from time to time, there were genuine supporters of the planet at PO.com. They dropped offline and are living an alternative lifestyle somewhere - or committed suicide which is the inevitable and logical conclusion you must reach about truly having a zero impact on the planet.

None of you reading this are in that category. You are contributing to BAU and prolonging the death of the Ecology, and contributing to humanity. Now you know what you are doing.

The consumption of oil is still increasing. The higher the demand goes, the faster the downslope of the crash.

When lemmings get overpopulated, they jump in the water and drown. When humans get overpopulated, they have resource wars. There are thousands of nuclear weapons awaiting the final resource war. It doesn't need to make any sense. Imagine a General saluting the President of his country, and telling him that "we" were the victors. Both are dressed in anti-radiation suits. In fact, humans very rarely act in ways that make sense. Humans are the only species that can effectively destroy the Earth, and probably will. We came close when I was young, when the Soviets put ICBMs in Cuba. The root cause of that near-Armageddon episode was ideology, the Founding Founders of the USA vs. Marx and Engels. Those that survive that final war are only those smart enough to leave this place before Armageddon.

You noticed that I am again up too early, and I'm here at PO.com again. Where I read a bunch of opinions that came from some very intelligent people, about what we should do or would do, if we were smart enough. (Flashback: The Scarecrow singing "If I only had a brain".)

I guarantee this much: Humanity has seldom if ever done the smart thing under any circumstances. I'm not expecting the PO crash to be any different. I think that the sick economy is already obscuring the underlying causes of the approaching crash. I think that crash is decades away, and I still hold out two slender threads of hope. Those are first that some unknown new form of portable energy storage will be found that rivals gasoline and diesel fuel, and we can limp along in all our billions until the falling fertility rates decrease our numbers to a survivable level of a billion or less, making Armageddon unnecessary. Second hope, that enough humans leave the planet that our species can survive Armageddon.

About humans "wising up" in any of the hundreds of ways we talk about here, and modifying instinctive behaviors or cultural beliefs, I have no hope whatsoever.

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', '.')
Note that whatever your beliefs, it makes sense to minimize your impact on the planet - and thus allow more humans to live here.

[KaiserJeep]

No, I don't consider those two comments to be contradictory. I hope against all logic that we can find a way out of the corner that fossil fuels have put us in. But the population decline must be normal and a result of reduced fertility - I don't want war and I don't want some heavy handed despot dictating the number of permitted births.

Peak oil is of course only the first of a long series of resource crises that we will experience. If we survive that we have to deal with a potable water shortage, the pollution of the seas, arable land erosion, pesticide/herbicide/fertilizer shortages and runoffs, scarcities in the dozens of rare elements needed for electronics, coal pollution, and the utter lack of any sources of renewable energy to provide baseload generation. When those crises are past, others. Look at the population graph that says that the world either peaks at 8 Billion between 2040 and 2050, or blows through 16 Billion in 2100, still going up exponentially. More than half of those people either way are Asian and African, and the First World becomes more and more insignificant as the decades pass.

The USA fracked first, the rest of the world will follow - and when the Middle East frack's it's wells, look out for resurgent Muslim extremists, armed with the latest technology.

I would love to say, let us all concentrate on making the world a better place. But there are crazies and criminals and terrorists in this world, and I think that there always have been and always will be. I'm encouraging my Grandkids to leave the planet, as the only responsible path. I think that there is a better than even chance that several Middle Eastern countries will acquire both nuclear weapons and ICBMs this century, maybe this decade. Are you up for more "duck and cover" drills?

Do you understand what will happen when we do leave the planet for space habitats? Trillions of humans live in space eventually, and they start to have resource issues ..... centuries or millenia from this date. It is the ultimate "kick the can" play. But technology will save us, not some Gaia Earth-Myth.

It also gives rise to interesting questions. Should we or should we not drop a half-mile diameter rock on the Middle East, for example? All those other countries down there are just collateral damage....this Arab-Israeli thing is getting tiresome after 3000 years.

[Pops]

The smell of self justification is strong here. LOL

I hope our generation demonstrates to our kids the trap of binary thinking and they learn that a little cognitive dissonance is a good thing. It is encouraging that we are becoming more secular, less convinced of our special status.

It is OK to admit that we don't hold the absolute "truth", possess all the "facts" and can boil life down to simplistic binary choices.

[onlooker]

Well by getting away from this Humanistic "world revolves around us" mode of thinking we can proceed forward to try and tackle the huge and pressing problems we confront. Almost like a self-absorbed teenager who finally learns that the world does revolve around him/her. I think their is a word in the English language for this it is called humility. The future will force us to re-discover this word.

[kanon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('h2', 'H')umanism of course is a pathological mental disorder, . . . I believe it only comes about when the fundamental daily experience of our animal tribe is only interacting with itself, not larger nature. . . .
The key delusion of course in such a "debate" is that we are going to plan rationally anything at all, . . .
That's greed, hubris, pride, arrogance, sloth, gluttony, just like the real ethical church teachings, for example the cardinal sins, warn us so severely about. . .
. . . humans are just going to burn the fuel they need to maintain their illusion of the life they need, we'll push the population numbers high enough until that peaks due to hitting resource constraints, then a long readjustment to sustainable numbers will occur, . . .
I expect no rational handling because I've looked at history, and given we have taken on an economic system where resource destruction is top dog, it's unlikely it will suddenly get smart and stop, but material reality will force change, . . .