I'll check it out. For now, well, the earth will go through a mass extinction. Some life will survive, and in a few hundred thousand years all of this will be buried. The earth itself has 1-2 billion more years before the sun itself expands and evaporates our oceans. Cheerful stuff!
Actually I do find the immensity of several billion more years of life on earth to be a cheerful thought to contemplate. There was a very fun series in 2002 called "The Future is Wild" that looked at possible evolutionary futures.
Episode One - Return of the Ice
The world is deep in a period of glaciation. Five million years after the human era, the planet is once again dominated by ice-caps. The ice locks away so much water that sea levels have dropped by 150 metres. Ice sheets cover most of North America. In Europe they cover Scandanavia and the United Kingdom, reaching as far south as France.
Five million years into the future, the Mediterranean Sea is unrecognizable. The collision between Africa and southern Spain has sealed it off, cutting off inflowing water from the Atlantic. Combined with a drier climate, this has transformed the once vibrant sea into a vast salt desert, dotted with a few ultra-saline lakes.
Episode 3 – The Amazonian Prairie: Five million years into the future, the drying climate has turned much of the Amazon Basin from forest to grasslands, creating a savanna-like environment.
Episode 4 - The Cold Kansas Desert : Five million years in the future, North America has undergone a dramatic transformation. Ice sheets extend as far sount as Chicago - turing the once fertile wheat-belt into a cold, dry desert.
Episode 5 - Waterland : One hundred million years after the human era, Earth is unrecognizable. The continents have shifted, merging into new configurations, and the planet is locked in a muggy greenhouse climate. Vast tropical rainforests and shallow seas dominate the landscape—ideal conditions for life to thrive.
***This one has turtles having evolved into the size of dinosaurs****
As silly as these are, they remind me that we are only 485 million years into the tale of life on Earth. The Earth is only 1/5 of the way through its story. Whatever happens to us in the next few hundred years, the Earth Abides.
Very cheerful indeed! I suppose my cope for all this is knowing that the future is unknowable, so maybe things will change or be different. It'll probably we worse and faster than expected, but like you pointed out, resisting in every little way possible helps whether that's through simple sabotage or trying to become less reliant on the system. The other cope is knowing that we're not the only species to cause a mass extinction because algae did it first. Humans should probably be better but it's in every species' nature to overconsume before crashing and burning. We just have the unfortunate (or fortunate?) luck of being born to see it. Who knows what'll happen?
Just being marginally aware and marginally honest the outcomes are obvious.
Mass industrial society did not comprehend time in any meaningful quantity. And that used to work out very conveniently. (Disregard the future, disregard the past )
But now it's getting into the range that us consumers are able to understand. Bite-size lifetimes. Not generations, not deep into the past or deep into the future, as previous civilizations were able to envision and acknowledge.
We were untethered from the consequences of our actions. And yet now we are directly anchored to the inevitable conclusion.
Those that refuse to face the truth will likely perish no matter how wealthy or powerful they may be.
The world is burning up and zettajoules more energy is being absorbed than radiated out to space. We are all heading into a furnace- all the world's species, and we humans, we self-proclaimed lords of the planet will go with them fighting among ourselves until none be left to fight.
Regardless of acknowledgment or awareness, we all face the same fate. It's just a matter of how surprised we will be. I suppose not being surprised will make it a little bit easier.
I guess it was too much to hope that an existential crisis for our very race would bring us together. Instead, we seem determined to "do collapse" in the ugliest way possible.
If humans are too busy/denying to even recognize that we are in an existential crisis, then there's no hope that they will band together to work at trying to change it.
It seems humans aren't so different than any other organism, in that we expand as much as we can until the resources are exhausted. Just like algae or bacteria in a Petri dish.
Exactly. No awareness that we're in an existential crisis, living out a worldview opposed to life on earth that will eventually undermine human civilization. They think we're just going through a dip, and not the beginning of a terminal decline. We're digging ourselves into a hole while saying "Dig faster, there's light at the end of the tunnel."
If I could subscribe I would. I don’t want to publicly explain that statement. I appreciate those posts of yours that I’m able to access. You make sense.
Honesty always sounds like heresy to a culture drunk on denial. America was fascist in its bones before Mussolini put a name on it. Slavery, genocide, eugenics… we wrote the playbook Hitler borrowed. People want to cosplay resistance while scrolling memes, forgetting that political movements have been started with memes when they’re designed correctly. Collapse isn’t coming, it’s already here. The real question is whether we face it with our eyes open or keep baptizing our lies until they drown us.
All true. And it doesn't include what I see as the biggest Elephant in the Room, which is our addiction to economic growth. That addiction is starting to bottom out. Lots of people are calling our situation "late-stage capitalism," but I prefer to think of it as "late-stage economic growth addiction." As Yuval Noah Harari pointed out in his book "Sapiens," capitalism and the addiction to growth go together. He called our economy a giant pyramid scheme, and he's right.
Thank you. Putting it all together makes sense. Covid (and I would throw in other autoimmune diseases); escalating climate change and the Fascist coup are a daunting trifecta.
One of the ironies of this is that the thing the Regime denies -climate change- is affording them the excuse to grab more power as our resources dwindle.
Fascism is inevitable-currently taking hold of the country without a mask. The biosphere collapse is happening as well as the destruction of the climate. Our main natural resources are going to (oil) or are already depleting (copper), and the so called "transition" is just a puppet show on TV (there never was any transition of energies, but additions- see William Jevons and Jean Baptiste Fressoz). Super AI is, at this point, inevitable already (mainly because of the Maximum Power Principle).
These events (part of what is called the polycrisis of our technological civilization) all have different timings, though. For me, AI is the fastest and the most radical of all (specialists give ASI a span of 3 to 20 years to develop, which is not that great a span actually). Once AI is more intelligent than the sum of all humans, our future becomes totally unpredictable because nothing will remain in our hands. Just as an ant doesn't know what a human will do next and can't understand it. At best, humans will be pets. What comes next becomes irrelevant for humans (whether they still exist or not). It will still be true that intelligence and wisdom are not the same thing at all.
Ahhhhhh. What is scary is that all is so scary - that I now find Newsom less scary. And he is a scary coked out gum snapping sleaze bag. But to your point I will be voting party line democrat going forward. Only good thing about this shit show is learning how compromised and decadent each party truly is - but at least the dems put on humanist airs. I really didn’t think this run with Trump would go cray cray out of the gate. Oh how wrong I was. Frankly Newsom more appealing to me than Harris. It was the dem install of Harris that swung me to Trump. Next go round they need legit put a proper candidate forward in proper legal manner.
I like this excerpt from Roy Scranton's new book on ethical pessimism: https://lithub.com/embracing-ethical-pessimism-in-the-face-of-near-certain-climate-doom/
Everything on earth will keep on keeping on regardless of what happens, or what is happening.
I'll check it out. For now, well, the earth will go through a mass extinction. Some life will survive, and in a few hundred thousand years all of this will be buried. The earth itself has 1-2 billion more years before the sun itself expands and evaporates our oceans. Cheerful stuff!
Actually I do find the immensity of several billion more years of life on earth to be a cheerful thought to contemplate. There was a very fun series in 2002 called "The Future is Wild" that looked at possible evolutionary futures.
Episode One - Return of the Ice
The world is deep in a period of glaciation. Five million years after the human era, the planet is once again dominated by ice-caps. The ice locks away so much water that sea levels have dropped by 150 metres. Ice sheets cover most of North America. In Europe they cover Scandanavia and the United Kingdom, reaching as far south as France.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=petcsuk2Puc
Episode Two - The Vanished Sea
Five million years into the future, the Mediterranean Sea is unrecognizable. The collision between Africa and southern Spain has sealed it off, cutting off inflowing water from the Atlantic. Combined with a drier climate, this has transformed the once vibrant sea into a vast salt desert, dotted with a few ultra-saline lakes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHma-zxJ1ok
Episode 3 – The Amazonian Prairie: Five million years into the future, the drying climate has turned much of the Amazon Basin from forest to grasslands, creating a savanna-like environment.
Episode 4 - The Cold Kansas Desert : Five million years in the future, North America has undergone a dramatic transformation. Ice sheets extend as far sount as Chicago - turing the once fertile wheat-belt into a cold, dry desert.
Episode 5 - Waterland : One hundred million years after the human era, Earth is unrecognizable. The continents have shifted, merging into new configurations, and the planet is locked in a muggy greenhouse climate. Vast tropical rainforests and shallow seas dominate the landscape—ideal conditions for life to thrive.
***This one has turtles having evolved into the size of dinosaurs****
As silly as these are, they remind me that we are only 485 million years into the tale of life on Earth. The Earth is only 1/5 of the way through its story. Whatever happens to us in the next few hundred years, the Earth Abides.
Very cheerful indeed! I suppose my cope for all this is knowing that the future is unknowable, so maybe things will change or be different. It'll probably we worse and faster than expected, but like you pointed out, resisting in every little way possible helps whether that's through simple sabotage or trying to become less reliant on the system. The other cope is knowing that we're not the only species to cause a mass extinction because algae did it first. Humans should probably be better but it's in every species' nature to overconsume before crashing and burning. We just have the unfortunate (or fortunate?) luck of being born to see it. Who knows what'll happen?
Just being marginally aware and marginally honest the outcomes are obvious.
Mass industrial society did not comprehend time in any meaningful quantity. And that used to work out very conveniently. (Disregard the future, disregard the past )
But now it's getting into the range that us consumers are able to understand. Bite-size lifetimes. Not generations, not deep into the past or deep into the future, as previous civilizations were able to envision and acknowledge.
We were untethered from the consequences of our actions. And yet now we are directly anchored to the inevitable conclusion.
Or not.
Thank you, Ms. Wildfire. Another excellent, brutally honest article.
Hard times require hard truths
Those that refuse to face the truth will likely perish no matter how wealthy or powerful they may be.
The world is burning up and zettajoules more energy is being absorbed than radiated out to space. We are all heading into a furnace- all the world's species, and we humans, we self-proclaimed lords of the planet will go with them fighting among ourselves until none be left to fight.
Regardless of acknowledgment or awareness, we all face the same fate. It's just a matter of how surprised we will be. I suppose not being surprised will make it a little bit easier.
I know it’s also harder than showing up at a protest, but here goes once again:
https://open.substack.com/pub/digitalcanary/p/the-art-of-simple-sabotage
I guess it was too much to hope that an existential crisis for our very race would bring us together. Instead, we seem determined to "do collapse" in the ugliest way possible.
If humans are too busy/denying to even recognize that we are in an existential crisis, then there's no hope that they will band together to work at trying to change it.
It seems humans aren't so different than any other organism, in that we expand as much as we can until the resources are exhausted. Just like algae or bacteria in a Petri dish.
Exactly. No awareness that we're in an existential crisis, living out a worldview opposed to life on earth that will eventually undermine human civilization. They think we're just going through a dip, and not the beginning of a terminal decline. We're digging ourselves into a hole while saying "Dig faster, there's light at the end of the tunnel."
If I could subscribe I would. I don’t want to publicly explain that statement. I appreciate those posts of yours that I’m able to access. You make sense.
I appreciate it. No explanation needed.
Honesty always sounds like heresy to a culture drunk on denial. America was fascist in its bones before Mussolini put a name on it. Slavery, genocide, eugenics… we wrote the playbook Hitler borrowed. People want to cosplay resistance while scrolling memes, forgetting that political movements have been started with memes when they’re designed correctly. Collapse isn’t coming, it’s already here. The real question is whether we face it with our eyes open or keep baptizing our lies until they drown us.
All true. And it doesn't include what I see as the biggest Elephant in the Room, which is our addiction to economic growth. That addiction is starting to bottom out. Lots of people are calling our situation "late-stage capitalism," but I prefer to think of it as "late-stage economic growth addiction." As Yuval Noah Harari pointed out in his book "Sapiens," capitalism and the addiction to growth go together. He called our economy a giant pyramid scheme, and he's right.
Thank you. Putting it all together makes sense. Covid (and I would throw in other autoimmune diseases); escalating climate change and the Fascist coup are a daunting trifecta.
One of the ironies of this is that the thing the Regime denies -climate change- is affording them the excuse to grab more power as our resources dwindle.
a very thorough & truthful look at the world today
and where we are in it....
Fascism is inevitable-currently taking hold of the country without a mask. The biosphere collapse is happening as well as the destruction of the climate. Our main natural resources are going to (oil) or are already depleting (copper), and the so called "transition" is just a puppet show on TV (there never was any transition of energies, but additions- see William Jevons and Jean Baptiste Fressoz). Super AI is, at this point, inevitable already (mainly because of the Maximum Power Principle).
These events (part of what is called the polycrisis of our technological civilization) all have different timings, though. For me, AI is the fastest and the most radical of all (specialists give ASI a span of 3 to 20 years to develop, which is not that great a span actually). Once AI is more intelligent than the sum of all humans, our future becomes totally unpredictable because nothing will remain in our hands. Just as an ant doesn't know what a human will do next and can't understand it. At best, humans will be pets. What comes next becomes irrelevant for humans (whether they still exist or not). It will still be true that intelligence and wisdom are not the same thing at all.
As resources are depleted, authoritarian governments rise and flourish. That seems to be a constant in history.
Ahhhhhh. What is scary is that all is so scary - that I now find Newsom less scary. And he is a scary coked out gum snapping sleaze bag. But to your point I will be voting party line democrat going forward. Only good thing about this shit show is learning how compromised and decadent each party truly is - but at least the dems put on humanist airs. I really didn’t think this run with Trump would go cray cray out of the gate. Oh how wrong I was. Frankly Newsom more appealing to me than Harris. It was the dem install of Harris that swung me to Trump. Next go round they need legit put a proper candidate forward in proper legal manner.
♾️🌍🌎🌏♾️ I second Agapecordis