Climate doomism!

[The Reformed American Republic]

I wouldn't be surprised if civilization collapses by 2100.

That's actually incredibly optimistic. MIT thinks it will be in 2040.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xw3x/ ... lapse-soon
https://thehill.com/changing-america/su ... e-by-2040/

I wouldn't be surprised if civilization collapses by 2100.

I'll be dead by then.

You probably won't be so lucky.

[PhilTech]

You probably won't be so lucky.

I'll probably say I am quite optimistic, I still think there is still a much brighter future ahead of us.

Or maybe I am just that shallow...

[The Alma Mater]

Who ever thought that Y2K was going to end the world?

the people who thought it would trigger MAD when launch detection systems went haywire.

Which would have happened - had we not invested loads of manpower to prevent just that.

It is very odd that people cannot understand that preventing a problem does not mean the problem was not real.

[Page]

We're not going extinct any time soon, but a lot of people are gonna have a really bad time.

[The Sherpa Empire]

It's never too late to act -- but it does take time to see the effects of your actions and it is not easy to get everyone on the same page when you need to organize a big collective change in behavior.

I don't think humanity will go extinct or civilization will collapse, but I do think we'll continue to see issues with unusually large wildfires, droughts, etc. If you look back at human history, there are lots of individual civilizations that have collapsed because of natural disasters like droughts, famines, etc. -- but that does not mean humans stop being civilized. It just means new civilizations will replace the old.

Can still be scary times to live through, even if the world and humanity and civilization do not end.

[Adamede]

I wouldn't be surprised if civilization collapses by 2100.

That's actually incredibly optimistic. MIT thinks it will be in 2040.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xw3x/ ... lapse-soon
https://thehill.com/changing-america/su ... e-by-2040/

I'll be dead by then.

You probably won't be so lucky.

Eh I'm taking into account individual (most northern/wealthy) nation-states holding themselves together by sheer force of will. The third world I expect to disintegrate much earlier as the environment and ecosystems degrade.

[Risottia]

[

snip

"We've had doomday predictions before, so I don't take them seriously"
"when?"
"these ones"
"those didn't end the world though"
That's the point.

Wrong.
The point was that those doomsday thingies were clearly idiocies already BEFORE the moment they foresaw for the doomity doom. Seriously, Y2K? MAYAN CALENDAR? There wasn't anyone in his right state of mind that could have believed that stuff.

[Il Borgia Vaticano]

Someone has probably already said it, but I'm not a doomer insomuch as we're already too late.

I'm a doomer because I'm very certain we still have time left to stop it, but our governments are too greedy and incompetent to do so.

[Adamede]

It's never too late to act -- but it does take time to see the effects of your actions and it is not easy to get everyone on the same page when you need to organize a big collective change in behavior.

I don't think humanity will go extinct or civilization will collapse, but I do think we'll continue to see issues with unusually large wildfires, droughts, etc. If you look back at human history, there are lots of individual civilizations that have collapsed because of natural disasters like droughts, famines, etc. -- but that does not mean humans stop being civilized. It just means new civilizations will replace the old.

Can still be scary times to live through, even if the world and humanity and civilization do not end.

"Civilization" is a lie we tell ourselves to justify our uncivilized actions. "Civilized" in the face of what every civilization has done is frankly meaningless.

And the fact that civilizations have collapsed due to climate change before is a good indicator that ours could collapse as well.

[Il Borgia Vaticano]

It's never too late to act -- but it does take time to see the effects of your actions and it is not easy to get everyone on the same page when you need to organize a big collective change in behavior.

I don't think humanity will go extinct or civilization will collapse, but I do think we'll continue to see issues with unusually large wildfires, droughts, etc. If you look back at human history, there are lots of individual civilizations that have collapsed because of natural disasters like droughts, famines, etc. -- but that does not mean humans stop being civilized. It just means new civilizations will replace the old.

Can still be scary times to live through, even if the world and humanity and civilization do not end.

"Civilization" is a lie we tell ourselves to justify our uncivilized actions. "Civilized" in the face of what every civilization has done is frankly meaningless.

And the fact that civilizations have collapsed due to climate change before is a good indicator that ours could collapse as well.

Some technologically equivalent or analogue of a society adapted to the world we leave behind will probably build itself up in a few dozen million years or so after we're gone.

[The Alma Mater]

[

"We've had doomday predictions before, so I don't take them seriously"
"when?"
"these ones"
"those didn't end the world though"
That's the point.

Wrong.
The point was that those doomsday thingies were clearly idiocies already BEFORE the moment they foresaw for the doomity doom. Seriously, Y2K? MAYAN CALENDAR? There wasn't anyone in his right state of mind that could have believed that stuff.

Everyone who was not an imbecile believed Y2k. And rightly so.

[Red Lake Circle]

You probably won't be so lucky.

I'll probably say I am quite optimistic, I still think there is still a much brighter future ahead of us.

Or maybe I am just that shallow...

I mean, hey, I'm believing in a brighter future out of sheer spite, you're probably gonna end up much happier than I am lmao

[Adamede]

"Civilization" is a lie we tell ourselves to justify our uncivilized actions. "Civilized" in the face of what every civilization has done is frankly meaningless.

And the fact that civilizations have collapsed due to climate change before is a good indicator that ours could collapse as well.

Some technologically equivalent or analogue of a society adapted to the world we leave behind will probably build itself up in a few dozen million years or so after we're gone.

No. Humans aren't going extinct anytime soon, If our civilization collapses a new one will rise from the ashes within a few centuries (imho), but it will likely be a far more insular and primitive one.

[Imperial States of Duotona]

I was mostly positive until COP26. Everyone just kept dragging their feet, especially America and China who really need to start pulling their weight.

So basically, I'm on the fence.

[Knask]

We were on our way to be saved, as we would be going to Mars and established a colony there.

Unfortunately, the billionaires decided to focus on Twitter and postpone space exploration for a while.

[Red Lake Circle]

We were on our way to be saved, as we would be going to Mars and established a colony there.

Unfortunately, the billionaires decided to focus on Twitter and postpone space exploration for a while.

...I would look up the difficulties associated with creating a Mars colony. Long story short - no, Mars colonies will not be saving us anytime soon.

[Adamede]

We were on our way to be saved, as we would be going to Mars and established a colony there.

Unfortunately, the billionaires decided to focus on Twitter and postpone space exploration for a while.

A Mars colony wouldn't save us. They would be dependent on Earth for survival for a long ass time.

[Kerwa]

I wouldn't be surprised if civilization collapses by 2100.

That's actually incredibly optimistic. MIT thinks it will be in 2040.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xw3x/ ... lapse-soon
https://thehill.com/changing-america/su ... e-by-2040/

I'll be dead by then.

You probably won't be so lucky.

It’s already collapsed.

This is just the technological rubble.

[Knask]

We were on our way to be saved, as we would be going to Mars and established a colony there.

Unfortunately, the billionaires decided to focus on Twitter and postpone space exploration for a while.

...I would look up the difficulties associated with creating a Mars colony. Long story short - no, Mars colonies will not be saving us anytime soon.

No, and that's all because Musk wants to spy on the private nessages of his ex on Twitter.

[Red Lake Circle]

...I would look up the difficulties associated with creating a Mars colony. Long story short - no, Mars colonies will not be saving us anytime soon.

No, and that's all because Musk wants to spy on the private nessages of his ex on Twitter.

Well, more than that, Mars is an irradiated husk of a world. Making that inhabitable by any means by any amount of people is going to be an impossible project for a while, let alone bringing enough people up there to continue human civilization.

[Eahland]

We also had y2k, the Mayan apocalypse, the new ice ace and new plagues.

Hence why I said "real" doomsday predictions. About the only thing real on this list is Y2K and there's still no consensus if it was a real threat that we averted and saved the global economy in the process or if we just wasted a ton of money for no reason.

As someone who was actually working in IT in the '90s.. some of both, but much more the latter than the former. I was actually deliberately unemployed for the later part of 1999 because I didn't want to spend it trying to prove a negative to people who didn't actually understand what I was talking about, but thought they were experts because of the media hype.

There were Y2K bugs, but they were mostly pretty superficial UI stuff... systems that would display the year as 19100, or that wouldn't let you enter a date past '99. Some databases that only stored two-digit years. But for the most part, systems weren't using decimal dates internally at all, so while there would have been some bureaucratic mess, the notion that computers would just stop working en masse and embedded systems would fail was complete nonsense. A lot of them didn't even care about the date, and even for the ones that did, for most of them 946684800 was a tick no different than 946684799.

I have a mess of old computers around. I have one system, an IBM PS/2, which has a Y2K bug in the BIOS, and would no longer boot after Y2K. (It'd probably boot now. It's been long enough since I had it powered up that it's probably forgotten the time and reset to 1/1/80.) There's another, an original IBM PC, which I could no longer connect to the network. It doesn't have a CMOS battery, so I'd have to tell it the date every time it booted up. If I just didn't tell it it was after Y2K, it would be fine. But when it brought the network stack up, it would get a time fix off the Netware server, and lock up. But those were the only two machines, out of dozens in my collection, that had problems, and they were both old even then.

[Dumb Ideologies]

One of the defining features of humanity is a capacity to innovate. But a lot of influential people, companies and countries have a short-term interest in ensuring that we don't do enough. Humans are not particularly good at properly weighing severe future harm against current-day inconvenience and it is often easiest to side with those who want to water down environmental policies to maximise current-day economic prosperity. When things get REALLY bad for those capable of marshalling the resources to do something major about it, it is likely to be too late. I'm sure they'll find a solution that allows them a good chance of survival and so humanity won't go extinct or anything, but a large portion of the population will likely die or be reduced to a miserable life. 80/20 doomerist, but pushing the vested interests at least slightly further than they want to go now will maybe make things a little bit less terrible.

[Rhodevus]

The world isn't going to collapse in 2040, or 2050 or any of that. We are approaching (and have approached and have passed) the time in which the positive feedback loop is beginning, in terms of greenhouse gases interacting with the world's enviro cycles. But, we aren't going to feel all the worst effects any time soon. We will start to feel things, but society isn't going to collapse because of it. People in the global south will feel the effects much worse than the global north.

Also, space colonies are not the solution to saving humanity (not in the near future at least. maybe in the far future, sure), BUT space exploration and the scientific breakthroughs that come from it definitely are. Money put into space exploration helps to develop new materials, advancements in technologies and the reusing of existing technologies which will be extremely beneficial to us all.

More research and development into green energy, increasing efficiency of production, implementation and manufacturing, and also importantly, proper disposal and actual reusability is key.

Now, all that was very anti-doomer, but I am a moderate doomer, in that I think things are going to need to get a lot worse before they get better

[Sky Reavers]

Yes, climate changes. It changed in the past, and will change in the future, no matter if humans exist or not. For it always will. Ecosystems will be ruined, and new ones will appear in their place. Still... pollution could and should be reduced. As for humanity... Society won't collapse. We will adapt. Yes, some things will become tougher, but I think, that climate change may also bring some new opportunities.

So no, I am no doomer. Yes, there will be some problems, but not collapse-tier ones.

[Stellar Colonies]

Going into space to move ourselves to a new planet is a dumb idea because nowhere would be more habitable than Earth, but going into space to develop an industrial and resource base up there and expand our range is a pretty good one.

Difficult, though, and Earth would still come first of course.