Humanity

[Pluto100]

What do you think will happen to Humanity? I have written down what I think in the attachment below.

You rock! Have a nice day!

Pluto100

[LukeTim]

With regards to the whole humans getting along thing, I wrote a couple of articles on my blog about the subject. You might like to read them.

http://threemix.co.uk/luketim/

I don\'t write for it very often... so they are the only two articles.

[Pluto100]

Wow! I just read that and it was awesome! Good job! YES!!! I am not alone in worrying about Humanity!! YES!!!!

[Nibb31]

I sincerely and deeply believe that we\'re screwed. I give us a century or two, after which I think that we will be either extinct or reduced to a few thousand individuals surviving on the scarce resources we have left.

This is neither good or bad in the grand scheme of things. Good and bad does not exist in nature and to think that we are not just another insignificant species among billions of others is delusional. Nature hates emptiness, so once we\'re gone, something else will take our place. Our molecules will be transformed and recycled. In the end, life will prevail even if we don\'t.

[Kryten]

I honestly don\'t think humanity could go extinct, even with something like another P-Tr event happens, or nuclear war. There\'s simply too many of us, and we\'re too adaptable.

[Pluto100]

Nibb31, I am with you. But, there is always that chance where we will somehow survive after that. Kryten, very true! I mean, even if most humans die, maybe a few million or so would re-build. I just can\'t belive how long Humanity has survived.

[Ted]

Our social conscience has evolved to the point where the large majority of the population deem discrimination for uncontrollable qualities (race, gender, disabilities etc) inappropriate, so I doubt mass persecution of anyone will happen again.

I think within the next 50 years, judging by the last 10, we will see a massive decrease in our rights to freedom of speech and thought. The Internet will be used to track and quell activism of any form that is not beneficial for a government. The sharing of information will be discouraged in the name of DRM and \'intellectual property\', this can already be seen with e-books. I don\'t think massive revolutions of the Western world will occur soon, nor will any genocide. People will be content with the prison that they are in because it\'s a prison to protect them from themselves.

Also, I suspect we will run into problems with overpopulation soon and governing systems will need to be reformed to accommodate for them, we can\'t have so few governing so many, it won\'t work.

[Nibb31]

I honestly don\'t think humanity could go extinct, even with something like another P-Tr event happens, or nuclear war. There\'s simply too many of us, and we\'re too adaptable.

Oh really? We are fully capable of starving ourselves to death, eating up all our resources, turning arable land into toxic wasteland, poisoning the oceans, creating mutant viruses... All it would take is a new anti-biotic resistant strain of tuberculosis and we\'re toast. Radiation could cause widespread sterility. Allowing Monsanto to replace all our crops with sterile engineered seeds is suicidal. And knifes and machetes are just as good for genocide as nuclear weapons.

e

Whatever happens, population growth at the current levels is not sustainable, so either we stop making babies and reduce our numbers peacefully (fat chance of that happening) or there will be a lot of fighting for resources and human population will diminish 'naturally', but it will be far from painless.

That\'s why I said that it\'s likely that we revert back to a few thousand individuals. There have actually already been such bottlenecks in our history. Once we\'re at those levels, we can bounce back, but chances are that whatever emergs from that will have as much in common with us as we have with our Neanderthal cousins. For all we know, we might not even be able to recognize our descendants as 'Humanity' as we know it.

[Kryten]

I don\'t see anything there that could realistically affect the whole planet. We managed to survive with Tuberculosis without any antibiotics for tens of thousands of years, so I think we\'re good there; all 7 billion of us aren\'t going to suddenly drop dead if we overtake the amount of food the planet can produce, and Monsanto never even mentioned the Terminator system or anything like it again after the initial hissy fit. Good look getting everyone on the planet to commit genocide against everyone else. The bottlenecks you mention all happened when we were still restricted to the horn of africa, we\'ve spread too much for anything like that now.

Basically, we\'re like cockroaches. We\'ve now infested the whole house, we\'ve got into all the cracks, and you\'re not getting rid of us without something incredibly drastic.

[Pluto100]

Ted, I can see what you are saying. If we don\'t die, We will just have too many restrictions and our freedom will be the one dying. I remember, from this one Doctor Who episode, there was this thing called the 'Osterhagen Key' or something that was used if the world was so bad that dying was better.

Oh really? We are fully capable of starving ourselves to death, eating up all our resources, turning arable land into toxic wasteland, poisoning the oceans, creating mutant viruses... All it would take is a new anti-biotic resistant strain of tuberculosis and we\'re toast. Radiation could cause widespread sterility. Allowing Monsanto to replace all our crops with sterile engineered seeds is suicidal. And knifes and machetes are just as good for genocide as nuclear weapons.

e

Whatever happens, population growth at the current levels is not sustainable, so either we stop making babies and reduce our numbers peacefully (fat chance of that happening) or there will be a lot of fighting for resources and human population will diminish 'naturally', but it will be far from painless.

Wow. I really think that was an interesting explanation of what might happen!

Kryten, I agree, even if we do have a major catastrophe, we will survive!

[Imandreas]

The pessimism in this thread is absurd. I know for CERTAIN that some crazy guy is going to want to forge an empire. Since there is no land left on Earth, they would be forced to take over the moon and settle it. Then everyone will join in the space race.

[Ted]

The pessimism in this thread is absurd. I know for CERTAIN that some crazy guy is going to want to forge an empire. Since there is no land left on Earth, they would be forced to take over the moon and settle it. Then everyone will join in the space race.

It\'s an unfortunate fact that our technological and mental advancement has left terrible things in its wake. For example, it took WWII for us to create human rights and it also led to massive advances in many technological fields, but led to the deaths of more than 56 million people.

Currently, we are making positive progression in almost all fields, but our ignorance and naivety about inherent underlying problems in society and ourselves, which don\'t effect our day-to-day lives (which is why they are so neglected) but they will effect us drastically in the long run. Unfortunately, the majority don\'t always realise this and when they do, it\'s too late.

I dispute your claim that a \'crazy guy\' will form a Moon colony. Firstly, you say that there is no land left on Earth, yet most empires solved a lack of free land by taking other\'s land, so why spend the trillions building a Moon colony when you can spend billions battering your neighbouring country? Furthermore, the materials required to build anything space-related are quite hard to obtain for a country that is hostile, due to trade sanctions and the like, and even if they are obtained they will most likely be wasted in early testing (see North Korea\'s recent space exploration attempts). A more realistic prediction would be that we see rises in insurgency, due to sub-standard quality of life, in countries with a low GDP which might lead to more events like the \'Arab Spring\'/civil wars (although, how much of Arab Spring was an independent uprising is another matter).

I can\'t imagine that any developed countries will go to war any time soon, we just no longer have that \'enemy mentality\' where we feel disdain for the other country, technology like the Internet has made us realise that we are not that different. On a side note, it is this reason why it is so very easy for the West to be in a majority approved \'conflict\' in Afghanistan and for US drone attacks to occur in Pakistan and Yemen that kill civilians; the average person can\'t empathise with the civilians of the other country, so they find it difficult to oppose such a thing.

[Pluto100]

D: I am so sorry! I feel like I have made people start to fight with each other! I am so sorry!

[Pluto100]

Also, This song pretty much describes how today is a supposed 'Dreamworld'.

[Ted]

D: I am so sorry! I feel like I have made people start to fight with each other! I am so sorry!

Not at all, at the most you created an incredibly interesting intellectual debate about a very deep and subjective topic.

[Pluto100]

:/ Ok. I was just getting worried . Well, in that case, Cool! When I first created this post, I was thinking nobody would ever respond to this post XD!

[Imandreas]

-snip-

1. Exact.

2. The reason why they could not take land is because every other nation would destroy them for agressive actions. In addition, the materials are expensive, but many space programs have achieved quite a bit with limited funds. Imagine if the US decided to octuple the funding of NASA, as an example of my thought.

3. Off topic, but basically same as No. 1.

[Endeavour]

The reason people don\'t get along and share is because each person would benefit more from the absense of the other person than from sharing his own resources.

[nibula]

lol nobody doing evil things in finland im safe

[mincespy]

You see, I don\'t think the internet will be used as a tool for opression, because, well,. everyone owns the internet, so if a government decides to use it as a tool of opression they might have a few problems with other countries. And also, because of the vastness of the internet and the fact there are so many users and so many HUGE sites (memebase, 4chan, etc...) ideas spread extremely quickly. It\'d sooner be used as a tool of revolution than opression.

That\'s what I hope, anyway.

[Ted]

You see, I don\'t think the internet will be used as a tool for oppression, because, well,. everyone owns the internet, so if a government decides to use it as a tool of opression they might have a few problems with other countries. And also, because of the vastness of the internet and the fact there are so many users and so many HUGE sites (memebase, 4chan, etc...) ideas spread extremely quickly. It\'d sooner be used as a tool of revolution than oppression.

That\'s what I hope, anyway.

You make incredibly accurate points, something as vast as the Internet can\'t be used directly for oppression, much like how any form of writing can\'t be directly used for oppression. However, as we can see in China, the UK and some areas in the Middle East the Web is being censored, the reason for which is irrelevant. This sets a bad precedent as it can lead to a slippery slope of government censorship. While in the UK it is very few web site that are blocked and those that are can easily be accessed via a proxy, in Iran, for example, and China we can see cases where DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) is being used, which literally allows the government, and those with similar interests to the government, to control and manipulate the flow of information that the public receive via the Internet.

This stops people being able to circumvent the \'firewalls\' and means that freedom of speech via the Internet is stifled. Most people, of course, don\'t care about these instances as it doesn\'t directly affect them, but the worrying matter is that in the UK, and more recently the US, politicians have been talking about adopting the same methods of \'regulation\' as Iran and China, claiming to be fighting copyright infringement. Whether these motivations are valid or not isn\'t important, the matter at hand is that censorship or \'regulation\' of a medium such as the Internet on the scale that is being discussed can lead to some very bad consequences if the people in charge of it choose so.

Matters such as these can\'t be hypothesised about though, we can only wait and see if people care enough about freedom of information, expression and themselves.

[Endeavour]

You see, I don\'t think the internet will be used as a tool for opression, because, well,. everyone owns the internet, so if a government decides to use it as a tool of opression they might have a few problems with other countries. And also, because of the vastness of the internet and the fact there are so many users and so many HUGE sites (memebase, 4chan, etc...) ideas spread extremely quickly. It\'d sooner be used as a tool of revolution than opression.

That\'s what I hope, anyway.

I feel that it would be ineffective as a means of revolution. The amount of new content on the internet at any given second is astounding. Any movement on the Internet is quickly forgotten.

[mincespy]

You make incredibly accurate points, something as vast as the Internet can\'t be used directly for oppression, much like how any form of writing can\'t be directly used for oppression. However, as we can see in China, the UK and some areas in the Middle East the Web is being censored, the reason for which is irrelevant. This sets a bad precedent as it can lead to a slippery slope of government censorship. While in the UK it is very few web site that are blocked and those that are can easily be accessed via a proxy, in Iran, for example, and China we can see cases where DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) is being used, which literally allows the government, and those with similar interests to the government, to control and manipulate the flow of information that the public receive via the Internet.

This stops people being able to circumvent the \'firewalls\' and means that freedom of speech via the Internet is stifled. Most people, of course, don\'t care about these instances as it doesn\'t directly affect them, but the worrying matter is that in the UK, and more recently the US, politicians have been talking about adopting the same methods of \'regulation\' as Iran and China, claiming to be fighting copyright infringement. Whether these motivations are valid or not isn\'t important, the matter at hand is that censorship or \'regulation\' of a medium such as the Internet on the scale that is being discussed can lead to some very bad consequences if the people in charge of it choose so.

Matters such as these can\'t be hypothesised about though, we can only wait and see if people care enough about freedom of information, expression and themselves.

What you talk about is PIPA and SOPA, and we all saw how that went. The public does have a voice, and on that occasion they chose to use it. Quite loudly.

And what I said about the countries that cansor the web not having good relations with other countries- well, that\'s just about true for Iran and China.

[LukeTim]

Wow! I just read that and it was awesome! Good job! YES!!! I am not alone in worrying about Humanity!! YES!!!!

Thanks. It\'s a subject which is very often on my mind.

[LukeTim]

The reason people don\'t get along and share is because each person would benefit more from the absense of the other person than from sharing his own resources.

That\'s just patently untrue. We are a social species and need each other just as much as we need our 'resources'.

In fact, Evolutionary Game Theorists have known for a long time that cooperation very often works out better for everyone than for the one selfish individual. Although unfortunately, the more cooperative a society is the more it leaves itself open to exploitation by any selfish 'strategies' which may arise.