What The Movie Oppenheimer Taught Me About Technology Development...

[magnemoe]

1 minute ago, tater said:

Those death figures are deaths from all causes during war years, not combat deaths (also includes genocide/democide).

I messed up and forgot WW2, and subbed WW1 by mistake. WW1 (+Sino/Japam) was ~2.7%, WW2 was ~3%). Corrected it.

I know and I agree, I say the Spanish conquest might be an exception because it would be an effect any wide scale first contact even if peaceful.
But if your forces steal all the food in an area that should obviously count to the death toll. Also the general diseases. 

Think it was in Italy after it was united they send an brigade level unit marching to the south  and back around 1850 to show the flag. No combat outside dealing with some bandits. But diseases ravaged the brigade who had losses who would been insane in WW 2 among the allies. 

[kerbiloid]

I'm afraid that seriously speaking about 25 mln people of neolithic society, having no iron hoe, no iron shovel, no iron axe, no iron plough, no draft animals, no fertilizer (even cattle manure),  but using just hands and wooden digging sticks,
and even more, telling (wiki) about 1 hectare of crops feeding 20 humans at such level of agriculture (normally, currently, 1 ha / human to live, 1 ha / 10 humans to survive),
on the continent, mostly consisting of stony highlands and swamps, is a pure propaganda nonsense.

Hunters-gatherers ~ 0.1 human / km2.
Steppe herding nomads ~ 1 .. 2 human / km2. 
Developed farmers ~ 100 human / km2. 

Thus, primitive agrarians with wooden digging sticks and no cattle ~1 human / km2 or so (much better than h-g, but worse than nomads). 

North America = 25 mln km2
South America = 18 mln km2
Let the Central be South, then both Americas are ~ 20 mln km2.

NA, mostly h-g = 20 * 0.1 ~ 2 mln (max)
SA, 50:50 primitive agrarians and h-g =  10 * 1 + 10 * 0.1 ~= 11 mln (max)

But as most parts of Americas are deserts, swamps, mountains, and snowy "Alas!"ka with Canada, this should be at least twice less.

And as we can remember, the "South America" empires were in collapse before the Spaniards had arrived.
This also means that the part of hunters-gatherers was higher

So, NA <= 1 mln, SA <= 5 mln in the best case.
Actually, this is even very optimistic estimate, as, say, all native Siberian peoples in total (except Yakuts, who came much later) are ~200 k humans in total, the Siberian knanate was won by a ~1 k  army of Yermak with colleagues, the farther Siberian territory won by 1 .. 2 k army of Khabarov, Poyarkov, and others.
No reason to presume that South Americans, being on almost same technological level as the Siberian peoples, just in warmer climate, would be significantly more numerous.
Let's remember that the h-g population is highly volatile, as the natural food is highly unstable (~50% of cattle mortality every 7 years in a steppe, for example). So, the population matches the lower bound.

So, 500 k of the N.Am. natives, and 1-2 mln of the S.Am. natives is a realistic number.

***

Any empire is based on violence. The emperor has an armed force which can devastate any rioting region. Also, combat and civil weapons are different.
What a force can it be, when there is no way to concentrate resources gathered from peasants working with wooden sticks, with no animals and carriages?
What's the difference between two men protected with feather coats and armed with wooden clubs? What can provide superiority of 100 Emperors's men above a thousand of same rioting men?
No mounts, no armor, no knight weapon.

So, a hundred of the Spaniards in steel armor and with steel swords are a pack of terminators, being compared to any local Amerindian army (because the natives wouldn't be able to concentrate more than several hundreds per battle), and the empires are just armchair phantoms.

***

Also, why should the Indians be mysteriously afraid of horses? A horse is just a big llama and much smaller than a bison.

Edited August 3, 2023 by kerbiloid

[tater]

Yeah, non-state societies have huge % chances of death to violence in a lifetime, grossly higher than people living in nation states.

In addition, the death of people in the Americas from introduced disease would have happened had the Europeans been 100% peaceful.  In fact, it might have happened even faster, because people that interact in a friendly way spend more time in proximity with each other. I'd not count that.

[SunlitZelkova]

It's funny. If you go through my post history, you will find that several months ago I was arguing the exact opposite of my present belief: that humans are unthinking animals, consciousness is an illusion, and humans are doomed to destroy themselves just as any other overpopulating species is and go extinct by 3000.

Oh well. I guess we are going to do this until the mods shut us down. Let's go!

17 hours ago, tater said:

They have not enabled WW3, they prevented WW3—that's all I argued, not that they had prevented all wars. See chart. Battle deaths are low. No "expansionist regimes" ever existing again is fantasy. One would expect them at the same rate they always had throughout history.

I understand it. What I am saying is that no WWIII =/= peace. Wars happen elsewhere. And nuclear weapons have enabled wars, and therefore do not maintain "peace" (TM).

Peace (TM) is the supposed reason why scientists would still propose nukes in a peaceful world. I argue later in the post this is not the case at all, and therefore scientists would not propose nukes. Therefore nukes wouldn't be built, and nukes are not inevitable.

17 hours ago, tater said:

Populations are violent. People are violent. Some neighborhoods are violent, some peaceful.

Individuals are violent. Not "populations".

17 hours ago, tater said:

When, when did people "adopt peace?" I have asked this several times, no answer (unless it's below, going point by point, sorry). When was this golden age when people were not warlike? PEOPLE.

If you answer me, resolving my conundrum I mentioned below-

On 8/2/2023 at 6:32 PM, SunlitZelkova said:

I don't understand your fixation on a past era of peace being necessary for a present one. Humans are innovating like crazy today, yet it took hundreds of years before- there was no prior age of innovation measured in years or decades necessary for our current time to be possible.

Then I can answer you, but I'm not going to answer if you are just creating this arbitrary requirement that a social phenomena has to have happened in the past to be possible in the present.

Explain to me why peace is not possible now (whether "now" be 1918 or 2023) unless it has happened before.

As I will say at the end of the post, things do not need a "prelude" to be possible in the present.

17 hours ago, tater said:

That we all know chemical weapons have been used after WW1 on multiple occasions, it's well documented. Since we're talking WW2, The Japanese used them in China. Iraq used them in their war with Iran. So a rule against use doesn't mean anything—and to use them, they had to first have a program and make them. So I am "insinuating" that rules don't matter. There are rules against murder everywhere, doesn't stop murder.

Are you suggesting rules are worthless and thus not worth creating?

That is, society would see no change whatsoever if murder was legal? Or if chemical weapons were legal?

Rules do matter. Even if someone breaks them, it doesn't make it ok for everyone else to do it.

In the counterfactual with peace, and when fission is discovered there is a treaty to prevent the weaponization of it, rather than a violation causing everyone to build nuclear weapons, the nuclear builder would just be invaded and their nuclear project stopped before bombs could be assembled***. Thus still no nuclear weapons.

This is literally what would be happening in the world with both nukes and chemical weapons if it wasn't for geopolitics getting in the way. Nations building chemical weapons isn't going to make them legal again, and nations building nuclear weapons is totally preventable even if the concept of an atom bomb is widely known.

I'll note this is the basis of the nuclear ban and nuclear disarmament proposals... which in my opinion are very logical and very feasible once you get everyone together (i.e. even if everyone disarms, there is no threat of someone in the future creating bombs again and then suddenly having sway over the world).

***As to why this didn't happen in our world, nobody wanted war period- they wanted peace. See below for more detail.

17 hours ago, tater said:

Mutually assured destruction is the prevention WRT large powers, assuming both have them. But yes, it only applies to the one with the weapons if no one else has them. That is a very powerful incentive for any state with expansionist goals to be the first, as they could then do as they wish with no concerns (assuming they have a delivery system as well).

My oh so very plausible counterfactual posits a world without expansionist regimes. No expansionist regimes = no nuclear weapons. Therefore they were not inevitable. See below for further details on this.

17 hours ago, tater said:

The most peaceful time in history (battle deaths, and democide) is NOW.

The US has literally been at war near continuously since 1950, ironically the year after the USSR detonated its first atomic bomb. The only years in which the US was not involved in a conflict somewhere were 1976-1979, and 1985.

17 hours ago, tater said:

With nuclear weapons. It's not impossible that it's because of nuclear weapons. Minus nukes there would be no reason for great powers not to fight as they often do.

Except... ya know... not wanting war?

If the only reason the great powers haven't gone to war was because of nuclear weapons, why didn't the USSR invade Western Europe in 1945 when it possessed a conventional advantage, and its economy was geared for supporting a large scale war? And the US nuclear arsenal was dinky and consisted of only small bombs anyways? (nothing capable of obliterating mass tank formations as theorized, just as a tactical nuclear strike was deemed unfeasible in Korea)

Why didn't the US bomb Chinese positions in Manchuria in 1950, when the Soviet Union only had 3 atomic bombs- and dinky 15 kiloton ones at that?

Because they desired peace for themselves.

But Stalin wouldn't have approved Kim Il-Sung's invasion if he knew there was a high chance of the Americans attacking the USSR and China (which there would have been without Soviet nuclear weapons) and North Vietnam wouldn't have launched its war of reunification if it knew there was a high chance of an American invasion (which there would have been without Soviet nuclear weapons***).

Nuclear weapons don't prevent great powers from going to war. Unless we are exploring a counterfactual where Germany and Japan won WWII, none of the great powers want global war today. They are deterred, or would be deterred, by that alone.

What nuclear weapons have done is enable wars. War is feasible for great powers, because their enemies automatically can't get involved because of the fear of nuclear weapons.

***In fact I'd say the reasoning that you propose, where one nation would wish to become the sole nuclear power, would not prevent peace, it would create demand for a war to destroy the other great powers before they could build their own nuclear weapons. That isn't "maintaining peace", it enables war! Therefore "maintaining peace" is not a good reason that a scientist would adopt for wanting to build nuclear weapons in a peaceful world. Going back to the topic of the thread, that means I have yet to see a good reason why nuclear weapons would even be proposed in a peaceful world, and therefore nuclear weapons are not inevitable.

17 hours ago, tater said:

"Scientists." All it takes is a few who want to if paid by a state that want to pay them.

Ok, but even if a scientist wants to, in the absence of international tensions, no government is going to spend precious money on that.

Scientists don't just automatically build what they want to. If that was the case, Project Orion would have taken us to Mars by now.

17 hours ago, tater said:

Also, again, when was this magical period that had no international tensions?

In that sentence I was referring to my oh so very plausible world where conflicts were resolved and peace reigned after WWI 

17 hours ago, tater said:

What's this "free pass" business? Killing people is wrong—people still kill each other. What's your point? I get it, you'd prefer a utopia where people don't kill each other, ever. Sounds nice. Won't ever happen. The present day reality I live in is just "reality."

We are not talking about people killing each other in general, we are talking about war. War can be prevented. It is not inevitable. War can be eliminated.

17 hours ago, tater said:

I don't think it's feasible at all. If everyone were to become peaceful except for a small handful of warlike people, the warlike people take over in whatever region, and are now a larger group of people who are warlike—even if forced to be against their will (at first). You'd  have to end all warlike people somehow, which will literally never happen.

You don't need to end all warlike people. You educate, make warlike views taboo, and even the craftiest of sociopaths will never get elected or come to power: thus no war.

Every individual is capable of making good decisions. In the Vietnam War, the government, a group of warlike people, tried to get American society warlike too, but it didn't work (at least not on a majority). This is possible everywhere.

17 hours ago, tater said:

Humans fight battles. We have for as long as we've had civilization. Claiming nukes have enabled the current amazingly low battle deaths is only demonstrated by considering the counterfactual of no nukes. I would argue we would have instead followed the trend from WW1 to WW2, with WW3 likely killing even more—with conventional arms alone. Given the spacing of WW1/2, a WW3 leaves room for World Wars 4 and 5. (WW3 would have been WW1 part 3, after all. Assuming 1 superpower is not completely eliminated, WW4+ follows.

Just as WWII was not inevitable, WWIII is not inevitable without nuclear weapons either. It certainly wouldn't be in the 1950s (as I mentioned earlier in this post, no one wanted conventional war as a matter of course), and I imagine without nuclear weapons, the progressive attitudes of the 60s- reciprocated in the USSR in the 1980s- would have led to a general acceptance that war is bad, except without the sickening illusion that we need nuclear weapons to keep that peace.

It doesn't prevent all wars- some were already precipitated by colonization/de-colonization, but in both the counterfactuals without WWII and without nuclear weapons in a post-WWII world, numerous wars are prevented, while the theoretical "Big War" remains nothing more than a thought exercise as well.

During the Cold War we didn't go "welp, I wish I could attack the other guy but those nukes are in the way!" Both the USSR and US actively wished to avoid war with each other, nukes were a means to an end, not the cause.

In fact I would only say it was because each side had this desire for peace that they built nuclear weapons. This desire for peace would exist with or without nuclear weapons, and therefore WWIII was not inevitable, and if anything it was actually highly unlikely (even in a world without nuclear weapons).

17 hours ago, tater said:

So in the real world—where nations had fought wars within the lifetimes of their current leadership when fission was discovered—threats of war were real literally everywhere on Earth. As a result, any sane leader would assume that some other state must be working on this obvious technology.

Even in my counterfactual with no WWII, certain wars were still going to happen because of colonization. But those wars aren't going to drive nuclear development.

France isn't going to start building nuclear weapons just because the Vietnamese are gearing up for revolution...

So here we encounter another theme: it takes a great power conflict to generate a fear of nuclear weapons, not the generic threat of war alone.

17 hours ago, tater said:

Any counterfactual has to IMHO result in total world peace at least a generation before the leadership in place when fission is discovered. No one living in power who has ever known war. Even if we stipulate 1938 as fission year (seems like minus wars science might have progressed faster, course maybe science got more $$$ because of warlike states flexing for power), then we need to imagine no wars at all after maybe the mid-1800s. Seems... unlikely.

As I said above, the threat of war =/= cause for nuclear development. At the very least, militaristic great power competition is. This is eliminated in my counterfactual where WWII does not occur, therefore there will be no nuclear weapons.

I'd argue peace is even more likely with wars having occurred in recent memory. Someone who knows violence is more likely to prevent it, versus someone who has no knowledge of it at all.

I might be going out on a tangent here but:

It has been theorized the reason the Japanese Army lacked a modern mechanized army was because of their lack of participation in WWI. I'll bet if Japan had gone through grueling trench warfare lasting four years and lost millions of men on a similar scale to Britain or France, their leaders would have been more reluctant to go to war in 1941. Part of the reason they did so then was because they optimistically believed they could start a short, fast conflict similar to the Russo-Japanese War with the Western powers. But if they had had a hand in a real great power war 27 years earlier, they might be more skeptical of the feasibility of doing so. They might not have even launched the second invasion of China in 1937.

Britain and France more or less had this mentality, which is why they appeased Germany. Even the USSR avoided open warfare until it was absolutely necessary. Roosevelt obviously desired peace and kept the negotiations going up until the Attack on Pearl Harbor.

Going back to a word you mentioned earlier, the Japanese government was... stupid. And in Germany and Italy, sociopaths came to power. But their rise was not inevitable. It depended on people, people who had a choice to make better decisions. The Japanese government also had the ability to make better decisions, as did people in the army.

The economic collapse in Germany did not make people elect you know who. The ideology of the Meiji Restoration did not make Japan attack. People in the present (of 1933 and 1941) did these things.

The possibility for them to have made a better decision exists. They could have made it.

As I said earlier, they also could have not made it, as they did in reality. I am not saying nuclear weapons were impossible, just that they were not inevitable.

If I step outside and decide to cut down my neighbor's precious tree, do you think that is inevitable because of some underlying historical reason, or did I have a choice not to?

Prisons exist because people have choices, and sometimes they make bad ones. If things were inevitable, we wouldn't have prisons, we would have mass therapy centers. Because it wouldn't be the prisoners fault for their crime, it would be out of their control.

But things are in our control.

15 hours ago, Terwin said:

Citation needed.

Outside of the family unit, which has a biological drive to care for one's offspring, I do not see it.  Possibly because of of the biological drive to compete for resources to perpetuate your genes.

We are different from the other animals. We are conscious. We have the ability to reason, to make good decisions.

I'm sorry but I can't prove humanity is good with facts and statistics anymore than I can prove murder is bad with facts and statistics. It is solely a matter of faith, just as there is no logic to the prevention of murder.

If I was being purely robotic I would go back to my aforementioned previous views that humanity is not different from any other animal, that consciousness is an illusion, our destruction is inevitable. Statistics will prove that.

But I am not a robot. I am not preprogrammed, like a guinea pig or cat. I can reason and make decisions for myself about how I view the world, rather than surrendering my mind to the false reality of hard observation.

I have faith in people. I see the bright side of things, and I believe the bright side will prevail and eliminate the dark side one day.

It isn't scientific, it is ethical, philosophical, and maybe even religious*** (although I won't go into that side because of forum rules).

Reality does not explain everything. Our thoughts our beyond reality- they don't physically exist- and look what they have done for the world. They put a man on the Moon. Unthinking animals don't do that. Cold, instinctual creatures don't do that.

Beings capable of taking their biological love for fellow tribespeople, mates, and offspring and expanding it to cover the entire Earth are who do that. And that's what we are. It's a work in progress, but one day it will be complete.

The dark side will disappear.

***Note for mods: while I believe belief in the good nature of humanity is to some extent an idea religious in nature, it is also largely secular, and therefore it doesn't violate human rules. Religion is not something required for it, so this discussion can continue without violating forum rules. It is purely an ethics and philosophy discussion.

15 hours ago, Terwin said:

Oh, so that is how you intend to define world peace.

Sure, we have never had Interplanetary conflict, so we have always had world peace.

Brother killing brother and nation killing nation is just internal conflict after all.

Uh... we have interplanetary peace, that's for sure. Largely because no one lives on any of the other planets. The solar system isn't the world though.

Civil wars, which are obviously inside nations, would count as something that violate world peace. But...

15 hours ago, Terwin said:

Lynchings, riots, armed voter suppression, and repeated deployment of the national guard

...don't. That's not war.

We are using the definition of world peace as "no war". Murders and riots and hate crimes are still occurring in the hypotheticals we discuss. Those will take way longer to eliminate and it won't be achieved in one generation, as world peace might be.

We are talking about reasons nuclear weapons were built, and why they might not have been built. Therefore the context revolves around war- the things nukes are used for- not literally every single human conflict. That has nothing to do with nuclear weapons.

15 hours ago, Terwin said:

Innovation builds on innovation.  If you look closely, there is an exponential curve starting with the development of agriculture.  Sure there are bumps(wars) and dips(fall of roman empire, dark ages, etc) but the curve is there.

I see no issue with a trend that has been in place for thousands of years continuing apace, but I also do not see something that has not had any prelude in thousands of years coming about.

(Even rockets at least have an astronaut (myth?) from 4000 years ago, search on Chinese rocket chair)

If anything, the prelude tater is looking for is warring groups coming together to form a nation and then staying that way.

If war can be eliminated among the divided Japanese shogunates, it can be eliminated among the divided nations of the world.

Still, I don't believe a prelude is necessary. If a prelude is necessary why did the Chinese rocket chair come into existence? There was no prelude.

Edited August 4, 2023 by SunlitZelkova

[tater]

5 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

I understand it. What I am saying is that no WWIII =/= peace. Wars happen elsewhere. And nuclear weapons have enabled wars, and therefore do not maintain "peace" (TM).

Peace (TM) is the supposed reason why scientists would still propose nukes in a peaceful world. I argue later in the post this is not the case at all, and therefore scientists would not propose nukes. Therefore nukes wouldn't be built, and nukes are not inevitable.

I've never argued that peace equals the lack of ww3. I argued that conventional ww3 would have been so profoundly worse than the tiny wars we have had since the 40s as to dwarf them—indeed to dwarf ww2 itself.

As soon as fission is out there—particularly the peaceful application for power production—it doesn't take "scientists" to make bombs. Sure, they won't be "good" bombs, but gun type fission weapons are trivial, it's only the fissile material that presents a challenge—which is more industrial than scientific.

5 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Individuals are violent. Not "populations".

Populations certainly vary in violence a great deal.

5 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Explain to me why peace is not possible now (whether "now" be 1918 or 2023) unless it has happened before.

I'm saying that humans are not inherently peaceful or we would have demonstrated it.

Non-state societies are grossly more violent than state societies. Lifetime change of death from human violence is grossly better even during the 1940s than it was thousands of years ago (or even during the 40s for tribal societies). The scale of the violence was smaller, but a handful dead out of a small tribe is a higher % of the pop than, say hundreds of thousands dead in the US in WW2 vs 100s of millions in the nation.

5 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

That is, society would see no change whatsoever if murder was legal? Or if chemical weapons were legal?

Rules/laws absolutely matter. All laws are enforced at gunpoint, however. Every single one. Rules against chem/bio are enforced by threat of violence by great powers—and we have seen them ignored, too. For small countries, we'd what, bomb them conventionally so badly that their society is wrecked? How many deaths as a result? Surely it must be enough to deter others. In the case of Japan in WW2, is the solution defeating them at a huge cost of lives, then putting a couple handfuls of leaders to death after a trial? Seems to send the message that if you use the weapons, make sure you win the war.

In the case of nukes, you could have rules if they did not exist, "No one build atomic weapons or we will bomb you or invade you!" The answer in that case of course is, "If we get nukes, then you CAN'T bomb or invade us, or we wipe you out!"

5 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

My oh so very plausible counterfactual posits a world without expansionist regimes. No expansionist regimes = no nuclear weapons. Therefore they were not inevitable. See below for further details on this.

There's no such thing as "no expansionist regimes." They have always existed.

5 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Just as WWII was not inevitable, WWIII is not inevitable without nuclear weapons either. It certainly wouldn't be in the 1950s (as I mentioned earlier in this post, no one wanted conventional war as a matter of course), and I imagine without nuclear weapons, the progressive attitudes of the 60s- reciprocated in the USSR in the 1980s- would have led to a general acceptance that war is bad, except without the sickening illusion that we need nuclear weapons to keep that peace.

Korea.

Vietnam.

Both conflicts could have increased, but were held small because of the US/USSR and fear of escalation.

5 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

In fact I would only say it was because each side had this desire for peace that they built nuclear weapons. This desire for peace would exist with or without nuclear weapons, and therefore WWIII was not inevitable, and if anything it was actually highly unlikely (even in a world without nuclear weapons).

There were as many unresolved issues after WW2 as WW1 I think.

5 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

So here we encounter another theme: it takes a great power conflict to generate a fear of nuclear weapons, not the generic threat of war alone.

Except that in a world without nukes, anyone who possesses them becomes a great power, instantly.

Longing for the days 1000 years ago when your people were hegemons? Make some nukes, poof, you are once again kings!

5 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Prisons exist because people have choices, and sometimes they make bad ones. If things were inevitable, we wouldn't have prisons, we would have mass therapy centers. Because it wouldn't be the prisoners fault for their crime, it would be out of their control.

This is drifting into notions of free will, but many things are inevitable. I'd argue prison is not to change people, it's to cage up the criminals, since a small group of people do most of the crime (as repeat criminals). Therapy won't fix them.

5 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

We are using the definition of world peace as "no war". Murders and riots and hate crimes are still occurring in the hypotheticals we discuss. Those will take way longer to eliminate and it won't be achieved in one generation, as world peace might be.

Those same violent people can control whole societies (and have).

6 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

If war can be eliminated among the divided Japanese shogunates, it can be eliminated among the divided nations of the world.

All that needs to exist to create a strong incentive to develop a nuke is the idea that one of the other 150+ nations on earth (or a few non-state movements) might be working on one.

Any scenario needs to be such that no country ever thinks that it's even plausible than any other country is working the issue.

[kerbiloid]

18 minutes ago, tater said:

might be working on one.

will sooner or later develop one occasionally.

[Terwin]

7 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

As to why this didn't happen in our world, nobody wanted war period- they wanted peace.

Lots of people wanted war, even lots of people in power wanted war.  They may not have admitted it as such, but they clearly did.  Lots of powerful people make lots of money off of weapons, and war is a great way to encourage large weapons purchases.  As such, a world without war would necessitate a world without greed.  If it was a world without greed, I do not see how you could even classify them as humans any more.  

 

7 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

My oh so very plausible counterfactual posits a world without expansionist regimes. No expansionist regimes = no nuclear weapons. Therefore they were not inevitable. See below for further details on this.

Without a propensity to expand, the proto-humans stay in a small community and get wiped out by a single adverse event.  As such, a propensity to expand is needed for humanity to even come into existence, so positing a world without the human desire to expand necessarily means a world without humans at all. 

Don't forget hat the proto-Neanderthals migrated up north to experience differential evolution so that when re-combined with the expanding proto-homo sapiens we got the super-intelligent cross-breeds(by comparison to their parents) that eventually became modern humans.  So even if proto-humans never had a species ending event, they would still be small animalistic tribes without engaging in both migration and expansion.

 

7 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

I'm sorry but I can't prove humanity is good with facts and statistics anymore than I can prove murder is bad with facts and statistics. It is solely a matter of faith, just as there is no logic to the prevention of murder.

Sure there is logic to the prevention of murder.  Murder harms the community by reducing the available manpower as well as usually engendering a strong emotional reaction in those who know the murdered and thus encouraging more wastage of community resources.  There is more to it than that, but that is sufficient.  (if you look at them, every one of the 10 commandments is geared towards creating and perpetuating a strong and growing community, I consider that to be one of the reasons that the Judeo-Christian value systems have been so successful)

 

7 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

But I am not a robot. I am not preprogrammed, like a guinea pig or cat. I can reason and make decisions for myself about how I view the world, rather than surrendering my mind to the false reality of hard observation.

Animals are capable of active cognition, but they generally rely on previous analysis and generalization(Oh, an apple, I eat those, oh, a predator, I run from those, etc).  Humans are capable of prolonged active cognition(and also meta-cognition, which I think is unique to humans), but we are also capable of falling back on trained reflex as well(if you ever drove somewhere and after getting there you cannot remember the drive, then you were on 'autopilot', also called inattention blindness and is similar to how animals behave most of the time).

I hope 'false reality of hard observation' is more akin to evaluating the news with skepticism and an eye to likely causes of bias(aka, do these allegations against $POLITCAL_FIGURE make sense, or are they more likely to be hyperbole/propaganda?), as opposed to flat out refusal of demonstrated fact(aka 'the earth is flat' and 'the moon landings were faked').  Although I will admit that the barrier between the two got a lot fuzzier post-Snowden.

 

[Vanamonde]

The thread has again wandered into current politics, which we have had to rule off-limits on this forum due to the inevitable arguments. Please move on to other discussions.