Time for a new thread. This grows out of my "Politicians are Birds" theme, but is less of a joke.
Human ideals must have limits. Human hopes must not.
"Hope" is like dreaming, loving, caring....... all the "good" that makes us somehow "happy" for a moment. We need hope, and nobody should just crush it.
Ideals are a lot like our "hopes" but when we imagine some "ideal" we get "Ideological", and that is a problem. Ideologies always go wrong somehow, when we push them too far. The problem here is that we are trying to make a realistic or practical thing out of our hopes.
Politicians may be more like the buzzards that feed off of our hopes and campaign for various ideological values. If eyes are the windows of the human soul, politicians are like crows or buzzards. They feed on us, and start with picking out our eyes.
Political ideologies are worse than politicians because they intellectually blind us to reality. We focus on the ideas not the facts.
Alright. We do have a fundamentally limited Earth, but we also have Space, with thousands of planets out there, and, maybe, "God" if not some benevolent advanced ancestral world where there are still people living billions of years after spawning colonies across the Universe, maybe, say with some older ones in the Pleiades. Who knows. Maybe we are the leading edge in "human" progress. Kinda doubt that, really. I think Darwinian science, the science of genetics and Life, requires an earlier start date than what is possible on this Earth, only about 1 billion years ago, at the end of the Pre-Cambrian Age. Oh wait, isn't that only 500 million years in geologic time. Life didn't exist then here except maybe in volcanic fumaroles with sulfur based archeobacteria.
Statistically, don't we need more time in our evolutionary scale than this planet provides?
Next, as to our "End", we are indeed at a depletion point for some resources, but we also have technological knowledge, and we can turn to other resources and do OK for a while. Maybe we can colonize the Moon or Mars, and mine some Asteroids for the copper we need to go green, what the hell.
Facts are stubborn things. We have coal enough to last thousands of years, Uranium enough to do for a hundred. We can learn to burn clean, recover CO2 and use it in advanced '"green" agriculture, say in greenhouses instead of open fields, where we can double or quadruple growth rates and sustain world populations like 20 or30 Billion humans.
We can build greenhouses with stuff that's practically unlimited like clay and glass made stronger like our windshields. Very thin silicon deposited from gas form on plastic, multilayered, will last a hundred years and be nearly as light as plastic sheet.
I think the Malthusian problem can be pushed back a few hundred years, and I think we can live a lot better in the meantime. And go to the Stars.
Human ideals must have limits. Human hopes must not.
"Hope" is like dreaming, loving, caring....... all the "good" that makes us somehow "happy" for a moment. We need hope, and nobody should just crush it.
Ideals are a lot like our "hopes" but when we imagine some "ideal" we get "Ideological", and that is a problem. Ideologies always go wrong somehow, when we push them too far. The problem here is that we are trying to make a realistic or practical thing out of our hopes.
Politicians may be more like the buzzards that feed off of our hopes and campaign for various ideological values. If eyes are the windows of the human soul, politicians are like crows or buzzards. They feed on us, and start with picking out our eyes.
Political ideologies are worse than politicians because they intellectually blind us to reality. We focus on the ideas not the facts.
Alright. We do have a fundamentally limited Earth, but we also have Space, with thousands of planets out there, and, maybe, "God" if not some benevolent advanced ancestral world where there are still people living billions of years after spawning colonies across the Universe, maybe, say with some older ones in the Pleiades. Who knows. Maybe we are the leading edge in "human" progress. Kinda doubt that, really. I think Darwinian science, the science of genetics and Life, requires an earlier start date than what is possible on this Earth, only about 1 billion years ago, at the end of the Pre-Cambrian Age. Oh wait, isn't that only 500 million years in geologic time. Life didn't exist then here except maybe in volcanic fumaroles with sulfur based archeobacteria.
Statistically, don't we need more time in our evolutionary scale than this planet provides?
Next, as to our "End", we are indeed at a depletion point for some resources, but we also have technological knowledge, and we can turn to other resources and do OK for a while. Maybe we can colonize the Moon or Mars, and mine some Asteroids for the copper we need to go green, what the hell.
Facts are stubborn things. We have coal enough to last thousands of years, Uranium enough to do for a hundred. We can learn to burn clean, recover CO2 and use it in advanced '"green" agriculture, say in greenhouses instead of open fields, where we can double or quadruple growth rates and sustain world populations like 20 or30 Billion humans.
We can build greenhouses with stuff that's practically unlimited like clay and glass made stronger like our windshields. Very thin silicon deposited from gas form on plastic, multilayered, will last a hundred years and be nearly as light as plastic sheet.
I think the Malthusian problem can be pushed back a few hundred years, and I think we can live a lot better in the meantime. And go to the Stars.
Last edited: