Kurzgesagt has many videos on this topic. In one video, they point out we may actually be in the right place at the right time and could be one of the first civilizations. This seems egocentric at first, but if you consider how chaotic the early universe has been and how relatively calm things are in the last billion years, it does make sense.
Also, I learned recently that we don’t have as much time with Earth as I originally thought. We have a few hundred million years to figure out how to colonize other planets or live in space before Earth becomes radically different and potentially unlivable. I imagine most civilizations get snuffed out like this.
The past survival of livable conditions on Earth is no guarantee they will persist for very long in the future. There's observer selection bias to consider. For example, the O2 level in the atmosphere could drop below that needed to sustain higher life. As I understand it, there's been no feedback mechanism identified that stabilizes O2 at current levels, so the persistence of adequate oxygen over the last 500 million years could just be an unlikely accident.
In the absence of burial of photosynthesized materials atmospheric O2 will disappear in a few million years as reduced materials are exposed by geological processes and then oxidized. So, the time constant for O2 fluctuations is rather short.
If and when we spread into the galaxy, we may find many planets where livable conditions were snuffed out before intelligence could arise. In our own solar system, both Mars and Venus may have been more habitable than Earth earlier in the history of the solar system, but now are forever ruined.
> We have a few hundred million years to figure out how to colonize other planets or live in space before Earth becomes radically different and potentially unlivable.
Hmm... at the rate we are going, big parts of the Earth (a big slice around the Equator) may well become unlivable for human beings in a couple of decades.
I get the idea that it won't mean that the Earth will be unlivable for all organisms, but from what we know, a sufficiently advanced civilization only needs a couple hundred years to destroy itself.
And AI is likely a binary outcome. It’s either very good for us or not, and it won’t take a million years to figure out which. We were in caves not long ago.
Very little to no evidence that continuously increasing intelligence will maintain the status quo indefinitely, on a scale of at least thousands of years. The odds of us not either populating the galaxy or utterly owning ourselves are vanishingly small. What is the middle ground that you think is likely, and what things have to happen for that to be true? Why is it more likely than one of the extremes?
It's so interesting that our intuitions are vastly different on this. You and I both just can't believe that our default case isn't obvious.
I personally think "recency bias" is to blame for the "we'll muddle through" case. Life is great and the weather is fine, and there are no asteroids or globally impacting volcanoes, and we haven't had a civilisational collapse in a good while, and nukes didn't kill us, so the current state is pretty locked in indefinitely, despite massive technological change that we have zero chance of predicting the outcomes of.
That's an unstable equilibrium at best. We take over the galaxy or die trying.
Well we are pretty capable of predicting, right now, that our civilization is very likely to collapse in the next few decades because we can't seem to address the climate/biodiversity problems (which are consequences of the abundance of fossil fuels that will end soon).
Loss of keystone species[1]. Say, if bees went extinct, our agriculture would come crashing. We still rely on other organisms for a lot of important, sometimes poorly understood until too late[2] functions that sustain our civilization.
If bees went extinct, it would affect none of the essential crops we grow. Grains are wind pollinated, not insect pollinated.
More generally, I'm sure extinctions would wreak havoc on wild ecosystems. But we grow food by explicitly destroying wild ecosystems, replacing them with monocultures. Crops seem to grow just fine anyway.
I think it's a bit telling/alarming that you seem to be "okay" with monocultures and mass extinctions because we don't seem to be affected (at the moment).
This discussion is about the claim it causes civilization to collapse, not whether I'm okay with it. But hey, thanks for steering this in an ad hominem direction.
Which you steered there because you wanted to be nitpicky about the biodiversity issue, where what I originally said was that civilization is likely to collapse because we can't seem to address the climate, biodiversity and energy problems.
But hey, thanks for steering it in an ad hominem direction.
I'm not allowed to question a statement that loss of biodiversity could cause civilization to collapse in the next few decades? Really?
This is an objective statement about facts out in the world, and as such it is completely acceptable to ask how this position was reached. I questioned it because it looked like bullshit to me. You don't think bullshit should be called out?
The statement was that the climate change, biodiversity loss and energy crisis could cause civilization to collapse in the next few decades. You cherry-picked "biodiversity" there.
I was merely pointing out the irony that you complain about somebody steering the discussion somewhere while you actually did that in the first place.
To start, remember that in the 50s and 60s, the Gros Michel banana went extinct due to a blight that killed the entire strain because it was genetically homogeneous (there's the lack of biodiversity you asked for), and now what we see in supermarkets is the Cavendish.
Now, imagine if instead of a fruit, a blight did similar devastation to rice. But not just any of the 22 species of rice grown, no, let's get rid of one of the two that's predominantly consumed across the world.
One rice species fails and everyone relying on it as the staple carbohydrate/energy source in their diet is at risk of famine. Rice is what allowed Asia to become the most populated continent. Wheat can't compare. The diversity of grains humanity enjoyed in prehistory was already whittled down before this imaginary scenario started. Even if you rush in aid from around the world, even if you drop everything trying to figure out ways to successfully replace the lost rice strain with one of the others, people need to eat every day. There will be a starvation event, period.
There have been plenty of events that dropped population throughout history and it's always rebounded, like Black Death. COVID really messed up supply chains for a while. But losing an important strain of rice forever isn't a temporary setback like a disease. Civilization now is so complex that permanently losing a staple crop and population to starvation has a very real risk of undermining infrastructure to the point that there's not a critical mass of either physical or knowledge workers that can keep things running, especially if people are fighting over scraps, fleeing a breakdown of social order, or retreating into their family home hoping to weather the storm. Cascades are bitches.
And the world already has heightened tensions in other areas, Russia v Ukraine, Israel vs Hamas, Iran, China, India and Pakistan. Plus with other resources like oil and water already hotly contested, and the need to keep face against geopolitical rivals, could lead to all sorts of strange things. If China is particularly devastated by a loss of rice, would Xi be desperate enough to move into Siberia for more resources, or finally poke the Spratley Islands hard enough for them to ignite? If India's particularly plagued, maybe Pakistan will take advantage of that? The US will find itself drawn in. How long until someone is driven to use the football?
And, here's an extreme example: what if all biological matter on Earth was human? You think we could handle the "biodiversity loss" well?
The Kurzgesagt videos on these sorts of topics are interesting and entertaining, but they're often very speculative — they can rely heavily on unique but unproven theories, unprovable philosophical questions, or even just interesting sci-fi premises.
They're definitely informative and interesting within a given scope of discussion — it's good to ask interesting questions and explore what different answers might look like, because it helps us to push the boundaries of our mental models of the universe. But some of the videos — particularly the ones on Boltzmann brains or solutions to the Fermi paradox — are a lot closer to "here's an interesting thought experiment" than "here's something that's likely to be the case in our universe".
(Although they're usually very explicit when they do dive into this sort of speculative territory, and they also do a lot of videos which aren't in this vein at all — this is no slight on Kurzgesagt and the people who enjoy watching them!)
Yeah, I didn't want my comment to be a criticism of Kuzgesagt - like you say, they're usually very upfront when they do their more speculative videos. But I think sometimes people see the Kuzgesagt name and are like "oh, that's the informative science videos, this must be true", whereas a lot of the Fermi paradox stuff is closer to speculative fiction in nature than some of their other videos.
I've seen at least one "physicist reacts" video to this that tl;dw's to: "seems reasonable, would obviously require a lot of technological advancement and work"
Also, I learned recently that we don’t have as much time with Earth as I originally thought. We have a few hundred million years to figure out how to colonize other planets or live in space before Earth becomes radically different and potentially unlivable. I imagine most civilizations get snuffed out like this.