Human Extinction Scenarios

our favorite or most likely to happen?

cause #2 is pretty easy innit

should have added Google Goggles to the list

Take-over by a transcending upload

wtf does this even mean

runaway greenhouse or disease seem most likely i think?

oh you know, pick whatever you want! i just thought it would be fun to chat about HUMAN EXTINCTION SCENARIOS

Take-over by a transcending upload

wtf does this even mean

6.1 Take-over by a transcending upload

Suppose uploads come before human-level artificial intelligence. An upload is a mind that has been transferred from a biological brain to a computer that emulates the computational processes that took place in the original biological neural network [19,33,53,54]. A successful uploading process would preserve the original mind’s memories, skills, values, and consciousness. Uploading a mind will make it much easier to enhance its intelligence, by running it faster, adding additional computational resources, or streamlining its architecture. One could imagine that enhancing an upload beyond a certain point will result in a positive feedback loop, where the enhanced upload is able to figure out ways of making itself even smarter; and the smarter successor version is in turn even better at designing an improved version of itself, and so on. If this runaway process is sudden, it could result in one upload reaching superhuman levels of intelligence while everybody else remains at a roughly human level. Such enormous intellectual superiority may well give it correspondingly great power. It could rapidly invent new technologies or perfect nanotechnological designs, for example. If the transcending upload is bent on preventing others from getting the opportunity to upload, it might do so.

The posthuman world may then be a reflection of one particular egoistical upload’s preferences (which in a worst case scenario would be worse than worthless). Such a world may well be a realization of only a tiny part of what would have been possible and desirable. This end is a shriek.

I'm in a real nuclear holocaust mode these days, so it's an easy choice.

Resource depletion

"we're living in a simulation and it gets shut down"

*bong noises*

you would think it would want at least one other upload to be its upload friend

I'm voting for nuclear holocaust since abject terror of it informed so much of my childhood. Although I think our actual extinction will be from an asteroid or comet or some other geological event.

this end is a shriek!

Suppose uploads come before human-level artificial intelligence. An upload is a mind that has been transferred from a biological brain to a computer that emulates the computational processes that took place in the original biological neural network

lol this is some silly-ass Kurzweil shit right

4.8 Physics disasters
The Manhattan Project bomb-builders’ concern about an A-bomb-derived atmospheric conflagration has contemporary analogues.

There have been speculations that future high-energy particle accelerator experiments may cause a breakdown of a metastable vacuum state that our part of the cosmos might be in, converting it into a “true” vacuum of lower energy density [45]. This would result in an expanding bubble of total destruction that would sweep through the galaxy and beyond at the speed of light, tearing all matter apart as it proceeds.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT

where is "man-made disease"?

it's sad that there's so much wildly implausible bullshit on this list, next to, you know, actual likely/possible things like global warming and nuclear annihilation.

dan i believe that's the "genetically engineered biological agent" option

xxp coursing its way through yer tender vittles

like it's kind of irritating to see "things that are already happening" lumped in with "things that might theoretically possibly happen but the chances are one in a jillion"

it's sad that there's so much wildly implausible bullshit on this list, next to, you know, actual likely/possible things like global warming and nuclear annihilation.

― You big bully, why are you hitting that little bully? (Shakey Mo Collier)

yeah, i had a similar thought, but part of it based on his definition of risk:

For there to be a risk, given the knowledge and understanding available, it suffices that there is some subjective probability of an adverse outcome, even if it later turns out that objectively there was no chance of something bad happening. If we don’t know whether something is objectively risky or not, then it is risky in the subjective sense. The subjective sense is of course what we must base our decisions on.[2] At any given time we must use our best current subjective estimate of what the objective risk factors are.[3]

broad enough to include a lot of wacked out stuff

wacked out AWESOME stuff!

we've got 20 sweet tv movies ready to roll right here, let's greenlight it

where is "a most heinous fart"

dan i believe that's the "genetically engineered biological agent" option

lol I completely scrolled past that three times and didn't notice

Risks in this sixth category (ZS: existential risks) are a recent phenomenon. This is part of the reason why it is useful to distinguish them from other risks. We have not evolved mechanisms, either biologically or culturally, for managing such risks.

With the exception of a species-destroying comet or asteroid impact (an extremely rare occurrence), there were probably no significant existential risks in human history until the mid-twentieth century, and certainly none that it was within our power to do something about.

in general, it's these two thoughts that concern me - we've developed the potential to destroy ourselves but not to systematically protect ourselves, and the whole problem is completely new to humans (Dec. 31st, 23:59:59 on Carl Sagan's Cosmic Calendar)

the fate of the universe

are we talking literal extinction as in not one human left, because i dont think many of these would cut the mustard

"Killed by an extraterrestrial civilization" has to be the best one no matter the criteria

are we talking literal extinction as in not one human left, because i dont think many of these would cut the mustard

they're divided up into four categories: Bangs, Crunches, Shrieks and Whimpers:

Bangs – Earth-originating intelligent life goes extinct in relatively sudden disaster resulting from either an accident or a deliberate act of destruction.

Crunches – The potential of humankind to develop into posthumanity[7] is permanently thwarted although human life continues in some form.

Shrieks – Some form of posthumanity is attained but it is an extremely narrow band of what is possible and desirable.

Whimpers – A posthuman civilization arises but evolves in a direction that leads gradually but irrevocably to either the complete disappearance of the things we value or to a state where those things are realized to only a minuscule degree of what could have been achieved.

realistically it seems like it will be "Something unforeseen"

Come on, they couldn't include 'Biblical End Of Days' even for LOLs? I guess it has to be shoehorned into 'flawed superintelligence'...

I voted nanobots, deliberate.

Runaway global warming
Resource depletion or ecological destruction
Genetically engineered biological agent

These are the only ones I take seriously.

(although I'm fairly pro-genetic engineering. it could save humanity too, applied properly).

"We’re living in a simulation and it gets shut down" is basically 'YOU KEPT KILLING EACH OTHER AND BEING MEAN AND BUYING RIDICULOUS CARS AND NOW GOD IS PISSED AT YOU AND DOESN'T WANT TO PLAY ANYMORE'

or, god is bored with you. there's a better simulation. i.e., you used to be in civ IV. but now there's civ V.

we've developed the potential to destroy ourselves but not to systematically protect ourselves, and the whole problem is completely new to humans

now I know what I'm going to be tossing and turning over as I periodically wake myself up tonight
last night I kept waking myself up with the need to buy a long-reach stapler so at least our self-induced vulnerability is comparatively interesting

children are innocent
a teenager's fucked up in the head
adults are even more fucked up
and elderlies are like children

will there be another race
to come along and take over for us?
maybe martians could do
better than we've done
we'll make great pets!

my friend says we're like the dinosaurs
only we are doing ourselves in
much faster than they
ever did
we'll make great pets!

think if you were in Pirates! you'd never get to settle down

Like, is total nuclear annihilation even still on the table, other than in our 1980s memories?

Shrieks – Some form of posthumanity is attained but it is an extremely narrow band of what is possible and desirable.

Welcome to your new transhuman digitally uploaded computationally unlimited immortal existence - © Microsoft!

Like, is total nuclear annihilation even still on the table, other than in our 1980s memories?

total annihilation is unlikely absent huge stockpiles deployed by national actors. even a small-scale nuclear exchange (between, say, Israel and Iran, or Pakistan and India, or North and South Korea) would severely fuck things up. but humanity would soldier on.

are we talking literal extinction as in not one human left, because i dont think many of these would cut the mustard

― these pretzels are makeing me horney (Hungry4Ass), Thursday, April 5, 2012 5:17 PM (39 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they're divided up into four categories: Bangs, Crunches, Shrieks and Whimpers:

Bangs – Earth-originating intelligent life goes extinct in relatively sudden disaster resulting from either an accident or a deliberate act of destruction.
Crunches – The potential of humankind to develop into posthumanity[7] is permanently thwarted although human life continues in some form.

Shrieks – Some form of posthumanity is attained but it is an extremely narrow band of what is possible and desirable.

Whimpers – A posthuman civilization arises but evolves in a direction that leads gradually but irrevocably to either the complete disappearance of the things we value or to a state where those things are realized to only a minuscule degree of what could have been achieved.

― 1986 tallest hair contest (Z S)

in terms of "likelihood" + potential to actually make man extinct i'm going w/ asteroid/comet over physics disaster and space invaders

We’re living in a simulation and it gets shut down

the simulation argument is outstanding:

This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html

iain banks turns it into a religion in one of his books (their core belief is that we are in a sim and if they get enough converts believing this, running the sim will become pointless and it will get shut down)

I hope earth human civilization ends due to superintelligent ants and their ability to construct geometric solids like in PHASE IV

http://www.goofbutton.com/images/phase_iv%20%2835%29.jpg

I will also once again seize the opportunity to link the classic Excerpts from
Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant

http://downlode.org/Etext/WIPP/sickening.gif

I agree. The system is unsustainable, and it’s breaking, but maybe just not how we thought it would.

i look forward to seeing how this works out

Ok so apparently this take is one of Elon Musk’s talking points, so that gives me pause. Still, what if it’s just his pro capitalism motives that are wrong.

https://www.techopian.com/thanos-was-wrong-about-population-but-so-is-musk-suggests-famous-economist/

This article disagrees with both scenarios, but then doesn’t really seem to find a compelling reason to believe that humans will just choose a path of equilibrium, aside from stating that societies who achieve it are the best. The one example of a success story they offer is Costa Rica. So I looked up Costa Rica’s projections, and unfortunately they don’t paint a picture of stability but instead follow the same declines.

I am extremely skeptical of overpopulation language when wielded by space-colonization enthusiasts.

Like, "omg there are too many people on earth that's why we need a Mars colony" is not a resource-neutral strategy given the resources we burn on building spaceships'n'shit.

Like, have you seen Mongolia? Wyoming? Iowa? Saskatchewan? There's tons of places with almost nobody there.

It'd be way easier to make sustainable human habitats in Wyoming than to terraform the fucking moon - Wyoming already has an atmosphere and plants and such.

Fortunately or unfortunately, people don't want to live in Wyoming. People overwhelmingly want to live in, or near, cities. That's why it's so freaking expensive to live in Brooklyn or Berkeley or whatever. People keep voting with their feet. We could try listening to them.

Fast forward to space colonies as a method of alleviating earth overpopulation: you're just relocating the problem. Imagine the coolest possible Mars colony, I betcha people will mostly want to live near the Martian PleasureMall, not out harvesting the ice rings of Xenion 47, or in the Martian hinterlands.

eating frozen yogurt at the martian pleasuremall

No, you have it backwards. He doesn’t believe we have an overpopulation problem. But his motives are more like we need more people just to colonize Mars n stuff.

More drones! We need more drones! Now, work faster, you fuckers!

I'd like the rest of the day off... Baby Diego's has death affected me more than I expected

eating frozen yogurt at the martian pleasuremall

Underrated Pulp single

lol

this was typed at the us politricks thread, but i decided it didn't belong there at all, and i wanted it to go somewhere, so here i am. the topic was the sense of impending doom/extinction overwhelming some people, so:

it seems like previous societal collapses have primarily been resolved by movement/relocations. with so many people alive, and with so many powers and forces placed very emphatically upon preventing movement, it's hard for me to avoid fearing that genocides, intentional famines, or regional nuke attacks will become ever more the technique of choice.

after reading bloodlands, then watching the past year in ukraine, it's hard to avoid super doomy feelings. i hear those idaho christian fascists.

as a result while i know extinction by climate is out there as possibility, i cannot stop worrying about what i perceive as a more imminent and likely intermediate zone.

i got here found YMP's pulp joke and had a good real laugh, i needed that.

climate change is making all those things more frequent/likely though

the number of people alive isn't the problem its it's the fact that the people responsible for climate change are already exploiting, enslaving, incarcerating, starving, drowning and shooting those least responsible (the vast majority of the planet) and are actively preparing to ramp this up with little to no pusback on the level of national or international politics

*pushback

climate change denial these days is acknowledging the problem and refusing any solution other than more capitalism and more nationalism

The leading climate deniers switched to “climate change may be real but of course there is nothing we could or can ever do about it” about 15 years ago, the rest of them are still catching up

Xpost don't forget magic technology that the smart people will surely come with any day now, so no need to worry.

(sometimes more precisely formulated as magic geoengineering that will definitely not make things worse and is definitely not just a play for enormous contracts for the relevant firms/industries.)

Tbf that “magic technology” isn’t just some kind of pipe dream, there are a lot of things happening which would’ve seemed impossible not that long ago. I’ve heard a number of climatologists say things actually looked a lot more dire 10 years ago

The thing about magic climate technology is that it's the only solution to climate change that I see any chance of actually working (a slim chance, with probably many unintended side-effects), because governments and corporations will never do anything serious to actually try to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

I don't think that's exactly true, virtually every major country on the planet has pledged to massively reduce emissions in the next 30 years and I feel like they're not all just gonna....do nothing

(also oil is rapidly reaching the point where it's getting prohibitively expensive to extract compared to renewables so maybe there isn't really a choice here)

Sorry to be that guy but keep smoking that hopium.

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/02/us-coal-use-on-the-rise-but-renewables-continue-rapid-growth/

https://www.greenpeace.org/eastasia/press/7488/plans-for-new-coal-plants-in-china-rebound-with-8-63-gw-approved-in-the-first-quarter-of-2022/

https://m.timesofindia.com/business/india-business/indias-coal-demand-to-top-1-billion-tonne-in-2022-push-net-zero-goals-further-away/amp_articleshow/88346693.cms

Feels like I missed a major country? Oh there it is.

https://www.reuters.com/article/indonesia-coal/update-1-indonesias-2022-coal-use-for-power-generation-set-to-rise-3-idUSL1N2S609P

What’s the fifth biggest country in the world again? Oh shi-

So so glad I missed this creep when he made his cameo tho.

We also currently have a lot of magical thinking where many with no intentions to procreate are super concerned about climate change for the sake of all those kids other people must be having. But not themselves.

Reminds me of the quip about how every political philosophy is based on the ideal tribe size, and libertarianism reduces the tribe to the isolated nuclear family.

Personally I’m not completely devoid of hope but it’s becoming increasingly clear that only a global revolutionary progressive movement can stave off climate catastrophe.

oh I'm not fooled into thinking everything is heading the right way but I don't think it's incorrect to say things have progressed quicker than expected? when Inconvenient Truth came out there was this sense that renewables could never progress fast enough in the next 15 years to make a dent which is clearly not the case anymore

also the fact that you can sheer a sheep many times but only slaughter them once (sorry there is probably a better metaphor for this). the powers that be are not going to be insulated from the consequences of climate change, not if it has a catastrophic effect on those of us who actually provide profit and pay taxes. it is obviously gonna go down in a similar fashion to Covid - there will be a ton of pain and suffering but ultimately I feel like whatever the bare minimum is we'll find a way to do it

I'm not sure even economic rationality will always overcome the inertia of established power structures whenever they don't align (we would have less uneven development otherwise) but that's more likely to force change than appealing to morality which has been a disastrous strategy for environmentalists. otherwise we need a revolution or something. which would be hard and unpredictable and brutal and we're disorganized and they have most of the guns and it could easily backfire make everything worse for everyone so idk. keep voting for some suits to keep doing nothing I guess

imo the core issue was that the environmental consequences of using fossil fuels were and still almost entirely are externalized. privatize the profits, externalize the costs. and even on the demand side, the costs are externalized to everything on the planet. in other words, they should have put a price on carbon back in the 1980s. some people have been trying to do it since the 1980s, ha. god damn, whatta world.

but if they put a price on carbon that comes close to capturing the environmental costs of fossil fuels, then shit would get way more expensive. and we can't have that. ever. so instead we've spinning our wheels above a canyon for pretty much my entire life

xps the powers that be are as insulated as they can be in their compounds- they will be affected eventually but they can kill a lot of people first. sadly a lot of people who aren't rich are more excited about the opportunity to oppress and eliminate surplus populations to reduce competition than in the kind of solidarity that would require upending these structures which provide them with whatever meagre oppressive powers they have. I wish I knew the solution but I'm sceptical of it just being tech, especially tech that still requires hyperexploitation of global south workers to even exist

I'm not sure even economic rationality will always overcome the inertia of established power structures whenever they don't align (we would have less uneven development otherwise) but that's more likely to force change than appealing to morality which has been a disastrous strategy for environmentalists. otherwise we need a revolution or something. which would be hard and unpredictable and brutal and we're disorganized and they have most of the guns and it could easily backfire make everything worse for everyone so idk. keep voting for some suits to keep doing nothing I guess

― Left

my feeling is that a lot of people look at radical change and focus a lot of attention on revolutions succeeding, and when i look at radical change what i see is the old ways of doing things failing. the awful shit oligarchs and established power structures are perpetrating isn't exactly new. what looks new, from my perspective, is the absolute _chaos_ surrounding the repression and systemic violence they're putting into practice. oligarchs, of course, can victim-blame all they like, but it's starting to be more and more readily apparent that it's them, not us, who are unpredictable and brutal.

Chaos rewards the polluters in the short term though. In terms of revolutionary change, it doesn’t have to be violent. It doesn’t necessarily even have to be systemic change immediately but otherwise it would require an almost paradigm shift in terms of people’s attitudes. It’s been done before (at the national level at least) but true odds are slim for a real global nu enlightenment.

I don’t think deterministic attitudes towards the owning class are especially helpful. This moment requires some alliance of liberals and leftists, obviously in that case the owners will have to be split. Monbiot may be tiresome these days with his puritan mindset but he did nail it with this 🧵

3. Broadly speaking, there are two main types of capitalist enterprise. One seeks an accommodation with the administrative state, and benefits from stability, predictability and regulations that exclude dirtier and rougher competitors. It can live with a thin form of democracy.

— George Monbiot (@GeorgeMonbiot) November 20, 2020

tl;dr:

4. The other is raw, unrestrained accumulation, which sees democratic constraints as illegitimate. Only “the market” is a legitimate forum for decision-making. As Peter Thiel, echoing Hayek, insisted, market freedom and democracy are incompatible.https://t.co/HtTmIgg4VZ

— George Monbiot (@GeorgeMonbiot) November 20, 2020

I don’t think deterministic attitudes towards the owning class are especially helpful. This moment requires some alliance of liberals and leftists, obviously in that case the owners will have to be split. Monbiot may be tiresome these days with his puritan mindset but he did nail it with this

― recovering internet addict/shitposter (viborg)

kinda funny you say that, i wrote a long post which said basically the opposite of what you're saying here and deleted it as not being really relevant

you talk about revolutionary change and you talk a paradigm shift and then you talk about alliance with liberals. i don't know who monbiot is, i don't really hang out on politics/Discourse threads here, so i'll try to give you the tl;dr re: my perspective. basically i got a lot more in common with left than i do with whatever the heck it is you're talking about.

i'm a trans woman. i experience my existence as a revolutionary act, an act of radical liberationist subjectivity which is fundamentally incompatible with liberal capitalist norms. what kind of paradigm shift are you expecting? whose paradigm do you expect to shift? sure, i'll be glad to ally with liberals, just as soon as they stop being liberals. otherwise, all i'm doing is sacrificing my actual allies in favor of an "alliance" with a group whose values are merely procedural, and not just that, procedural values which put me at a structural disadvantage!

i'm not interested in strategic concerns. i'm interested in continuing to exist in a world which is structurally hostile to my existence.

to me, the soul of revolution is not violence, but _non-compliance_.

I think the most elegant, graceful decline would be by choice; couples decide not to have as many as two children but are free to have any number, including zero or as many as twelve. If they have none or less than two, it might be for any number of reasons, e.g., giving way to other species.

I think the most elegant, graceful decline would be by choice; couples decide not to have as many as two children but are free to have any number, including zero or as many as twelve. If they have none or less than two, it might be for any number of reasons, e.g., giving way to other species.

― youn

i'm sorry i just don't understand what you're talking about here. i don't. what does choice _mean_? "giving way to other species"? like, it's within my power to _choose_ whether or not the people in power _choose_ to genocide any number of other species? i mean i got some friends who are big on the church of euthanasia, that lady chris and all, and i just don't _get_ chris. the entire purpose of my life as a trans woman is to survive, and she's saying the human species should go extinct?

i fucked around with antinatalism. i like cioran. i think he's funny. i think he's wrong, but funny. the human _species_ is outside of my purview. my "choice" about whether or not to reproduce is less about humanity and more about _me_. having opinions about human extinction was an excuse. why didn't i reproduce? because i was horribly abused as a child and because i didn't want anyone else to go through what i went through. because i didn't truly trust myself to be a good parent. because living in a failing capitalist society means i don't have the _ability_ to provide for any children i might have.

one of my friends is a mom and i am so fucking happy for her. she went through a lot to have that child, delayed her transition for years, and her child will never know her as anything but her mother. and she had that opportunity because the country where she lives, they _covered_ that, they _supported_ her in her ability to inseminate her wife, _paid_ for her sperm preservation and ther fertility treatments necessary, and i'm really happy, in america, i have a really good insurance plan. they paid for my genital reconstruction surgery, and it's been really amazing, but having a _child_ is never something that was financially within my reach. existing, for me, meant giving up on even the _theoretical possibility_ of children.

and theory, y'all are talking _theory_ here, as if societal collapse is a _theory_, as if societal collapse and human extinction are the same thing, as if the end of capitalist ethnostates is the literal end of the fucking world, and whenever someone like me points out that it's not, people tell me how many people will die, as if i don't know, as if people like me aren't the ones with our heads on the chopping block, as if we're not already fucking dying, as if the "genocide" y'all are so afraid of isn't what we have to live with on a daily fucking basis.

i mean i do all this mindfulness work, i work to exist in the present, and the present _really fucking sucks_, but i do it anyway because it's the only place i _exist_, it's the only thing i have any _control_ over, it's the only way of living that has any fucking _meaning_ at all. and the meaning it does have, it's a lot, it's amazing, it's wonderful, it's horrible, it's being _full_ of everything, all the things, and i should worry about whether or not humanity goes extinct? that's not fucking up to me.

it's not up to anyone here, either. quit worrying about whether humanity has a future and start fucking _living_.

whatever the heck it is you're talking about

The analysis I presented was straightforward enough, seems safe to assume your dismissive attitude stems from your own intransigence.

But sure let’s run with this. Given the actual global political reality the best hope given your obstructionist posture would be for Russia to take over Europe and uh for conditions to become so depressing in the richest countries that they enter a terminal demographic decline? It could work.

I’m getting the dawning realization that it’s actually a good thing that metastasized music boards aren’t running the world right now. Things could somehow be much much worse! Give us a shot, we could really make it happen.

Taking sides: graceful elegant decline vs last great hurrah of living it up and bowing out fast

GWAR’s ‘This Toilet Earth’ vs Stars of the Lid’s ‘And Their Refinement of the Decline’

I’m getting the dawning realization that it’s actually a good thing that metastasized music boards aren’t running the world right now. Things could somehow be much much worse! Give us a shot, we could really make it happen.

― recovering internet addict/shitposter (viborg)

um, i _don't_ rule the world, i don't live my life by being like "what would the ruler of the world do?" and then doing that. you think _i'm_ ignoring the underlying political reality? here's the underlying political reality: _you don't decide what happens_. none of us do. if people want to think about what they'd do _if_ they were the ruler of the world, what's the _best way to do things_, i mean i guess there's a place for that, but i have limited time for your cosplay apocalypse when my lived experience is the people who actually _do_ rule the world actively working towards the extermination of people like me.

oh hey, I’m actually still here? (and have been for two decades so not sure what the unkind creep/cameo comment was about) I do now regret trying to publicly work through some thoughts I was having on this topic. I spend a lot of my irl time isolated from intellectual debate, so reached out clumsily and probably worded some things poorly. But it doesn’t matter.

Will say that theorizing about this stuff is not necessarily removed from being personally invested in it. If you plant and nurture a garden, you also do well to anticipate the weather.

Will say that theorizing about this stuff is not necessarily removed from being personally invested in it. If you plant and nurture a garden, you also do well to anticipate the weather.

― Kim

i mean i think that's a good analogy! some people like freak out and stress about the weather and like who does that benefit? every time there's sprinkles on the forecast people are like "SNOWPOCALYPSE" and they run out and strip the shelves bare of paint thinner because the world is going to end, now's our last chance to buy paint thinner. yeah, i get it, winter is coming, maybe preparations can be a little bit more practical? also where i am i'm in the middle of a fucking blizzard right now and i don't give a shit about the fact that winter is coming, i'm sorry, i'm kinda busy here. and i point that out and people get all mad and are like, well, if you had your way, it'd be winter _now_. uh, what?

quit worrying about whether humanity has a future and start fucking _living_.

What does start fucking _living_ consist of though ? What do you do differently ?

― Luna Schlosser

that's a good question, it's different for everybody of course but here's some of what it looks like for me

i do a lot of work on healing trauma, with a heavy focus on healing guilt and shame. lots of mindfulness practice, circle of control stuff. i had a lot of issues with rumination and spiraling, getting into patterns of intense anxiety about things i couldn't actually do anything about. refocusing those worries into the things i _could_ affect and control has given me agency over my own life, rather than making me feel like a pawn of enormous forces outside my control.

i've also become a lot more focused on local community. a lot of the past year i've been working on building up a discord for trans folks where i live. it's only a really really small subsection of all the trans folks where i live, but i think it's been really healthy and rewarding. community is really important for trans folks but online trans communities aren't always the healthiest places - particularly on corporate social media sites, there's a focus on Discourse, which means conflict, and personally i try to minimize conflict where i can.

of course that doesn't mean that i _avoid_ conflict - i mean, this is a conflict right now - but when i do so i try to do it in a way that builds empathy, being honest and vulnerable rather than making with the zings. zings are entertaining in the short term, but in the long term they do tend to hurt other people, and that's more important to me than the transitory entertainment they provide.

minimizing conflict is another use of mindfulness practice for me - a lot of times people will say things that will get me upset and i have learned to kind of sit with those feelings and let them pass before i make a rash and hasty response.

when i talk with other people, i've moved away from centering rhetoric in general to trying to listen to other people and engage with them on an emotional level. i think a lot of times when people talk they get hung up on theory and i'm a lot more interested in how people are feeling, in providing care. providing care is really important to me. it's one of the ways i find meaning in my life. i was suffering a lot, and there were other people who took the time to help me, to care for me, to help me understand things about myself, and i just try to pass that on, to do the same for other people in any community i'm a part of.

as a result of my decentering of rhetoric, i don't engage a lot with political threads, and this seems like basically a political thread. when i do, what i try to do is reframe the conversation from abstract ideas to concrete, real-world experiences. mainly i draw this from my lived experience as a trans woman, because that's the concrete, real-world experience i have. at the same time, i try to take care to not universalize my own experience, to try not to set out my particular experiences as normative in any way.

i strongly believe that the way people think about "politics" is broken, not just in terms of structural systems of oppression but in the political norms we've internalized, what we see as "political" and "not political". i agree, actually, with viborg that what's needed is a paradigm shift. for me, that paradigm shift consists of moving away from a politics based on abstract universal ideals and towards a politics based on solidarity, on acknowledges the differences in our lived experiences and working to ally with each other for our mutual benefit.

the strongest and most profound political act i have undertaken, an act i continue to replicate on a daily basis, is my existence as a queer person. it's hard to explain how deeply this has affected me, how deeply my experience as a queer person has _changed_ me. of course, it's not my _responsibility_ to, but you asked a sincere question and i want to answer it to the best of my ability.

there is something incredibly powerful and transformative about being an out queer person. for me to exist, i first had to throw out a lot of the assumptions i'd made, and for me, my political assumptions were liberal. the beliefs i'd been taught, the beliefs i'd tried to put into practice as a "cisgender heterosexual man", had _never_ really served me, had _never_ really been to my benefit, and when i came out as a trans woman, i found these political norms to be laughably inadequate. a _lot_ of trans and queer people are strongly leftist, are avowedly anticapitalist, and i think cishet liberals maybe don't understand why that is, don't understand the damage their ideals have done, the ways in which queer people have performed, in many cases continue to perform, self-erasure in order to accommodate these ideals. don't understand the way the norms they seek to defend promote and perpetuate these broken, toxic ideals. liberals are willing to acknowledge our right to exist, but _not_ to cede the power of self-determination to us. recognition of us is, it is clear to many of us, a privilege, one that can be revoked at their pleasure. liberals see themselves as our protectors, the ones who carry the burden, the ones with great power and great responsibility, and _nobody_ can carry that burden, _nobody_ can live up to that responsibility.

i've put down the burden. i've given up trying to "save the world". my life now is focused on taking care of myself as best i can and caring for the people i am in community with. that's _really really different_ from how i lived my life before.

"Like, have you seen Mongolia? Wyoming? Iowa? Saskatchewan? There's tons of places with almost nobody there."

As mentioned passim I visited Greenland in May, and I remember that the in-flight magazine was unusually upbeat about climate change:
https://i.imgur.com/gBresVj.jpg

I guess the lesson is that one man's meat is another man's mustard, or mookie. I can't remember how the saying goes. From what I remember Greenland itself would be largely unaffected by a rise in sea levels. If the massive ice sheet melted it would be disastrous for the rest of the world, but without the weight of the ice Greenland's interior would rise, albeit on an enormously long timescale. Of course the ultra-rich will probably ride it out in mega-yachts, which might explain why they're so willing to plunge huge amounts of money into something that depreciates so badly.

The isolation really brought home how unlikely human life was. The birds and animals I saw in Greenland had been around longer than us, and they hadn't developed writing; the dinosaurs that preceded them didn't develop writing over the course of hundreds of millions of years. We alone developed writing, and by extension a means whereby the dead could communicate with the living. That was our triumph over death.

My hunch is that in the far future we will end up like the Inuit, roving bands scattered in the temperate zone, hoarding rubber and glass. I remember an old book called Man Plus in which a man is surgically engineered to survive on Mars, but that's not a feasible solution to the problem of life in a world too hot for life. In the long run all life on Earth is dependent on the sun, which has a finite amount of fuel. We might put off our date with the inevitable by relocating to Mars, but that will be the end of us. The stars themselves also have a finite amount of fuel, so long-term survival in the physical world is impossible.

My suggestion is that everybody have a go at The Talos Principle. It's a puzzle game, but the storyline is unusually melancholic. It deals with the extension of humanity and its attempt to cast a light into the future so that something survives.

The choice was about how many children to have. The elegance and grace was about being free to choose. Giving way to other species was wondering about what happens when one is not present and imagining one's absence.

were sorry I thought of them together

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025/02/02/asteroid-hit-earth/

sweet url

On Wednesday, an unprecedented memo from the International Asteroid Warning Network reached the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs and from there winged across the planet to government officials. The memo said “Asteroid 2024 YR4,” first detected in late December after it came out of the sun’s glare and passed by the Earth, might hit our planet on Dec. 22, 2032.

The likelihood of impact was very low, just 1.3 percent. But that probability, combined with the estimated size of the rock — possibly big enough to cover a football field from goal line to goal line — was unusual enough to trigger for the first time the international warning system established in 2013.

Astronomers are making further observations and refining calculations for future orbits of Asteroid 2024 YR4. By Friday, the impact probability has edged upward to 1.6 percent.

That did not surprise astronomers, because such increases typically happen early in the observing process. What’s also typical is that the probability of an impact eventually drops down again, all the way to zero, as astronomers refine their forecasts.

“There’s a 98.4 percent chance, as of today, that it will go to zero,” Paul Chodas, director of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said Friday. (By Saturday, the impact probability ticked up to 1.7 percent.)

i see you reading this, i know what you're thinking here: how will i tell my children? look, if you're gonna talk to your children about this, just tell them "Asteroid 2024 YR4 certainly does not pose an existential risk to civilization — it’s not nearly big enough. But it would deliver a significant punch if it struck Earth. Astronomers initially estimated its diameter as roughly 130 to 300 feet."

wish you hadn't bumped this. that asteroid isn't NEARLY big enough!!!

i had hoped for bigger! one thing that goes unmentioned during those scenarios is the fish. "70% chance that the asteroid will hit the water, ocean, etc"...that's great and everything, but how does that feel for fish?

2032 is plenty of lead time to send Ben Affleck to deflect this thing, or given the football-field scale of it, the entire Manning clan. For a 1% chance at saving the world, it is totally worth a one-way trip!