The Future of the Human Race.

[Mr. Blonde]

I have a few friends that I discuss with (Bald nerd is one, hopefully another will be joining soon) the future of the human race on two primary planes: The pointlessness of our current (arguably, our entire) existence on this planet, and how badly we are fucking it up. I'm by no means at all a hippie or anything and i'm far from composting all my waste, but to be around the world, and with all the information we have available to us and see all the things that are completely fucking up our ecosystem, its hard to say how much longer we're going to be able to sustain life on planet earth. There are so many problems, ranging from the well known (deforestation, pollution, general wastefulness) to the lesser known but still very important.


Here is a good article to get started about what the future holds for humans if we don't get our shit together: Consumerism is 'eating the future' - opinion - 07 August 2009 - New Scientist

Highlights:

More specifically, all we're doing is what all other creatures have ever done to survive, expanding into whatever territory is available and using up whatever resources are available, just like a bacterial culture growing in a Petri dish till all the nutrients are used up. What happens then, of course, is that the bugs then die in a sea of their own waste.

Although we like to think of ourselves as civilised thinkers, we're subconsciously still driven by an impulse for survival, domination and expansion. This is an impulse which now finds expression in the idea that inexorable economic growth is the answer to everything, and, given time, will redress all the world's existing inequalities.

American economists and the government of the day decided to revive economic activity by creating a culture in which people were encouraged to accumulate and show off material wealth, to the point where it defined their status in society and their self-image.

I'm sure many of you are already familiar with the next two concepts, but just for a re-hash:

...globally, we're already in "overshoot", consuming 30 per cent more material than is sustainable from the world's resources. At present, 85 countries exceed their domestic "bio-capacities", compensating for their lack of local material by depleting stocks elsewhere, in countries that have "surpluses" because they're not consuming as much.

The worrying thing is that if everyone on Earth adopted American lifestyles overnight, we would need four extra worlds to supply their needs, says Rees.

Without global management, destruction will continue, producing food and energy "crunches" that make the credit crunch look like a tea party.

Solving the other problem – the advertising that feeds our desire to acquire – might be more tricky. In an ideal world, it would be a counter-advertising campaign to make conspicuous consumption shameful.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Pararelli is even more pessimistic. The only hope, he says, is a disaster of immense scale that jolts us out of our denial. "My sense is that only when the brown stuff really hits the fan will we finally start to do something."

I wonder how long everybody is going to go along ignoring the elephant in the room before they're FORCED to start realizing "if we don't do something soon, we are fucked"

I can personally say I live a pretty minimalist lifestyle, even moreso now than in AZ (although thats kind of obvious). One of the many reasons I quit the nightlife scene (on top of the fact of how pointless of a career path it was) was that I couldn't dumb myself down to enjoy myself surrounded by mental and physical vanity almost nonstop in my life. Lack of intellectual discussions aside, people don't even care. Its like the human race in modern culture is on life-auto-pilot. WHY does everyone work so hard to get money/posessions? Most people can't even answer that question (the answer is to attract a mate, get a family and spend all that money on them, until they run out and go into debt for the most part, fyi). And if they are intelligent enough to answer the question, they accuse you (me) of being a cynic or a pessimist.

Clearly I don't hold any of you in the ranks of what i just said, but I also don't know all of you that well. I'll leave that introspection to yourselves.