I'd argue the cold war was closer to the 'hinge of history'. In fact on this very day 9/26 in 1983, a not very well known soviet lieutenant colonel prevented what would very likely have been all out atomic war.
In the grand scheme of things, everything that happened this year is probably minor in comparison to Petrov's decision.
I think the Cold War, and even WW2 are part of the current period when it comes to the ‘hinge of history’ argument. They’re not saying this year is the most influential, or even this decade. I think it comes down to the explosive industrial growth and technological advances over the last few hundred years, and next hundred years or so.
It’s a unique confluence of incredible capability with little understanding of the consequences of using it. Nobody 100 years ago had the slightest clue that the industrialisation at the time could cause global warming, for example.
As for examples of pivotal moments, WW2 is a good example. We came very close to the world being completely dominated by Orwell style authoritarian one party states. A boot stamping on a human face, forever. It might even still happen. With social engineering and modern surveillance technology as used in China, we could end up in a super-stable oppressive regime with no way out.
Nuclear annihilation is another example. We came scarily close several times as you pointed out.
Global warming is a huge issue, it may even be too late to stop massive changes in our environment that will last thousands of years and shape human history and global biology permanently.
Genetic engineering could change who and what we are as a species in ways that might be hard or impossible to undo. It’s not any one of these that create the hinge either though, it’s all of them happening together.
This, again, proves that as an educated society we need to decisively counter the for-profit lies of influential corporations. There is a fundamental problem that may cost us severely in the not too distant future.
Fossil fuel companies have paid large sums to lie about the effects of their products on climate change, just like tobacco companies have directly killed innumerous people by lying about the negative health impact of cigarettes for decades. Nowadays, the evidence that these companies collaborated on misleading the public is openly accessible but back in the 70s or 80s YOU were the enemy for trying to warn about health dangers. Climate is the same now, propaganda has done its work for a long time.
And again, the same cancerous people jump on the bandwagon of an increasingly aware public and try to profit off the new movement by ways of green-washing and other pseudo-helpful bullshit.
These are significant problems where short-term profit motivation is more influential than long-term sustainability and "positive" development of society. Our only hope is the few people in human society who are motivated enough to study, learn, read and act for the greater good.
> This, again, proves that as an educated society we need to decisively counter the for-profit lies of influential corporations. There is a fundamental problem that may cost us severely in the not too distant future.
Who do you think has or rather should have more power than corporations? The state! And who is constantly crying for a less influential state? The current US administration.
As long as we as the voters do not allow the state to be the one in power but rather companies it will be companies doing whats best for them.
Don't we have just as much if not more power over corporations? You effectively vote for a corporation each time you do business with it.
We can choose to buy zero emission cars and purchase products exclusively from environmentally friendly corporations. Corporations will either adapt or go bankrupt.
The difference is, with a decent voting system, it only takes 51% of the population to decide government policy, but with corporations, even 1% of the population can keep harmful corporations from bankruptcy.
Even ignoring the problem of those 1% potentially being the richest 1%, there is the issue that harmful businesses often have lower costs than ethical businesses, and some consumers are too price-sensitive (or don't have time to become informed about every corporation's business practices) to vote "correctly" with their purchasing power.
Indeed, Arrhenius definitely had a 'slight clue' in 1896. It is probably comfortable to think that we really could not have known, but I think the reality is that it is often so much easier to kick the can down the road than to be careful in the present moment.
Interesting, thanks I had no idea. It doesn’t change my basic premise that the decisions made to do thing such as industrialise weren’t really informed ones when it comes to the long term consequences.
Had to look that up, and this was the closest I could get in a few minutes, which is still impressive, thanks for the link!
> Arrhenius saw that this human emission of carbon would eventually lead to warming. However, because of the relatively low rate of CO
2 production in 1896, Arrhenius thought the warming would take thousands of years, and he expected it would be beneficial to humanity.
It still seems that scientists at that point looked at it more from an interesting terraforming perspective and less like a looming catastrophy perspective.
I'm afraid democracies are inherently unstable. Athenian lasted 200 years and got swallowed up by Macedonian autocracy. Roman lasted 500 years and got overthrown by the army. Polish lasted 350 years and the parliament voted to allow neighbouring empires to divide the country. The US is at 250 years and people are seriously worried about it devolving into either Gilead or Cyberpunk any moment now.
It's not just democracies. I can't think of a system of governance that's stable over centuries. Oppressive regimes tend to implode once amassed suffering reaches a peak of rebellion, or evolve into something more benign (and potentially get conquered then). Even Rome, the long-lasting empire, wasn't ruled the same way throughout its history.
I think that's what GP meant when they wrote that "we could end up in a super-stable oppressive regime". Because the oppressive regimes so far weren't oppressive for long.
Whenever I get into this, I come back to the political genius in the 4th century who turned the Roman Empire into the Roman Catholic Church.
Rome continued to rule the world for a ~15 centuries. There is still a sizable chunk of the global population that obeys Rome, even though they are not ruled by anything like the Roman Empire.
Realising that the military empire wasn't going to work any more, and changing Rome's historically laisse-faire attitude to religion into an effective method of rule... that's genius at work.
The millenary histories of the Egyptian and Chinese empires disagree. Yes, dynasties came and went, but those polities endured for thousands of years—indeed one could argue that the ongoing governance of China by the Communist Party is just the latest dynastic swing.
Chinese dynasties got overthrown pretty regularly every two or three hundred years, with a good amount of divided kingdoms, or foreign invaders ruling over much of China, thrown in between.
Oh, also switching dynasties frequently resulted in the entire previous royal family being summarily executed.
I think we’re talking about forms of government and not geographical countries. China definitely doesn’t fit here since it’s governing bodies have shifted so drastically in the last few hundred years. I don’t know much about the specifics of ancient Egyptian government but I imagine it would vary with the dynasty if not with the individual ruler. Traditional monarchies are based on the whims of a ruling elite, family, and individual after all. They have no constitution to provide continuity and all law, secular and religious, is superseded by royal decree.
I'll have to read up on Egypt and pre-XX-century China. How oppressive were these dynasties typically? What did the life look like for a regular subject?
We'll probably never know, unfortunately. The literate classes in ancient societies rarely wrote about the lives of subsistence farmers, who were the vast majority of the population, so while some details can be reconstructed it's very hard to speculate about how oppressed a typical farmer would have felt.
That’s quite plausible. It may be that the only super-stable form of government is a high tech invasive AI powered surveillance state that knows everything about everybody and brooks no dissent. China is very hard at work building exactly that right now. In which case, in the long term were probably in trouble.
The AIs might not need to take over, we might actively hand ourselves over to them.
> democracies are inherently unstable. Athenian lasted 200 years and got swallowed up by Macedonian autocracy. Roman lasted 500 years and got overthrown by the army.
The Roman Republic learned from Athens’ democracy. Even late Republicans like Sulla and Cicero and Caesar recognised the Republic’s overuse of checks and balances, as well as its lack of a state army. Caesar almost uniquely recognised Rome’s broken voting system. Unfortunately, they were too late.
America’s founders were not. The lessons of the Republic gave us our strong executive and state-funded armed forces. Our Constitutional amendment process is sclerotic, but there is nothing to suggest our Republic is inherently flawed in the way Athens or Rome were.
> Our Constitutional amendment process is sclerotic, but there is nothing to suggest our Republic is inherently flawed in the way Athens or Rome were.
Analyses abound about [what's wrong with American democracy](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:Problems_with_the_curren...). The nail in the coffin though, will be the first part of your sentence. The American Constitution is notoriously hard to amend, which means that it is just too easy to maintain as it is by those who benefit from the status quo. We can already see this by how the will of the majority is routinely ignored through unequal representation. My opinion is that this is not sustainable and will have to be resolved through unlawful means, exactly because of the unflexibility of the law.
Look, I love the Roman Empire just as much as anyone (and get more than a little miffed whenever someone denies that the Eastern Roman empire was legitimately Roman), but it was in no way a democracy.
It's funny -and not counter to your point- but several of the succession struggles that plagued the Eastern Empire are characterized as "almost elections", by historians. Since its inception, the empire never had an official succession system and hence every new ruler was contested. Constantinople was so easily defendable that a popular usurper had great chances of making himself with the throne if he could take control of the capital. More than once, pretenders rose to power by popular acclaim at the hippodrome.
That's actually kind of a fair point. Another thing to consider is that if you consider only the military (which wouldn't have been that weird for a pre-enlightenment democracy), there are quite a few times during the empire that approached democracy (relative to the time period).
I guess, really, I meant to imply some sort of a modern interpretation of democracy, wherein a single city (or military) voting for the entire empire wouldn't exactly cut it.
The parent is talking about the Roman Republic, not the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire and its continuation the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire were not democracies.
> They lasted until 1453 - incidentally only 50 years before Columbus sailed
Sidenote: incidentally not coincidentally. The closure of the Silk Road and other important East-West land routes as a result of the Ottoman conquest was one of the important spurs that kicked off the Age of Discovery, as everyone scrambled to find new routes.
Most things have finite lifespans. The benchmark for a form of government is certainly not that it should be eternal and continuous.
Look at some cities in Europe. Many have waxed and waned, some even many times. They have been parts of different countries and empires. Many have influenced the world greatly for the better.
And they were overrun by the Sea Peoples, who set up their own dynasty. Overrun by Kush, who set up their own dynasty. Overrun by Persia, who set up their own dynasty. Overrun by Macedonia. Overrun by Rome. Each of those was an end of an established government.
> As for examples of pivotal moments, WW2 is a good example. We came very close to the world being completely dominated by Orwell style authoritarian one party states.
I doubt that would have lasted for long. Fortunately enough for humanity, free human are more productive than slaves.
Total subjugation is surprisingly stable, you end up with a poor society but starving peasants don’t revolt nearly as much as you might think. Looking at say English history you find various factions fighting each other, but it’s the upper crust instigating things. Similarly, Tsarist russia became less stable after industrialization and a rising standard of living.
In the end war is expensive because fighters aren’t producing food etc.
Total subjugation is internally stable - your peasants are not that likely to revolt, but you will fall behind your more open neighbours because you'll be much less productive, and that opens you up to external threats. Tsarist Russia and other nations of the time did not really have a choice to abandon industrialization for the sake of stability, it would just have caused it to be ripped apart by the industrialized nations - perhaps sharing the fate of the Ottoman Empire or the fate of China in the Opium wars.
East Germany vs West Germany; North Korea vs South Korea - and that's in less than a century. On a longer timescale, think Ming and Qing dynasties compared to Europe on the same timeframe - China was much more stable during that time, but stability was not sufficient in the long run. However, the current PRC is perhaps a counterexample, though there is a lot of nuance, external conditions and multiple very different approaches that the China leadership tried out during the last 50 years.
That only works if there is an open neighbour. If we end up with authoritarian control being ubiquitous, as potentially with a victory by the axis powers, or the success of global Communism, there wouldn't be any open neighbours to compete with.
It reminds me of getting on a stand-up paddle board. As you find your balance, there is a wobbling. If you haven't done it in a while, it feels almost certain you will fall. But (usually for me), you find your balance, and suddenly you are floating in the water, like Jesus Christ himself.
With all the new elements in society, I think we're all "finding our balance". And once we have, we'll be able to explore the future much more safely and effectively.
I guess that's the "hinge-y" argument. The negative argument might be that we're a house of cards, destined for greater instability not less, and we're experiencing what it is to fall apart.
Ahh yes, nothing like melting the ice caps and flooding several countries to "find the balance" between being able to be alive and everyone on the planet owning 3 automobiles to ensure GM has a profitable quarter
That's actually a great example of my point. Thanks for making it. I agree, not everybody needs 3 cars. And we also can't guarantee everyone soon be alive forever, or didn't you hear we're mortal? The sooner we can stop anchoring on straw men and unattainable dreams, the sooner we can actually solve problems. It doesn't feel as good as tilting against the windmills, but it's the path forward that's available to us.
These jabs we throw at oppressive regimes only signal that we are not ready to deal with our own oppressive regime. We have been the boot for a while now, rosy shaded boot, with lights on the side and WiFi. Having to read such well thought out statements while throwing shade at others only feeds my pessimism in foreign policy/domestic media control. Good luck dealing with the never ending boogeyman.
I don't really understand your point. Are you saying we can't tackle a clear case of oppression because there are other cases of oppression? Why can't we talk honestly about and attempt to address all cases of oppression whenever we see them.
Almost any multicentury period has dramatically changed human society.
Also people knew about and have already experienced pollution and other effects of industrilization. Read about London big stink.
Social aspects too, ludites, social disruption, leading to labor as a political / social force. Urbanizatiin. Communism. Labor laws. Etc.
Since ancient times "birth of civilization" we have deforested, over fished/hunted/farmed.
We have continously, dramatically changed our environment and ourselves. We've already genetically engineered ourselves (modern man and medical man are quite different) and numerous other species.
Everybody in every time period believes their time is different. Is frantic changes. Is etc.
Its only because they know more about recent events. Recent events are in memory.
The more you study human history, the more you realize it has always been a dramatic.
> We came very close to the world being completely dominated by Orwell style authoritarian one party states.
It seems like not only we came close, but it is the very reality we currently live in, we just don't like admitting it. Although instead of one party, we have one class.
Correct. Because, you see, I don't live in the real deal. I don't live in anything approaching an authoritarian state, even if you include class as well as party.
There were a great many other close calls. Rarely did it boil down to one person, but all sorts of things brought us dangerously close. And those are only the ones we know about. Who knows what mistakes have never been made public.
>>As it happens, on this occasion there was no imposter – at least, not a human one. The figure skulking around the fence is thought to have been a large black bear. It was all a mistake. But back at Volk Field, the squadron was still unaware of this fact. They had been told there would be no practice runs, and as they boarded their planes, they were entirely convinced that this was it –World War Three had begun.
Claims of Petrov preventing an "atomic war" are debatable. There were probably other checks built into the Soviet protocol and chain of command that would have easily detected the false positive.
You can look at the present day as a loud echo of the end of the Cold War. Today's "hinge" is in large measure the culmination of Putin's revanchist asymmetrical war on the West. If he fails to get his man in America, and if Europe contains the nationalism in Hungary and Poland and passes a "European Magnitsky Act" in response to the poisoning of Navalny, we will see the end of the Putin era, and eventually see Russia join Europe.
Or will see the power center of the West shift to Europe, and a more powerful, and expansionist Russia threaten peace in Europe.
The cold war was very bad, but in my opinion the risk is still high and growing. The Petrov incident was just one of many close calls that have been publicly disclosed during the short time nuclear weapons have existed.
- Vasily Arkhipov was a Soviet submarine flotilla commander in charge of a submersed fleet that was being bombarded by depth charges from US navel ships. A captain on one of the subs thought war had broken out and wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo. Vasily thought the bombardment was a signal for the submarines to surface. He was right, a ceasefire had been announced and the warships were dropping practice depth charges to try and signal the submarines should surface and communicate. link - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov_(vice_admiral)...
- Boris Yeltsin sat in front of an activated nuclear briefcase because Soviet radar detected an inbound US nuclear missile. The launch location and trajectory matched a war game scenerio of the US detonating a nuclear missile in the atmosphere, causing an EMP to wipe out Soviet electronics. His military officers wanted him to launch a counter attack and he only had minutes to decide. Turned out to be a missile launched to study atmospheric conditions. The Soviets were notified, as were other nations, but the message didn't get to all forces due to the internal strife and collapse the USSR was undergoing. Link - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident
- A computer simulation of an incoming Soviet nuclear attack was accidentally fed into NORADs network. Everyone thought it was real. The National Security Advisor was awakened by a call and almost called the President, but was luckily able to determine it wasn't real. Link - https://gizmodo.com/the-computer-simulation-that-almost-star...
There is a whole list of other incidents. Yes, many of them occurred during the cold war. They seem to have slowed down as time goes on, maybe nations are just better at covering things up. You still have incidents like in Hawaii, where residents were notified of an incoming ballistic missile from North Korea and that it WAS NOT a drill.
Turned out to be a drill...(or was it)?
The number of nuclear weapons worldwide has decreased, but proliferation has increased. Think of each nuclear capable nation as a node in a weighted graph. Each node is connected to every other node. The weight is the probability of conflict between the two nodes. Each time a node is added, risk goes up (proliferation). You can have dramatic changes in foreign and domestic policy, risk goes up (US politics anyone?). You can have long standing animosity between countries (India/Pakistan), risk goes up. You can have new animosities (India/China), risk goes up. There can be just plain system bugs or miscommunication as illustrated in the examples listed above.
Now throw in the ramifications of climate change like political instability, infrastructure strain, resource scarcity, and refugee migrations into the mix. Or a truly mad guy with a nuke. We haven't had large scale war for a long time, but as countries deal with internal pressures and external competition for resources and global standing, the risk is never off the table.
I would says the risks are still high today and are rising.
It's amazing how well propaganda works. The idea that he prevented an atomic war is absurd. Firstly, he was a lieutenant colonel. Had no power to start anything let alone nuclear war. Secondly, even if he had accepted the false alarms, people up the chain of command would have figured out it was a false alarm. In what scenario would the US only launch 5 nukes? The story is obvious nonsense or propaganda and yet it gets posted over and over on social media. Why?
> Petrov's decision.
Petrov's decision is one of the most overhyped propaganda on social media. It's a non-story turned into a story for some reason.
If people just took the time to think about the content rather than mindlessly consuming content maybe we'd get less nonsense.
I'm surprised none of the responses here are discussing climate change. Unlike other concerns, higher average global temps are baked in for centuries, even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emissions today (which, obviously, is not happening).
I put in a "yes" vote for the hinge of history simple due to the fact that our inability to drastically restructure our economy today will severely negativity affect billions in the future. Keeping global warming below 2°C is a pipe dream IMO, and the big question remains to be seen of whether we see big positive feedback loops that result in greatly increased warming (8°C or so). If that happens, WWII will look inconsequential by comparison.
You will never do this easily. If I run a developing nation there is absolutely no way I accept that you, a developed nation with a century of pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, will merely accept a reduction of your annual emissions. I will pump as much CO2 as necessary to raise my population into prosperity and until you have taken out enough GHG to match my historic emissions you're going to have to either take me with guns and bombs or you're going to have to pay me.
You don't want to do the first because future millions of people are not worth the lives of present millions. And you're not going to do the latter because you can't afford it. You burnt too much to get here.
So guess what? You're fucked. I'm not going to help you for free.
It's like Europe giving Brazil shit over the Amazon. Buddy, you guys clear cut your forests. Your absolute forest cover doesn't matter. You've killed so many of your forests. Brazil has 60% forest cover. Germany has 30%. You cut your trees to build cities. And I can't? No, raze your cities or pay me for 400 years of treelessness.
The thing is that brazil is mostly cutting forests down for slash and burn farming. If they modernized farming practices, the rate of deforestation would drop significantly. The solution there as with most of these questions of climate fairness is for first world countries to invest in technological development of poorer regions. If brazil’s farmers could practice farming in the same way as european farmers, they wouldn’t need to cut forests down.
I'm all for that: the approach of paying them not to do it, either with tech or money (pure dollars or carbon-taxing imports and your local production or anything like that).
They have to subsidize because labor and land are more expensive the Europe than Brazil, it has very little to do with how efficient the farming techniques are.
> They have to subsidize because labor and land are more expensive the Europe than Brazil
Yeah, mechanization is lower in Europe... (This is related to the subsides.)
Anyway, those waves of temporary immigrants that every year go to Europe from poorer neighboring countries aren't much more expensive than Brazilian labor.
It's absolutely true, but put this way, it lends an argument towards force-subjugating the entire planet under one government just to end the bickering about fairness. Global warming isn't fair.
What I'd honestly want to see happening instead is developed nations doubling down on greentech, and donating all of that (+ expertise and IP) to developing nations, so that the latter can leapfrog the CO₂-intensive energy generation methods. After all, the developing nations aren't into greenhouse emissions for the sake of greenhouse emissions - they just want to have the same level of prosperity for their people as the West enjoys. So I say we should just give them the means to achieve that without burning fossil fuels, for free - and screw intellectual property and some perceived "fairness". This is a global problem, we're all in this together.
There is no “greentech” that mitigates the environmental damage of the luxury everyone wants, which is space. And no one with kids is going to voluntarily accept living in cramped apartments while other countries have individual houses on lots.
Increased space per person => increased fossil fuel usage => increased emissions.
Maybe the greatest “greentech” would be dissuading having kids, either culturally or economically.
I’m not sure everyone considers space the top luxury. Just look at most Asian/European metropolises: people are happy to sacrifice space for other luxuries.
Wouldn't read that much from it. They're likely sacrificing space because they have little other choice (Japan, HK?), or because cities are where the good jobs are.
> And no one with kids is going to voluntarily accept living in cramped apartments while other countries have individual houses on lots.
Families with children all over the world have been accepting that. The urbanization of the developing world is mainly people moving from villages where they had their own home (or at least a family compound) to cities where they live in modern blocks at best, shantytowns at worst. Once the first generation gets installed in that modern block, successive generations simply accept living in a block as normal – yes, some might dream of their own home on their own land, but that is regarded as something available only to a select few, not a mainstream thing.
Space means more miles driven, more ground paved with cement/concrete/asphalt, more distance water/electricity/gas/sewage/trash has to be pushed.
The amount of (developed) land a person uses is a rough proxy for quality of life in the developed world, and it is afforded by ignoring the long term externalities of fossil fuels.
Obviously everyone wants a detached single family house with a garage and a couple cars and a backyard for their kids and a few flights every year for the family, but if the environment is buckling with such a small portion of the population enjoying these benefits, there is no chance everyone can.
Overall consumption needs to go down, which means lower consumption per person, and/or fewer persons.
There are ways to do it. Sometimes you just need the tech to exist and you just need to drive down the price. Subsidies to build solar have done a great job in that respect.
It's just not enough until it becomes crazy cheap, though. You have to be way better than fossil fuels to match up because of their advantages.
And no one has the power for global subjugation. No single group of currently allied nations has that power. So that's a safe thing. It simply can't happen. I doubt America could even subjugate Mexico, which is next door.
The hopeful side of this might be that the economies of scale in renewable energy such as wind and solar have been funded by the wealthy countries. Thus the developing nations are in a far better spot where it may even be cheaper to use renewable sources than GHG producing sources.
If you consider that coal plants also come with negative health effects on a population (elevated cancer rates, etc) - it makes even more sense.
Compare this to how the U.S. invested in developing fiber optic technology - it was INSANELY expensive to build out fiber networks in the 80s/90s, and now it's nearly free.
The small countries who waited until ~2005 or after were able to build out their internet infrastructure for a fraction of the cost.
Perhaps a similar effect is taking place with energy, but I may be overly optimistic.
You can say this but no nation as a whole has the balls. That's the power of fighting off an invasion from a rich country. I can lose ten for each one of yours and you will lose hope first.
To say nothing of the fact that the first American soldier who dies to stop climate change will cause, by his death, the crucifixion of your "liberal tree huggers". Your internal politics will fracture and break you. You are too weak for this.
And if you're European, your populace doesn't have the appetite to use guns and bombs to stop climate change anyway.
There's no need for invasion or occupation, bombing is enough - look at per capita carbon footprint of Afghanistan or Somalia. And that can be done "cleanly" with drones, no risk for the attacking nation.
Other than that, some parts of American / Western population would be gladly sold on "the overpopulated non-whites are destroying the world by over-consumption and need to be kept in check" - without realizing the irony of "over-consumption" and without seeing the parallels between "overpopulation" rhetoric and eugenics of old.
Moreover eternal war is more money for the capitalists, while there's little profit in saving the world peacefully. And you know who truly rules the West.
So hopefully we can all agree on stuff. I'm not sure it's all that likely.
EDIT: also if you're a "leader of a developing nation", chances are you're going to see effects of climate change, like drought and famine, way sooner than the rich parts of the world. And if you get no aid because you refuse to cooperate ... you know. Maybe your replacement that got to power after you got hanged by an angry mob will do more solar panels or whatever.
The developed world can't afford it. Both those countries were fucked already. And the Afghanistan war barely has support - despite sheltering someone who performed the most significant terrorist attack on America in decades, perhaps centuries. If you want to stop Brazil or China or India from industrializing you're in for it. It's not going to work. It won't work there and it won't work in Pakistan or Indonesia. And it won't work in Nigeria. And it won't work in Argentina.
You just can't do it.
And the benefits of industrialization are huge. Especially now before we put carbon caps in because everyone knows you get grandfathered in.
When the famines come, you'll be expected to buy food. And the West will be expected to sell it. Because what are you going to do, say "No aid because you didn't play along"? You'll get absolutely mulched in your Parliaments and your Congresses.
To say nothing of what will happen, which is that China will sell them food because it is unlikely everyone gets a drought at the same time. And then you will have committed a geopolitical own goal.
You can force a lot of things. A lot of things. But China put the cat among the pigeons. Everyone knows that burning hella fossil really fast is optimal, because sooner or later the West is gonna ask for some deals. And since we'll wipe the slate clean of emissions then, it is optimal to burn now. Burn everything because the jubilee will come.
It's so weird, in movies there's always the villain going out of their way trying to "destroy the world" and it seems so far fetched - and now I'm talking to one.
Hahaha! I am flattered. But, like all the villains in the movies, I don't see myself as the bad guy. You're trying to screw me out of my share while clearly not contributing your share, and I have access to a slow WMD you can't stop. That's just bad negotiating on your part.
You can:
1. Try to disarm me, but you are unable.
2. Try to not screw me, and it'll be fine.
3. Do your bit, and it'll be fine.
Listen, what that will look like is that the US+Europe has to reduce carbon emissions some 75% for a few decades and India+Brazil+developing_nations get to boost theirs to 250% for a few decades. Then we will all have emitted the same carbon into the atmosphere and the playing field is leveled. Fair. Equitable. Unachievable only because you don't want to be fair or equitable.
That's why the countries with the most resources and technology have to graciously give those things to developing nations. Lead by example, but make sure that any nation can also have nuclear power, electric vehicles, etc. It's simple really, you stop letting any one person or family hoard massive pipes of resources. Yes this is something like socialism, but with everyone finally realizing that acting in their own self interest is identical to fixing the climate problem. No one can escape that. I assure you Elon doesn't want to go live on Mars by himself.
If anything I think the global pandemic has shown how unprepared we are to come together globally and utilize technology to solve hard problems. Maybe something good will come from all of this in that direction and we will learn from our mistakes.
No. Life is a constant struggle against the encroaching entropy and I suspect keeping civilization going will never get easier.
That said, coronavirus is not even close to being a threat to human civilization. Compare this to 1918 Spanish flu and the contrast can't be clearer. Despite enormous growth in human population and much higher connectivity, we are managing global death toll an order of magnitude lower. We absolutely can be much better but we can't ignore 100 years of progress either.
Yes, but we're stretching our global economies thin in the process. At this point in our civilizational development, it's the systems that are important. If this or a future pandemic pushes most economies past breaking point, the death toll will very quickly skyrocket from a mere million to a bit larger billions dying in wars and starvation.
That's a weird way to see it though. Historically some humans have struggled to acquire the basics of survival, but actually the planet we live on is a bastion of low entropy in a sea of chaos precisely because of "life". Better to go a little hungry and keto than be constantly choking on noxious fumes and fishing nothing but old boots and cans out of the ocean.
Outside of the US and Brazil, I have been really impressed by the ability of people to come together and deal with a massive collective action problem.
If anything, it has shown that people have the capacity to pull together when they need to.
Lots of cases here in Spain but hospitals are generally coping fine (with Madrid being a bit of an exception at present in that hospital numbers are rising as well, but are currently manageable).
To be fair, it's much more difficult to have an effective lockdown a country that has people tightly packed together and that isn't a WEIRD individualistic society.
What we need are bite-sized reforms that are palatable to people across the country. You're not going to sell middle America on a comprehensive multi-trillion dollar environmental package any time soon, but you could sell them a handful of "separate" $500B 'Manhattan Projects' to tackle some things now while you bring them around on the rest.
The only reform that would make any difference is one that would cause lower consumption of fossil fuels, i.e. a large tax on fossil fuels. It would especially negatively impact “middle America”, as it would cause prices for everything to rise, and hence they would be forced to consume less (which is the goal), and hence it wouldn’t be palatable.
Anything short of forcing people to consume less now is pie in the sky thinking.
Not necessarily. Tax carbon heavily and then redistribute the tax equally among all citizens. Anyone using above average carbon net pays into the system, anyone using below average gets a net payout.
Then markets, our most advanced coordination/optimization method can be utilized to figure out how to reduce our carbon emissions.
I wonder if paying out the dividend on a weekly or monthly interval might help with this some degree. Only getting paid at the end of the year tax refund style feels a lot more like a bonus than a reliable paycheck.
The goal is to reduce total use of carbon based fuel sources, not just redistribute wealth.
While I agree that redistributing wealth should also be a goal, any solution that doesn’t lower total consumption is useless, so the pain of less consumption would be felt by anyone consumer more than average (which is probably everyone in the developed world).
Redistribution is just a technique to avoid a conflict of interest. They may end up redistributing between more- and less- wealthy people, but that's just a side-effect. Considering that low-carbon technologies are more capital-intensive than high-carbon tech, the redistribution may actually be from less-wealthy to more-wealthy actors.
We want the tax rate to be high enough to disincentivize carbon-emitting actions relative to carbon-neutral (or carbon-capturing) actions. But if government's ability to finance public operations is also affected, then we have a problem. The revenue-maximum tax rate is based on a completely different optimization problem than the carbon-minimum tax rate.
Making carbon taxes revenue-neutral decouples the two policy objectives.
Even at a neutral tax, carbon use should go down since it becomes more expensive than non-carbon alternatives. There two obvious knobs:
1) tax rate: $/ton of CO2
2) wealth distribution: 100% goes to state vs 100% goes back to population or anywhere inbetween.
The two knobs are independent. You could crank tax rate of co2 way up while still equally dividing the revenue generated and heavily discouraging co2 emissions.
Sulfur dioxide from a supervolcano eruption would ironically not be considered a disaster if it were to reflect sunlight for a few years.
Since we cannot arrange for a supervolcano yet, we could purposely emit sulfur from ships and existing smoke stacks. But wouldn't this cause acid rain eventually? Crops would receive less sun. Fictional remedy to fight solar-powered machines in "the Matrix" - global solar grids would have reduced input.
Though most of their deaths were instantaneous (if it was large meteor) - the other half of the world would have been around for a few more seasons, before the food chain was rapidly squeezed (vaporized atmosphere from ground zero sloshing around pressure systems, sunlight inhibition from dust withering vegetation).
This is why I think that, even facing the chaotic "sloshing" due to projected >8C temperature within a century referenced in parent, a civilization that has practiced/standardized/mass-produced greenhouses at a hectacre-scale could fare well despite the projected drought/storm/fire/sea-rise/permafrost-methane-feedback that is being suggested as consequence. The only "silver bullet" specialty that I know would be beneficial at any point in the future anyways (ability to grow large variety of food in barren areas with limited resources).
Norway has large greenhouse production for higher latitude growth. Commercial sized greenhouse footprint to replace existing traditional outdoor grazing and staple crops would be enormous, which is why it may be more efficient to think of how to modify a biome instead of mass producing plastic/glass/steel enclosed micro climates (which may not be compatible with traditional tractors/combines/dusters which have long been mass produced).
I’m pretty sure there’s studies showing we could drop global temperatures by about 2°C right now with cloud seeding at a cost of a couple billion USD a year.
It's theoretically possible but the change is so drastic and required in so many countries I really don't see it happening. For instance in the US, even if the Democrats get full control, eliminate the filibuster in the Senate, and decide to pass something more extreme than the Green New Deal style legislation that's floating around at best that'll stick for 4 maybe 8 years at the outside.
There is a huge fusion reactor in the sky that we can use. It provides energy much cheaper than any fusion plants we can hope to build in the next fifty years.
In principle you are right, but this is one case where you have it backwards. The reality that science shows is far worse than what has permeated mainstream culture, on the web or otherwise.
The size of the climate disaster, and the urgent need for radical changes in the global economy, simply can't be overstated right now.
Unfortunately, the amount of status quo propaganda, especially in the US, is also staggering. You can't open a media site and not read false information like 'we still have time', 'scientists aren't really sure', 'new technology will help address this', 'if people did this one easy thing, the problem would go away', 'track your personal carbon emissions and the world will be saved' - all dangerously misleading and outright false information. But cleverly disguised as of we can keep the status quo and things will just improve.
While I agree that climate change is the dominant issue of our time, I disagree that media is underexposing it. There is quite a lot of unwarranted climate doomsaying. To give an example, in the coverage of natural disasters like wildfires and hurricanes they keep drawing a link to climate change and saying this will get worse and worse due to climate change. But what the IPCC actually says is this:
Increasing exposure of people and economic assets has been the major cause of long-term increases in economic losses from weather- and climate-related disasters (high confidence). Long-term trends in economic disaster losses adjusted for wealth and population increases have not been attributed to climate change, but a role for climate change has not been excluded (high agreement, medium evidence). [1]
The message that what is causing these major natural disasters is mostly people living and building in the wrong places, not climate change, is what the media should be saying, but they tend to link it almost entirely to climate change, which is an overstatement.
> The reality that science shows is far worse than what has permeated mainstream culture
I'm really curious where did you get this information from. I suppose it must not be popular or mainstream media, because of course msm telling you that science shows a worse reality than msm is a contradiction.
So does which primary literature does it come from?
Maybe it's a different experience for you, but the IPCC reports are much better than what's permeated mainstream culture around me. I consistently see people saying that we've gotta stop having children, that the Earth can't support modern industrial civilization, that in 100 years we won't be able to grow enough food and half the planet will starve. The IPCC reports don't suggest anything nearly this bad.
Which parts exactly? Because usually it is claimed (in popular and mainstream media) that ipcc reports are toned down for consensus and political support.
I see where you're coming from but one doesn't need references to say that water is wet. This is a similar case. "Science" (people like you and me that looked into the matter, did experiments, asked critical questions, and presented their work) finding that we are causing the climate to change into something that is less favorable to humans than our current climate is abundantly clear to anyone who will either read the evidence or verify the experiments (e.g. buy an accurate CO2 meter or whatever other part it is that you doubt).
There is a huge difference between what I was responding to...
> The size of the climate disaster, and the urgent need for radical changes in the global economy, simply can't be overstated right now.
...and your take, which I fully agree with:
> "Science" (...) finding that we are causing the climate to change into something that is less favorable to humans than our current climate is abundantly clear to anyone
Personally I think it's true that the size of the climate disaster is absolutely enormous and we really do need radical changes throughout the global economy. But if you don't share that opinion then I see why you'd want to see a citation with such a statement, even if you don't deny that the CO2 in the air is man-made and causing the planet to become a lot less hospitable to us.
So I'll oblige and go to Wikipedia's climate crisis page, which provides under the heading of "Scientific basis":
> While powerful language had long been used in advocacy, politics and media, until the late 2010s the scientific community traditionally remained more constrained in its language.[13] However, in a November 2019 statement published in January 2020 issue of the scientific journal BioScience, a group of over 11,000 scientists argued that describing global warming as a climate emergency or climate crisis was appropriate.[14] [...]
> Also in November 2019, an article published in Nature concluded that evidence from climate tipping points alone suggests that "we are in a state of planetary emergency", defining emergency as a product of risk and urgency, with both factors judged to be "acute".[15] The Nature article referenced recent IPCC Special Reports (2018, 2019) suggesting individual tipping points could be exceeded with as little as 1—2 °C of global average warming
The page does warn for the backlash from the alarmist phrasing, but at least many scientists appear to find this phrasing accurate. They're not infallible but it does seem to be our best understanding of the situation.
> A new report by 11,258 scientists in 153 countries from a broad range of disciplines warns that the planet “clearly and unequivocally faces a climate emergency,” and provides six broad policy goals that must be met to address it.
The analysis is a stark departure from recent scientific assessments of global warming, such as those of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ...
This says two things to me:
1. "a stark departure from recent scientific assessments of global warming" says that this is NOT what the experts in the field are saying.
2. "from a broad range of disciplines" says that these are mostly not climate scientists.
> the catastrophist framing of climate change is self-defeating because it alienates and polarizes many people.
That rings very true unfortunately :/
> often accompanied by demands that poor nations be denied the cheap sources of energy they need to develop
I have literally only ever heard that argument in articles that say this is a stupid argument. Who'd ever say that? These people have bigger problems than climate change and don't have the resources or infrastructure or do something about it. The poorest also pollute the least per capita. It's us who can do something.
But then the article builds on that logic by saying:
> “If you want to minimize carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 2070 you might want to accelerate the burning of coal in India today,”
Which doesn't logically follow. No, we can't expect the poorest of this planet to buy or build hi-tech solar panels and batteries when they could simply dump coal in a steam turbine and be done with it, but it's also not the case that we're optimizing for CO2 in 50+ years. Those are two different statements. In fifty years we'll be long over our CO2 budget and potential runaway effects have long been triggered.
Anyway, the premise of the article is not necessarily wrong. The last sentence captures its point reasonably:
> Happily, there is a plenty of middle ground between climate apocalypse and climate denial.
And it also captures why I'm afraid the article is (unintentionally) a bit misleading. The author clearly understands climate change, and he's also clearly frustrated with extremists calling it an apocalypse (or, in your words, doomsday predictions). Indeed, I'd describe something as apocalyptic or doomsday if it threatened the lives of most of us, and that's not the case here.
So he's arguing against exaggerating to a point that very few people (a vocal but tiny minority perhaps) agrees with. That's a correct argument, but it's very easy to extrapolate that to what was said above: "[no] urgent need for radical changes in the global economy". It might not threaten most humans' lives, but that doesn't mean it's not big enough of a deal to implement radical changes. Intuitively, the "plenty of middle ground" between apocalypse and denial centers around "it's there but not that big a deal". I don't think that's what the author meant to argue. Especially if one only looks at the headline and is already inclined (as many Americans seem to be) to think that the whole climate thing is not as important as activists make it out to be. Those readers are now going to be more strongly convicted, while the article isn't actually that blunt. The headline is meant to catch readers' eyes but thereby sends the wrong message.
The question that remains is how bad it's going to be. The author didn't really convince me there. There are error margins on any prediction, and most meaningful predictions build on other predictions with their own error margins. We don't yet know how to be self-sufficient. If we're fine with letting natural food chains collapse, do we have all the dependencies needed for growing the food we need to stay healthy? Not everything will go extinct at once, but we don't know which parts will be able to adapt, so we need to make sure we captured the whole (circular) dependency chain.
We'll probably find solutions to missing pieces, hence my not expecting it's going to be the end of humanity, but how fast will we figure it out? How fast can we scale up synthesizing that? There's just so many unknowns. Reducing a single variable, CO2 in the air, seems trivial when compared to the engineering feats we'll need to artificially make the earth hospitable to 10 billion people.
One thing in the article that keeps coming back is the koala. I don't know why he keeps bringing it up, it really doesn't matter if koalas specifically are still around. The question of food chains would be much more relevant.
Another thing is the wildfires, cited in a few places to not currently be solely caused by climate change. Again, not something I think many people really claim in the first place. The message, as I see it in climate activists' promotional materials, is more that we'll see more of this in the future. The article confirms that climate change is already playing a role, albeit small and definitely not a singular cause, and the climate has as of yet barely changed.
Another place where the article is a bit odd is this:
> “There is robust evidence of disasters displacing people worldwide,” notes IPCC, “but limited evidence that climate change or sea-level rise is the direct cause”
The "notes IPCC" part is a link to a PDF which does not contain that citation, even in part (the world "displacing" doesn't occur at all and "robust evidence" is used in one spot but not something that seems relevant to this quote). I looked it up because it sounded weird in the first place. Why would a panel on climate change look at displacement caused by sea level rise when it has been changing on the order of centimeters per decade? Of course you would find "limited" evidence for that directly causing displacement.
The cited rise itself is also using 2007 numbers which were adjusted by the IPCC in 2014 (and the article is from 2019 so it could easily have used those numbers), but whether it's 0.6m or 0.9m, I guess the consequences aren't all that different.
As a Dutchman I also feel obliged to say something about the representation of our situation. It says we learned to live 7 meters below sea level 400 years ago... even with today's tech we couldn't simply manage a wall of 7 meters of sea. This -6.76m point is 30km inland. Every meter of rise would be a really big deal (glancing at a heightmap (AHN3), one of the higher sea-to-land-after-dike height differences seems to be -1m). But we're just a tiny country and it wouldn't make sense for everyone to do a lot of effort just for us, so enough about us. This thing about the Netherlands just isn't accurate in multiple ways.
That said, I thought the predicted sea rise would be on the order of meters, not less than a meter. That's one takeaway from this article in which the effects of climate change will be less bad than I thought. Wikipedia has another chart that shows a few meters of potential change, but of course I can't tell who among all the smart people is most likely to be right, so I'll stick with that it's very likely going to be less than 1m.
So let me just try to end on that. I spent 3 hours looking into this now, from reading the article to putting my concerns into words while learning more about various aspects. Another takeaway in the same vein is that when digging into Wikipedia's citations, it's often not put as starkly as Wikipedia's text actually says. Nevertheless, I hope I also showed that the article doesn't argue that we don't have a very big and urgent problem (even if it's not an "everyone will certainly die" kind of big).
> Know that doom predictions, being very emotionally appealing, travel around the world before science can get its shoes on.
Read the first few paragraphs of any paper in climate or environmental science; their outlook is usually much bleaker than anything you find in the general public.
In the general public I routinely see claims that we have until 2030 to save the planet!
Are there really science papers claiming worse?
Meanwhile the IPCC worst-case scenario is that world GDP in 2100 will be 8.2% lower with a +3.7°C temperature increase, compared to the aspirational +1.5°C increase.
I'm not sure why the focus has been put onto greenhouse emissions and CO2 in general.
If there's any direct threat to the planet, it's insane amount of industrial waste entering the environment daily that gets downplayed in this ridiculous song and dance about CO2.
Industrial waste poisons drinking water, destroys the oceans and their ecosystems, poisons the land and our food.
Everyone's busy worrying about how much CO2's being produced, very few people seem to be worried about what kind of mysterious proprietary petro derived chemicals are being pumped into rivers, lakes, the ocean. Few people seem to sorry that groundwater and resevoirs are contaminated by agricultural runoff, runoff from factories, manufacturing plants, chemical plants, oil refineries, fracking operations.
Every day, thousands of tons of carcinogenic, toxic, environmentally altering chemicals are relaeased into the environment doing damage we don't even understand yet.
Sperm counts keep dropping, and it very well may be due to chemicals that mess with our hormones and genetics.
I don’t know why it isn’t talked about more. There has been a significant drop and at the current rate it won’t be too long until the average man is considered essentially infertile.
I remember becoming very concerned by the idea that microplastics are behind decreasing sperm counts. But by Occam’s razor, I think it’s much more reasonable to assume that lack of exercise, poor diet, not enough sleep and sunlight, and high levels of stress are the bigger culprits.
Maybe it will be self correcting in the end, if sperm counts drop enough to make a dent in population numbers, which is where a lot of the problem ultimately lies.
Would it not be best to make your (good) point about industrial waste without referring to the conversation about CO2 as a ridiculous song and dance? It's not as if gigantic problems can be expected to line up in a neat and orderly queue for us to deal with one by one.
Totally agreed. Plus it's not like these are even really separate problems. These petrochemicals exist entirely because they're effectively by-products of fossil fuel refinement, the use of which is the major contributing factor to CO2 emissions.
I think the reason people are concerned about CO2 and greenhouse gasses is that we know they will end up hurting us, while industrial waste is not something to be concerned about at the moment beyond local effects. The fact that this is 'damage we don't even understand yet' points to this simple fact that this is not a significant problem and can safely be ignored while we work on the problem that we know will have serious long-term consequences.
I'd like to understand this perspective. The predictions I've seen, even for a worse case scenario, would result in huge levels of sea rise inundating coastal areas, large parts of the Earth becoming uninhabitable for humans, massive ocean die offs, climate-change induced wars, etc.
This would quite obviously result in death and misery for billions (again, this is the worst case scenario), but I haven't seen any evidence that the Earth will become fundamentally uninhabitable a la Venus.
So it would be a disaster in any sense of the word, but I don't see how it would become a humanity-ending event. I'd like to understand why people think otherwise.
The current thought patterns that seem to be the dominant ones for the majority of ordinary people seem to assume that there are no feedback loops or tipping points. While the evidence from other planets directly contradicts this.
Also with end of history, I didn't mean the end of the human race. Just the end of the current civilization and possibly written history. Another dark age, so to speak.
> While the evidence from other planets directly contradicts this.
To echo what another reply said, our own planet contradicts the idea that we would turn into a Venus for some reason. In that all the carbon we're putting back into the atmosphere is from organic processes that took it out of the atmosphere eons ago.
So, again, yes, the change will be enormously traumatic for humanity, but I don't see any evidence that written history will somehow disappear, for example.
I wonder about this. As carbon we are now emitting must have been at one point in atmosphere? And at that point there was some sort of equilibrium. So could we really push it all to atmosphere again? And would that really lead to loop-back?
Just to ‘second’ your perspective - humanity has an uncanny ability to adapt. Climate Change will be a monstrous stimulus to adapt to, but I don’t see where it ‘ends our kind.’
On the whole, the same folks who fear climate change the most, praise the mission to make life multi-planetary. Those two beliefs held concurrently are a head scratcher to me... if you believe in our ability to make life multi-planetary, then surely we can adapt here. Mars is much more unforgiving than any forest fire, hurricane, or massive earth bound event.
Venice and New Orleans might be a write-off, and NYC will have sea walls, but folks must have some drive to adapt beyond just bland acceptance.
Climate change can absolutely be reversed by sufficiently determined technological and industrial civilization.
The reason most climate activists don’t acknowledge that is because they don’t want it to be true. They prefer being noble doomsayers before the “ignorant sheep.”
There are (expensive) geoengineering projects that would give humans direct control over global temperature.
It's also crystal clear geoengineering will ultimately be how the problem is addressed. Everything else is a distraction given the reality of how people and societies work.
Maybe climate change could be by a sufficiently determined technological and industrial civilization, if there was some such thing. Climate change could also be solved by a magical flying rabbit, if there was some such thing.
They aren't talking about sufficiently advanced technology (magic). They're talking about things we can already do, but have serious trade offs.
The most common suggestion is to add particles to the atmosphere that reflect sunlight. I think sulfur was first proposed, but I think study of calcium carbonate has been ongoing to avoid the ocean acidification issues that sulfur presents.
> they don’t want it to be true. They prefer being noble doomsayers before the “ignorant sheep.”
This is obviously false. Please take this nonense elsewhere.
I agree with the rest of your comment more than with the person you replied to, like, of course we can have a major effect on the climate if we see the need to (if we indeed see 8°C warming and traditional food supplies failing, suddenly the powers of this world will see ways to do something about it that they aren't doing today) and it doesn't automatically mean an imminent end to history like GP claimed. I just don't get why you had to add the cited part. We're all on the same team.
Climate change killing us, while planning on "going to Mars", is one of the funniest modern narratives.
Unabetted climate change will be "devastating" in many ways, but it likely won't wipe us off the face of the earth in a generation. We are incredibly resourceful.
It's not very difficult to offer apocalyptic pronouncements like this; it's nice though if they can be accompanied by some hard evidence which has preferably not been cherry picked to fit an agenda.
It's unlikely that humans will die out even assuming worst case scenarios. So I guess it depends on your definition of "history" whether climate can cause it or not.
I think no. We are in a boring, prosperous, stable time with an overactive media. The virus is bad, but it will pass and medical science will save many millions. The plague of Justinian, this is not. Hope I'm not wrong about that, at any rate.
Nobody serious sees the Coronavirus as an existential threat to humanity unless it mutates in a way that really enables it to wipe out most humans.
Climate change and the collapse of global ecosystems can absolutely manage that and according to every serious scientist we are pretty much on the worst case scenario path according to any peer reviewed model.
The rise in nationalism and authoritarianism around the world is another phenomenon that could unleash forces of global conflict which might lead to cataclysms like a nuclear war or another world war at least.
Of course pivotal moments in history can only be declared as such in hindsight. But the forces leading up to them usually gather steam decades before. It looks as we have no shortage of those in our time.
>> according to every serious scientist we are pretty much on the worst case scenario path according to any peer reviewed model.
> Obviously not true.
I think GP was referring to predictions of climate sensibility to changes in CO2 concentration appearing to track the predicted worst-case [1]. He was not referring to the predictions of CO2 concentration per se.
And the predictions about CO2 rise you refer to are not very comforting anyway. If the 2 degree line is crossed, as predicted by these data, then a cascade of tipping points [2] will likely put the earth into a permanently "hot" climate state.
There's a possibility that the third sentence you wrote is tightly coupled with the second one.
On a personal level I mainly agree with you (we're on track for much worse than the RCP2.5 that everyone is barely even attempting to make goals for), but the complexity of the system seems to bring people to vastly disagree about this somehow.
I think what really has become a turning point of our civilization in the last few decades is that specialization and the complexity of the world are absolutely entirely outside of the reach of any single person. The expansion of diversity and knowledge in the last few hundred years is much like the expansion of the universe, in that we can't seem to be able to beat it at all in terms of speed no matter what we do.
Any sci-fi device that could perhaps offset that eventually (e.g. a future neuralink-thing being able to "upload" knowledge into you) is not the kind of thing I would bet my savings on in terms of time constants when compared to much more immediate events like climate change wrecking our modern civilization.
> There's a possibility that the third sentence you wrote is tightly coupled with the second one. On a personal level I mainly agree with you (we're on track for much worse than the RCP2.5 that everyone is barely even attempting to make goals for), but the complexity of the system seems to bring people to vastly disagree about this somehow.
By my way of thinking about such things I think this is the best comment in the thread so far, in that:
- it recognizes that there are even more risks (disagreement over climate change --> political changes --> war) from climate change than the obvious first order ones
- it recognizes that the world is a system, and that it contains complexity
- it recognizes that complexity can cause vast disagreement
- it does not speculate about (and consider to be a fact) the causation of an observation ("to vastly disagree about this somehow") but rather, correctly notes that the causation is unknown
> I think what really has become a turning point of our civilization in the last few decades is that specialization and the complexity of the world are absolutely entirely outside of the reach of any single person.
I agree, and I estimate that most other people here would as well, but only when thinking about this concept abstractly. But if one is to closely(!) observe how people talk about our (infinitely complex) world, you may notice this phenomenon where it seems as if people are literally not aware of the complexity of the world. Now, if one is to respond to such a comment pointing such a shortcoming out, typically (in "smart" communities) the person can then(!) skilfully recognize whatever aspect of overlooked complexity you noted...but at the time they made the initial comment, was this complexity ~"included in the cognitive context of their mind" when pondering the problem, or was their mind working with a vastly simplified model of the world (because that is efficient, and the mind seems to often err on the side of efficiency rather than correctness)? If one is to ask that question, the person will typically assure you with supreme confidence that of course they were aware of it, but that they were "speaking loosely/generally" or something along these lines - which of course may be true, but is it actually true? I would say the fact of the matter is unknown, because we do not seem to have that level of insight into the workings of the mind. (And if you then respond with this theoretical question, extremely interesting things often transpire, but that's a whole other ball of wax that I'll skip for now.)
I believe if you treat this very general and speculative philosophical idea as a kind of lens through which to view the activities of human beings from an abstract, curious alien entity perspective (no prior or presumed knowledge of "how it is" with Earth and Humanity, but infinite curiosity about the highly paradoxical nature of our species), you may start to notice a set of repetitive patterns everywhere you look, in all sorts of different levels of dimensional abstraction and aggregation. And if you notice that and then speculate about what unseen/undetected Force in the Universe could be causing all this, maybe some interesting new theories might start to emerge about why things are the way they are.
> Climate change and the collapse of global ecosystems can absolutely manage that and according to every serious scientist we are pretty much on the worst case scenario path according to any peer reviewed model.
Except that most models are piss-poor at predicting anything and that they only cherry pick the ones that happen to make it with new data.
On top of that, climate change is a slow moving disaster, and we are typically good at mitigating long term changes (at least way better than urgent crises). Scientists calling for the end of the world at every opportunity will look ridiculous 100 years from now.
Please don't spread false information like this. With any model you choose, we are way over the line where we could mitigate long term changes.
The science is absolutely certain on this one: the only way to prevent disastrous climate changes, including massive rises in sea levels, extreme temperatures and drought in many highly populated areas of the world etc. is to stop emitting CO2 TODAY, literally. Or, well, to be more accurate, a few years ago, more likely.
Either way, urgent overhaul of our whole global economy is the only option, but it remains of course an absurdity in the current political climate.
> On top of that, climate change is a slow moving disaster, and we are typically good at mitigating long term changes (at least way better than urgent crises). Scientists calling for the end of the world at every opportunity will look ridiculous 100 years from now.
I wish I could share your optimism. Climate change may be a slow moving disaster, however it is more a "high latency" moving disaster. In the sense that once the symptoms start hurting us, it will not be possible to administer any control inputs that will effect the course of climate change within an acceptable period of time.
And while we may be good at mitigating long term changes, I think "existential crisis" kind of long term changes may not have any modes of mitigation that would be acceptable to the current generation of humans (like accepting that 90% of world population just won't have a chance of long-term surivival).
>On top of that, climate change is a slow moving disaster, and we are typically good at mitigating long term changes (at least way better than urgent crises).
That statement is laughably incorrect, in fact the complete opposite of what is pointed to by the evidence. Humans are much better at dealing with urgent crises than long term threats due to our evolutionary history. We even have three branches of emergency services and the military that are trained to deal with urgent crises.
You know what the science doesn't show? That we're "typically good at mitigating long term changes". The history of the earth is a story of alternating periods of relative stability and momentous upheaval. Even though we've gotten "smart enough" to become a thorn in nature's side, nature has a nasty habit of rearing its head suddenly and biting back with overwhelming force.
Don't make the mistake of thinking this is something you can safely ignore. If you do, your children will pay the price.
Covid isn't necessarily the primary concern but one crisis among many. Arguably most civilization collapses happened in times when there were too many crises at once, that individually could be handled but all at once or in close succession become overwhelming. A current example of this would be that with climate change we face increase in temperatures causing wildfires on the west coast, deadly heatwaves in the southwest and hurricanes along the Atlantic. Due to Covid hospitals are already overwhelmed so injuries from hurricanes are harder to deal with, making not massive events worse than the sum of their parts. Combine this with governments unwilling to take action and who actively dismantle the preparations already in place and it is worth being concerned.
Calling this a prosperous time is also flawed, for who? The middle class is nearly gone, freedoms are being eroded, racial tensions are still high, the world order is destabilizing as many governments lean into more dictator-like structures. I genuinely want to understand what you see to give you hope because right now I'm failing to find much to grab onto.
More people than ever before in human history live above the line of absolute poverty, today, right now, and this has been a continouos trend for many years so far. The middle class is only eroding insofar as you define things in some wacky ways. In terms of basic acquisitive power, quality of life, access to goods and services and general well-bieng, more people than ever and a larger percentage of the population than ever before live what in fairly recent history would be considered very much middle class or even upper middle class lives. I know it's fashionable to deride the modern world as fucked with poverty and misery (and ironically this is a thing most often done by comfortably middle class, educated people with plenty of access to good standards of living) but none of the basic data on how well our world's 8 billion people live right now actually supports this notion. Shifting goal posts endlessly also can slip into dishonesty.
> Calling this a prosperous time is also flawed, for who? The middle class is nearly gone, freedoms are being eroded, racial tensions are still high, the world order is destabilizing as many governments lean into more dictator-like structures.
- It is a prosperous time for far more than ever before. Within the last thirty years, a new world power has risen and raised 400 million people out of poverty in an unprecedented act of economic engineering with no military conquest to enable it. Never before has this been done. Its neighbour during this time has simultaneously raised 180 million people out of poverty. During this time neither nation has fought its neighbour. Before this massive reduction of human unhappiness, the loss of the median American's third car pales.
- Absolute measures of human standards of living have continuously increased. They are not going down. The major world economies have all improved continuously. You will need to define the middle class and why that measurement is meaningful to you. If Bezos gets Mars and I get a piece of American land the size of San Francisco, our relative inequality will have increased, but I will take that trade every day.
- Racial tensions were way higher in the past. Black people were segregated! In South Africa, they had apartheid. And a little farther back and Japanese-Americans were in concentration camps. In California, the fourteen thousand Army National Guard troops suppressed race riots.
- The world order is being destabilized as America withdraws the shield that preserved Pax Americana. This is true. But that was a subsidy to (or perhaps an investment in) the world, a tide that raised all ships, and America's more than anyone else's. America prospered with world trade. By these actions, America weakens herself. But that's geopolitics. The sands shift with the wind. We shall see what happens. Other generations faced greater threats.
Inequality has increased, and I think this is bad, but I don't get the point of an over-the-top statement like this. Median household income in the US is over $60,000 (source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N). How is that gone?
Tack on the radical shift in how we consume information and how corporate/state actors try to manipulate this new information system to actively promote misinformation and discord with regards to all of the items you listed.
I worry that we’re at a point at which technology can permanently entrench power in the hands of the few, and that the world’s largest democracy is currently in thrall to people who would like to see that happen.
India's independent democracy is messy, however it is young and India is a giant nation. A democracy of 1.4 billion people that even partially functions is a remarkable feat. What they're attempting is obviously no small task. Europe for example has several poorly functioning democracies, to go with two dictatorships. Among ~195 nations, there are not more than three dozen well operating democracies among them, along with another two dozen that kinda-sorta function democratically.
Boring? I certainly disagree with that. Stable is also questionable. Prosperity - one should not take for granted. The world is much more connected today, and most of our prosperity and stability comes from people with varying interests finding ways to work together and trust each other. Sparks in one part of the system can bring down the whole system much more easily.
The pandemic, when combined with widespread misinformation and mistrust, increasing inequality and climate change makes for a potent combination and people are right to be worried.
It’s going to be funny when 50 years from now I see my grand kid’s history textbook, and Brexit, Trump, and the Coronavirus are all together in one paragraph describing people’s anxiety about globalism in the post Cold War world
What am I supposed to think BBC wants for me (from me?) when this already-ominously-worded page popped into view with three additional scary headlines pre-loaded in my eye-line so I've read them before I can even choose not to.
"You may also like:
- Are we on the road to civilisation collapse?
- The perils of short-termism: Civilisation’s greatest threat.
- The greatest long-term threats facing humanity."
I know even discount supermarkets put their highest-converting items at eye-level on the shelves across, so I'm sure the same considerations go into news media and the placement isn't an accident. I remember Facebook's research project inserting more-positive or more-negative stories to a person's personalized News Feed yo successfully influence their mood in that direction. The ability for Facebook or anyone to do such a study makes me pretty confident BBC could detect three "negative" wordings if they hadn't directly paid somebody to write them this way, and they could avoid say I'll "like" them so a momentary positive hits first to maximize my emotional whiplash.
I think what you are "supposed" to think is less important than what you (and everyone) do think, as well as what the downstream consequences are due to your consumption of this type of article, a type which we've likely all read several several instances of every day for years on end.
Regardless of what you think about the concept of hinginess, I'm thoroughly unconvinced by the arguments presented against it in this article.
The first one for example, seems like an adapted doomsday argument: given that we continue to exist for x years at a certain societal level, and given the certainty of a hinge, our prior for the hinge being this century would be very low.
But this is begging the question. The entire point of a hinge is that we don't know if we're going to continue to exist at a certain level of development, thus our assumptions required to develop the prior are dependent on our conclusion that this isn't the period of the hinge.
The other arguments boil down to accusations of bias. These are a little more substantial in that we do actually know these biases exist, and we should account for them. But that doesn't mean necessary that we're not living in a hingey period. It's not necessarily an argument against moreso than a stern warning that more research is needed and the conclusion isn't warranted yet.
I'd think there should be stronger arguments against the premise, and some comments in this post have given far better arguments already.
That's also what stood out to me. It's almost like the article was painting the hypothesis as something a lot of people who 'feel' the same way (as the author) is trying to prove it to be true without going into why do they feel that way and how much bias is in that.
Sure, technology is developing fast, but its been quite fast since just before the start of the industrial revolution or when humans started walking or farming etc. I would speculate during those times of rapid development of some of the historical civilisations there was probably just as much of a feeling of it being at a hinge as now.
It's just that right now we like to attract people's attention and creating suspense and that sense of hingeyness is good at attracting attention and there's now a lot of money to be made from attracting attention. Not just money, but you can drive political action if you give people this kind of sense of do or die urgency. This could turn the hypothesis into a self fulfilling prophecy. That's why we need better arguments against it.
I haven't read the book, podcast, etc... But at a glance, i don't think I buy the "hingeyness" concept.
Stretching the analogy... A hinge matters because the door it hangs is flat. It "only" moves at the hinge. History is anything but flat. It can bend at any point and in any direction.
The 18th century gave us most of the political and economic institutions we have: nation states, republics, liberal democracy, maritime law, modern philosophy, limited liability companies and stock markets.
I don't think this means the 19th and 20th century were determined by those. The US/USSR standoff could have been something else entirely if the nuclear cold war had preceded WWII instead of succeeding it.
The "lever" is technology, and this just gets increasingly powerful as we go along.
The only way that, in retrospect, any century is a "hinge" is if in the following century, we have less powerful technology and ability to impact the world.
So, in a sense, hingeyness simply means "collapse." A century is a hinge inasmuch as it is enough of a collapse to destroy technology.
In any case, I think we are currently underestimating the threat of nuclear war. The threat has not really receded much, if at all, since it was at athe top of everyone's list of fears.
We're still likely to have mass death and ecodestruction appear out of a clear blue sky.
Probably only true if we allow the “hinge” to be a process that spans several centuries, perhaps starting around 1800 with the beginnings of industrialization and gathering pace in the 20th century.
If we look at the 21st century so far, it just hasn’t been... that interesting! Indeed some scholars of technological change (to take just one metric) actually think the pace of change has slowed. The 20th century gave us flight, the Haber-Bosch process, nuclear weapons, antibiotics, space flight, computers, the Pill, the Internet. The 21st? The iPhone? Meh.
Think long term. Expect a humdrum next decade and an interesting next century.
- Instant high fidelity communication and work/business;
- Private and ever-cheaper space flight;
- True automation (it's only the beginning of the 21st, I bet on automation hitting hard mid century);
- AR/VR (which will likely become the escape of choice for much of the world later this century);
- Renewable energy that most can afford (it's already realistic for everyone to be self-sufficient);
- Viable artificial/grown organs (for use in medicine and food production);
And more. It's already been a hell of a century. If your life is boring, it's most likely because it's easy. There's no lack of choice when it comes to excitement, but we're risk averse at the core. The media is full of over-exaggerated bad stuff because it's exciting to watch (and again, risk-free). I hope we don't fuck it up.
I agree; life is easy and a little bit boring for more and more people in the 21st century, unless they specifically choose to do risky things. I think that is a very good thing. I also agree that the media tends to report on bad things and downplays progress. However, I think what is underreported is not the 21st century inventions you mention, which get media coverage, but rather deep long-term global health improvements that began in the 20th century and have been continuing since then: metrics like infant mortality, food security, life expectancy, the eradication of polio. A great source for this is: https://ourworldindata.org/
As for specific 21st century technologies, let’s take those you mention one by one:
> Unprecedented access to information;
Yes. Although this was the growth of the internet and the web, both late-20th century technologies.
> - Instant high fidelity communication and work/business;
Same as the first point.
> - Private and ever-cheaper space flight;
To do basically 20th-century things like putting satellites into orbit... but cheaper! I hope we do something genuinely new this century like going to Mars - but that’s some way off.
> - True automation (it's only the beginning of the 21st, I bet on automation hitting hard mid century);
You’ll need to be more specific but sounds like this isn’t here yet? I agree automation has been improving but again, it’s a long-term trend.
> - AR/VR (which will likely become the escape of choice for much of the world later this century);
Sure, although sounds like this is more about future promise than what we have now, which is a fun but niche entertainment.
> - Renewable energy that most can afford (it's already realistic for everyone to be self-sufficient);
This is good but... again 20th-century tech becoming better and cheaper.
> - Viable artificial/grown organs (for use in medicine and food production);
Promising research but still a way off from becoming a routine medical treatment.
So... I think all of these things are great but, as I mentioned in another reply, they just don’t have the world-historical impact of key 20th century tech like the Haber-Bosch Process, or antibiotics, or powered flight, or effective birth control. I think we are in a phase where we’re mostly improving what we already have (which is great!). Maybe a novel 21st-century technology will come along with that kind of impact, but I don’t think it’s here yet.
> - Renewable energy that most can afford (it's already realistic for everyone to be self-sufficient);
I agree with your comment except this one. I don’t see anything that has come close to the benefits of fossil fuels, and I don’t see the political will to tax fossil fuels sufficiently to curb consumption sufficiently to curb climate change. Any reduction of fossil fuel use in developed countries with the luxury of being able to spend more on less polluting sources of energy will be made up in increased consumption in developing countries.
I was talking more about solar and wind installations, as well as battery tech and the low power consumption of modern tools.
20-30 years ago, if you wanted a stable ~3KW supply, you needed a generator and diesel/petrol. Lights, computers, power tools consumed an immense amount of power compared to today.
Now you can have one turbine and several solar panels coupled with a battery bank and you have the same supply of electricity without burning anything. It can power your whole house and everything you own for decades.
I'm a fan of decentralized energy production, though.
Humph. I think the iPhone (actually, smartphones) is right up there with the biggest changes of the 20th century. It's what put humanity on the Internet. That may not be so obvious to someone from developed countries, where pretty much everyone already had a PC with Internet connection by then, but that was only about 1 billion out of our nearly 8 billion population... about 6 billion more were connected by smartphones over the last decade. The final billion can't afford those yet, but that's changing fast.
The thing is, the smartphone wasn't just cheaper than a PC; it's more accessible and provided greater motivation for connecting people. Messaging like WhatsApp has lowered the cost of what people were already considering essential (staying in touch with friends and relatives) enough to justify the higher initial cost, and voice commands and voice messaging made it usable even for people who were essentially illiterate. The impact on billions of people's daily lives has been enormous.
Only 20 years in (or is it 'already 20y in'?), and there's already reusable rockets, CRISPR, 3D printing and the combo deep learning + astonishingly both powerful and affordable CPU/GPU/TPU.
I would say this is already an interesting century, invention-wise.
Also, one could argue that the 21's internet is not the same as the 20's, in which case modern, cheap and massively deployed internet can be classified as a 21st great invention.
But we're splitting hairs. Centuries are an artificial construct. Measuring pace of change by such a crude method makes no sens to me.
I find it very concerning that all your (excellent) examples of progress are not just 20th century inventions, but entirely before 1970. I do believe progress has slowed down.
We can debate its cause... I'd go for financial incentives drawing smart people to banking and advertising instead of more socially beneficial pursuits.
IMHO iPhone (or smartphones) are under valued. Yes, they do not give you more (like antibiotics give more life or nuclear more energy) but they absolutely help you to lose less time (e.g. navigation that helps you to avoid traffic jams and get lost in unknown place). That replicated in billions of people changes the world’s pace drastically.
To be clear, I’m not saying the iPhone isn’t useful or valuable. It just simply does not compare to the key technologies of the 20th century in terms of transforming the basic parameters of human life on earth.
My favorite example is the Haber-Bosch process for fixing nitrogen and producing synthetic fertilizer (invented 1910). Surely a far more “undervalued” technology than the iPhone! It enabled us to scale up global food production to feed at least an extra 3.5 billion people who otherwise would never have been born, or would have starved.[1] Antibiotics are another great example. Several hundred million lives saved.
With respect, I think this is in a different league from saving some people a little time waiting in traffic.
My 99 year old grandma says that the greatest invention in her lifetime was the washing machine, freeing up an incredible number of labor and hours wasted every week in every household (and usually by women) for more productive tasks.
Different kind of improvement. A smartphone (not the bloody iPhone) has fundamentally changed everyone's life directly.
For the vast majority of people, food production is something that just "happens" out there. They don't grow anything, they just get it from a store.
I've seen people on the Internet who can't afford a simple boiler or an indoors toilet (but they have a phone/computer)... and that's sad, but also amazing.
I agree, they are different kinds of impact. That’s why I like to emphasize the Haber-Bosch process, because it is largely invisible. Mostly people have never heard of it.
Because the impact is different it’s very hard to compare. One interesting thought experiment that can help is to imagine the technology disappearing and think about what the consequences would be. Thinking that through for smartphones and the Haber-Bosch process is left as an exercise for the reader.
>My favorite example is the Haber-Bosch process for fixing nitrogen and producing synthetic fertilizer (invented 1910). Surely a far more “undervalued” technology than the iPhone! It enabled us to scale up global food production to feed at least an extra 3.5 billion people who otherwise would never have been born, or would have starved.
It also kept Germany going in WW1 far longer than otherwise, by compensating for blockades on saltpeter for explosives.
Lets also add vaccines to that. I also wish there were a process like Haber Bosch for phosporic fertilizer (of course it cant, since phospor is not in any quantity in the athmosphere)
I was educated at my university that the hinge of history was actually World War I.
Hundreds of millions died in horrific new waus, the world centralized around a pole of power, and basically the world has only been getting better since.
I was left with this impression when I listened to Blueprint for Armageddon, by Dan Carlin. It's excellent. I thought I knew the history of that era but I was very wrong. The early parts are a little boring compared to what it turns into, but I can't see how that could be avoided given the topic.
> basically the world has only been getting better since
You made me really curious how we measure this! Sorry this turned into a massive wall of text but considering how depressing every news cycle has been for the past few years I hoped it would feel grounding to be able to put some numbers to things, even if they aren't happy numbers :)
Worldwide average human is what I want an idea of, but the closest and largest "good" or "bad" measurement I see in the news on a regular basis is USA economic health as a graph of GDP-per-capita of the entire economy, no divisions based on any geographic boundaries since the economy is borderless, with 'health' seemingly the result of Worthington's Law on the entire-economy scope.
U.S. Economy health data doesn't seem to provide a path to any physical human scope at all, since . I hate the idea of defining "good life" in monetary terms at all, but it seems impossible with only the whole-USA data due to income inequality within a region like the Bay Area, huge disparities in other regions compared to the coasts, people who don't "participate" in the economy directly or at all, etc. The graph of USA GDP growth over time did show a general upward curve, never under 0%, in a way that felt like things getting "generally better" as we hope. Looking at headlines made the data more confusing though, like Bloomberg's from a 2019 report:
> "U.S. GDP Grew a Disappointing 1.2% in Second Quarter — Economic growth was well below expectations; cautious business investment offset robust consumer spending"
I had assumed "Good Health" (or at least "Okay" health) was growth over 0.0%, but I guess not if growing by 1.2% was disappointing. The headline is unclear if that's some sort of official expectation percentage or just theirs, but since it doesn't say what the expected rate was I dunno.
I gave up on the officially-published data being usable here, but I remembered a bunch of press in 2018 about California having the 5th largest economy in the world, larger than the UK's. No "world" or even "USA" average would come from CA-only data, but at least it might be personally fulfilling for me. Unfortunately all the news websites ultimately just link back to this tweet as the original source https://twitter.com/psaffo/status/992530974515781633
I'm aware of the World Happiness Index, but it asks people to describe their own happiness in their own words based on their own area which is useless here. I guess I will have to trust that US GDP growth has the possibility to be an okay representation on the country-wide scale, as long as any growth is separated-equally per capita :)
Sure, in a timeline that includes energy becoming matter and biogenesis and complex life evolving, our era is going to turn out to be uniquely influential.
I don’t think the word hubris does justice to this line of thinking.
Edited to add: the “hinge” people think they can make out is likely just an illusion caused by the phenomena known as the present. Reminds me of Kevin Kelly’s essay “The singularity is always near”: https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-singularity/
I’m also amazed at how good Betteridge’s Law actually is in practice, considering it’s meant to be a joke and not a reliable tool for finding the truth.
Are we not always in the "hinge of history"? What we do determines what the future is like, and the future is dependent on how we act now. If everybody aims towards the highest good, society will probably look better than if we aim towards the worst future possible.
I think something like this can only be determined in retrospect. The importance of a specific event usually makes little impact at the time it occurs, and reverberates through the future. It's only upon looking back that we can see how important it was.
Was Nietzsche world-renowned when he was actively writing, or Einstein when he made his discoveries?
For those who would like to delve a bit deeper into the Hinge of History, this is the link from the article and is well worth the read. It was submitted here 2 days ago and got zero points!
Its often a human mistake to think that right now is the most important time ever because it is literally the moment we are in. With the perspective of history and with the imagination for the future you can start to see how what we think is the most urgent things maybe not so, and you can see how small changes elsewhere might be the best thing for the future.
It can inoculate you against being manipulated by urgency-based calls for action.
> Its often a human mistake to think that right now is the most important time ever because it is literally the moment we are in. With the perspective of history and with the imagination for the future you can start to see how what we think is the most urgent things maybe not so, and you can see how small changes elsewhere might be the best thing for the future.
I agree. Another form of cognition error is our tendency to conceptualize things in Boolean terms, such as whether:
- now is the "most important time ever" (and therefore we should seriously consider doing something about it), or it isn't (and therefore no action is required)
or
- now is plausibly an extremely important time (and therefore we should should seriously consider doing something about it)
On its face, this distinction may seem excessively pedantic and trivial, and it very well may be, but it also very well may not be.
I believe that if one can manage to practice this sort of thinking skilfully, that it can help inoculate one from confusing heuristic predictions about reality, with objective reality itself (which seems to be an extremely common behavior regardless of internet forum).
> It can inoculate you against being manipulated by urgency-based calls for action.
Perspective of history however does not show that being passive is universally what is needed more that if we wait, it gonna be alright. Now that current need is not urgent.
I mean, not being the most important historical moment does not imply it is not important for us and those right after us. Generally we should seek to avoid those super important moments by working on issues before they get so bad.
> Its often a human mistake to think that right now is the most important time ever because it is literally the moment we are in.
Whenever I ask my youngest child what their favourite toy is, more often than not it is the one they have just played with, or what their favourite book is, and it is the one they have most recently read. I suspect that our view of history is similar. Now is always the most important moment in time, whichever time now is.
The peak of what aspect of human civilization? And why 2015?
[Edit: I find it highly unlikely the peak of human civilization, whatever it means, should happen during my lifetime. Surely the Romans in 100BC might have thought the same as you do? Why do you think there won't be people in 2222 who think the same?]
I personally felt that Brexit / Trump marked a turning point where the foundations of the Western world were fundamentally called into question. Things have felt a lot less stable to me since then.
Geopolitics is one thing, but climate and environment are another. I remember in the 90s growing up as a kid hearing all this talk about the environment and if we act now we can turn it around etc. That turn around never came. Global weather events seem to be getting more extreme / frequent. The number of animal species we've wiped out is pretty mind boggling.
It feels like the combined trajectory of geopolitics, the climate, and biodiversity are heading in a direction that won't support life as we lived it in the 20th century.
Id be happy to be dead wrong about that. But it seems to me we've definitely wrecked the planet and that'll have huge consequences that'll change the nature of life on earth. It also seems to be the case that when a society collapses and another emerges the default seems to be an authoritarian regime with democracy being somewhat of an anomaly.
In 2001, AQ found a "hack" that turned a commonly used benign technology into a weapon that took down two towers. I think we should have been less narrowly focused on winning a "War on Terror" and put some effort into preventing other such "hacks" that nation states could employ against the West.
Yes, we have been since 1945, when the first persistent existential threat we created ourselves first arose... Nuclear Weapons.
Now, we have the added threat of Genetic Engineering, the second existential threat we created ourselves.
All of our Institutions have an embedded growth obligation they haven't been able to meet since the 1960s, which lead to their being run by people willing to fudge the truth to keep the illusion of competence and power going.
We're on the edge of the abyss... and many people don't even realize it.
> Yes, we have been since 1945, when the first persistent existential threat we created ourselves first arose... Nuclear Weapons.
That makes me wonder at what point the world's nuclear arsenal became big enough to be an existential threat. For reference, there were apparently ~300 atomic bombs in the world in 1950:
Silly concept; the present is perpetually the most important time in history because it is the only time we can do anything. The past is cemented by what happened, and the future is not here. There always is re-writing history, but then again that is achieved in the present. The present is the only time that can matter, because it's the only time we have agency.
The historian Yuval Noah Harari says that we are transitioning from an era dominated by human emotion, into an era dominated by data-driven manipulation of those emotions.
By gathering data from each individual, it is possible to build a profile that can be used to predict how that person would react to different stimuli. And at scale, it can be used to trigger people's emotions like playing a piano, manipulating them at will.
Today we can already see that by emphasizing divisive topics like: "abortion", "gun control", "immigration"... it is possible to make people upset towards each other with a high success rate. What if the reason these topics are emphasized is not morality but really about how people will emotionally react to them?
The author's argument that we are not at a hinge point because "there are potentially a vast number of people ahead of us, yet to born" is challenged by the doomsday argument which suggests that it is statically most likely that the future population is equivalent to the historic population, and thus, given that the current population is exceptionally high, catastrophic collapse is imminent. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument
Subjectively it feels sorta true for a 40 year old, but I bet it pales in comparison to WW2. Large portions of many nations perished, and their kin had to rebuild society. Nuclear weapons were deployed for the first time.
The fact that we even recovered from it is amazing (although some didn't, certainly).
I live in the US because my grandparents' generation lost the war. And the US has a generation named after the effects of the war (baby boomers).
I remember reading the phrase "post war" dozens or hundreds of times as a child, but it took awhile for the reality of it to sink in.
This is all an argument that there were perceptually worse times before, so how could it be bad now?
WW2 setup an era defined by one very unusual property: the absolute dominance of the United States and it's economy as the global hegemon.
But the US is not adapted to the notion that what it achieved from that era was a set of historically unique advantages that are not a property of "American exceptionalusm" but rather what you get when you're one of the few nations on the planet which didn't have its cities bombed.
Agreed. Maybe biggest since WWII, certainly not biggest ever. Climate change is terrible but because it's smooth (even if superlinear) it's hard to ascribe hinginess to a specific moment.
C.f. altitude vs geographic prominence.
Also, I think the fear of A.I. has distorted the fact the outward rate of change has declined massively from say the "special century" of 1870-1970, even if it has picked back up a bit in recent years.
Agreed. Every great power today was profoundly molded by it. America & Soviet Union became the sole superpowers. It basically decided the communist government of China. It eventually set free the other next great powers, such as India and Nigeria, from colonial rule. The impact on technology was equally profound. The computer, radar, the jet, the turbo pumped liquid rocket, the drone, the atomic bomb...
I mean, an entirely new source of energy was first harnessed (really the first since the invention of fire) and the first human made object was sent (briefly) into space...
Hingey times are defined in retrospect. I do think covid provides an easy event for future historians to point to as the narrative of this time is written.
As people living through it we know the reality is far more complicated - there are wars, rising popularism, the rise of China, a hyperactive media and a million other factors. COVID will be the convenient way to explain the big changes to the world order that are already underway, just as we were taught the assassination of Franz Ferdinand kicked off World War I.
Twenty years ago or so it was "the end of history." Now it's a hinge? It sounds like historians keep finding solutions that are in need of problem. Or perhaps, a book or two needs to be sold?
Meanwhile, we're struggling to get past history properly re-paradigmed.
We're not, time between start of WWII and till the Arab Oil embargo when the technical revolution ended, was quite a bit more influential. And yes sure people had an even better way to destroy biosphere then too, as well as lots of ways to make things better, and it's fair to say our grandfathers used this resource in general, in a very constructive way.
We neither got that much potential to either break or fix things, nor we make a wiser use of what we have. Yes we got Elon Musk sure, but apart from him, all that the humankind is doing is finding progressively sneakier ways to make people click on ads, which is hardly a great achievement. Everything else from art to politics is just a tool to this end.
The next few decades can be claimed as the hinge of history due to two reasons, climate change and genetic engineering. There have been many wars and changes in the past, but now is the first time that our technology has basically reached worldwide geoengineering scale. We are fundamentally changing the climate of the entire world, that has never happened before in human history.
Throughout all of human history, the human has not changed. If you somehow time traveled a human baby from 10k BC to present day, they would grow up and fit in with no issues. Now the very nature of what is human could change due to genetic engineering. Again, this has never happened before in human history.
I think yes. There are numerous Anthropocene existential threats which are likely to lead extinction. <Edited to deleted enumeration of threats and snarky comments about nothing being done about it.> Decisions we make now will have a major impact on whether humans survive or not.
That's actually probably not true. I'm not a historian, but one interesting thing I've learned from reading lots of history is the different attitudes different societies had about the past/future.
As far as I know, it's only really since the enlightenment/industrial revolution, that people feel like the future is going to be better. The idea that the past was the golden age, where Humans were much more advanced, knew more, Had better technology, etc, seems to be the common position in history.
Im not sure about the feeling that society was"hungry" ala the article, but I suspect that feeling is connected.
If the stakes keep on rising, how high would they be 50 years from now? And in 200? 2000?
How high were the stakes 300 years ago? Should we think people living in 1720 didn't have it that bad compared to now? Will people in the future look at now and think the same?
Being knocked down didn't sting as much when nobody had electricity, indoor plumbing, or technological aids. Modern society has much more to lose from a dire economic collapse.
I didn't read the article, but the answer is emphatically yes. We are rubbing up against the reality that most humans are less and less valuable to other humans such that they are basically valueless, and their market value diminishes accordingly, and that technological advances and market efficiencies are actually eliminating scarcity within certain arenas. We have to grapple with the fact that most humans offer almost nothing of value, while we actually have the capability, within certain domains, to actually allow them to be entitled to certain things.
Pair this with neural interfaces, AI, asteroid and celestial body mining, cheap space travel, and economics are going to start looking weird. I say this as an avid fan of capitalism. It isn't going to fail because of corruption, it's going to fail because markets are optimized and technology is increasingly pushing your average bloke out of the game.
Let me put more concrete, recent evidences that we value human life more, not less.
Black lives matter.
By any standard, it's clear racial discrimination has gotten better over the years (it's still nowhere near good enough, but better than in the past, even only by small relative amount), as there's no doubt police brutality has been worse in the past. But why are we outraging now ? Each single death now matters more now, because each injustice has much higher chance of getting broadcast and shared widely. What would have been ignored and silently covered up are now seeing the eyes of the world, and the direct consequence of that is the enormous movement.
Whether you agree that's a good idea or not, you can't deny the fact that now Japan is spending tremendous amount of money to protect the lives of relatively small number of people, and it had a popular support in Japan, meaning Japanese were more than happy to spend tons of money to protect their fellow citizens.
I wrote that comment when I was drunk, so let me try to clarify.
I don't mean we value human life less in the way that a woke 14 year old means that, which is the way you seem to have interpreted it. I mean it in the sense of market value. Technology and market efficiency are leading to your average person being less valuable to other people, and fewer people being substantially more valuable. Maybe one farmer can now feed 100,000 people. The 999 people it used to take to feed those 100,000 people are actually less valuable to society than they were prior to the technological and market advances that allowed that one person to feed 100,000 people. Sure they can get different jobs, and new jobs are created, but there is no guarantee that this happens according to any functional ratio; it's certainly not 1:1.
This is essentially why wages are stagnating. Most people are actually worth less to society than they used to be. And again, I don't mean that in the woke sense, I mean it in the market sense. I mean that wages are accurately reflecting their true market value, and that value is less and less as time goes on. I think that the minimum barrier to entry in order to produce market value is constantly rising, and is basically happening on the basis of something like IQ. Maybe the next century will be characterized by more jobs like software and hardware engineers, while even those jobs will change and eventually be done by fewer and fewer people, but the point is that not everyone will actually be able to do those jobs. If nurses and doctors and PAs are phased out in favor of diagnostic algorithms and service utilities, for example, that doesn't mean that those millions of roles will have millions of new roles created in order to service the technology. And more importantly, the new roles to service the technology might actually require capabilities that most of those people are not actually capable of.
I'm not making a statement about society being some way and it should be some other way. I'm saying that our societies are fundamentally predicated on the notion that stability can be achieved simply due to the idea that people provide relative value to one another. This idea is what has allowed liberal democracies to function with minimal authoritarian influence. That most people are capable of providing sufficient utility to one another such that, left to their own devices, they are able to secure resources for themselves by providing utility to others. This is less true now than it was, and will continue to be less true as time goes on. All I'm saying is that we're approaching a hinge point where we have to grapple with this reality.
I wonder what percentage of people want to see huge historical changes at this point. I certainly feel that the past decades were too stable, then stagnant, and it feels like covid is accelerating the moves considerably. If anything, i want more of it
Be careful what you wish for. Rapid large-scale change is exciting perhaps, but not controllable. It is a recipe for sub-populations to slip through the cracks, increasing human suffering.
Thought experiment: Lets say you live the life of a random human throughout all time, both past and future. That is one data point, but one data point can tell us quite a lot still. So lets say you start your life, and you notice that the human population had just expanded exponentially to 100 times what it usually was, what would you assume will happen in the future?
If the future will hold millions of years with humanity prospering on earth with roughly current population number then picking a human born today is very small, it is like winning the lottery.
If humanity expands quadratically to other solar systems then the chance of being born today is basically none.
The most likely scenario would be that human population is currently at its peak and the population will within not that many generations dwindle down to almost nothing and probably go extinct.
I don't think this logic applies to the demographics of today. The total number of humans to have ever lived is calculated to be ~105 billion. So assuming you're applying that logic to today, you're one of the most recent ~7%, which doesn't seem that remarkable -- at least not to the point of assuming fatalistic scenarios.
If humanity continues like this with no new discoveries then in ten million years we would have 200 million per year * 10 million years = 2 quadrillion people. Getting a human who lived at the start of that peak is very improbable.
But you are right, civilization lasting another few thousand years isn't that improbable. Just that it is strange that it would last a thousand years but not a million, seems like humanity should have figured out how to stabilize things if civlization lasts that long.
Edit: Or maybe our ultimate downfall will just be lack of evolutionary pressure so at some point nobody can sustain civlization. That wouldn't happen in a thousand years but a million years is definitely enough.
Edit2: Or we solve our lifespan issue very soon and people no longer die, so people also no longer can procreate or they would exhaust available resources.
I'll read the article in the morning. Apologies for pre-commenting.
I do not believe the world hinges on 2020. It is certain more than one nation is going through defining moments, but the world will survive it - as it will the coronavirus.
I do believe that the United States is at a tipping point unlike any moment in the past 50 years. Whether anyone likes it or not, we are the world's leading consumer and second leading producer (GDP). We have massive influence on foreign affairs, soft power, and the global environment.
Domestically, four more years of the current administration and its lack of rule of law will drive more people toward resistance. It will enable those who envy our president's unchecked power to emulate it at any level - the shamelessness, the gaslighting, and the bullying - so that our politics makes the 20th century look downright polite.
The decision to, or not to, participate in global efforts to reduce human impact on the environment could be a defining moment for the next few hundred years of human existence. So yeah, I think this is a huge moment for the US, and the world.
Just starting in on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism,_the_Highest_Stage... and while much of what VIL[1] says could be written a century later, my initial skim of "VIII. PARASITISM AND DECAY OF CAPITALISM" reveals that he's assumed that an imperial power will also be a creditor.
> "In the geniuses Lenin and Trotzky, the Bolshevik movement found its leadership. Lenin had no use for democracy as it was known in America. To him it was a sham, a front for the great capitalist trusts, which—even though the capitalists themselves might not know it—were doomed to get bigger on a shrinking market, until international capitalist war, bankruptcy, and working-class revolution was the result. Lenin was as sure that this would happen as he was that the sun would rise the next morning. The only dispute was the matter of timing; a few Bolshevik pessimists thought that the capitalist world might last into the 1920's."
In the grand scheme of things, everything that happened this year is probably minor in comparison to Petrov's decision.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...