I don’t think it’s so much that people have gotten dumber, there’s always been dumb folk, but the age of social media has made them less fearful of looking stupid.
It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.
There’s also the compounding effect of being able to hear more voices from around the world thanks to the internet.
Every village has an idiot. These days you don’t need to visit the village to run into their idiot.
And now that it’s easy to do so, they’re banding together to form entire metropoli of only idiots.
They have their own village now.
As I tend to say: before social media every village had a village idiot. Now the village idiots are connected, more easily to find and spreading their lack of knowledge.
The internet has made it easy to find others to group with no matter how extreme you are.
It’s also allowed then to connect with one another. Pre- digital age, every village had their idiot. Now every village idiot can share their stupidity with one another instantly.
There was a ton of stupid conspiracy theories around the whole clones sheep thing back then. I think looking back on that time period (like two decades ago, not one) the dumb conspiracies were forgotten as they didn’t lead to anything outside of fearmongering.
Same for the moon landing, there are still conspiracies that it was all faked.
No, the earth will not be ok of we do the bare minimum
Oh the earth will absolutly be ok. It’s we that won’t be.
Or in the worst case, all life on Earth won’t be ok.
No, life in general would be fine. It will be (already is) a mass extinction but earth had a couple of those and life will bounce back.
The worst case scenario is turning Earth into a planet with a climate like Venus’s.
A planet that proves the existence of runaway greenhouse effects btw.
It is theoretically possible that life exists there, but multicellular life is considered unlikely, and we’ll probably never get to take surface samples, given it’s been measured at 464 Celsius.
We probably can’t fuck up the planet that badly, but toss in a nuclear exchange to greenhouse effects and an unfortunate volcanic eruption or two?
You say that as it’s not a big deal.
Do you really want to see a world without dolphins, pandas, tigers, anacondas…?
I don’t think he’s saying it’s not a big deal for us, but for the planet.
I know, but that’s a very detached and unemotional take… Sure “life” will keep existing. But not the life we know. That we love. That we grew up loving so much. I understand not everyone feels exactly like me. I was absurdly fascinated by biology books and wildlife documentaries and would read and watch them religiously.
Thinking of all of that just dying and ending truly breaks my heart. More than most anything.
Just not as much as the thought of humanity disappearing. But I know most people share that sadness.
I also don’t think the person is unemotional, it’s more about having the correct idea of what’s actually going to happen if we don’t do anything. I also think ecology needs more rationality, otherwise we get people closing nuclear plants to restart coal plants.
It would be a shame for my anaconda if we ain’t got buns, hon.
We’d be dead as well, so wouldn’t see them anyway.
Also, the world is pretty cool without dinonsaurs. It will still be pretty cool with what ever comes after what we currently have.
I can’t explain how knowing all the animals you grew up loving will die forever is sad. If you don’t feel it you don’t I guess.
Well, I could imagine it if I wanted to make myself sad. But I, personally, will be dead long before even the last Panda. So it’s really just a hypothetical.
I even think humanity will survive fine as many icy places will become habitable and we’re good at adapting to extreme climates. Overall it’s rather our current civilisations with the bad but also the good in them that are the most endangered.
If we manage to keep the warming to levels seen in previous warming periods, humanity might come out better on average in the long run, but the planet is heating faster than it did in those other periods and we haven’t demonstrated any ability to control ourselves. We’d have to stop generating CO2 pretty soon to avoid surpassing the last great warming period.
I guess people didn’t understand my point. If we don’t curb our carbon emissions, we’re certainly going to have a climate that we never lived and it will kill a lot of people. But it’s not unlimited, at some point we will not be able emit more carbon, because there’s no more or we lost the ability to do so. So while fewer than today, there will probably still be habitable places like Nothern Canada and Russia. I think humanity would be able to survive there, although much smaller and the centuries of disasters would have destroyed our civilisations as we know them.
People probably thought I’m denying the urgency to do an ecological transition, but I’m not. I’m trying to comment on what would actually happen, similarly to previous comment saying that the planet itself is not going to die.
You’re making an assumption that the feedback loops are all well understood. They might be, or maybe there will be some runaway effect, some source of carbon or other greenhouse gas that’s completely unknown, gets released, and boils the oceans.
Humans : challenge accepted.
We aren’t doing the bare minimum. We’re doing less than the bare minimum. That’s the problem.
*the Earth as we know it
We’ll cause a mass extinction, possibly taking us down with it, but the planet will survive at least until the sun expands and eats us whole in a couple billion years
of course the moon exists, but it is hollow. it is a reptilian space ship and arrived 12.8k years ago
Nah, it’s a giant spider egg.
Don’t worry, though, when it hatches it will inexplicably lay an egg the same size and density as the first one somehow.
Space Whale, not spider. The spiders are the parasites that live on the egg.
How can it be hollow if it is made out of cheese?
It’s swiss? With a huge air bubble in the middle?
That exhaustion is the whole point.
Also science way back: “Hey guys, isn’t phlogiston just the absolute best? And lobotomies are so cool they deserve a Nobel prize.”
Lobotomies still work in certain cases of epilepsy
Did you think this was a clever response?
Scientists =/= Science Educators.
Both groups existed decades ago and still exist today
We’re still making incredible advancements. Have you read the stuff on gravitational waves?
The real issue is that scientists have access to twitter and have the same basic urges as anyone else, the urge to correct the people who are wrong.
your kid will die if you won’t use vaccine isn’t exactly great and accurate science communication
I, too, require great and accurate science communication in my funny JPEGs
It is a meme
