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I look at all the threats to our way of life and I wonder if we are at the high point of our civilization and it's all downhill from here.   Nuclear proliferation, terrorism, climate change, US government bankruptcy, oceans filling up with plastic, political polarization...   What does the future hold?  An economic crash and depression caused by exploding federal debt?  Rising seas flooding major coastal areas around the world?  Some rogue state or terrorist organization setting off a nuclear weapon in a major city?  Liberals and conservatives literally shooting at each other, in a civil war with no front lines or boundaries?  A pandemic racing through and eliminating a billion or so people and causing a severe economic decline?  

Are we the lucky ones who are living at peak civilization on earth?  And in 10 or 20 years it all rolls over and either declines or crashes and we enter a new dark age, with disease, depression, pollution, and chaos?  

People like to look up at the sky and wonder if anyone else is out there.  But isn't it possible, or even probable, that if the beings on another planet are smart enough, they will eventually destroy themselves, by raping their environment, by borrowing themselves into bankruptcy, by allowing their arguments to get out of control, just like we are doing?    

Maybe we should just enjoy it while it lasts.  We're the lucky ones who live at the peak of history.  We have everything.

"I wish you would step back from that ledge, my friend." Watch some Steven Pinker and relax a bit.

We live in an age of sensationalism. We no longer know fact from fiction. But this is all very, very cyclical. Just go back and look at each decade. There's always been some sort of "mass hysteria" in the air. Everything is just faster now processing and networking wise. That's all it is.

(02-01-2020, 10:28 AM)Caldrac Wrote: [ -> ]We live in an age of sensationalism. We no longer know fact from fiction. But this is all very, very cyclical. Just go back and look at each decade. There's always been some sort of "mass hysteria" in the air. Everything is just faster now processing and networking wise. That's all it is.

Mostly right.
The other thing that is new about this time in place is how easy it is to feel like you have a community of like-minded people.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the mainstream newspapers and TV channels were able to make everyone feel like organizations like the John Birch society or CPUSA was fringe and not respectable. Now people just cling to their little sub group and sub narrative more when you try to tell them their views are not respectable.

We are overdue for the Fourth Turning. Strauss & Howe's generational theory posits a major crisis every 4 generations or so. We cycle from

High
to
Awakening
to
Unraveling
to
Crisis

and each generation has its archetypes as drivers:

Prophet
Nomad
Hero
Artist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2...nal_theory

“Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen.
Keep in the sunlight.”

— Benjamin Franklin

I have this on a cubicle wall at work where I can always see it. Wise words to live by.

(02-01-2020, 08:05 AM)The Real Marty Wrote: [ -> ]I look at all the threats to our way of life and I wonder if we are at the high point of our civilization and it's all downhill from here.   Nuclear proliferation, terrorism, climate change, US government bankruptcy, oceans filling up with plastic, political polarization...   What does the future hold?  An economic crash and depression caused by exploding federal debt?  Rising seas flooding major coastal areas around the world?  Some rogue state or terrorist organization setting off a nuclear weapon in a major city?  Liberals and conservatives literally shooting at each other, in a civil war with no front lines or boundaries?  A pandemic racing through and eliminating a billion or so people and causing a severe economic decline?  

Are we the lucky ones who are living at peak civilization on earth?  And in 10 or 20 years it all rolls over and either declines or crashes and we enter a new dark age, with disease, depression, pollution, and chaos?  

People like to look up at the sky and wonder if anyone else is out there.  But isn't it possible, or even probable, that if the beings on another planet are smart enough, they will eventually destroy themselves, by raping their environment, by borrowing themselves into bankruptcy, by allowing their arguments to get out of control, just like we are doing?    

Maybe we should just enjoy it while it lasts.  We're the lucky ones who live at the peak of history.  We have everything.

Predictions of doom have always been with us. Overpopulation will result in mass starvation and war by 1980. We're going to run out of oil by 2000. Parts of NYC will be underwater by 2010. The next ice age has already started. No sense planning for the future because the world will end in a nuclear war. There are lots more.

Yes, we are lucky to be alive and living in the greatest country on Earth during the time of the best of everything.

Doom is always possible, but has proven to be much less likely than the prophets of doom would have you believe. The debt is bad, but manageable. Despite the alarmist rhetoric, Global Warming is not significant, and warmer is better for the biosphere. The rate of sea level rise is the same now as it was 100 years ago, we're still coming out of the "little ice age." The US has had no major terrorist attacks since 9/11.

(02-01-2020, 12:20 PM)Byron LeftTown Wrote: [ -> ]We are overdue for the Fourth Turning.  Strauss & Howe's generational theory posits a major crisis every 4 generations or so.  We cycle from

High
to
Awakening
to
Unraveling
to
Crisis

and each generation has its archetypes as drivers:

Prophet
Nomad
Hero
Artist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2...nal_theory

Rinse, cycle, repeat. We build and build and build until there's no more room left at the top. Then the top topples over and we repeat the cycle. 

This has been going on now for what feels like a few millenniums. 

(02-01-2020, 08:05 AM)The Real Marty Wrote: [ -> ]I look at all the threats to our way of life and I wonder if we are at the high point of our civilization and it's all downhill from here.   Nuclear proliferation, terrorism, climate change, US government bankruptcy, oceans filling up with plastic, political polarization...   What does the future hold?  An economic crash and depression caused by exploding federal debt?  Rising seas flooding major coastal areas around the world?  Some rogue state or terrorist organization setting off a nuclear weapon in a major city?  Liberals and conservatives literally shooting at each other, in a civil war with no front lines or boundaries?  A pandemic racing through and eliminating a billion or so people and causing a severe economic decline?  

Are we the lucky ones who are living at peak civilization on earth?  And in 10 or 20 years it all rolls over and either declines or crashes and we enter a new dark age, with disease, depression, pollution, and chaos?  

People like to look up at the sky and wonder if anyone else is out there.  But isn't it possible, or even probable, that if the beings on another planet are smart enough, they will eventually destroy themselves, by raping their environment, by borrowing themselves into bankruptcy, by allowing their arguments to get out of control, just like we are doing?    

Maybe we should just enjoy it while it lasts.  We're the lucky ones who live at the peak of history.  We have everything.

What you're referring to here is a scientific theory referred to as the Great Filter. According to the theory, the reason we haven't found any advanced life out there is because all other civilizations have reached a certain point and then vanished, died off, ceased to exist, whatever. The ones left aren't advanced enough to be found. The question is what the event that triggers the filter is. Is it the weaponization of the atom? A meteor impact? Environmental damage to the planet from industrialization? Or is it something we haven't encountered yet, like an effort to combine matter and anti-matter, or to create some kind of "stargate" style method of space travel?

Under this logic, the best case scenario for us would be future expeditions finding remnants of primitive civilizations on other planets, as that would suggest that we have already passed and survived the Great Filter event. A bad scenario would be finding evidence of a civilization more advanced than ours, as that would indicate that we haven't reached the Great Filter event yet. The worst case scenario would be finding the remnants of a civilization roughly as advanced as ours, because it would mean that we are very close to finding out what's going to kill us all.

The reason we haven’t found other civilizations is because of the immense vastness of space. Most people don’t realize, or simply can’t comprehend just how big the universe is.

(02-03-2020, 01:36 PM)homebiscuit Wrote: [ -> ]The reason we haven’t found other civilizations is because of the immense vastness of space. Most people don’t realize, or simply can’t comprehend just how big the universe is.

The answer to that is how long it has been in existence.

Humanity is capable of interstellar travel, albeit there are some obstacles to overcome and it is far too expensive to contemplate anytime soon. But (say) 1000 years from now, assuming no "Great Filter" event TJ described, it should be worth colonizing planets around other stars. Using 1/10 the speed of light as a speed limit gets us to the other side of the galaxy in about a million years. By 10 million years humanity, if not stopped, will inhabit all of the inhabitable planets in the galaxy. The galaxy has been around for 13 billion years, and chemically developed to sustain advanced life for at least a billion years (Earth is 4.6 billion years old). If races capable of interstellar travel are at all common, Earth would have been colonized long ago by another race. The similarity in our DNA to even low life forms on Earth means that we originated here, we are not that other race or their offspring. It's highly likely that we are unique in our galaxy.

There are billions of other galaxies which could have such civilizations without yet reaching the Milky Way of course.

One other possibility is that some ethically superior race is keeping Earth as a zoo. That might make sense if faster than light (FTL) travel is possible, but FTL travel reduces the time required from one planet to inhabit an entire galaxy down to the rate of population growth. That would require 30 or 40 doublings, which for humans is just 3,000 to 4,000 years. That makes the possibility of one other race developing at the same time as ours essentially zero.