this but unironically. democracy can only function in a society with good education, otherwise you end up with populists.

and education gets to the people because it pays off for the people economically. you give 12 years of your lifetime, you receive a well-paying job afterwards. if economic growth slows down, people won't be engineers anymore and people will receive less education, thus weakening democracy.

Water is the only renewable energy source that isn't that much more complicated than coal.

Atomism existed for millenia before we investigated this possibilty to such a degree that we were able leverage that concept to change the world. Its goes back to the 8th century BCE in India and the 5th century BCE in Greece. In both cases, people engaged in it imaginatively and thinking was applied. But its reach was small and only effected a small group who weren't able to make a large societal impact.

Even in the 17th century, when there was a revival of interest in epicurean atomism, it was actively competing with corpulism. Hell, Mendelev, creator of the periodic table, didn't believe in atoms. That's sort of crazy to me!

Dalton, whose atomic weight was leveraged by Mendeleev and the rest rejected, posited what later became the basis of modern atomic theory. Einstein further developed this with Brownian motion describing how atoms effected the seemingly random movements of pollen. Perrin later verifies this experimentally in 1908.

So more than just the idea, it's the culture of inquiry, debate, skepticism, investigation, and, eventually, experimentation that is important. Not just the idea. I guess, if I were to preserve anything, it would be that culture. No sentence can do that. But people's radiance can.

* Disclaimer: this is a quick gloss of a long timeframe. A lot of details were omitted.

nah, the idea that everything is made from atoms is not very useful for most practical applications. you can even build fully-functional wind turbines, lightning bulbs and probably even telegraph networks without ever understanding anything about atoms.

Fuck Ted Faro.

Periods mfer! Can you use one‽

I think a lot will depend on whether nuclear wars break out but yeah, even in the worst case scenarios I don't see civilization dissappearing entirely. And honestly it all kinda makes sense to me. Nature has to regulate itself somehow. If one species becomes too dominant things get tipped out of balance. If you have an infection because an organism that is usually present in small numbers on your body has turned predatory and is growing beyond sustainable levels you develop a fever until things are back to normal. It's the alternative to dying. (Matrix Elrond had it right)

I think there will be a large decline in population numbers, but it should be through low birth rates and not through wars/famines. also, it will take probably a century or longer, and not happen within a few years.

we're facing extreme economic pressure in the next 5 years to successfully implement economic reforms (tax the rich, universal basic income) to be able to survive. but, as many people have pointed out already, UBI is ultimately only a bandaid solution, because it relies on political goodwill from activists fighting for the good cause, and that makes it questionable whether it can stay implemented un-interruptedly for very long times. so, population decline would make the society more resilient because people could demand higher wages, because there's lower supply of human labor, and that would be a long-term solution.

St. Carlin

100% . I love to see it!

Let the shower wash away your tears...

When faced with a changing environment, a species has 3 choices: Adapt, Migrate, or Die.

Humans have apparently decided to vault past the first two and just yank that third lever.

Those other species weren't the authors of the global ecosystem's demise, even with an understanding of the situation and opportunity to change the course of events

Not really a fair comparison, is what I'm saying.

You're running off the assumption that the survivors know useful information and that theyre also able to utilize that useful information plus be able to source needed materials since they wont have travel

I think we're assuming books will continue to exist.

I think one of the real marvels of civilization is the redundancy of information. For every college course you've taken there's a text book, and there may have been dozens of physical copies of that book used in your class, but also for many other classes at other schools that taught that same subject. There may have been 10,000 copies of that book in circulation across the globe, in many different countries.

It's not impossible to lose information forever, but we've put in some really strong defenses against that really happening. There are a lot of libraries in coastal areas which could flood, or big cities that could burn after wars or riots. But there are also plenty of libraries in small towns, and at high elevations. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Aspen has a public library for instance, and so do some of the small towns nearby that you don't know the name of.

The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.

-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Arthur Dent realizes that he, as an individual, is pretty useless for improving a society, but he can make a damn fine sammie.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean regarding health and lifespan, but I think looking forward from 2025, things are quickly going to go off the rails. We've already been seeing severe problems resulting from climate change for years now, and I think that it's going to rapidly get worse within the next 5-10 years. I'm not talking about sea level rise (except in very vulnerable places that are already partially underwater, like Florida), but about intensifying weather disasters, droughts, and shocks to the global food supply. As a result of this, I think we will see more and more unrest as well as authoritarianism used to deal with that unrest. How quickly all this is going to decimate the population is anyone's guess.

Yep. It doesn't count any of the other huge problems we're creating.

• Our farming techniques deplete the land and turn it to desert
• Over-fishing/hunting have led multiple animal populations on the brink of collapse. Even a small change could end it.
• We're very close to depleting aquifers all over the globe. Once those are gone we don't have anything to drink or to water our crops.
• We're poisoning the skies and waterways with toxic chemicals, plastics, and forever chemicals.
• We're breeding antibiotic resistant germs and modern travel allows viruses to spread worldwide in hours/days

We're rushing towards our destruction in multiple ways. Any of those alone would result in massive deaths. And as resources get tighter, disputes and wars will break out over what's left.

All of these together will nearly certainly lead to our destruction. And this is going to start hitting hard within 5-10 years.