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All Tomorrows and Man after Man: What is your prediction for the future of mankind?


Kurshok

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I'd like to hear the thoughts of the people on this board of what they think the future of mankind holds. Will we eventually diverge as a species into multiple descendant races? Or will we somehow keep our baseline DNA and form universally compatible? Will we be a free society or a dystopia? Is the future still malleable depending on the will of the people and the will to risk it all, or do only a small elite control us all with free choice being an illusion? Will we get into interstellar travel, or are we doomed to die when our sun does, if not wipe ourselves out before then?

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The only way a species can diverge into different "races" is, when there isn't much intercourse. So that can only happen on earth after global travel died. Interstellar travel is almost impossible without fusion power - which always was, always is and maybe always will be just fifty years away...

Most countries are already dystopias, free will for the majority is always an illusion and most probably also know that. Greed for wealth and power doesn't really seem to die. The terraforming project also has already did enough harm - so climate will continue to get worse both politically and metheorologically for some decades from now.

The future is all biblical plagues caused by humankind itself.

 

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If everyone had a level of consumerism that the US has, we would need 12 Earths to satisfy it. While policies of infinite growth are carried out as now, where the profits of a few prevail over the welfare of the rest and a percentage in the stock market more than a human life, the days of humanity are numbered.
There were recently heavy rains in polar areas, the first ever recorded.
We are not 5 minutes before 12 o'clock, but seconds and at the conferences of the climate, apart from cold buffet and selling CO2 quotas to each other, absolutely nothing happens.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2124366-forget-snow-rain-will-become-main-precipitation-in-the-arctic/

Washington beach, nice

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Our children and grandchildren will piss on our graves in gratitude

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21 hours ago, Kurshok said:

So... a lot of people here have a pessimistic view of humanity's future?

Hey, i gave you the optimistic version where humankind adapts and survives.

There still is a significant chance for thermonuclear war by accident - which would probably just be the end of the human species as a whole...

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A thermonuclear war is not necessary, nor is it going to happen by accident. In case there is a military act with another country, a missile is launched that explodes 200 km above this country and it is over, since due to the EMP effect this country is deprived from one moment to another without infrastructure, communication, electricity or electronics. To consequences without supplies of water, fuel, food and without any ability to strike back. That is the risk of nuclear weapon nowaday.

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1 hour ago, Abusimplea said:

Hey, i gave you the optimistic version where humankind adapts and survives.

There still is a significant chance for thermonuclear war by accident - which would probably just be the end of the human species as a whole...

It would be better for humanity to die free than live as slaves.

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4 minutes ago, Kurshok said:

It would be better for humanity to die free than live as slaves.

Well, currently about 1% of humanity is living free and while i don't expect that number to significantly change in the near future.
While a sudden death of 99% of the population would certainly help a lot on stopping the ongoing terraforming, i somehow am not quite able to actually wish for that to happen though...

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Freedom is irrelevant in extreme weather and environment, so only who is fittest to survive in extreme conditions counts.
With massive desertifications, floods, increasingly stronger hurricanes and extreme temperatures and infrastructure that have gone to hell.

 

Germany last month

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No more jokes and excuses about climate change.

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@OrbWeaver
Maybe you'd care to elaborate on what your standard of evidence is? We have abundant documentation of a decades long rise in frequency and severity of all kinds of extreme weather events, rising temperatures, sea levels, greenhouse gases etc. etc., as well as broad scientific consensus on the causal relationships between many of these phenomena.

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@OrbWeaver I am always very careful with information on the network and I do not accept anything that I cannot verify by other means.
Certainly there were occasional floods in Germany in the past, especially in the Rhine basin, but never in history have generalized floods in almost all of Germany like that of the past Juni, never since this has been realized in history, the same in Belgium with a similar catastrophe.
Here in the south, the beaches are filled with dead fish by the ton, due to climate change due to the warming of the sea and coastal agriculture with its chemical fertilizers that cause an excess of algae and the reduction of oxygen in the sea. 

This I do not have to consult in the media, I have this here next to the house.

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I'm fully aware that we as humans have to do a better job in caring for the environment but I personally think that the current "we as humans are predominantly to blame for the current climate change" is just part of a huge political machine which is fueled by extreme climate models that don't draw a realistic picture. I always prefer to look at real data and in the Netherlands for example the sea has been rising at the same rate for over more than 100 years (+/- 2 mm a year). But in other places world wide an increase isn't showing either. Satellites show an increase, but there are so many factors that can distort the data coming from these and although satellites are becoming more accurate, they still are very far from tide gauges for example. I understand it, climate change is a big money maker, but if our leaders would really care for our CO2 emissions, they wouldn't be flying in private jets to their climate meetings. I know that the current measures could help with improving our environment, but then just say that you want to do that. Becoming CO2 neutral is an impossible task and apart from that there have been numerous studies that the effect it's going to have will be minimal and the cost will be tremendous. There are so many ways that we can really care for our planet without having to pay so much.

Below I'm sharing an article by Sebastian Lüning a German climate researcher. Think of it what you like, we are all free to believe what we want of course. Here's the original German article for German speakers.

"Who erased the medieval warm period? The latest UN report has distorted climate history. The traces lead to Bern.

By Sebastian Lüning

In the Middle Ages, Switzerland and other parts of Central Europe were as warm as they are today. The so-called Medieval Warm Period (MWP) is scientifically well documented in the region: between 800 and 1300 AD, many Alpine glaciers shrank dramatically and some were even shorter than today. The tree line shifted upward. Permafrost thawed in high alpine areas that are still firmly in the grip of ice today. Those high temperatures are clearly demonstrated by tree rings, pollen, chironomid fossils, and other geological reconstruction methods.

Controversial temperature curve

For a long time it was assumed that the Medieval Warm Period was a regional, North Atlantic phenomenon. But this warm phase also occurred in many other areas of the Earth, for example, in the Antarctic Peninsula, in the Andes, in North America, at the North Pole, in the Mediterranean, in East Africa, China, and in New Zealand. Together with expert colleagues, I have evaluated many hundreds of case studies from around the world in recent years and published the syntheses continent by continent in peer reviewed journals.

Three of those publications are cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its recently published Sixth Climate Report. The Medieval Warm Period was then followed worldwide by an abrupt drop in temperature. During the Little Ice Age of 1450-1850, the climate cooled to the lowest temperature level in the past ten thousand years.

Unfortunately, one searches in vain for this information in the new IPCC report. The IPCC maintains its own view of the climate history of the last thousand years. In the Summary for Policymakers, a controversial temperature curve is prominently displayed right at the beginning, giving the impression that only minimal pre-industrial climate changes have occurred in the last two millennia. With the onset of industrialization around 1850, the curve then shoots up by more than a degree. This method of representation is also known as the "hockey stick": the climatically straight pre-industrial period according to the IPCC forms the shaft, and at the end of it is the hook of the hockey stick, representing the rapid modern warming. It is a case of déjà vu. Indeed, the third IPCC report in 2001 contained a similar hockey stick graph, designed to make politicians believe that the current warming was unprecedented and therefore entirely man-made.

Over the past two decades, however, paleoclimatology has made great strides and data has been diligently collected. From this emerged more realistic temperature trends with a pronounced Medieval Warm Period and a later Little Ice Age. All the more bitter now is the reversion to the old hockey stick times. How could this have happened? What were the possible motives for this renewed distortion of climate history?

The debatable new hockey stick temperature curve comes from the international paleoclimatology group PAGES2k, whose coordinating office is based at the University of Bern. Climate scientist Thomas Stocker, who has collaborated on IPCC reports since 1998, teaches and conducts research at this university. In 2015, Stocker even ran for the general chairmanship of the IPCC, but he lost to South Korean Husung Lee, who recently presented the report of Working Group 1. Stocker co-authored the Summary for Policymakers of the third IPCC report, in which the Hockey Stick played a central role.

Now, over twenty years later, the "new" hockey stick comes from Stocker's university, where he heads the Department of Climate and Environmental Physics. Just a dumb coincidence? There are many indications that the new climate curve may have been commissioned for the sixth IPCC report. Five of the nineteen authors of the contributions to the new hockey stick curve are from Bern. But a significant portion of the PAGES2k researchers could not technically support the new hockey stick version and left the discredited group.

Evidence thanks to tree rings

Meanwhile, the departed scientists published a competing temperature curve with clear pre-industrial temperature fluctuations. Based on tree rings, those specialists were able to show that summer temperatures in the pre-industrial past had already reached the current temperature level several times. This work by Ulf Büntgen of the ETH research institute WSL and his colleagues was not included in the latest IPCC report, although it was published in time for the editorial deadline. Interestingly, the controversial PAGES2k curve had already been included in the first draft of the sixth climate report, although the corresponding publication had not even formally appeared yet. How could this happen? In the second version of the summary for policy makers, the curve was then shrunk to postage stamp size, at the edge of a larger composite figure. This was the last version available for comment by the IPCC reviewers, of which I am one. So it was all the more surprising when the hockey stick image suddenly appeared in the final version at full size.

The laws of leverage apply

The IPCC is concealing from the public the fact that many experts and reviewers consider the graphic to be highly problematic. For one thing, the new hockey stick contains a whole range of highly anomalous data whose use is difficult to justify. For example, PAGES2k integrates a Bauring dataset from the French Maritime Alps, although the creators of the original case study explicitly advise against using it for temperature reconstructions. On the other hand, it omits data showing strong pre-industrial natural variability of climate. Extensive criticisms made during the report review process and formally published in publications were ignored by the IPCC authors.

In light of this behavior, a peer review process makes little sense. The fundamental problem is that both the IPCC authors and editors are appointed by a politically elected IPCC board. Thus, the selection of researchers involved in the IPCC report already establishes a line of thinking that can hardly be watered down later. The laws of leverage apply here: whoever has the upper hand gets his way.

The arbitrariness of the IPCC is also evident from another example. Even in the first draft of the report, the IPCC explicitly mentioned the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age in a summary table in Chapter 1 of " The Physical Science Basis." The erroneous reference to a regionally limited phenomenon in the North Atlantic was removed in the second draft in response to expert criticism. However, in the final version, which could no longer be seen by the experts, both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age had been surreptitiously dismissed and replaced by meaningless text under the umbrella term "the last millennium." Three small asterisks explain to the reader that the terms "Medieval Warm Period" and "Little Ice Age" could not be used in the report because they would be too ill-defined and regionally variable.

That's how easy it is to rewrite climate history, and hardly anyone notices. Why is this important? The pre-industrial temperature trend is highly relevant to the division ("attribution") of modern climate change into human-caused factors on the one hand and natural factors on the other.

Since natural climate factors play a minor role in climate models, those models can only generate hockey stick patterns. Thus, any real pre-industrial warm or cold phase poses problems for the models because they cannot reproduce it. They are designed not to.

This raises uncomfortable questions about their suitability and usefulness for future climate development. Ultimately, they are uncalibrated simulations that really shouldn't be released for future modeling at all until they match the climate record. In other words, if a climate model provides answers to the question of what the past was like, and those answers are miles away from reality, then the prediction of the future is likely to be just as strongly off.

Uncomfortable topics

It is particularly curious that the climate models of the so-called CMIP6 type, which were prepared specifically for the sixth IPCC report, turned out to be largely unusable. Due to errors in cloud modeling, they produced temperature graphs that were far too warm. Therefore, the IPCC stated that it would put more emphasis on historical temperature trends in the current sixth report. However, since that historical approach - as described above - is highly controversial, the IPCC has now blown up this "saving grace" as well. In its official press releases, the IPCC largely omits these uncomfortable issues. And in most media reports, the public does not find out about them either.

This will continue to reverberate in the scientific community for a long time. For it is only a matter of time before critical climate scientists systematically address the inconsistencies in this biased IPCC report. The incident demonstrates how political tactics undermine the scientific integrity of the IPCC and undermine trust in the institution."

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6 hours ago, Carnage said:

I understand it, climate change is a big money maker

If anything, going against the notion of climate change would be the money maker. Industry has a vested interest and practically infinite means to influence politicians and public opinion that nothing ought to be done, and writers like Lüning have a personal interest in "exposing" climate change (or vaccines, for that matter) since it has significant potential to become a bestseller book.

On the other side you have the interest of media to publish click-bait articles, i.e. I was quite disappointed to read in the fine print that National Geographic's April 2020 article "See how your city's climate might change by 2070" was based on a worst case scenario. This is a general problem of relying on second hand sources like newspaper articles for learning about complex issues. This is an important reason to be scientifically literate and read the research articles yourself in the context of other research and with an eye for flaws. Scientists have formal training in this and comprehensive knowledge of their field. So when the majority of climate scientists agree that climate change is man-made and a major problem for humanity's future, this carries much more weight for me than what commentators in a newspaper or a fringe website have to say.

Granted, scientists have a conflict of interest when they receive funding for their research which, at least in medical research with ties to industry, is associated with lower methodological quality and higher odds of the conclusion being favourable towards the sponsor.

The question is, do politicians actually have an interest in climate change being a major problem? Policy that would adequately address it would be highly unpopular both with the donor class and the general public, since - very understandably - most people don't want to give up a significant part of their living standard. Failing to implement such policy, on the other hand, causes politicians to lose their credibility in the view of climate-conscious voters when they consistently and spectacularly miss their own climate goals. That seems to be the dynamic at least in Germany, where the only party that more than half-heartedly campaigns on addressing climate change historically had little say in running the country or financing German climate research.

What I think is valid criticism is the validity of climate models to predict what will happen in the future, since the climate is incredibly complex. However, for that reason, I think the statements "climate change will be a catastrophe" and "climate change is just hysteria" are equally uncertain. What we do know for certain is that atmospheric CO2 is rising rapidly, acts as a greenhouse gas and the resulting temperature increase has a highly plausible causal relationship with many of the climate developments we're witnessing.

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This is the usual argument of many who deny climate change, confuse (in an interested way?) punctual changes in the weather with a generalized worsening.
Naturally there were years in the past with exceptionally cold climates, due to large volcanic eruptions, as happened in the 'little ice age' in the Middle Ages, also with normal fluctuations in certain years, due to solar activities and others.
But the specific local climate has nothing to do with global climate change, which is absolutely evident and is no longer doubted by any serious scientist, but by politicians and certain economic interests, mainly those in the field of fossil fuels.
It is absurd to deny at this point that the main cause of global warming is the human being, who happily blows the CO2 accumulated over millions of years into the atmosphere in a short time and on top of that, eliminates with massive deforestation the forests and jungles that can absorb it.
The validity of the temperature curves can be easily checked, if you also see the satellite images, which show the galloping reduction of glaciers, LAKES on the pole and even rain in polar areas as a result of this warming, not to mention climate catastrophes and increasingly extreme hurricanes.

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4 hours ago, Dragofer said:

If anything, going against the notion of climate change would be the money maker.

Researchers that aren't in favour of "climate change is predominantly caused by humans" usually don't get the funding of the ones that are. And of course there the subsidies and such. So going against it isn't the way to make money.

4 hours ago, Zerg Rush said:

This is the usual argument of many who deny climate change

I don't deny climate change and neither does Sebastian, the available data just doesn't show that we are predominantly to blame for it. I'm not interested though in a whole discussion about who's right or not. I respect everyone's opinion about the subject but from past experiences I know it's just better to agree to disagree as we all get our information from different sources. The most important thing though is that if you want to help your cause, is you start being the example. You can't change what other people do and there's very little we can do to change what the leaders in the world do.

I care for the environment, so I try to be mindful in the things I buy and consume, haven't driven a car in the last three years (because I don't need to), etc. I personally think the biggest problem in the world is over population, as it puts a lot of strain on the natural resources and wildlife. With 25% less than we have now we would put a lot less strain on everything.

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As I said before, we are the main cause of climate change, which as a cause also has the natural climatic fluctuation that repeats every 80,000-100,000 years, but we are accelerating this change by 10, which is clearly shown by the statistics that have been taken from the ice sheets of the arctic of the last hundred of thousend of years.
An exponentially accelerated change since the industrial revolution.

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Human influence vs natural change

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Visble consecuences

https://earth.org/data-visualizations/case-studies/

https://climate.nasa.gov Real time with satelite, among others.

Anyway, we have to do something right now or we have to move to another planet .... ah, okay ... there isn't.

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Like I said mate, lets just agree to disagree. I can give you some graphs now that shows something from a different perspective and then you can show/tell me something different and so on, it's just a never ending circle and we'll never agree. The important thing is that we both care for our planet in different ways and I hope you're doing your part and not just screaming "the end is nigh" and then just continue living like normal.

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That is, everybody can do something 

Buying local products
Avoid using products wrapped or packaged in too much plastic as much as possible
Use public transportation as much as possible
It is not necessary to have a new smartphone every half year
Use energy efficient appliances and lighting
Boycott products of large polluting companies.
This to begin with and what I strictly comply with.

But although the consumer himself can make some changes in his habits, ultimately it is the same neoliberal system that must change, based precisely on wild consumerism for a supposed infinite growth in order to exist and this depends on what we vote for.

It's capitalim and economic interests vs Nature and Earth. 

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On that we can certainly agree, but that requires a change in everybody and goverments will have to start thinking about what they can do to make the cheap but polluting products, produce, etc. less inviting. There's a limit in what they can do at the moment though, because putting a high tax on cheap poluting products from China for example in favour of more expensive products that do everything to minimize the strain on our environment, is likely going to cause trade wars and such. Everything works based on what people want and as long as there's a market for the cheap polluting products, companies will continue to deliver.

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It is not about cheap or expensive products, it is about the incitement to buy things that we do not need, to keep an absurd consumerism afloat.
Look around your house and the amount of things that you have that you never use or that are useless.
Regarding food, we complain about the massive cattle raising, the greenhouse gases that it causes and the resulting deforestation, but on the other hand, we no longer eat meat and animal products as before 2 or three times a week, but 3 times a day, 7 Days of the week. This apart from encouraging the criticized mass cattle ranching, is not at all healthy for ourselves, the proliferation of obesity, diabetes, rheumatic and coronary diseases show it.
Personally, I like a good cutlet or a ham sandwich, but I prefer to eat it once or twice a week, but then of the highest quality, than to do it every day with second-rate or sale products, which in the end I even get more expensive. In other words, it is not about reducing the standard of living, but about consuming what is needed, putting quality before quantity.
This even provides more freedom by not depending so much on things, it does not make sense to work more hours than the clock, to be able to have a car bigger than the neighbor, having a burnout at 40, This is not quality of life and neither Liberty.

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