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Edited on Sat Dec-06-08 10:09 PM by tom_paine
Another good one, Paul. Onl time will tell if it is partially or wholly true. I suspect it is.
And if it isn't, and somehow we pull another technological rabbit out of our hat (fusion, anyone?) one wonders if we just won't revert to those self-destructive psychological imperatives that do indeed seem to be at the core of what it is to be human, and proceed to the next "overshoot and dieoff" moment where we will once again wait for a technological rabbit to pop out of the hat.
Given the magnitude and scale of our problems, environmental, social, and energy to name a few it is almost certainly going to reach a point, unless we colonize the stars (which could well mean, from a universal perspective, that the "disease" has broken out of it's first infected cell and is about to go a-travelling to do the same to other "cells in the body"), there will come a time when no tecnological rabbits pulled out of hats can save us.
We may have already reached that moment. Time will tell.
The others side of this, and quite frankly, the one that is far less believable due to the massive leaps and logical shortcuts one must make to poof them into being as ideas, is that humanity has always been cyclical, and that nothing moves in a straight line downward forever. (except species going extinct)
Or the laughable cornucopian's dream of endless technological rabbits pulled out of endless hats.
Honestly, if we weren't so vicious, self-centered, and shortsighted as a species, such a thing might be possible. A world at relative peace and harmnony (note I said relative, utopia being a likely impossibility) might have enough maturity, education, and the forseight to have conserved resources with which to do this.
We, in a galactic sense, are the mean, stupid five-year old on the playground, and God Forbid we should, even now, meet a BENEVOLENT, NONVIOLENT alien species.
For it is almost a certainty that we will rob them, kill the ones who resist, and co-opt or enslave the survivors. Why? It's what our species does. In many ways, it's ALL we do.
Of course, in our modern "enlightened" age, a little PR and some Plausible Deniability should be all that is needed to achieve the same goals without it being 100% obvious.
Only 99% obvious will do to fool 99% of humanity, most of whom WANT to believe the lie, anyway.
Yet in the end, PR or no, the nonviolent aliens will "just sorta get" robbed, killed and enslaved.
Just happened, you know? Nobody's fault.
Sorry I digressed into the hypothetical. In the galactic or universal sense, there can be no pride in being a member of the human species. While we have nothing to compare to, I suspect we are among the worst, if only because a species that is "more Bushie" than us would have died out long before this, IMHO. We are just "not horrible enough" to have survived long enough to do some REAL damage before the Universe grows tired of it and extincts us, to foolishly anthropomorphize a gigantic collection of dust and gas.
I guess it's clear I think you are most-likely correct (and Baker, Kunstler, and all the rest), but I hold out foolish hope with no good reasons to back it up.
I'm such a typical human.
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