Following on from all of the climate discussions, etc, can someone answer me this:

Why is it so important or critical that the human race, or indeed the planet as a whole, continues to survive?

I get that those people who have children don’t want them to suffer, but assume from today that no more children are born. As the population gradually reduces to nothing, so will our impact on the planet and subsequent damage of it. Those alive now will not live long enough to see the planet uninhabitable by life, and once we are gradually gone the life that is left will survive in whatever form it can.

In the vastness of existence, if the human race dies out, or this planet’s resources are used up such that it is no longer able to support life, why does that actually matter?

It’s only imperative to humans. As I guess you know.

And being that most of the engagement on the subject so far has been from … y’ know… people, then that’s the most represented PoV.

I guess if you did a poll of polar bears then you’d get a pretty different answer.

It isn’t.

But I worry for my kids if they are there at the end.

It isn’t. Roll on the Vogon hyperspace bypass.

Carl Sagan’s pale blue dot quote more eloquently makes the case for both people and planet than any of us chumps on here ever could, seek it out and have a ponder on the words and their context

Being there at the end would be a great story though. Think of the Instagram likes.

It’s only important to US..

But..the wierd thing about humans is that we appear to be the only species that is aware of their dwindling survival chance…yet does very little (as a whole) to combat it!

We are all aware of climate change and impact, yet have a very ‘someone else’s problem’ approach to it.

No other speciaes would have so much information, and do so little with it…

DrP

Because we are made in God’s image.

Ok, I don’t personally believe that but some people do and it was the only answer I could think of that could justify why it matters for humans to die out.

Because we think the universe would be empty without us….

In the vastness of existence, if the human race dies out, or this planet’s resources are used up such that it is no longer able to support life, why does that actually matter?

It doesn’t matter to me.

I wouldn’t worry about it. Human extinction is guaranteed to come before any kind of mass enlightenment or even any slight change in behaviour that would make your lifestyle less convenient. The planet will carry on without us.

I’d like to see the planet survive so as to give some of the other species on it a chance to live in peace.
The human race, I’d like to see die out. Pretty much this:
https://www.vhemt.org/

The planet is not going to literally explode and vanish. It will still be there. Humans are capable of surviving pretty extreme climates, but it’s obviously not ideal for the future of humans.

Cockroaches FTW!

The world would be better off if we didn’t.

Ultimately it’s meaningless though, even if humans survive another million years it’s completely insignificant in the scheme of things.

This video puts an excellent perspective on our existence:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA

It’s only imperative to humans. As I guess you know.

Yes, but this point does seem to be frequently forgotten… with ‘saving the planet’ becoming an elusive goal in itself

I’d like to see the planet survive so as to give some of the other species on it a chance to live in peace.

The planet will carry on regardless of what we do to it, IMO thinking otherwise gives away our vastly overinflated sense of importance in the big scheme of things. It’s an interesting philosophical debate in any case!

It isn’t imperative. The land has been here longer than the likes of you and I (to quote a crusty 90s band), and a billion years after humans die out, something similar may take our place.

But I do get that people who have kids probably don’t want their children to live in a fiery hellscape.

Humans probably won’t actually die out, but perhaps a smaller population will live in great suffering/discomfort. Do we want to visit that sort of pain on our future generations? Do we have empathy for these people we don’t know, and that don’t exist yet?

But there are already people we don’t know living that kind of existence today. Whether through famine in Haiti or Somalia or Angola (etc), or being bombed to shit in Syria or Yemen (etc).

So I doubt that society, in the aggregate, will pull itself together enough to achieve any of these targets in the headlines.

Can’t we talk about washing up bowls?

and why is there such a drive to have children? to continue the family line or pass on your DNA?

is it inbuilt to all species that you must procreate.

maybe climate change etc is the planet’s response to our parasitic nature in an attempt to kill us off.

Can’t we talk about washing up bowls?

Or even bikes given that this a bike magazine forum

I mean I’d like the planet to continue to support life. I guess I’m thinking of the other things that are on it right now because that’s what I know but I realise it may well go on to support life that I don’t even recognise as life.

@teenrat
I can’t understand that either. And I try to, I really do. But even people in the most desperate of circumstances where there is little hope of things getting better, bring new life into those desperate circumstances. Obviously I understand it a bit but overall, nope.

There’s almost zero chance the human race will survive for millions/billions of years, it’s just whether we kill ourselves off relatively soon or let nature take it’s course

No other speciaes would have so much information, and do so little with it…

Maybe this is entirely typical and across the universe there are countless cases of intelligent life evolving, wrecking its own environment through consumption and then fizzling out while they argue about the difference between an SUV and a large estate car. Fermi was onto something…

and why is there such a drive to have children?

Because it’s good for The Economy!

Others have said the same, but it’s only imperative to us, but perhaps we’re looking at it from the wrong direction.

Every species on earth is driven by own hormones to reproduce, if they didn’t they’d have become extinct long ago. Ensuring the species survives is a by product of that.

Over-population, which is the real ecological disaster is what happens when a species gets too good, too intelligent. Most other animals on earth spend most, if not all of their time ****, Fighting and Feeding, because if they don’t, they and their species, dies. We’ve made our lives so comparatively easy that we don’t have to worry about that, we’ll all likely live long healthy lives.

In order for Humans to survive, at least as long as the Earth is still around we need to go against our most basic of urges, we have to reproduce less, and consume less when our brains which haven’t changed much since we were hunter-gatherer are telling us to do the opposite. Our obesity problem is caused by the same thing that’s caused our over-population and over-consumption problem.

I personally belief that we will never be able to do it, we’re just far too greedy, we can’t help it because as much as we think we’re completely rational beings, we’re far from. We just can’t help ourselves and enough is never enough.

For example, Nuclear Fusion is becoming a reality, if it works out as we hope it should, it could in theory produce near infinite, clean, renewable energy. We could replace every combustion engine and power station with one, but we’ll spend decades fighting over it, the business will complete to squeeze as much money out of it as possible and nations will fight over the technology to give themselves the upper hand over the others, all to ensure we can have a better ‘lifestyle’ AKA more crap we don’t really need.

No, I suspect by the end of my life in 2060 ish, things will be really bad, I mean we’ve already dismissed some really obvious signs of climate change. Floods, fires, droughts, plagues, but until it’s really, really bad when we can no longer adapt to it, when it’s too late, we’ll prioritise climate over money and things.

Even if I’m wrong and we somehow find equilibrium with earth, it doesn’t ensure we’ll survive forever and there’s not point colonising Mars if survival of the species is the goal.

Here’s a list of predicted events in the far future, unlike our forefathers, we probably won’t be long forgotten, you never know, thousands of years from now some scholar might be trawling through an archive and discover the ancient STW forum, hopefully they’ll have a laugh about Cats covered in Sudocrem, feel sad about Magnet Dog last days or wonder wtf picolax was and why anyone would do that, but they’re probably wonder why we spent our days arguing. Anyway, there’s any number of potential extinction event here, in short, at some point in the far future, even if we don’t **** it up, the Earth is going to die and take everything on it, with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

‘We’ could of course, try to leave our Solar System, the closest protentional exoplanets ling in the habitable zone is over 20 light years away. Even if we travelled there as fast as any human made object has ever gone, it would take 86 years to reach it and we had to fire that thing into the sun.

I’m an only child, in my mid-40’s with no kids. My chain of evolution stops here, there will be no trace of my parents or me in 5o years time.

So once I’m gone there will be no imperative need from my perspective.

It’s because we are important in our own minds, I can’t see any other reason. Animals would take back over and re-wild the earth is a global virus finds a way to work around our current science.

and why is there such a drive to have children? to continue the family line or pass on your DNA?

is it inbuilt to all species that you must procreate.

maybe climate change etc is the planet’s response to our parasitic nature in an attempt to kill us off.

This really. All species will breed until their food source, environment, whatever can no longer support them, then they decrease, and eventually an equilibrium is reached regarding food sources, preditors, size of habitat, whatever.
We are no different to any other species in that respect, all that is different is that our habitat is more or less the entire planet, once it can longer support us we will die back, if we change it a lot we will die out and those species more suited to what we have created will become more dominant.
If we deal with climate change something else may wipe us out in 100,000 years, if we don’t it could finish us off in a couple of hundred, no species last forever and we are no different.

This video puts an excellent perspective on our existence:
..https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA

Wow @kenneththecurtain thanks for posting that. Think I need to crack open a drink now ! Even just the start of it put’s some context on things.

So for sure let’s tackle climate change for the sake of ourselves and future generations, by reducing emissions and/or adapting to the consequences. It’s a massive challenge, but probably child’s play compared to dealing with some of the other threats in the first couple of mins of that video!

Everything on the planet has continued as it was as much as it could despite what the human race has been doing. The advances the human race have made in just the last 10,000 years are astonishing with all other animals still doing the same things and having the same capabilities as they did 10,000 years ago, I mean a cat still can’t even start a fire!

That rapid advancement is clearly what has caused the problems that simply didn’t exist 10,000 years ago and it won’t end well as basically nobody wants to give up what they have.

Don’t care about humans dying out, I do care about the planet and everything else that lives upon it that our selfish actions are affecting.

Don’t care about humans dying out, I do care about the planet and everything else that lives upon it that our selfish actions are affecting

I’ve heard this attitude mentioned a few times, and have to say I find it absolutely unfathomable.

Why?

The world would be better off if we didn’t.

Would it? With noone around to care, or anthropomorphise it, it would not matter either way.

Life just happened, and consequently humans just hapoened. That is neither good nor bad, it is neutral. In fact, since both good and bad are entirely human ideas, without humans there is no ‘better off’.

All animals and plants change their environment, so by that logic a sterile Mars type world is ideal.

I mean a cat still can’t even start a fire!

That’s because cats are rubbish. Dogs can start fires and use household appliances

My suspicion is we will **** this sorting the climate change lark up and get ourselves into a terminal decline. Annoyingly for all other life on the planet we are not going to do a Captain Oates and quietly slip out of the tent but we’ll hang on for another few thousands years kicking and screaming thoroughly and completely bolloxing the place up for pretty much everything but the cockroaches. And the midge. Those **** are never going to cop it.

@idiotdogbrain

Why?

OK. So if humans didn’t exist other species would presumably be left to live in some sort of undisturbed ‘natural’ bliss (you know… eating each other and fighting over habitat and food sources). What is intrinsically ‘good’ about that? Particularly if no-one is there to observe or appreciate it ?

And then if one of those other species started to evolve just as we have done… do you think they’d opt to forgo a more comfortable life just to preserve the place? Of course not. So why ascribe some higher value to other species than ourselves ?

EDIT @molgrips I think nailed it more succinctly than my attempt!

Would it? With noone around to care, or anthropomorphise it, it would not matter either way.

As I alluded to with the rest of my post, nothing really matters – so I don’t disagree with you.

That said, I find it uncomfortable that ‘success’ of our species has come at such a high cost to so many other species. I don’t think we are worth more than all of those other species, nor do I think that they should be seen as a necessary sacrifice for our continued survival.

I get that those people who have children don’t want them to suffer, but assume from today that no more children are born

Well then it wouldn’t matter, but as long are then we need to look after the planet for all living things.

Because we have a baked-in/evolved biological imperative to reproduce. That’s the only imperative I’m aware of. Philosophy and science may vary. Theology also.

Humans are like a parasitic infestation. Life is just a sexually transmitted disease that always ends up being terminal. There’s plenty of other life on the planet that would thrive without us here. There are as many galaxies in the universe as there are grains of sand on the Earth. We are infinitesimally small but like to spend a lot of time convincing ourselves otherwise.