[ExI] Apocalypse Soon: Has Civilization Passed the Environmental Point of No Return?

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of BillK
Subject: Re: [ExI] Apocalypse Soon: Has Civilization Passed the
Environmental Point of No Return?

On Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 6:34 PM, spike  wrote:
> >...  Climate change will not kill everyone nor every beast and every
change will not necessarily be a bad thing... spike


>...I don't think these scientists are complaining just about climate
change.  They seem to be worried that humanity is having an overwhelming
effect on the planet.  Species are dying out at an incredible rate...These
reports are not just 'doom and gloom'. They are pointing out that funny
noise in the engine that needs attention before the car stops completely...
BillK

_______________________________________________

Hi BillK, 

I have been watching the debate go back and forth both online and in society
over climate change and impending collapse and so forth.  It occurred to me
that the reason I tend to have a different outlook than the mainstream is
that I have a different vision of the endgame.  For instance, a common
vision of the long term, or endgame of humanity from an Asimov POV is planet
with about a billion humans collected in about a thousand population
centers, with most of the rest of the planet more or less wilderness, a
billion well-fed well-educated comfortable smart people that eventually
colonizes the solar system and form a nice steady state sustainable peaceful
existence that extends indefinitely into the future.  I think this is a
common vision of the future, but it is not one that I share.

I envision and endgame in which we figure out how to upload, then we
gradually manage to get most or all of the metals in the solar system into
some kind of computronium, so that there isn't really much dead matter
anywhere.  Everything that isn't hydrogen or a noble gas is somehow involved
in contributing to pure thought in my vision of an endgame.

With that vision, it is natural to assume that some species now on this
planet will go extinct.  Reasoning: there is so much less habitat available
as humans continue to radiate outward from Africa.  That we should be
inadvertently terraforming the planet to be more comfortable for an African
beast doesn't surprise me at all.  If we had a planet in which humans are
the largest predator and all animal life is carefully controlled, that to me
isn't hard to imagine.  If that is an intermediate stage to the endgame
previously mentioned, well that seems reasonable to me.  I can envision a
planet in which we collect and store all the sun's energy that makes it to
the surface, we maintain about 30 to 50 billion proles, every square meter
of land is used for something, there are no more wild predators, the largest
non-human animal that manages to survive are our pet dogs and cats, and
below them, mammals at the level of mice.  I can imagine this state of
nature as a stage in the development towards an endgame of disassembling
planets to convert the metals to computronium.

That being said, I agree that species are going extinct, and that I do not
see how to save them all.  I don't accept the notion that if many species go
extinct that it will cause humanity to go extinct.

spike