Where we are headed as a species

[Amine]

Looking at people are well... sheep the whole fact is that is true you have people who just aren't scientifically literate.
That is a bad thing i mean it's a terribly dangerous thing. For one Pam Bondi she is signing a bill to oppose  air pollution 
get this we have the scientific facts of well pollution is bad global warming is real. And  we have people who aren't well 
informed enough to speak out against her and  people signing that bill. The worse part of it is the fact people can be 
persuade into thinking global warming isn't a issue i mean this is 2015 and it's winter it hasn't snowed in Buffalo New York 
that is a sign among many and even looking at this past hurricane season. We have smart people giving people facts and  
its like damn its falling on deaf ears  but people only want to listen when things really get bad. It's that same mentality of 
let the future generations handle it because what if the future generations don't want to. This is my key point of it all 
we will nearly destroy this planet for money then look at fixing the planet as profit gain. I don't think we are going to be around
very long with this sheepish mentality of believe in what x person says even though he doesn't  have facts. Damn.... really depressing
but you know what maybe we will be smart enough not to let it go that far.

"Some things are bad." Yep, I totally, totally agree with you...

Adopting a defeatist mindset because "some things are bad" doesn't seem a rational thought process to me, though. Where's the perspective? Where's the sense of proportion? People are still dumb, but they are spectacularly more intelligent than ever before. The literacy rate alone proves that.

Yes, there are looming sustainability issues. There always have been. This doesn't mean they aren't dire, but we shouldn't throw up our hands and make fatalistic threads about "where we are headed as a species" because of it.

There are millions of people out there doing positive things in the world. There are spectacularly good changes that have been happening in all realms of measurement which can't be ignored in a balanced view. I think the real question is why someone would take such an unbalanced view.

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This species will die out eventually. Every species does.

Except that we are the only knowledge-creating species.. We are the only species that figures out how to survive in completely inhospitable environments.

[Edwardo Piet]

This species will die out eventually. Every species does.

Except that we are the only knowledge-creating species.. We are the only species that figures out how to survive in completely inhospitable environments.

We're still die out eventually.

And the water bear can live in places we cannot yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade

Tardigrades are notable for being perhaps the most durable of known organisms; they are able to survive extreme conditions that would be rapidly fatal to nearly all other known life forms. They can withstand temperature ranges from −458 °F (−272.222 °C) to 300 °F (149 °C), pressures about six times greater than those found in the deepest ocean trenches, ionizing radiation at doses hundreds of times higher than the lethal dose for a human, and the vacuum of outer space. They can go without food or water for more than 10 years, drying out to the point where they are 3% or less water, only to rehydrate, forage, and reproduce. They are not considered extremophilic because they are not adapted to exploit these conditions. This means that their chances of dying increase the longer they are exposed to the extreme environments, whereas true extremophiles thrive in a physically or geochemically extreme environment that would harm most other organisms.

[Amine]

Except that we are the only knowledge-creating species.. We are the only species that figures out how to survive in completely inhospitable environments.

We're still die out eventually.

And the water bear can live in places we cannot yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade

Tardigrades haven't figured anything out.

We'll certainly change. Does that means we'll die out? In some sense, but not the sense I think intended here. Given that we figure things out, and create the ability to live in circumstances that should kill us, there's not necessarily any guarantee that we will die out like other species.

[Edwardo Piet]

Yeah they haven't figured anything out but I was talking about their ability to survive in any environment.

If we don't make ourselves extinct we shall become extinct another way eventually.

It doesn't matter how much we change, all life dies out eventually. Even our sun will die out eventually, and eventually our solar system and our galaxy.

[Amine]

Yeah they haven't figured anything out but I was talking about their ability to survive in any environment.

If we don't make ourselves extinct we shall become extinct another way eventually.

It doesn't matter how much we change, all life dies out eventually. Even our sun will die out eventually, and eventually our solar system and our galaxy.

Well, we have hundreds of millions of years to deal with those problems, and given that it only took us a few thousand to learn how to fuse atoms, I'm not sure those are problems we won't figure out a way to deal with. We figure things out.

[Edwardo Piet]

You really think we'll last hundreds of millions of years?

You know how long that is compared to how long we've been on the planet so far, right?

[Amine]

You really think we'll last hundreds of millions of years?

You know how long that is compared to how long we've been on the planet so far, right?

You're the one making a definite claim here. You're saying we will get wiped out somehow, because all species do. I'm just pointing out a fundamental difference between our species and all the other ones that invalidates that reasoning. I don't know if we will last hundreds of millions of years. If we weren't knowledge creators, I could be pretty much certain that we wouldn't. That's not the case, though. There are halfway-decent reasons to think we might just last that long. If we populate the galaxy, the loss of one solar system won't extinguish us. If we get to other galaxies, admittedly a very challenging problem from our current perspective, then we pretty much have the entropic death of the universe to worry about. And there may be some way to resolve that problem, who knows. I've read proposals. I don't rule out the proposition that knowledge-creators are here to stay, period.

[Edwardo Piet]

Nah I'm saying I think we will in all likelihood get wiped out eventually, however long that takes.

You seem to be claiming that we're an exception.