Prez wrote on Jun 12, 2024, 21:25:
So when I say that it is ludicrous to me that all of you very intelligent but hopelessly, preposterously negative people don't see science as an inevitable eventual fix to this...

Science works by consensus. You know this. It took almost 50 years for a critical mass of consensus to finally get some, but not all, people onboard with the idea that climate change was real and directly impacting humankind. Year after year, we continue to break global records for "hottest year on record". The plural of anecdote is not data but we had about two whole weeks of Spring here. With the heat index, we've been cracking over 100 degrees since last month. We have record snow, tornadoes, and hurricanes, year after year. Oh, and record breaking hail, too. Yet still there are people who jam their heads waaaaaay up their ass and claim climate change isn't real or that mankind has absolutely nothing to do with it. These science illiterati are the millstone around the neck of progress and, brother, it is goddamned heavy millstone. Especially since some of those mouthbreathers are in positions of political power. Moreover, they're often happily bribed "lobbied" by corporate interests who do not give a single fuck about five years from now and only care about this quarter's bottom line, no matter how reckless, endangering, or catastrophic their actions provably are.

I am one of those "negative doomsayers" not because I lack trust in science but because I have zero trust or hope in humanity as a whole. Not when a significant amount of them think climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese for...reasons. So my carved out niche of a safety net isn't anti-science, it's a bulwark against either the direct, malevolent actions or willfully ignorant stupidity of humanity. If anything, my little homestead is the very epitome of using science to solve the problems that are facing my family. I can list all the scientific disciplines that went in to planning it, are being used to construct it, and will be used to operate it.

But the reality is that science cannot automagically fix all of humanity's problems when humanity will not stop creating those problems. It's like picking at an open wound. It isn't ever going to heal unless you do something radically different and beneficial to heal it.