RedEye9 wrote on Jun 13, 2024, 14:29:
Next week when a fushion powered flying car soars over BoP’s airstream we’ll find him shaking a fist at the sky while polishing his truck that sets on blocks because gasoline is no longer available. 😂😂😂

Ha! Gasoline will still be around long, long after I am dead. Besides, with 15hp and enough gearing, you can make anything move with something as simple as steam.

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Prez wrote on Jun 13, 2024, 14:33:
I didn't mean to offend. But things getting worse just means that it is going to be harder and harder to ignore, meaning eventually people will have to take notice. It is the human condition that until things become seriously bad, nothing of real significance is going to happen. It is required that things get worse. It's how you eventually convince a critical mass of people to finally act. It's amazing to me that a man of your intelligence hasn't noticed that pattern after all this time. How much will be irrevocably lost before that happens? You got me. But something else about the human condition that I am acutely aware of and have firsthand experience with is that we humans are adaptable to what would have seemed impossible conditions under which to live before if forced to. People have gotten way too soft in their cushy existence to be honest, but humanity can and will learn how to rough it again. It's not like it hasn't been done like a billion times in history.

This is based on survivorship bias. Things have, indeed, gotten bad enough many times in humanity's past for a select group of people to take action to ensure their own survival. Funnily enough, they were also called whatever the then current version of "negative doomsayers" was. You literally only exist because your ancestors, like mine, took actions that ran contrary to what everyone else around them was doing. "Emigrating to an uncharted continent? That's crazy talk! What's wrong with <whatever country name>?!", "Leaving the city and abandoning much of what you own because you've noticed a steady and continuing uptick in disease? That's crazy! The priests will just pray harder and everything will work out.", and "You're going to abandon the teachings of the Church in favor of reason and logic? That's heretical and you're going to burn in Hell" are just a few examples of events that have changed the course of human history by running counter to what everyone else thought should be the maintained status quo. Things changed because those people adapted and survived while the rest of humanity did not. Usually those that did not died in terrible, horrible ways while being broke and starving.

Prez wrote on Jun 13, 2024, 14:33:
All that aside, if betting on history repeating itself for like the billionth time and the belief that mankind is capable of truly miraculous, mystifying things when necessity dictates makes me a goofy clueless idiot than so be it. I've been called way worse. I have reams upon reams of evidence proving my point as well. I could probably get offended by some of your pretty insulting assertions as well, but I choose not to. As far as I am concerned, we're good.

Humanity, as whole, doesn't do anything. It reacts like a mass of single celled organisms. A select group of people become proactive. That's true all the way back to our distant origins when the smart hunter-gatherers noticed that snow wasn't melting and migrated to warmer climes or developed means for themselves to survive in situ. They had zero problems letting everyone else who didn't either migrate with them or join the tribe in situ die. Your evidence would support that assertion because it comes from the same source mine do, those who survived wrote the history.

I'm not calling you anything because that would be disrespectful. I addressed your points, not you personally. We're fine. I like you no less than I did previous to this exchange.

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cappy wrote on Jun 13, 2024, 19:42:
Even then they will typically succeed in delaying (often by decades) or watering down change. Historically, they've had considerable success in doing that. Inevitably, the steamroller of progress eventually rolls over them and they retrench for the next battle to also inevitably lose (after considerable delay).

That is only true on small scale situations when we expand the scope of the scale to also include events that affect humanity as a whole on a global scale. I think, honestly, that is part of the problem. Most people have difficulties wrapping their brains around events that affect their own states/districts/whatever a country calls their land partitions. They absolutely cannot fathom a problem that encompasses the whole globe and near 7 billion people. So they do their best to either reduce or abstract the problem to something they can grasp (which then loses some of, or entirely eliminates, the granular details necessary for dealing with the problem) or shift the responsibility for dealing with a problem that large on to another entity (be that a government, group, or someone else).

In all the annals of human history, we have only faced four major threats to our existence and we, as a species as a whole, bungled them all. The only reason we continue to exist as a species is because some of us survived on a planet that was able to right itself. We did not actively contribute to those problems that threatened our species as we are currently doing now to the one that faces us. In my mind, that is a major shift in how the survivors are going to have to handle this new threat. Because it is no longer about Man vs Nature. It is now Man vs Nature vs Other Man. The Other Man are going to be the groups you identified but those groups have more wealth and power than at any time in human history. It's going to get really, really ugly and entail a level of internecine fighting we have never before witnessed in human history. Simply out of necessity and, sadly, greed. Someone is going to kill everyone else in as wide a circle as possible for clean water, arable land, and whatever resources they think they need or want. We humans have done it to an extent before for a whole lot less.