Comment on the agent's argument in the matrix
deft@lemmy.wtf 8 months agoNah I’m still extremely skeptical. Humans have only been this way for like .01% of that time. There’s no reason to think we’ve doomed anything.
GOE happened a long time ago but that doesn’t matter. The point is the world has been changed often and life recovers and usually advanced further than it did before.
sxan@midwest.social 8 months ago
I think you missed the point that life doesn’t have the luxury of time that we’ve had, because the sun is going to cook the planet in half the time as between us and the GOE. Our successors will have to advance farther, faster, and with fewer resources to escape the planet - which we still haven’t, in any meaningful way - before the sun makes the panet uninhabitable.
If humans somehow survive in some form and we can cut out most of the evolving-to-big-brains time, most of the knowledge they might inherit will be useless, as it’s based on resources they have no access to.
Sure, it isn’t impossible, but the odds are stacked against anyone following us succeeding in escaping a planet which is 2/3 of the way through its goldilocks phase of life. The best chance is for us to get our shit together, and get some self-sustaining colonies out there. Preferrably in deep space, eventually.
deft@lemmy.wtf 8 months ago
Again human arrogance.
Animals have evolved just as long as we have my friend.
sxan@midwest.social 8 months ago
Humans are animals, and are the only ones who’ve evolved to prioritize big, expensive brains over every other survival characteristic. It took us a long time to do that, and even then, we spent a massive amount of time - most of it, in fact, running around not creating anything more complex than baskets. There is a lot of evidence - 2 billion years worth - that there are a huge number of variables that have to work out just right to produce something like what a human is.
deft@lemmy.wtf 8 months ago
We didn’t prioritize big brains though. What we evolved to do lead us to big brains because we simply had great diets through cooking.
Other species can absolutely evolve cooking or at least a process of breaking down food to both be more calorically dense and easier to digest. After that it was what less than 1 million years to get here? Most of that happening in the last 100,000?
We’ve just not seen any species reach this point that doesn’t mean they can’t or won’t. Also a bigger question, why should they want to? What have we accomplished actually?
We’ve managed to understand how ecosystems work. Destroyed most of them.
We’ve discovered how to manipulate material to prolong our life span or ease our workload to what? Oppress our own species and others?
I just don’t see us being that great and also don’t see it being impossible for other species to surpass us in ways we don’t even consider because we are arrogant.
Many species on this planet are highly intelligent and arguably moreso than humans. If you judge a fish by it’s ability to climb a tree you’ll think it’s a moron. Dolphins, fungus, ants, moss, fuckin water bears. They’re all incredible creatures, why do we hold ourselves above them?