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Is the end of days coming?


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Do you think the human race is on the way out?

If we are we have only ourselves to blame....

If things got that bad and it was life or death... how many people would give up their cars NOW-TODAY to save the planet....??

Use only a 3rd of all the gas and electricity & water we use Today...??

recycle 90% of our waste, how many of us have a compost bin in the garden??

 

Sad fact is too many people live for now and find all of the above nothing more than an inconvenience ...... i call them "ignorance"

 

If we stopped spending "as humans do" on wars... and put the money and goverment powers to better use.... we would not face the problems we face today.... But as we do live like Humans want to live.... by the rules of Greed, Ignorance and Denial ....

 

"we spend more on killing each other than we do trying to care for each other.."

 

Id say we are all ******.

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madowl. Would you stop going to watch football? :)

Yes i would..... like id miss what we have to put up with...;)

its only a game.. yes ... it would be hard.... but there are more important and better things in life than a game of football...

 

2 of my kids have had meningitis...... i know where my pride and values lie.

life is a gift that so many of us waste.

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Excuse the biblical title, but it's time for amateur eschatology hour! Do you think the human race is on the way out? If so when and how? What do YOU think is gonna happen?

 

Nope, we are just in for a big change

 

Are we going to make the planet a barren inhospitable place with our rubish and greenhouse gasses?

 

Nope, we will push it to the extreme then pull out all the stops to preserve it. Or, we will live in a very basic manner and start again.

 

Are the various groups around the world who have contented themselves with car bombs and guns going to go nuclear/biological?

 

Doubt it. The threat of it is what keeps them happy.

 

Are the American religious right deliberately provoking the states into catastrophic action to fulfill their own end of the world prophecies?

 

Nope, doubt they are that clever. Just playing a game that they will become scared of when the doo doo hits the fan.

 

Are emergant antibiotic resistant diseases going to sweep the world wiping out all in their path?

Not the world but maybe take a few prisoners with them. SCience and faith combined will have the answers as we move closer to the age of aquarius.

 

Will the cracks and disparaties in society become too much causing it to reach a critical mess and implode?

Possibly it will all swing so far one way then right back again.

 

Or are we going to follow the route of history and muddle through by a mix of luck and sheer bloody-mindedness?

 

Yep, it's humanity but I have faith in humanity.

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Whilst I think it likely that human activities HAVE contributed to teh situation, it's also worth remembering that the Sun is an irregular variable star. Not massively variable, but the activity has been known to vary in history, going by tree rings, sun-spot counts, etc.

 

For example, in the Maunder Minimum in the 17th century, much of Europe and North America had very cold winters - this was when the Thame froze over, for example.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_minimum

http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/20011207iceage.html

 

There have been a number of these periods of apparently lower solar output - another occurence of one of these could easily slow global warming, just as a longer period of enhanced solar activity MIGHT increase heating. However, the increased output of the sun that has been recorded is quite tiny, and dwarfed by the impact of things like volcanoes, forest fires, greenhouse gasses, etc.

And that is a Vogon talking, so just listen. :hihi: :hihi:

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It's all humans' own fault- we fail to see that the resources that are naturally present in the world are not inexhaustible, and manage our use of them accordingly.

I think you're being far too negative here Medusa. ;) *sticks tongue out*

 

We have now seen the error of our ways and we are in the early stages of doing something about it so it's a little unfair to say that our species is too complacent. Developing nations like China and India know that they have to be responsible and it's rather patronising towards them to assume that they won't be. The current problem is a couple of hundred years old and it will take time to halt and hopefully resolve. That rate of change in our activity if changing and the pace of change is accelerating as we all begin to take a part in the process.

 

It's not just the 'activists' that are doing something. We all are, either directly or indirectly. The goods we consume have increasing levels of environmental impact standards placed on them. I have faith that we can halt or at the least dramatically slow down the rate of real environmental damage.

 

But, here's the rub... I have a hunch that a part of that will sooner or later include population controls which lots of people won't like. At some point we have to acknowledge that increasing the population of our planet at an exponential rate has to stop. Guess which country has started putting those measures in place... It's China of course. :)

 

Soon I believe that those type of controls will be introduced in the West and it will be done through the eventual removal of financial child welfare support for families. I seem to recall I posted a thread about this very subject some time ago and that one or two people got themselves into a bit of a tiz about it, but IMO that will be a part of resolving our environmental impact.

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I suppose as I asked the question in the first place I should also give an answer. I don't actually think we are facing an 'end of days' in terms of the destruction of the human race - we are just to stubborn and adaptable for that (barring some cosmic cataclysm which wipes out all life on earth) - however what I can see happening all too easily is the collapse of society and a new dark ages. Society is more than simply a collection of individuals no matter what Mrs T may have told you. Without a set of shared core values (and here we are talking about values held by each member of society not laws imposed externally) then there can be no social cohesion as there is no common frame of reference. This actually becomes more apparent as general social cohesiveness breaks down and sub groups fall back on their own social similarities forming groups based on religion / race / football teams whatever which only exacerbates the differences between these subgroups and so speeds up the collapse in the overall society. Add to this the chronic short termism in the political establishment, lack of real research leading to inovational stagnation and increasing glorification of anti-social behaviour and things look rather bleak. The difficulty in overcoming this is that we have to give up some of our current percieved freedoms for the sake of other people and in a materialistic, individualistic and selfish 'society'. The more I look around, the more I see the 'bread and circuses' attitude - though suitably updated to 'big macs and big brother'.

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Without a set of shared core values (and here we are talking about values held by each member of society not laws imposed externally) then there can be no social cohesion as there is no common frame of reference. This actually becomes more apparent as general social cohesiveness breaks down and sub groups fall back on their own social similarities forming groups based on religion / race / football teams whatever which only exacerbates the differences between these subgroups and so speeds up the collapse in the overall society. Add to this the chronic short termism in the political establishment, lack of real research leading to inovational stagnation and increasing glorification of anti-social behaviour and things look rather bleak. The difficulty in overcoming this is that we have to give up some of our current percieved freedoms for the sake of other people and in a materialistic, individualistic and selfish 'society'. The more I look around, the more I see the 'bread and circuses' attitude - though suitably updated to 'big macs and big brother'.

 

 

This is a very good point you are raising. It is assumed by a lot of people - even here on SF :o - that we in the west are somehow more organised and civilised than poorer nations, and will therefore cope better in the face of calamity.

 

Recent events have proved this assumption to be very wide of the mark. In the Asian Tsunami, communities pulled together and organised relief and rescue parties independently of what their governments were doing. On the other hand, when hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the opposite happened. There was almost no voluntary initiative to aid the victims, and survivors soon reverted to the law of the jungle. Government efforts were marked by their callous indifference.

 

This is because there can be no deep seated social cohesion in what you call the 'individualistic and selfish society.'

What the cheerleaders of the policies brought in by Thatcher, and continued - to a lesser extent by Blair - fail to realise, is that there is a long term price to pay for our new-found wealth. It can be seen in it's more advanced stages in the USA, and it's first symptoms have long set in over here, with gangs of out of control teenagers wreaking havoc in certain inner city areas.

 

If Global warming does get to the point where society's revert to gang law, ours will be one of the first to go.

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