What a lovely metaphor for the self-created doom our species is sleep walking towards.

We’re patient zero for the world’s current greed disease.

Not only won’t we go along, our purchased government will internationally war against this. Never forget we destabilized the South American continent, a government at a time, to keep their markets open for capitalist exploitation and snuff out any potential examples of an economy that serves its people, as opposed to a society that subsists in service to an economy as it is here and increasingly everywhere.

We’re a big reason the global owner class has so much unelected, unaccountable power that needs to be fought to begin with, our government has spent decades convincing other governments to “turn the bull loose” to open their markets to unchecked capitalist exploitation and betray their people under the promise that their elite can live like gluttonous modern Pharoahs for their betrayal. The UK has fully fallen to this as just one example.

This initiative for all intents and purposes is an attack on the United States and everything its people THAT MATTER, not us, stand for.

Covid kind of disillusioned me to the whole “all humanity needs is a common enemy/suffering to get right” concept.

Same, if we can’t even, in actions not rhetoric, start from a baseline of “we’re all in the same boat, we all have needs and seek happiness, how do we maximize everyone’s well-being to facilitate that?” then we’re still just savage animals wrestling in the dirt, but with the dangerous capacity to devise technologies for selfish ends we aren’t wise/evolved enough to truly appreciate the consequences of using.

“According to The Atlantic, an asteroid that weighs more than 1.7 quadrillion metric tons could sterilize Earth by raising the temperature of its water above 100°C. This asteroid would be 10–1,000 times heavier than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and would be between 60–96 kilometers (37–60 miles) wide.”

The Atlantic article itself is paywalled, but yes, and it’s entirely dependent on the mass of said Asteroid.

Maybe the 10 commandments posted in every Louisiana classroom will stop the asteroids.

Whenever I dare to hope about the lofty, admirable star trek future, I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren’t up to the task for anything more than a token selfie by the best dozen humans we can possibly produce with great effort and training.

As a species, we aren’t going to spread out there. Still too primitive, and probably too self-destructive to make it out of this phase of evolution. This might be one of those great filters scientists postulate as to why there aren’t signals from innumerable civilizations out there.

We aren’t even capable of caring for one another, let alone the EASIEST to maintain, most naturally human friendly habitat we would ever encounter in the cosmos as we evolved to fit it. No airlocks, the air/water/waste recycling was already fully automated, all we had to do was not recklessly grow/metastasize to the point we strain the absolutely massive system out of greed and glut, and stop carelessly shitting where we sleep. We all know how that’s been going since we figured out how to make dead animal poison rocket us accross town.

Master space? Master planetary defense? We can’t even defend this world from our own habitual consumerism. We’ll be lucky if we aren’t scattered tribes living near the old hardened structures of the before times for emergency shelter from the new normal weather events in a hundred years. We’re already starting to argue over the resources it’s taking to rebuild population centers from the current new normal. We have played pretend we were since human civilization began, but we are NOT and never have been this world’s owners or masters, and we are still very much its subject.

And Reminder, what we’re doing and have been doing in decades won’t be undone for millions of years. The Earth is a self-correcting system, and the damage we’re doing is inconsequential to its 3.8 billion year old, beautiful story of life growing out of every crevice, just not on a timescale humans can benefit from or even truly appreciate.

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell - Great Filter

I, for one, would like to hear Elon beg.

Oof. Oligopolies/duopolies shouldn’t exist, but here we are.

If by mankind you mean about 30kish sociopath families on the backs of billions and to the detriment of the long term climate our only habitat, then sure.

And to be fair, those 30kish sociopath families would largely agree they’re the only mankind that counts.

https://www.investopedia.com/new-class-of-global-elite-have-emerged-8357556#:~:text="Centi-millionaires" are individuals,a wealth advisory firm said.

Sorry about my gutter trash mouth btw, I’ll work on that.

I have just come to acceptance with who we are, and enjoy the accidental poetry of our reckless worship of greed/gluttony/growth/metastasis being our, accelerating going by the latest science still going on deaf ears, end.

I also enjoy all the very corporate culture like bargaining that’s going on with cold, hard, unflinching physics. Oh we won’t make our non-binding emissions goals and grid standards, so we’ll just roll those back, the climate will understand!

We’re tackling our own self-inflicted, reverse terraforming climate disaster with the stages of grief because we refuse to stop and change how we live to find homeostasis with this world, so this isn’t going to end well, and just like with clean coal/corn ethanol/plant a tree offsets/planet scale carbon scrubbers and all the other private profit driven snake oil “solutions,” we aren’t going to science up a magic bullet to save us from the epically irresponsible actions of our epically irresponsible species.

Unlike a lot of sectors though, Airbus knows what they’re doing and is a high profile alternative, and unlike the US, hasn’t yet completely internalized our sociopathic greed disease to our degree, despite the global economic pressure we inflict on other nations encouraging them to betray and cause harm to their own societies and citizens if it means an extra nickel of short term private profit.

Don’t worry though, the UK has fallen to the greed disease, and our capitalists are bribing and coercing their way eastward, and they won’t stop until they either are physically stopped by something like climate change, or successfully make the world forget that Economies are lowly tools that are supposed to exist solely to benefit the people of the society they are a lowly tool for.

I mean, our owner class is sinking stupid amounts of money into it.

https://www.lifeextension.com/magazine/2015/10/billionaire-philanthropists-funding-anti-aging-research

https://www.businessinsider.com/richest-wealthiest-entrepreneurs-ceo-billionaires-tech-searching-hacking-longevity

Though I promise you that is one product, whether it’s a drug that costs pennies to manufacturer, or clone replacement body/organ vats, that they won’t allow to fall into the reach of the bottom 99% of us mortals.

Is there anyone who doesn’t see people like Zuck, Musk, and Bezos as hardcore wannabe gods?

As a child, I came to consider 40 to be basically dead and pointless, a withered husk clinging to life and a sense of relevance like the flagpole of a sinking ship.

As someone about to hit that mark, I still haven’t seen any new information that changes my opinion on that.

Our cognitive ability peaks around our late 20s. We humans love to delude ourselves about our mortality with comforting thoughts like “well my experience makes up for it, herp derp,” but that’s just something to help us sleep at night as we degrade at an ever accelerating rate.

She was shot 19 times.

I don’t consider it conspiratorial to say, given that it happened within hours the first woman was elected President, that it was more likely than not sending a message of ignorance bucking the idea of women leading, or considering it was cited as likely being a cartel, a message of “don’t think we won’t kill you if you act against our business interests just because you’re a woman.” which considering gender roles and mores are still much more traditional than in the US, might have been a message they felt was needed.

It may not be connected , but if it isn’t, it’s a pretty big coincidence.

The US died under Reagan as anything but a capitalist exploitation farm.

Right-wing peasant ignoramuses are darkly hilariously concerned about preserving the structure of their owner’s money printer and their own subsistence.

Our captured Gov’t: You go to prison…unless you’re very wealthy of course, this is America after all.

Then we’re happy to negotiate, settle, reduce, and otherwise facilitate your repayment in a way that’s convenient for you and your tax litigation team, sir!

To capitalists, a world without private profit, winners with too much, and losers with nothing isn’t a world worth existing.

I completely agree and have made similar points about that being our species’ epitaph.

Humanity is surrounding itself with the harbingers of its own self-inflicted destruction.

All in the name of not only tolerated avarice, but celebrated avarice.

Greed is a more effectively harmful human impulse than even hate. We’ve merely been propagandized to ignore greed, oh im sorry “rational self-interest,” as the personal failing and character deficit it is.

The widely accepted thought terminating cliche of “it’s just business” should never have been allowed to propagate. Humans should never feel comfortable leaving their empathy/decency at the door in our interactions, not for groups they hate, and not for groups they wish to exploit value from. Cruelty is cruelty, and doing it to make moooaaaaaar money for yourself makes it significantly more damning, not less.