He said to Neo that humans are like a virus, breeding and infecting the world with our “stick” and general disgustingness.

I look around the world, at the state of society, the environment, international conflict and the enshitification of humanity - I’ve gone through my life blindly accepting that life for life’s sake is beautiful, and worth it.

But as I see the state of it all, our perpetual need to destroy each other over ideas and resources, I struggle to come to grips with it. Societies around the world are facing population shrinkage… Do they all know something I don’t?

Is human life beautiful, and objectively worth perpetuating? Or are we a blight? Why should we be?

  • crapwittyname
    2·
    4 months ago

    Agree completely on a planetary scale. The chances are that we are very ordinary on a galactic scale, and that millions of other lifeforms on millions of other planets have risen to roughly this level of sophistication, and thereby become too powerful for their overwhelming stupidity, and died.
    See: the Copernican Principle, the Great Filter, and Dissipation-driven Adaptation (in ascending order of how much time you’ve got)

    • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.social
      3·
      4 months ago

      Oh, yes, of course. I completely agree with you; I assumed the context was Earth.

      My favorite theory to explain the Fermi Paradox is that we’re one of the early intelligent life forms in the universe. Our goldilocks situation occurred fairly early in the overall lifespan of the universe, even considering only the exciting period, when stars are forming and growing their own planetary systems.

      If we survive and get off the planet. we could be the mysterious “old ones” some future species discovers evidence of as they explore the galaxy.

      If we can just survive ourselves.

      • crapwittyname
        2·
        4 months ago

        I desperately want to believe your optimistic reading of the Paradox. I hope you’re right, and, thankfully, I can’t honestly say with any certainty that you’re not.
        The mass extinction that killed off the dinosaurs might be quite rare, especially if it was some kind of orbital event. In which case we might have accelerated advancement in comparison to other Goldilocks planets.