Quote:
Originally Posted by Slava
The human existence has never been as good as it is today. Despite people’s pessimistic outlook and thinking the worst, we have made enormous global progress. There could have been a newspaper headline today that said “yesterday 137,000 people were lifted from extreme poverty” and not only is that true, but they could have run that headline every day for the past 25 years! We’ve made astounding progress. We live better, have more stable lives, more food security and are healthier than at anytime in human history.
So, you can look at things cynically and say how bad things are and that we have all these problems. But the statistical reality is that there have been incredible improvements in nearly every department, and across the continents.
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Yeah, we lifted tons of people out of extreme poverty, leading to not only an explosion in the world population, but also a rapid increase in the average consumption of resources per person, and pollution per person. As a result, we're in the process of turning our one and only home into an uninhabitable wasteland. On a geological timescale, we're doing this in a blink of an eye. You can't, and I mean you just can't explain this away by waving in front of our faces how bad people had it 100 years ago.
Sure, people all over the world live much better today than their counterparts from 100 years ago did. But this ignores two very important points: 1) there are still egregious injustices that continue to persist into modern times, and 2) this relatively good state that we're living in will slip away from us soon, due to the unavoidable climate catastrophe that has already begun, and will only get worse from here.
The irony here should not be lost on you... it's largely
because of our consumerist society and modern lifestyles that we've created the situation that will likely do us in. Does this mean that humanity is completely doomed? Not necessarily. While major calamity is already baked into our near future, outright extinction is not. We can avoid the worst case scenario by taking major steps now to move away from fossil fuels and toward green energy.