• Kalash@feddit.ch
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          1 year ago

          No, life in general would be fine. It will be (already is) a mass extinction but earth had a couple of those and life will bounce back.

          • DragonTypeWyvern
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            1 year ago

            The worst case scenario is turning Earth into a planet with a climate like Venus’s.

            A planet that proves the existence of runaway greenhouse effects btw.

            It is theoretically possible that life exists there, but multicellular life is considered unlikely, and we’ll probably never get to take surface samples, given it’s been measured at 464 Celsius.

            We probably can’t fuck up the planet that badly, but toss in a nuclear exchange to greenhouse effects and an unfortunate volcanic eruption or two?

          • novibe@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            You say that as it’s not a big deal.

            Do you really want to see a world without dolphins, pandas, tigers, anacondas…?

            • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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              1 year ago

              I don’t think he’s saying it’s not a big deal for us, but for the planet.

              • novibe@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                I know, but that’s a very detached and unemotional take… Sure “life” will keep existing. But not the life we know. That we love. That we grew up loving so much.

                I understand not everyone feels exactly like me. But I was absurdly fascinated by biology books and wildlife documentaries and would read and watch them religiously as a child.

                Thinking of all of that just dying and ending truly breaks my heart. Almost more than anything.

                Just not as much as the thought of humanity disappearing. But I know most people share that sadness.

                • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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                  1 year ago

                  I also don’t think the person is unemotional, it’s more about having the correct idea of what’s actually going to happen if we don’t do anything. I also think ecology needs more rationality, otherwise we get people closing nuclear plants to restart coal plants.

            • Kalash@feddit.ch
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              1 year ago

              We’d be dead as well, so wouldn’t see them anyway.

              Also, the world is pretty cool without dinonsaurs. It will still be pretty cool with what ever comes after what we currently have.

              • novibe@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                I can’t explain how knowing all the animals you grew up loving will die forever is sad. If you don’t feel it you don’t I guess.

                • Kalash@feddit.ch
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                  1 year ago

                  Well, I could imagine it if I wanted to make myself sad. But I, personally, will be dead long before even the last Panda. So it’s really just a hypothetical.

          • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            The question is on a scale of the extinction event at the end of the last ice age to the End Permian Extinction Event aka the Great Dying how bad do we want it

            • dudinax@programming.dev
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              1 year ago

              Or, if instead of reducing emissions, we try to geo-engineer our way out of global warming, screw it up, and create a real snowball Earth.

              • LemmysMum@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                As opposed to geo-engineering our way into global warming like we have been?

                “Oh no, don’t try anything! We might be too successful.”

          • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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            1 year ago

            I even think humanity will survive fine as many icy places will become habitable and we’re good at adapting to extreme climates. Overall it’s rather our current civilisations with the bad but also the good in them that are the most endangered.

            • dudinax@programming.dev
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              1 year ago

              If we manage to keep the warming to levels seen in previous warming periods, humanity might come out better on average in the long run, but the planet is heating faster than it did in those other periods and we haven’t demonstrated any ability to control ourselves. We’d have to stop generating CO2 pretty soon to avoid surpassing the last great warming period.

              • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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                1 year ago

                I guess people didn’t understand my point. If we don’t curb our carbon emissions, we’re certainly going to have a climate that we never lived and it will kill a lot of people. But it’s not unlimited, at some point we will not be able emit more carbon, because there’s no more or we lost the ability to do so. So while fewer than today, there will probably still be habitable places like Nothern Canada and Russia. I think humanity would be able to survive there, although much smaller and the centuries of disasters would have destroyed our civilisations as we know them.

                People probably thought I’m denying the urgency to do an ecological transition, but I’m not. I’m trying to comment on what would actually happen, similarly to previous comment saying that the planet itself is not going to die.

                • dudinax@programming.dev
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                  1 year ago

                  You’re making an assumption that the feedback loops are all well understood. They might be, or maybe there will be some runaway effect, some source of carbon or other greenhouse gas that’s completely unknown, gets released, and boils the oceans.

  • DavidGarcia@feddit.nl
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    1 year ago

    of course the moon exists, but it is hollow. it is a reptilian space ship and arrived 12.8k years ago

  • agent_flounder@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Some people have always believed batshit stuff with no good supporting evidence. But anti-intellectualism has been on the rise for the past, day, 30 years in particular.

    Carl Sagan presciently called it out in “A Demon-Haunted World” back when new age and crystals and alien abductions were popular woo woo beliefs.

    It seems to have become more popular to reject “bOoK LaRnin’” in favor of anti-science, which has also been co-opted for political purposes.

    • papertowels@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      Full quote for somber appreciation, emphasis mine:

      I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness

      The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance

  • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The freedoms of speech and expression have morphed into a freedom of stupidity, and it really, really sucks that this isn’t something we as a culture have proven able to repudiate.

    • WaxedWookie@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Using your freedom of speech to tell someone they’re a moron that should shut the fuck up doesn’t count as free speech, apparently.

      Also, 1a specifically refers to the government silencing you.

  • madcaesar@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s 2023… People still believe some dude walked on water… And some other dude split the moon in half with a sword… Then put it back… The stupid has been with us since forever.

      • Smoogs@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Quran.

        Although I think Scientology is by far still the most fucked up story: Possessed by aliens.

        • countflacula@lemmy.ca
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          Possessed by very confused alien souls that got here because an intergalactic alien warlord named Xenu wanted to do a genocide so he rounded up a bunch of other aliens, tied them to volcanoes on Earth, bombed those volcanoes with hydrogen bombs, captured their souls and made them go to therapy.

          (For those who may have missed that south park episode)

          • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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            1 year ago

            I mean, that is the crux of the OTs. There’s a reason they tell members that it’s dangerous knowledge that will literally kill anyone who sees or hears it before they’ve been prepared by scientology. Anyone who claims to know and isn’t an OT is clearly lying because they are alive, so the silly alien soul story is clearly a lie until you’ve been brainwashed enough.

            • countflacula@lemmy.ca
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              1 year ago

              I thought the silly alien story came out because their higher OT handbooks were admitted as evidence in a case and became part of public record.

              • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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                1 year ago

                It did. But most members aren’t going to be handed court transcripts, they’re going to be exposed to people trying to explain it to them.

                Who are clearly lying because they’re claiming to know the OT documents, aren’t OTs, and haven’t gone mad or died.

    • Smoogs@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yup. It’s just bad actor syndrome and has nothing to do with ‘being right’ if they can move their goal posts so easily.

  • Isoprenoid@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    Also science way back: “Hey guys, isn’t phlogiston just the absolute best? And lobotomies are so cool they deserve a Nobel prize.”

    • agent_flounder@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Lol fair.

      But the difference between science and superstition: science gets closer to the truth over time in spite of ourselves while superstition either keeps the same bullshit or makes up new bullshit regardless of evidence or lack thereof.

      • Isoprenoid@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        science gets closer to the truth over time

        Now we step into epistemology. This claim cannot be substantiated. We don’t know if science is getting closer to the truth because we don’t know what the truth is.

        Science finds what works, it may or may not be finding the truth. It’s incredibly useful, and gets more useful over time, but we cannot claim that it gives us the truth. We cannot measure the “truthiness” of a science claim.

        Unless you assume “If something works, then it’s the truth.”. I wouldn’t support this statement though.

        • agent_flounder@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I believe we already were talking about epistemology. :) Science is a means of obtaining knowledge. About what, though?

          I suppose “truth” could mean different things in this context. I should have avoided that loaded term or tightly scoped what I meant by it. I meant science is interested in knowledge about how the universe behaves.

          Hopefully that doesn’t imply science somehow peeks behind the proverbial curtain to see why things behave as they do. Or answering questions like “what is an electron, really”.

          For example, science has progressively refined models describing how quantum mechanics behaves that can be used to make predictions. But it in no way offers any explanation for why quantum mechanics is the way that it is or what particles are, really.

          Scientific experiments test whether models predict outcomes or not, thus determining if the models need to be further refined or even replaced.

          The point is simply that science is the best way humanity has this far devised to learn how the universe works.

  • mommykink@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Scientists =/= Science Educators.

    Both groups existed decades ago and still exist today

  • ArdMacha@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s almost as if Western Governments have been cutting funding to education or something

  • theneverfox@pawb.social
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    1 year ago

    The Earth is not flat, it’s a hypersphere. It literally explains everything, and yet no one will engage me on that fact

  • nicoweio@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    your kid will die if you won’t use vaccine isn’t exactly great and accurate science communication