Is Humanity Dooomed?

swears

preppy-kei
I really wouldn't be suprised if after a new wave of Keynesian economics and tighter financial regulation, leaders again decide (in 30 years or so) that everything needs to be deregulated and privatised to give the economy a shot in the arm, and the cycle begins again.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
elaboration please

Because all civilisations are ultimately doomed?
Or because capitalism is a ravenous beast that eats its young and will ultimately be destroyed by its own contradictions?

as john said mainly these. nothing lasts forever.

the big point to me anyway isn't that this particular strain of civilization will end, as they all do, but how much damage will be done in the meantime.

tho craner's told us:
The ecological stuff is all untrue, obviously.
oh never mind what's even the point.

Just a few hundred years, I'm afraid. Give or take.

I dunno man, sooner than this I'd think, oil certainly isn't going to last another few hundred yrs for one. tho I guess you're counting the "transition" to (something?). the fall of the Roman Empire lasted f***king forever, after all, drawn out over several centuries.
 

vimothy

yurp
"If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." But maybe looking at it in terms of "Western Civilisation" is not that helpful.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Oh, man, that's my assumption. To be fair, one of my earliest memories is Protect & Survive drills in junior school. Not helpful, especially because my mother kept watching Woody Allen films throughout my childhood. It was like a perfect storm of doom and neurosis.
 

swears

preppy-kei
I think a lot of the doom talk in the media is tied into baby-boomer narcissism in the face of their fast-approaching old-age and death. I mean, how does civilisation survive without Hilary Clinton?!
 
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Sick Boy

All about pride and egos
I agree with the point upthread about how we will continue to get stupider with each generation. I think there is an inverse relationship between access to information and humanity's general intelligence.
 

empty mirror

remember the jackalope
so yeah, out of a lack of anything to contribute to this thread other than a vague sense of impending etc, i looked up the etymology of "doom" and it looks like it has an OE origin----meaning law, judgment and condemnation.

so no, there will be no doom, as there is no judge...
or is there?!!!
 

vimothy

yurp
Well, that's a third of the world's population, though obviously those two states are key drivers. And it's true that if you take out everyone except sub-Saharan Africa it looks pretty bad.
 

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
But is GDP growth not potentially misleading as an index of human progress? If the air became so toxic that it became required to buy bottled air, this would register as an increase in GDP as companies were set-up to profit...

And then there is the small matter of climate change.
 

vimothy

yurp
It's true that GDP is only one indicator, but it remains a useful proxy because so many things are associated with it. Not sure, in your example, if declining air quality really would, on net, increase GDP, though obviously some individual companies could profit from it. And, of course, there is also climate change. But the trends are not unambiguously bad.
 
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