On 08/10/2016 07:53 PM, Steve Kinney wrote:
On 08/10/2016 05:03 AM, Bastiani Fortress wrote:
11:00 PM, August 9, 2016, John Newman <jnn@synfin.org>:
If you dig punk/hardcore, the band Propagandhi makes some great shit.
Rage against the machine, while we're at it :)
Personally I don't hold much hope for humanity..I figure the solution to Fermis paradox is self-evident.
That is so depressing, but there's no denying it. In such discussions with people, i always claim cooperation and empathy is just as human nature as selfishness, as a pro-socialist argument, but deep down inside, i can't say i have much hope either.
Fermi's Paradox? Per its .com address:
"The Fermi Paradox is the apparent contradiction between the high probability extraterrestrial civilizations' existence and the lack of contact with such civilizations."
Maybe someone is killing them off ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Star
I don't mean to diss the "inevitable self destruction" model. My own conclusion is that it's in progress here and now and can not be stopped by any human agency. But while the end of civilization as we know it may be unthinkable for Civilized people and institutions, leading to the illusion that it means extinction, it is not unsurvivable. Humans are the toughest weeds Nature ever made, capable of living on pack ice or dry rock desert for half the year armed only with Neolithic technology ... and loving it. What will the first couple of Post Apocalyptic generations make out of the mangled landscapes and derelict infrastructure of Civilization? A new kind of civilization, of course.
That thing that happened in Europe after the Black Death? Homo Sap ain't seen nothing yet: This time it's global, and post-scarcity is among the possible outcomes.
We don't see interstellar "civilizations" very often, because those who did not get over making everything bigger and more powerful for sake of bigness and power didn't make it. For reals. Some of those gamma bursts may be industrial accidents, or Bad Outcomes to MAD based defense strategies (an especially stupid kind of industrial accident).
If the absence of torrents of long range EM message traffic is surprising, that's only because we presume aliens talk with strings and tin cans "just like us." If the absence of star drive signatures is surprising, it's more likely that our assumptions about what those signatures would be are faulty, than that there are no interstellar voyagers riding the starwinds. If the absence of physical visitors is surprising, that just means a lot of people have not taken a hard critical look at UFO investigations: Failure to invade and loot or otherwise dominate a technologically weaker species' cradle planet may be evidence of the presence of extraterrestrial intelligence, rather than its absence.
In my view practical anarchism is much more about developing adaptations for conditions after the fall of Civilization, than with making Civilization fall. The latter task has already been done for us gratis [not], by the Powers and Principalities of the world. Building the best future possible for kids born in 2150 is gonna be a fuckton of work, and we better get as much done in advance as possible.
:o)