Technology, the end of mankind - my theory

[peruvianskys]

If this type of thinking interests you, check out John Zerzan and Derrick Jensen; both are primitivist philosophers who agree with what you're saying. Derrick Jensen's book Endgame is a classic introduction to anti-civilization theory. Also Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, has a book called Technological Slavery that is interesting.

http://editions-hache.com/essais/pdf/kaczynski2.pdf

http://www.johnzerzan.net/

http://www.derrickjensen.org/

 

[teebeeohh]

technology is fundamentally good.
of course universal rule no 2 says that everyone is a moron, some or just more highly functional morons and thus we misuse technology.
Because fire was technology when some caveman first figured out who to make and yes, it burn down forests and people and stuff but it also keeps you warm and makes steaks. Now, what's wrong with that?

 

[McMullen]

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I'm sorry to break this to all of you, but the once beautiful "a couple of" [http://www.thefreedictionary.com/a+couple+of] has degraded into something completely else. I might have been stretching the word a bit, but what I meant was closer to 4000 B.C.

That doesn't really improve things much. I've been to archaeological sites in the US state of Oregon that are more than 10,000 years old. 10 seconds on Wikipedia says that "Anatomically modern humans originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago, reaching behavioral modernity around 50,000 years ago."

So, you're still not looking up what you don't know. I'm not trying to fight you here. I'm pointing out that speculation is not a replacement for actual research, and that if you want your ideas to be taken seriously, they have to be based on the latter. Your idea posted here is based on extremely faulty assumptions and should be abandoned. Learn more about the subjects you mentioned and come up with new, better ideas. Trying to defend a bad idea using semantics will only waste your time.

 

[Artemicion]

Meh, once we invent time machines everything will be just fine. Or we'll all be dead, so it won't much matter.

It's best not to fret about the small stuff, really.

 

[guidance]

I don't think its possible for humans to just quit technology, our evolution has come this far and it doesn't just stop and turn around. Species of monkeys have evolved to start using tools, and inevitably they will make bigger and better tools. When we are faced with a problem, we try and fix it, and fix it we shall. Even if many people will end up dead by the end of it, people will survive and fix the problem. No quitting technology wont solve the problem, many people will still starve, and many people will still die.

 

[Malyc]

Kinda hard to end fuel. So we run out of oil based fuel. Cars can run on alcohol, trucks can run on vegetable oil, there have been leaps in the areas of electric/hydrogen powered vehicles.

Just as an example, the alcohol based fuel: Top fuel dragsters are powered by methanol, and reach speeds in excess of 300 mph, in 1,000 feet, with over 8000 horsepower. Alcohol is perfectly capable of being able to power the vehicles necessary to transport goods. The only real downside is that it will take up a percentage of the food crops.

 

[Soods]

We're all going to die eventually aren't we? How will going back to the stone age help us?

It's not all about us. (Read the mass extinction part from OP)

 

[Gevas]

It's not all about us. (Read the mass extinction part from OP)

Of course it's all about us, who else would it be about? Fairly certain dolphins haven't started a space exploration program yet...

Anywho, the big issue is really supply/demand. When the cost of using solar/ethanol/what-have-you sinks below coal/petrol (which it must, by virtue of eventually running out) then we'll switch to that.

In the mean time, a bunch of dramatic people will make a bunch of noise.

 

[Joccaren]

Ok... No.
All the 'problems' with technology you are coming up with, the whole point of technology is to fix those problems. That created more problems related to that technology, but we created technology to fix those problems too. Technology now is moving faster than ever before. It used to take hundreds of years for any sort of technological breakthrough. Now it takes decades or less. Having never used technology would have us in a far worse place than we are now, and only developing new technology will keep us going. It is one main thing that currently separates man from animal.

 

[LobsterFeng]

We're all going to die eventually aren't we? How will going back to the stone age help us?

It's not all about us. (Read the mass extinction part from OP)

Yes but I believe that everything on this planet will die eventually. If not by technology then by nature. (giant meteors or whatever.)

 

[Gennadios]

Tards.

There is indeed a sizeable population that would have us sit blissfully on this rock until our sun expands into a red giant and engulfs us, or an asteroid hits, wiping us out. And to those people, all I have to say is give us a few more decades to populate mars and work our way from there.

They can all coexist with nature into obscurity once the more rational demographic of the human race is no longer being dragged down by them.

EDIT: Also, you might as well call survival drug addiction. Provided we get out of the solar system, our galaxy is still spiraling around a black hole. Then after that, apparently the universe is imploding. Every frying pan we'll likely escape for the foreseeable future will lead to some fire.

Suggesting we need to stop pursuing technology is the equivalent of lying down and waiting for death.

 

[Pegghead]

I heard, a while ago, a good point regarding technology, development and more importantly the aspect of fuelling it all that you brought up.

Some people call this the oil age, it's in our cars, our materials, our machines. Big business, hinge of power etc etc. Two things:

*We do have oil for hundreds more years

*We're living in the oil age, but the stone age didn't end because they all ran out of stone. We just move on and find better, more sustainable ways of doing things ala bio-fuel, wind-farms, solar and all that other good stuff.

I've often wondered if technology will ever reach a point where we look back at it all and say "Yup, we've literally perfected everything. Nothing ever breaks, noone's ever sick, all needs are covered..." and so on. Honestly, I feel that certain fields can reach that point without needing to fall into an endless, self-consuming cycle that eventually sucks us all in. ON thet tech side, look at firearms. Initially, proper guns were just cannons, then overtime those cannons became small cannons, and htose small cannons became smaller cannons, and those smaller cannons became so small a strong man could operate one on the move. Then eventually it all boiled down to the point where we had firearms that could fit in a man's hand. Now tell me, are modern pistols so small that you could accidentally swallow one? Of course not, that would be pointless. No, size-wise we got them down to a point that worked, and since then all they've had to do is focus on things like accuracy, power, clip-size etc. Hell, look at the AK-47. Made over 60 years ago and still widely used today.

Furthermore, there comes a point when certain people just don't want more advanced technology. If you go judging the human race by the kind of shallow, tech-savvy gadget geeks of the world then of course that would culminate in a never-ending cycle of advancement for the sake of advancement. However, if we're going to do that then we might as well judge it all by those wandering Bakhtiari people in The Ascent Of Man, still just roaming the countryside with their simple little tools, their livestock, the clothes on their back.

 

[McMullen]

We're all going to die eventually aren't we? How will going back to the stone age help us?

It's not all about us. (Read the mass extinction part from OP)

After I made my first post in this thread, I attended a lecture about how, more than 500 million years ago, the entire earth was almost completely covered by ice sheets, even at sea level at the equator, with patches of barren sandy tundra and iceberg-clogged waterways being the closest thing the Earth had to a warm climate. Because there was almost nothing to absorb CO2 on a global ice sheet, the carbon dioxide concentration increased over several tens of millions of years to a value nearly three orders of magnitude greater than what it is now.

This extreme greenhouse effect finally overcame the additional global cooling due to ice's reflectivity, and once the oceans started becoming liquid again, they absorbed more sunlight and warmed the earth even more, so that in only 4,000 years or so, a runaway greenhouse effect that was unimaginably intense next to what we're capable of caused global temperature to rise to an average - an average - of 50°C. That's 122°F, compared to the current value of 60°F. Again, that's a global average. Think about that for a bit. From a spring day in the mid latitudes to a value above most of the world's high temperature records.

Eventually all that excess CO2 is absorbed back into the soil and oceans, and the climate returns to something less like a hellscape.

Interesting to note, life was there before this, it persisted through it, and we are descended from the things that survived it.

So, once more, though we may cause a mass extinction, the damage we do is nothing compared to business as usual for Planet Earth. The only reason to be worried about a mass extinction is if your concern really is just for us. To worry about mass extinctions for other species is to not understand how things work around here.

 

[Frozen Donkey Wheel2]

So...if we run out of fuel, this would leave with an absolute lack of technology, which would cause civilization to collapse. To avoid this, we should immediately abandon all our technology.

Right. Makes perfect sense.

Or, you know, we could just use technology to create some kind of infinitely renewable source of fuel. And then use technology to fix any other problems with current technology. Which is kinda the point of technology in the first place, I might add.

Maybe think it through a little before posting next time, OP.

 

[crazyarms33]

Anyone who advocates quitting technology cold turkey really cant be taken seriously. How does one even define technology? Is it limited to computers and electronics? What about medicine? Or perhaps machinery? What about guns? Spears? Warm winter jackets with thermal lining? Hell even SHOES have been subjected to technology. Half of what you take for granted COMES from technology.
If you think that we'd be better off without technology I would invite you to go live in the woods for one week. Don't take anything whether it be food, shelter or even a knife. Once you're in the woods, take off your clothes, shoes included and burn them or throw them in a river and let them get washed downstream. Now live. Just you and your wits for one week. Tell me you don't invent/make something in that week to make your life easier and I will give your argument credit. Until then...well looks like you're SOL.

 

[Revnak_v1legacy]

We're all going to die eventually aren't we? How will going back to the stone age help us?

It's not all about us. (Read the mass extinction part from OP)

It's all about us. I don't think that cats or dogs can give any fucks about the other. We can. We can value things that are of absolutely no functional value to us. If we die off, existence is meaningless, as humanity is what is capable of making meaning out of existence, not frogs or dolphins. These animals are important, certainly, but not as important as the only species capable of recognizing the importance of these other animals. The extinction of humanity is far worse than the extinction of a thousand species, a million even, because we are the only things that will care when they're gone.

 

[SnakeoilSage]

Humans have never lived in harmony with their environments. Most scientists agree that the extinction of the mammoth and perhaps even neanderthals is not due to their inability to adapt to changing climates but at the hands of homo sapiens sapiens. We did so by being more inventive, using tactics and technology (i.e. fire) to overcome these physically superior beings.

 

[Torrasque]

1. Mankind hasn't been "monkeys with clothes on" for many tens of thousands of years now. Considering the power of Egypt and the Mayans several thousand years BC, it is pretty safe to assume that humans have been humans for a pretty long time now.
2. Depending on what you mean by "making our life easier and easier through miraculous inventions", you are either very wrong by saying "slowly" or absolutely wrong. Yes, agriculture took a while to get to a state where it could sustain a kingdom, but there is this thing called the industrial revolution that accelerated our technology by a fuckload. The industrial revolution wasn't a slow process, it was a very fucking fast process. Also, considering that the internet has only been around for as long as I've been alive (~21 years) and the fact that the internet is absolutely insane as far as advances in technology goes, I'd say your "slowly" is like saying M. Night Shyamalan occasionally makes bad endings to movies.
3. I've had more discussions about nukes ending all life on Earth than I have had religious discussions (and let me tell you, I have had A LOT of religious discussions...) To put it simply: no force on Earth can end all life on Earth, period. If we somehow nuked every square inch of the Earth, there would still be life on Earth. It would be simple life, but it would still be alive. It would be likely that we would kill ourselves if we detonated enough nukes of enough lethality, but to kill all life would require something much greater than we humans possess.

Now that all that is said, I think your concern that humanity is on the brink of destruction is ill-informed. The best defence that humanity has against calamity, is technology and human ambition. If you set enough people on a task, they will solve it eventually. The cure for HIV is forthcoming and the cure for AIDS is just around the corner. Give it a few more decades and cancer may be cured (or better treatable) as well.
Oil may be a stupid resource and many economies will collapse when it runs out, but humanity will still exist without oil.

All in all, I gotta say dude, you're more cynical and doomsaying than I am.
And I dream about the apocalypse, zombies, and survival every night =|

 

[Smooth Operator]

I see someone enjoys a good dose of Apocalypse porn, hey whatever get's you off.

But out in the real world only one thing can doom mankind, ignorance.

 

[William Fleming]

I just want to say: It sort of sounds like a plot outline for some novel.