by Reverse Engineer, Doomstead Diner
Discuss this Video at the Collapse Morning Wake-Up Call Table inside the Diner.
Extinction has moved from the dark corners of the Collapse Blogosphere into the consciousness of the mainstream. Just a few short years ago the discussion of human extinction was relegated to a few fringe websites, but not so anymore.
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Now it has become Topic #1 in the discussions on many websites that concern themselves with topics of collapse. Sometimes this comes to the exclusion of many other collapse related topics in economics, geopolitics, energy and social psychology that are impacting more directly right now.
Generally my focus over the years has been on the economics and energy end of the spin down we are immersed in, and I don’t dwell too much on the issues of extinction. However, here on the Diner we have treated the subject to analysis on a few occasions, most notably the Human Extinction Survey, which we ran a couple of years ago. It garnered the most respondents of any survey we have run at around 350 submissions until recently, when our Collapse Projections Survey brought in responses from over 600 Kollapsniks. The extinction survey also inspired a month long email streambetween various bloggers and pundits which was quite interesting.
I generally tend to avoid extinction discussions though for a few reasons. First, I have discovered over the years that it attracts a certain type of reader/commenter who is often nihilistic, misanthropic and sometimes suicidally depressed. The blog becomes consumed with the discussion of the topic while more proximal problems get ignored. Who cares if the monetary system is going to crash if we’re all gonna die anyhow, right? It also sometimes inspires people toward counter-productive behaviors. If we’re all destined to inevitable death here no matter what, let’s just Party like it’s 1999! It leads to inaction on problems we still can have an effect on as we move forward in collapse.
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The timeline question becomes very important here, because if extinction is indeed going to happen, when will it actually occur? If it’s in the next 5 years say, that has one set of problems and responses, if it’s going to happen in 50 there’s another set. Nobody can really finger this accurately, it’s all speculation but some true believers hammer down on anyone who doesn’t buy the whole ball of wax on Near Term Human Extinction (NTHE) is in denial and shooting up too much Hopium. Amongst this crowd, hope is a bad thing to have.
Recent events however compelled me to discuss this subject in detail, which I do in today’s Collapse Morning Wake-Up Call. The first is the rise of the Extinction Rebellion movement, which recently held a week long series of often very theatrical demonstrations in London to raise consciousness and hopefully get some real ACTION out of governments to combat this problem, which looms larger each day as more climate related calamities strike in more places with incresing ferocity and frequency.all over the globe. The second is a corollary issue of Population Overshoot, and the fact that many Millenials are now choosing to remain childless, for one reason or another. What kind of difference will this make to our society as time marches on here?
All in all, Extinction is a difficult conundrum to deal with, a Wicked Problem. Hopefully I clarify some issues with this discussion, or at least lay out my position on where I stand on these issues.
