SCIENCE

[Hastur]

[DrYouth]

The Earth will be fine without us...

And at some level humanity will live on... although it may be unrecognizable to us... perhaps only as a legacy and or some spin off life form... but at any rate we will all individually die... as will every one of our descendants...

That all being said, there is no particular reason to gratuitously offend our host environment...

A little respect goes a long way towards the soulful life.

[Hastur]

We should take care of our environment for our own sake, not for the sake of earth. She hardly notices us. The environmental movement is full of pseudo-religious and moral arguments that just muddy the water.

[Speaker to Animals]

We are not separate entities from the biosphere. Humans are a system in the biosphere and the biosphere is a system of the Earth.

If you think of it all as a single system -- i.e. as all the individual cells in your body compose a single organism, so do all the individual organisms on a planet compose a single biosphere -- then one can see that humanity seems to operate both as reproduction and as an immune response to external threats.

The biosphere has been severely compromised in the past by mass extinction events, mostly originating from celestial impacts. Guess what? Those days are almost over. The Earth actually evolved a response to such threats (humans).

The Earth is a complex life system that tends to want to spread over as much real estate as possible. It's done amazing work at getting footholds under Antarctic ice sheets and even flourishing in deep sea volcanic vents. But gravity kept it locked on our world except for what organisms were catapulted into space by celestial impacts, somehow survived out tbye, and then (maybe) survived an impact on another celestial body (or maybe that is how the Earth was seeded from a doomed Mars?). In any case, our desire to spread out seems to provide the biosphere with the tools necessary to reproduce.

This isn't like some ridiculous space fantasy show where Marxists roll around the galaxy in sterile kindergarten ships. We have to bring a significant amount of biomass per person. One person needs quite a lot of organisms to survive. We are very narcissistic about ourselves, but consider our motivations are not free of the Earth's evolutionary adaptations. In human reproduction, the sperm is it's own thing, swimming along according to it's own motivations. But those motivations are not free from human evolution and the drive to reproduce. Humans are like that for the Earth.

[DBTrek]

Kumbaya you hippy-dippy motherfuckers.

[DrYouth]

We should take care of our environment for our own sake...

Sure... but "for our own sake" dies at the extremes of individualism...

At the extremes of individualism "for our own sake" means gratuitous comsumption... cuz who gives a #*&%... and it feels good + sells shit.

There needs to be some greater sense of the self to make "for our own sake" connect with caretaking of any kind.

This is the primary crisis of the times.

[Speaker to Animals]

We should take care of our environment for our own sake...

Sure... but "for our own sake" dies at the extremes of individualism...

At the extremes of individualism "for our own sake" means gratuitous comsumption... cuz who gives a #*&%... and it feels good + sells shit.

There needs to be some greater sense of the self to make "for our own sake" connect with caretaking of any kind.

This is the primary crisis of the times.

Exactly correct.

I think the extreme individualist and the extreme collectivist are both wrong. It's both things. These are not mutually exclusive concepts, and without synthesis, they both lead to major problems.

[DrYouth]

I think the extreme individualist and the extreme collectivist are both wrong. It's both things. These are not mutually exclusive concepts, and without synthesis, they both lead to major problems.

+1

In a rare moment STA and DrY line up in a total eclipse...

Put on your safety glasses if you want to watch this.

[DBTrek]

I kid about the hippy dippy stuff, being a devout lover of nature myself.

What can I say, I’m conflicted.

On one hand my inner eco-terrorists thinks we should probably wipe Russia and China off the map for their environmental crimes, while there’s still time left for humanity.

On the other hand, I have to paint a deck and a fence soon, and the cheap goods supplied by foreign markets has allowed me accesss to a $65 paint sprayer that is an incredible value for what it saves me in labor, training, and project time.

What do we do, guys? Do annihilate the evil regimes that have contaminated 90% of their own ground water with industrial and nuclear waste? Or do we paint our deck and fence and drive our property values up a few grand with a $65 paint sprayer?

The dilemmas of the children of the 21st century.

[Hanarchy Montanarchy]

We should take care of our environment for our own sake...

Sure... but "for our own sake" dies at the extremes of individualism...

At the extremes of individualism "for our own sake" means gratuitous comsumption... cuz who gives a #*&%... and it feels good + sells shit.

There needs to be some greater sense of the self to make "for our own sake" connect with caretaking of any kind.

This is the primary crisis of the times.

Exactly correct.

I think the extreme individualist and the extreme collectivist are both wrong. It's both things. These are not mutually exclusive concepts, and without synthesis, they both lead to major problems.

How dialectic.

And to think, somewheres on this board, folks were being shitty about Hegel.

And Marx...