Fair point with megafauna, but my counterpoint would be that we were struggling to exist, like any other animal, and extinction is a part of nature. Driving things extinct isn’t inherently unnatural.

But then you could say, “Yes, but the same applies to climate change. The earliest oxygen-exhaling plants poisoned the atmosphere and lead to the extinction of more ancient plants.” (Or was it the giant fungus? I forget.) And you’d have a point there too.

But I think the key difference is having a viable alternative and being aware of the suffering we’re causing. We know what we’re doing; the plants did not, they just evolved that way. We have alternatives to farming and hunting animals until their extinction; early inhabitants of Aotearoa, who drove the Moa to extinction, probably didn’t. I will pick preserving megafauna over having my hypothetical preferred megafauna dinner, but I can’t pretend I’d pick preserving megafauna over preventing my family from starving to death.

If we really want to get to the heart of it, it is the monotheistic notion that the world was created for us, that there is another (better) world for us after we die, and that therefore it is our birthright to use this land in any way we see fit. Capitalism and industrialisation have provided humanity with the tools to proliferate to such an extent that the scale of the damage we are causing is far greater than anything we were capable of previously, but the Christian imperative to reap the land has been around far longer.

I agree so strongly that that philosophy definitely makes it much worse. My main issue with Abrahamic religions is the notion that god resembles man (and vice versa) instead of resembling forces of nature.

But I don’t think monotheism was a prevailing philosophy when the megafauna were driven to extinction. Animals (and sometimes even plants) have driven each other to extinction many times in our planet’s history, and we’re just animals. I think the only thing that gives us the potential to rise above that status is knowledge, and that acting as caretakers to all other living beings on this planet is the highest application of that knowledge in the short-term. Long-term, the highest application is extending the reach of life to other planets, even if it’s as simple as intentional panspermia with extremophile microbes.

I fully understand. I did that for a long time, too (working and participating in a frequent flying environment). But that’s really where we need to change society. The way we think about things that we have never questioned before.

And one additional thing should become very clear: it’s not only about our footprint. Someone needs to stop others from destroying everything, from flying, from coal rolling monster suvs etc. And as there are too few people being that someone, we need to be that someone.

I think he grew up and lived in Europe after his ancestors moved there from Africa.

Disingenuous bullshit for 300 Alex.

And the fascist oligarchs. Maybe lock em in submarines and drown the lot of em.

Ai data centres used about 0.5% of global electricity production last year. Electricity production is about 26,000 TWh annually, versus total energy production of 185 TWh annually, so AI was about 0.07% of all energy consumption. Energy production causes the bulk of greenhouse emissions: 73.2%, putting AI on 0.05% (this is unfair to AI, because electricity is cleaner than the average energy production which includes just burning gas for heat).

In comparison, trying to find something small on https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector my favourite comparison is that energy for making paper consumes more than 10x as much as does AI.

A large TV might consume about 100W while on, so 100Wh to watch for an hour. To reach the same consumption with AI, you’d need to run about 55 expensive (the upper estimate I found was 6700J - I assume this means long coding answers, research or image generation) chatgpt queries.

Personally I think it unlikely that someone would reach that 1 prompt per minute at that expensive estimate, so all yourself: is AI really “burning entire areas” compared to just watching TV?

It has it’s problems but this is a moral panic.

The vaccine did not work well for me: I got COVID at least 3 times. Was wearing N95 masks from the start (happened to have some). Stayed at home except for vital shopping. Grew my hair out. Social distanced the best I could. Played a lot of Animal Crossing. But interacting with work and family is unavoidable, and that’s who I believe I got it from every time, as they were generally not taking it seriously.

From what I read, when I got the shot and boosters I should have had some kind of mild reaction. Felt bad for a day or at least a few hours, something like that. But that never happened to me. However, others I talked to did have a reaction, and they also didn’t seem to get COVID. So I’m inclined to believe that the vaccine probably did work, for at least some segment of the population, just not for me for some reason. It was a rush job, so it not working for everyone isn’t a conspiracy, to me it’s somewhat expected. And maybe one of the other brands would have worked, but I don’t think you were allowed to mix them.

Hmm. The Lemmy antivax crowd.

And also made to be susceptible to that level of stupidity by capitalists & their owned politicians gutting education / failing to fund it adequately to begin with. (For US anyway.)

So? Matrix rules motherfucker, I don’t care if you’ve been manipulated into trying to kill me, I just care that you’re trying to kill me and it’s not my responsibility to deprogram your death cult ass. Fuck em, every last one.

Thanks you just wasted 2 gallons of potable water.

You shouldn’t needlessly salivate. That water is needed for datacentres.

The point was to test for human bias in the data. The initial complaint was that scientists were cherry picking the data to make it look worse than it was. By looking at the spread, it showed they were minorly cherry picking to understate the problem. A fact that is now more and more obvious as it plays out.

I actually think it might even be worse to not have kids at this point, someone needs to fix all the issues previous generations have created. I’m pretty sure we need human intervention, some kind of Geo-engineering/Terraforming to avoid a runway hot house earth (something like effective carbon capture)… So I don’t think antinatalism helps…

If anything is left, it’s not the end. Revolutionary optimism even in the face of extinction, man.

That and the willingness to throw every billionaire into a woodchipper.

I wouldn’t overestimate humanity’s survival capabilities. There have been over a dozen known species of the genus homo, yet all but one are extinct. The rest have died out mostly due to natural changes in climate.

Sure, we can adapt, but we’d have to put in an actual effort to do so. Reducing emissions is an adaptation, but we’re not doing enough in that regard.