Modern society. At the end 60s hippies were right after all…
The USA
Humans.
Humans.
Let’s go with the atomic bomb…if you disagree, consider that we made a weapon too powerful to ever be used again, but nations that have them get taken way more seriously in diplomacy.
And let’s be serious, it’s pretty much tick-tock, tick-tock before they get used again when they get put in the hands of zealots. Let’s be doubly serious, it will be religion that convinces some leader that they are within their divine rights to cleanse the world of their enemies.
Human history, as a whole, is so depressing and meandering it’s a weird question to try and answer. Were the great empires a success, or a failure? It depends on if you’re measuring monuments built or social justice enacted, and if you’re comparing against modern polities or whatever shitty local warlord they replaced. History doesn’t really have an end goal, as much as we’d like it to.
Maybe you just meant a personal failure:
Thomas Midgley is one of my favourites, because he’s famous for three things: Inventing leaded gasoline, inventing ozone-destroying PCBs, and inventing an accessibility contraption that strangled Thomas Midgley. He did nothing else of note; he’s like the real life Bloody Stupid Johnson.
Pheidippides of Battle of Marathon fame is famous for running a long way just to deliver some news first, and then dying from exhaustion.
People regularly make the same trip and are fine.He was regarded as a hero, and the races were originally in his honour, but I wouldn’t want to be him. Edit: Maybe not a great example, actually. The story names a much longer distance than a marathon, although it’s kinda mythical.Muhammad II of Khwarazm received an envoy from Ghengis Khan, who wasn’t bent on invading at all but wanted trade, and decided to steal their shit and kick them out instead. Then he killed the people sent next to ask for a nice apology. You can guess where that went.
The Soviets once tried to sextort Indonesian quasi-communist leader Sukarno with a tape. It did not work, because he was shamelessly proud of his “virility”. In at least some tellings he misinterprets the KGB’s presentation as a gift, although I doubt he could have been that dumb.
If it’s the same person I’m thinking about he understood that it was blackmail but didn’t care. He requested copies of the tape to keep for himself.
“Thanks bro/comrade!” would be a great way to play this off diplomatically with someone you still want to be allies with, so that could be the origin of that bit.
Isn’t what we call a marathon just the last short leg of his journey, and he ran like 100-150 miles?
In addition to mixing up the man and the place, I got that wrong. Fixed.
The United States of America
Agriculture.
Ohh it’s much worse than that. Usually humans would live to around 60 if they survived infancy before that. Their diet was varied and since food was a limited resource, there was no way of population blasts. But agriculture just fucked it all up. We stopped moving around since the land needed constant maintainence and since the diet became mostly carbohydrates, combined with back breaking work, our life expectancy dropped to 40. We didn’t domesticate wheat, wheat domesticated us. It took modern medicine… ie 20th century to get the average life expectancy up again.
I recommend you read the book called Sapiens. It’s an eye opener.
Because it lead directly to feudalism and other forms of autocracy?
Agriculture
Our collective response to climate change
That’s right. We theorized the effects shortly after the first coal power plant, and we have observed the effects for a century now. Yet the response has been minimal, to say the least
I’m sure we’ve seen nothing yet
As far as effort? You’re right
And damage!
large efforts are being made, its just not up to par with what people are expecting from their governments
Fostering societal systems of greed and competition rather than of cooperation and compassion.
This, we moved from Tribes to towns to cities to be more efficient but lost the cooperative aspect of the tribe which made it more efficient in the first place. Now corporations do market research until they figure out exactly what we can afford to get our needs met and then charge that price instead of anything related to their actual costs. It’s resulted in a situation to where most people live month to month and can’t afford vacation or even an unexpected car repair.
Thats me. My car, teeth, hair, and some parts of my rental house (thanks landlord) are falling apart and I can’t afford to fix any of it cause rent and bills are due each month and they keep going up. Its fucken madness, its making me insane.
Cheers from across the hellscape, friend.
The problem with cooperation and compassion is that it literally takes one dick to ruin it. If we could incentivize the psychopaths in society to collaborate for their own good, then at least we’d strike a nice balance, but our economies aren’t structured that way.
A system that can be so easily destabilized is not a system that has planned for the long term. I think we’re slowly getting there, as even the dicks in society are beginning to realise that they can be shunned for their public actions, and that shunning does come with real financial consequences.
I just can’t subscribe to that idea. If it took 1 dick to ruin everything society would never have gotten off the ground in the first place. Hell, even today, our power grid pretty much operates off the principle of 'don’t be a dick and shoot this with the guns we all have" and it took MAGA craziness for people to attack them. I’d say compassion operates within any given system in spite of people being dicks and thats why we have prevailed the way we have.
You make a good point
- We mine and manufacture nutrient dense fertilizer at massive environmental cost.
- We use the nutrients to grow plants
- We eat the nutrients in our food
- We expel 95% of these nutrients in our waste
- We dump our waste into the rivers and oceans with all the nutrients (often we purposefully destroy the nitrogen in the waste since it causes so much damage to rivers and oceans)
- We need new nutrients to grow plants
Before humans there was a nutrient cycle. Now it’s just a pipe from mining to the ocean that passes through us. The ecological cost of this is immeasurable, but we don’t notice because fertilizer helps us feed starving people and waste management is important to avoid disease.
We need to close the loop again!
Are you saying we need to start mining the rivers and oceans for nutrients? Or poop directly on the crops?
Poop indirectly on crops. Systems like this or the Aztec chinampa system, basically try to keep nutrients in the loop with fish and other aquatic organisms. Obviously, there’s a disease risk if you do it wrong, but that’s also true for modern water treatment.
You can sterilize waste pretty easily, we do it all the time, and you should before reclaiming not-water for reuse. Otherwise you’re gonna end up with epidemics like it’s the 1700s.
Like evasive chimpanzee said we need to poop INDIRECTLY in crops. Hot aerobic composting for example has excellent nutrient retention rates and eliminates nearly all human borne diseases. The main problem would be medication since some types tend to survive.
Also urine contains almost all of the water soluble nutrients that we expel and is sanitised with 6-12 months of anaerobic storage. So that’s potentially an easier solution if we can seclude the waste stream. Again the main issue would be medications.
I don’t have the answer, if it was easy we would have done it already. The main issue is we don’t have a lot of people working on the answer because we’re still in the stage of getting everyone in the world access to sanitation. Certainly the way we’re doing it is very energy and resources intensive, unsustainable in the living term, and incredibly damaging to the environment. We’ve broken a fundamental aspect of the nutrient cycle and we’re paying dearly for it.
The other problem is, like recycling, there isn’t a lot of money in the solution, so it’s hard to move forward in a capitalist system until shit really hits the fan.
Having the intelligence to create technology but not enough intelligence to understand the implications.
we understand the implications, we just assume that the negatives will happen to others and that the positives will grant us a temporary reprieve in which to plug existing holes
The thing is technology is neutral. How we use it isnt.
letting unqualified businessmen rule the planet instead of experts in their given fields.
For me, this post is right under the person who said “Agriculture” and the response “Because it lead directly to feudalism and other forms of autocracy?”
And if unqualified businessmen ruling instead of experts in their “given fields” isn’t a perfect way to describe feudalism, I don’t know if irony has survived.
Leaving the tide pools. Possibly even forming proteins to begin with. I much more enjoyed being stardust.
