My thoughts exactly. I feel like a day doesn't go by where I learn about another potential problem that could lead to the end of civilization. What's a good way to stack rank / prioritize these issues to know what's most urgent?
I suspect you are seeing the result of a few generations of humans doing exactly what you are proposing and subsequently maybe (with effort) fixing the number one demand. All the other "future huge problems" have become the now huge problems and it doesn't really make sense to rank all the definitely going to destroy our way of life issues because they will all result in the same thing with a similar time frame (way too soon).
I have the same intuition. It’s not all that different from an old codebase that runs on even older (and disintegrating) hardware. You may keep fixing things, adapt to mildly new requirements, change a tape deck here, a consensator there, but eventually the whole system is going to come down and has to be replaced - there’s nothing we know that lasts forever in a self-repairing way, and that’s what’s going to happen to our civilization. Telling by the worms and the beetles my guess is it’s a matter of decades, not centuries, hopefully not years. The only hope is that we’ve wisened up sufficiently till then to renew without completely getting annihilated or being back at cave-and-sticks level.
Climate change has been talked about for decades now, and very little actually seem to be done. What is something you would consider a number 1 that was fixed? (I guess the ozone layer hole was a relative success).
On the drawdown website, refrigeration seems to be #1. Afforestation is up there. Family planning too. But supposedly we have to be doing all of these things on massive scale.
maybe although I got to think that a lot of these environmental issues destroying our way of life way too soon are interconnected, and it perhaps isn't as difficult to rank them as it might seem when viewed as singular unconnected problems.
> There is a goal, but no way; but what we call a way is hesitation.
-- Franz Kafka
And it just occured to me that the following quote expresses exactly what I'm trying to say if you change "loving" to "solving problems impacting poor people and future generations, and not creating them by running away from other problems or just out of sheer selfishness or boredom". I put it like thast because it's already acceptable to "look out for number one", it's just the "irrational" stuff, having caring about people who don't even exist yet, as well as animals and plants that can't even sue us, that we are still having problems with.
> Because one does not see that love is an activity, a power of the soul, one believes that all that is necessary to find is the right object - and that everything goes by itself afterward. This attitude can be compared to that of the man who wants to paint but who, instead of learning the art, claims that he just has to wait for the right object - and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it.
- Erich Fromm
Yes, we need big solutions, of course this can't be solved by people just buying a little less and recycling. But still, I kinda feel it's weird to think assume we would do the right thing at large scale, if only we knew the exact right thing to tackle, when we aren't even doing it at smaller (and supposedly easier) scale.
Sorry for basically just posting a bunch of quotes, but now that I thought of it, it just seems too fitting not to:
> A tiger catches a mouse with his whole strength. A tiger does not ignore or slight any small animal. The way he catches a mouse and the way he catches and devours a cow is the same. But usually, although you have many problems, you think they are minor, so you don’t think it is necessary to exert yourself... So even though the problems you have in your everyday life are small, unless you know how to solve them you will have big difficulties.
