When our farmer ancestors warred, they often went about as far as they could to apply all available resources to their war efforts. This included converting plowshares into swords, ships into navies, farmers into soldiers, granaries into soldiers on the move, good will into allies, and cash into foreign purchases. When wars went long and badly, such resources were often quite depleted by the end. Yet warring farmers only rarely went extinct. Why?
I don't see how this can be an extinction threat though. It would be a remarkable coincidence if all the sides in the war were exactly equally matched and the result was extinction of every last human.
I was at university the other day when I saw a waitress shove a cafe customer hard. The customer and her boyfriend were startled. Then a waiter turned on the boyfriend as he got between them. The waiter was a big muscle bound guy. He shoved the boyfriend to the ground. There was shouting. I ran across the road to settle things. I've done some jujutsu and muay thai training. More recently I had done MMA training. I've done some self-defence training from local self-defence schools too. I'm a small guy and physically weak but I'm a decent figher. I haven't been in a street fight.
I threw my bag aside and stood over the boyfriend and the waiter. He had him in a wristlock and was giving him some pain, not just immobalising him. The girlfriend was keen to leave and distressed but the boyfriend couldn't get up. The waiter for shouting at the guy, along with the waitress. It was obvious that I didn't have the physical strength to remove the waiters hand. I thought about all the techniques I could have used and realised that any crude action could mean the boyfriends hand breaks if the waiter holds on, but in all likelihood, it wouldn't do much. My fighting strength is grappling, but even if I was in the boyfriends position, I would probably just escalate the situation since after arriving, the waiter had stopped escalating (and by bf was in no position too). The waiter would intermittently threaten me to back of but I didn't give a shit. From experience with friends, I can generally handle anyone without fighting experience nomatter how big or muscly they are. In hindsight, the fact that he had got the guy in a pretty good wrist lock and his size should have hinted that maybe he is a fighter, perhaps a bouncer at night. In any case, all that I did, at best, was help keep things from escalating because I was a witness who had signalled my preparedness to get involved. I tried reasoning with the waiter but it didn't make a difference.
If the waiter had escalated, I don't know what I could have done. Unless I was attacked myself and escalated, I had no means of protecting anyone. Eventually campus security arrived, but proved to be a bunch of wimps. They were scared of the big guy. There were 10 or so security staff and the guy was still on the ground in a wristlock. Eventually the police arrived and the waiter responded to their authority.
This experience has made me wonder about how better I can reason with someone like the waiter in the future, or how I could prepare/train for a situation to help the guy on the ground. I highly value my ability to handle aggressors cause I had lots of physical abuse as a child and nobody who knew about it did anything. One idea I can think of, is to become physically big and strong, or signalling authority like the police officers.
I included a link to the article where I read this claim in the comment you're responding to, click the words "this article" there to read it--the article is definitely talking primarily about axial tilt, although eventually it adds that 'To make matters worse for any beleaguered life forms, in the tilt erosion process a planet's spinning on its axis slows as well. Given enough time, besides losing its seasons, a world becomes "tidally locked"'. Googling a bit, I see another article here which focuses more on the fact that planets in the habitable zone of a red dwarf would become tidally locked, and that climate simulations indicate this would produce extreme temperature variations.
I don't see wars as *particularly* relevant to our propensity to exhaust stocks. Two very important stocks - fish in the ocean and reasonably safe potential CO2 release - have been mostly used up without any war being involved. Sure, war can increase the pressure to use up a stock, and can absolutely mess up cooperative arrangements to protect them. But, on the whole, I think it's a secondary effect.
That doesn't sound right. If the planet is tidally locked like the moon is to the earth, then you'd get extreme climate variation. But just a low axial tilt produces a perpetual spring. Hadley circulation is quite adequate to keep most of the earth habitable in a perpetual spring. Maybe what you read was referring to tidal locking.
It is also entirely possible that primitive life is common in red dwarf solar systems today but that life on Earth has evolved uniquely fast. In other words that we're (almost) alone today but that in a billion years life on Earth (and in other yellow star solar systems) has gone extinct/is primitive while the universe will be teeming with red dwarf solar system civilizations that have finally overcome all the difficult evolutionary steps.
"the fact that we nevertheless find ourselves in a G star's system, should lead you to suspect that the evolution of intelligent life may be less probable in red dwarf systems."
Yes, but our sample size is kind of small.
Tidal locking could be a problem for life but we just don't know that for sure (thriving ecosystems might exist in underground lakes or deep oceans (Earth's cephalopods show that dexterous intelligent beings can live in such places) and atmospheric heat circulation might greatly expand the livabl surface of a tidally locked planet.) Of course moons wouldn't have the tidal locking problem at all.
The predation argument is premised on a limitation on stocks (to the solar system), whereas the second argument says nothing (that I can discern) about the trajectory of stocks.
Is there a way to remotely determine whether a star has been partly artifically harvested? (Presumably such harvesting would remove material from near the star's surface. BTW I seem to recall that type 1A supernovas reach critical mass by gravitationally harvesting their stellar companion)
Red dwarfs are indeed a lot more common--this book says G type stars like the Sun make up about 4% of stars in our galaxy, while the estimates here suggest red dwarfs make up more than 70% of stars in most galaxies. But if you accept the usefulness of Bostrom's self-sampling assumption, that very difference, combined with the fact that we nevertheless find ourselves in a G star's system, should lead you to suspect that the evolution of intelligent life may be less probable in red dwarf systems. This article suggests one possible reason why that might be--gravitational interactions between a red dwarf and a planet in its habitable zone would tend to erode the planet's axial tilt fairly quickly, so that the planet would no longer have seasons, which creates an extreme temperature gradient between the equator and the poles with only a narrow range of latitudes that would be habitable for complex multicellular animals (presumably decreasing the planet's biodiversity and the pool of animal groups that might eventually give rise to an intelligent species), and in addition there's a possibility that "In a worst-case scenario, however, the entire atmosphere of a zero-obliquity planet could collapse, Heller said. Gases might evaporate into space around the planet's blazing middle and freeze to the ground in the bleak north and south."
Red dwarfs are more common than yellow stars. Red dwarfs have lifespans in the tens of billions of years and recently some have been found to have rocky planets in their habitable zone.
I don't care about the self bias of individuals. I expect it to be human nature to put oneself first, in most cases for most people.
The real problem might be that extinction might be objectively better. And people would never get or acknowledge that, because it's a low status belief that is socially undesirable - whether it is true or not.
The irony is that the positive potential is enormous, but that doesn't mean it will be unlocked, or that humanity avoids the critical mass of negtives that would outweigh it.
When I look at the way politics works and the quality of arguments and attitudes people use to justify easily avoidable real-world suffering, I am rountinely shocked by how low the quality is. To expect a positive future from this, combined with how hard coordination is (Moloch), requires an abstract low-probability-high-payoff thinking (e.g. H > D ) or an absurd amount of optimism about how human nature will fix its flaws with technology.
This is another way of saying what I was trying to say in my last post: improving tech can make war more destructive, increasing the risk of extinction via war.
I don't see how this can be an extinction threat though. It would be a remarkable coincidence if all the sides in the war were exactly equally matched and the result was extinction of every last human.
The question to me is whether you could have launched a knockout first strike against the waiter.
I was at university the other day when I saw a waitress shove a cafe customer hard. The customer and her boyfriend were startled. Then a waiter turned on the boyfriend as he got between them. The waiter was a big muscle bound guy. He shoved the boyfriend to the ground. There was shouting. I ran across the road to settle things. I've done some jujutsu and muay thai training. More recently I had done MMA training. I've done some self-defence training from local self-defence schools too. I'm a small guy and physically weak but I'm a decent figher. I haven't been in a street fight.
I threw my bag aside and stood over the boyfriend and the waiter. He had him in a wristlock and was giving him some pain, not just immobalising him. The girlfriend was keen to leave and distressed but the boyfriend couldn't get up. The waiter for shouting at the guy, along with the waitress. It was obvious that I didn't have the physical strength to remove the waiters hand. I thought about all the techniques I could have used and realised that any crude action could mean the boyfriends hand breaks if the waiter holds on, but in all likelihood, it wouldn't do much. My fighting strength is grappling, but even if I was in the boyfriends position, I would probably just escalate the situation since after arriving, the waiter had stopped escalating (and by bf was in no position too). The waiter would intermittently threaten me to back of but I didn't give a shit. From experience with friends, I can generally handle anyone without fighting experience nomatter how big or muscly they are. In hindsight, the fact that he had got the guy in a pretty good wrist lock and his size should have hinted that maybe he is a fighter, perhaps a bouncer at night. In any case, all that I did, at best, was help keep things from escalating because I was a witness who had signalled my preparedness to get involved. I tried reasoning with the waiter but it didn't make a difference.
If the waiter had escalated, I don't know what I could have done. Unless I was attacked myself and escalated, I had no means of protecting anyone. Eventually campus security arrived, but proved to be a bunch of wimps. They were scared of the big guy. There were 10 or so security staff and the guy was still on the ground in a wristlock. Eventually the police arrived and the waiter responded to their authority.
This experience has made me wonder about how better I can reason with someone like the waiter in the future, or how I could prepare/train for a situation to help the guy on the ground. I highly value my ability to handle aggressors cause I had lots of physical abuse as a child and nobody who knew about it did anything. One idea I can think of, is to become physically big and strong, or signalling authority like the police officers.
I included a link to the article where I read this claim in the comment you're responding to, click the words "this article" there to read it--the article is definitely talking primarily about axial tilt, although eventually it adds that 'To make matters worse for any beleaguered life forms, in the tilt erosion process a planet's spinning on its axis slows as well. Given enough time, besides losing its seasons, a world becomes "tidally locked"'. Googling a bit, I see another article here which focuses more on the fact that planets in the habitable zone of a red dwarf would become tidally locked, and that climate simulations indicate this would produce extreme temperature variations.
I don't see wars as *particularly* relevant to our propensity to exhaust stocks. Two very important stocks - fish in the ocean and reasonably safe potential CO2 release - have been mostly used up without any war being involved. Sure, war can increase the pressure to use up a stock, and can absolutely mess up cooperative arrangements to protect them. But, on the whole, I think it's a secondary effect.
That doesn't sound right. If the planet is tidally locked like the moon is to the earth, then you'd get extreme climate variation. But just a low axial tilt produces a perpetual spring. Hadley circulation is quite adequate to keep most of the earth habitable in a perpetual spring. Maybe what you read was referring to tidal locking.
It is also entirely possible that primitive life is common in red dwarf solar systems today but that life on Earth has evolved uniquely fast. In other words that we're (almost) alone today but that in a billion years life on Earth (and in other yellow star solar systems) has gone extinct/is primitive while the universe will be teeming with red dwarf solar system civilizations that have finally overcome all the difficult evolutionary steps.
"the fact that we nevertheless find ourselves in a G star's system, should lead you to suspect that the evolution of intelligent life may be less probable in red dwarf systems."
Yes, but our sample size is kind of small.
Tidal locking could be a problem for life but we just don't know that for sure (thriving ecosystems might exist in underground lakes or deep oceans (Earth's cephalopods show that dexterous intelligent beings can live in such places) and atmospheric heat circulation might greatly expand the livabl surface of a tidally locked planet.) Of course moons wouldn't have the tidal locking problem at all.
The predation argument is premised on a limitation on stocks (to the solar system), whereas the second argument says nothing (that I can discern) about the trajectory of stocks.
Is there a way to remotely determine whether a star has been partly artifically harvested? (Presumably such harvesting would remove material from near the star's surface. BTW I seem to recall that type 1A supernovas reach critical mass by gravitationally harvesting their stellar companion)
Red dwarfs are indeed a lot more common--this book says G type stars like the Sun make up about 4% of stars in our galaxy, while the estimates here suggest red dwarfs make up more than 70% of stars in most galaxies. But if you accept the usefulness of Bostrom's self-sampling assumption, that very difference, combined with the fact that we nevertheless find ourselves in a G star's system, should lead you to suspect that the evolution of intelligent life may be less probable in red dwarf systems. This article suggests one possible reason why that might be--gravitational interactions between a red dwarf and a planet in its habitable zone would tend to erode the planet's axial tilt fairly quickly, so that the planet would no longer have seasons, which creates an extreme temperature gradient between the equator and the poles with only a narrow range of latitudes that would be habitable for complex multicellular animals (presumably decreasing the planet's biodiversity and the pool of animal groups that might eventually give rise to an intelligent species), and in addition there's a possibility that "In a worst-case scenario, however, the entire atmosphere of a zero-obliquity planet could collapse, Heller said. Gases might evaporate into space around the planet's blazing middle and freeze to the ground in the bleak north and south."
No, increasing flow access to stocks is another way of saying that returns to predation don't diminish as fast with declining prey populations.
Red dwarfs are more common than yellow stars. Red dwarfs have lifespans in the tens of billions of years and recently some have been found to have rocky planets in their habitable zone.
I don't care about the self bias of individuals. I expect it to be human nature to put oneself first, in most cases for most people.
The real problem might be that extinction might be objectively better. And people would never get or acknowledge that, because it's a low status belief that is socially undesirable - whether it is true or not.
The irony is that the positive potential is enormous, but that doesn't mean it will be unlocked, or that humanity avoids the critical mass of negtives that would outweigh it.
When I look at the way politics works and the quality of arguments and attitudes people use to justify easily avoidable real-world suffering, I am rountinely shocked by how low the quality is. To expect a positive future from this, combined with how hard coordination is (Moloch), requires an abstract low-probability-high-payoff thinking (e.g. H > D ) or an absurd amount of optimism about how human nature will fix its flaws with technology.
Give me liberty or give me death! [But Robin didn't think this way when he justified selling a child into slavery to avoid its death.]
This is another way of saying what I was trying to say in my last post: improving tech can make war more destructive, increasing the risk of extinction via war.
They're independent arguments, aren't they?