And no, I wouldn’t be happy about it at all.
Or the Amish, and a buttload of subsistence farmers in Africa and Asia.
It would be interesting to see who colonizes who.
Regards,
Shodan
I am very fond of civilization - or what passes for civilization around here. Thank you very much.
Well, that depends where you live. 
I can make both, so I’m set. 
The problem with setting out to purify water and grow stuff would be that, unless you happened to live in some extremely remote area, you’d quickly be overrun by very hungry, desperate and possibly armed folks who can’t get their hands on a stock of goats and seeds … or rather, they can, but only by taking them from you. Chances are you won’t be left in peace to make greenhouses and windmills.
That is, unless your civilization-ending event is something that zaps a goodly portion of the world’s population.
I apologize if you were offended enough to consider a pit thread, but I personally don’t think of humans as being any ‘better’ or ‘more valuable’ than animals. I realize that most humans equate intelligence and highly developed nervous systems to being higher on some cosmic totem pole, but I don’t.
That’s kind of frightening. Do you mean that in your opinion eating a fish and killing a human child are morally equivalent?
On second thought, I wasn’t being completely forthcoming when I said “happy as a clam.” It’s not exactly happiness at the chaos and horrible misery that I’d feel, but something else: a sense of relief at the return to normalcy. Humanity spent 99% of its history much as other mammals in their natural state: fearful of predators (human or otherwise), short-lived, and scrabbling to survive. A sizable minority of us still do live that way. That’s just how organisms operate, and the (sort of) unique evolutionary adaptation of consciousness doesn’t somehow keep us from being animals. In my opinion, what we consider first-world western civilization simply can’t last. It’s a blip and an aberration. And if I were to survive through it, I’d just be happy that the collapse of civilization didn’t last a few hundred years and/or cause the extinction of Homo sapiens.
Although the part of my brain that loves Fallout would probably genuinely enjoy the apocalypse. For a while.
You want your life to be nasty, brutish and short?
You think you’d feel “relief” at a return to a “normalcy” you’ve never experienced, and only dimly understand the ramifications of? Really now?
You know, apparently birds used to be dinosaurs. Do you think they’d feel relief if we chopped down all the trees and clipped their wings? After all, it’d just be return to normalcy.
I would personally loathe it for the most part, and probably would regret every second until I die of scurvy or radioactive brain worms that I had ever had a strange sort of hope that it would happen. Yet from an existential perspective I think it would be oddly positive: the emptiness and anomie of life kinda disappears when you have to focus on fending off raiders and keeping your turnip crop from failing and hoping that the priests report good auguries. That’s what we’re made for.
If I were a (cognizant) dinosaur, I’d be relieved if the bolide only decimated my species instead of annihilating it.
I’m not saying there’ll be anything “good” about it; it’s not a matter of good and bad. But it’s gotta happen sooner or later. I don’t want any harm to come to (almost) anyone, but the underlying entropy is real. The earth will get consumed by the sun, the human race will eventually going to go extinct, and in the meantime civilizations will rise and fall, though it’s questionable whether there’ll be any more after us. That’s just the way it is.
That’s not really a fair comparison. I’d say eating a fish and eating a human child are morally equivalent. Doesn’t mean I’d be more likely to eat a child in real life. Eating children doesn’t interest me, and laws and social norms prevent it. But if I were God, I’d see them as the same. I understand why people might be shocked by me saying this, but on what basis should one life count for more than another? And should my views on the value of life be dictated by social norms and homophily? I don’t buy it. If you believe a child is more “valuable” than a fish you should be able to express why you think that is true, and I haven’t heard a single rationale that isn’t based on some self-serving (to humans) explanation or personal convenience. I think if a fish could talk, it would probably tell you that it thinks that killing a fish is far worse than killing a human child-- for the same reasons!
And before I get questioned about it, yes, I do perceive more tragedy in a child’s death than in a fish’s death, but only because of conditioning and my own ability to relate to the feelings of the child and the relatives-- not because I believe there is more inherent value.
Good, evil, morals, superiority, inferiority, guess who invented these concepts? Humans did. If we asked a fish whether it thought killing its babies or killing a baby human was worse, it’d just flop there stupidly. If fish could talk and were sentient, then obviously its own set of morals would put fish above all other animals.
You can pontificate all you want about inherent moral objectivity, but the fact is that all these ideas are human-centric. We empathize with our own species, just like every other species does, it’s only natural. You can call it “selfish” but really, what’s the point? Everything anyone does it selfish. Preserving the environment is only “good” because it is beneficial to humans, whether its to keep our food sources or to make us feel better about ourselves.
Not to mention the various kibbutzim in Israel. Tight-knit, self-reliant and well-armed.
We aren’t “made” for agriculture - that’s almost as ‘new’ as living in cities. If anything, we are “made” to be hunter-gatherers.
There are still places in the world one can attempt this with minimal interference, though admittedly they aren’t the easiest places to survive by hunting and gathering. Try Labrador.
If a fish could talk, it would be correct in its assertion that it’s death is a tragedy. That’s the whole point.
This would definitely be a problem and a reason that people could survive on their own. The difference between the group starting up civilization and the people doing the looting is that the former group has a reason to no tear itself apart. All that is necessary is to have good enough defenses to wait out the aggressors because in theory there is food and water available inside but not out, that’s why they want in. I think Alessan has the right add-on to what groups need to survive.
Dude, that’s my profile!
The difficulty is that the “growers” are of necessity more vulnerable than the “aggressors”. They need not only protect themselves, but also their investments: fields and livestock as well.
Not to say that some groups wouldn’t make a success of it, but it is defininitely going to be a major problem: our comparatively huge populations are simply not sustainable by subsistance farming, and for every person having the knowledge and materials to make a start of it, there is going to be a hundred who don’t.
Yep, I figure something like 40% causalities. It’s those challenges that I find interesting though, there are very few opportunities to face life and death on a day to day basis on such a wide variety of issues from how it irrigate the crops to how best to transition from guns to bows. That is why I think despite disliking the death and hardships I would enjoy the end of civilization.
Of course how civilization is destroyed will affect all of the scenarios not to mention how long you do the minimum just waiting for civilization to rebuild itself. I know I probably would stay in the area for a while hoping that everything would restart and I could go to work the next day.