Some thoughts about secular stagnation | 107 comments (107 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)

Humans, like cockroaches, are exceedingly easy to kill but very difficult to completely exterminate.

Then again, our technological civilization could be argued to be a part of our extended phenotype - just as one might regard an anthill as a part of the ant colony, rather than a part of the ground. If one takes that view, then to extinguish a culture is tantamount to an extinction event.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Thu Nov 21st, 2013 at 11:30:12 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: animal economics (none / 0)

I'm not optimistic. I think our culture and accumulated knowledge are unique, and uniquely endangered.

Without that culture humans are just animals with unusually developed language skills. Humans as a species can survive without that culture.

But I think in Darwinian terms the persistence and mechanical amplification of knowledge are a new symbiotic genus in their own right, and wholesale extinction would just as catastrophic as any other kind of extinction.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Thu Nov 21st, 2013 at 11:35:24 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: animal economics (none / 1)

Give it fifteen thousand years and the survivors of the nuclear Armageddon will have developed a new technological civilization. Humans are tenacious bastards like that.

But it will bear so little resemblance to the one we currently live in that one might as well argue that mainline humans went extinct and a sub-species evolved to fill in the abandoned niche.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Thu Nov 21st, 2013 at 11:53:24 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Some thoughts about secular stagnation | 107 comments (107 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

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