Technology

We can't even come together to wear a peice of cloth to slow the spread of a virus.

Whenever I dare to hope about the lofty, admirable star trek future, I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren't up to the task for anything more than a token selfie by the best dozen humans we can possibly produce with great effort and training.

As a species, we aren't going to spread out there. Still too primitive, and probably too self-destructive to make it out of this phase of evolution. This might be one of those great filters scientists postulate as to why there aren't signals from innumerable civilizations out there.

We aren't even capable of caring for one another, let alone the EASIEST to maintain, most naturally human friendly habitat we would ever encounter in the cosmos as we evolved to fit it. No airlocks, the air/water/waste recycling was already fully automated, all we had to do was not recklessly grow/metastasize to the point we strain the absolutely massive system out of greed and glut, and stop carelessly shitting where we sleep. We all know how that's been going since we figured out how to make dead animal poison rocket us accross town.

Master space? Master planetary defense? We can't even defend this world from our own habitual consumerism. We'll be lucky if we aren't scattered tribes living near the old hardened structures of the before times for emergency shelter from the new normal weather events in a hundred years. We're already starting to argue over the resources it's taking to rebuild population centers from the current new normal. We have played pretend we were since human civilization began, but we are NOT and never have been this world's owners or masters, and we are still very much its subject.

And Reminder, what we're doing and have been doing in decades won't be undone for millions of years. The Earth is a self-correcting system, and the damage we're doing is inconsequential to its 3.8 billion year old, beautiful story of life growing out of every crevice, just not on a timescale humans can benefit from or even truly appreciate.

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell - Great Filter

Congress is making laws about bathrooms and genitals like a bunch of 6th graders running a minecraft server. Of course we can't handle fucking asteroid defense.

Real talk, an asteroid wiping us out would only expedite the inevitable. If we could pull together and deflect an asteroid, there's hope. If not, we failed the test and die with the consequences. But we don't need the asteroid to fail this test. We're making great strides towards destroying our home with home field advantage.

We've already solved this. We just need to train a team of dysfunctional oil drillers to send up to the asteroid.

We are not at a point where the "global community" is more than a few competing, egoistic and greedy tribes with clashing world views, so that's no surprise.

Don't look up

"Sustaining the space mission, disaster preparedness, and communications efforts across a 14-year timeline would be challenging due to budget cycles, changes in political leadership, personnel, and ever-changing world events," the report says.

First administration: "We must do something about the asteroid. I've started a plan to divert it, but it'll take several years."

Second administration: "The asteroid is a corrupt globalist conspiracy. We never needed to divert asteroids in the past, why do we supposedly need to spend all your hard-earned tax dollars on this all of a sudden? I will prove my anti-elitist attitudes by cancelling the asteroid program as soon as I take office."

Third administration: "Yes we recognize that the asteroid is a threat, but as we saw last time there's just too much political resistance to solving it. Let's focus on other priorities that we can solve."

Achievement unlocked: discovering the Great Filter.

Don't Look Up!

That's okay, humanity had s good run. I imagine we'll have extinctified ourselves way before a space rock could do it. A+ for trying though.

I'm roundaboutly reminded of one of my favorite novels - Greener Than You Think, by Ward Moore.

It's a science fiction story about the end of the world that was written in the late 40s. The proximate cause of the end is all of the landmasses of Earth being smothered by a gigantic and very aggressive strain of Bermuda grass, but the real cause is the utter and complete failure, due to ignorance, greed, selfishness, short-sightedness, incompetence, arrogance and so on, of every attempt to combat it.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In an exercise involving multiple US government agencies during April 2024, NASA conducted a so-called "tabletop" game in which participants plot their response to a 72 percent chance that an asteroid may hit Earth in 14 years.

Underpinning a bewildering number of moving parts is the likelihood that space agencies are not ready to implement the operations needed to find out more about the threat and mitigate it, even with more than a decade to prepare.

The game also found that the "role of the UN-endorsed Space Mission Planning and Advisory Group (SMPAG) in an asteroid impact threat scenario is not fully understood by all participants."

"Sustaining the space mission, disaster preparedness, and communications efforts across a 14-year timeline would be challenging due to budget cycles, changes in political leadership, personnel, and ever-changing world events," the report says.

It recommends "periodic briefings and exercises to continue to raise awareness of planetary defense and increase readiness for preparation and response to an asteroid impact threat."

Speaking to US public radio service NPR, Terik Daly, planetary defense section supervisor at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said experts didn't know of any asteroids of a substantial size that are going to hit Earth for the next hundred years.

The original article contains 610 words, the summary contains 206 words. Saved 66%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Call me an optimist, but I think that if an android was actually going to destroy life as we know it, nations would do everything in their power to advert the disaster.

Half the population would believe the asteroid is a hoax spread by the [insert ethnic or religious group here].