In the show "3 Body Problem" (I haven't read the book) the statement was made **'our civilization is no longer capable of solving its own problems'**. Would you agree?
No civilization has ever been capable of solving the problems of civilization. This is why history hasn't ended yet. We hope that eventually we may discover how to address the problems of civilization. We weren't built for any of this. We have to use non-intuitive methodology because the intuitions we evolved have equipped us for a totally different lifestyle. We have not figured out how to get humanity to function peacefully and productively in these massive systems. We're the first animals to even try to do what we're doing.
The thing about that is that there isn't a definable human nature, just tendencies and systems. Using technology like CRISPR to force a definable human nature for all humans would likely doom us. It would be nice until the the environment we adapted our species to changes and then no one in the entire population would be capable of adapting to the new environment since we bottlenecked ourselves for short-term peace and prosperity.
I'm partial to the notion of memetic evolution, which is to say that humans have a concurrent driver of behavior besides our genes. Less so than capability or willingness, I tend to believe that some of the memes driving us are too successful, if that makes sense. They perfectly capitalize on the foibles of the human organism and I just don't believe we're able to surmount that. The only likely way out is running through the painful cycle described in another comment here. We need to suffer sufficiently to initiate a change in the ideas by which we operate
I'd argue that our civilization is more capable of solving it's own problems than it ever has been, just because we are are far better at identifying them, communicating them to the rest of the world, and analyzing the effects of what we try. Just because we have not solved all our problems does not mean that people in years past would have been able to do so and we've somehow lost that ability.
FWIW, book three is basically "a feminized society is incapable of making the hard but necessary choices". I like the series for its concepts, but not its themes or characters. It has a lot of Incel-adjacent stuff going on.
That said, when we're being so half hearted about global warming, it's hard not to be cynical. People want the solutions to keep everything the same, but without carbon output. It's not going to work that way.
We're having a hard time convincing people that they don't need an EV with 600 miles of range if you're just willing to rest for 20 minutes every two to four hours of driving. Which would be a good idea, anyway. That's a relatively minor change compared to the status quo.
The real solution is high speed rail and bikes. How do we get people to go along with that if we can't even go so far as small changes to road trips?
I’ve only had some exposure to chinese society, but the little I do know helped flesh out the characters. Remember how Bilbo did not off his relatives tea, and it was a serious disrespect? There’s a lot of cultural norms followed or disobeyed in the book that describe the characters’ natures.
you’re not wrong, but is easier to buy a car that can travel that than it is to convince people to build thousands, if not tens of thousands, of charging stations
In the US, it's getting there, but not good enough.
I just did a trip to Minneapolis and tried to use some of the chargers around the suburb of Plymouth. They chose a deployment based on the DirtRoad app, which is terrible. Totally broken. Tried three different L3 stations and they all errored out in unique ways.
Came down to going to the other side of the city to a Walmart, with only a few miles of range to spare. Of all places, Walmart seems to at least have reliable chargers.
US needs lots more L3 chargers, and tons more L2 chargers in places you'll tend to be a while (hotels and event parking and such). Once that's done, though, there isn't much call for more than 400 miles of range, tops. Further battery improvements can go into making it cheaper and lighter, not go longer.
Honestly, I love driving so, so much, and I cannot fathom a road trip where we don't make a pit-stop at least every four hours. In fact, you kind of had to do that back in the 80's, because fuel economy was total shit back then. My little Mazda fuel sipper had a max range of a bit over 400 miles, and if we had to use my parents' van, it was closer to 250-300.
Thank you, I have been saying the same thing about the books for a while now. They are incredibly misogynistic and the characters are pretty badly written. And yet I still keep seeing them recommended. They remind me of the old scifi novels like Niven and shit where its just a few cool scifi concepts and then a heaping load of sexism.
I listened to them on audiobook, most books I read more than once, don't plan on going back to them though. A good series I recently listened to was the wayfarers by becky chambers, very good characters.
Just an anecdote: Any bike I’ve ever owned, got stolen or if it was well locked, wrecked and hacked to shit for no apparent reason. I have ADHD so it’s difficult for me to go through the motions of carrying the bike with me to the office and back, each time I leave, and at home I haven’t the space to bring it up with me. Most grocers or markets or shops don’t allow me to wheel it along with me inside.
It would be amazing if that was an option, but I’m not rich enough to replace a bike every few months, and I do move enough to warrant having a good bike, not just any cheap and rusty one. So it’s a pickle.
I am still very much in opposition of unnecessary cars in cities, so I do not own one currently, and instead of bike, I move about with buses and trains. It’s okay, but I’d love to have the freedom some days, that a bike provides.
But it is simply impossible for me to own one. It makes no sense whatsoever, since for some reason, the cities are not even close to safe to keep one for someone like me who’s not so great with self-execution and routines. And I live in one of the safest countries on earth, that has been declared the happiest country on earth for 7 years in row now… I can’t imagine how bad it is elsewhere…
Sometimes reality does not fit well with ideals.
Luckily, I have the option of public transport. But I don’t even know what I would do if I didn’t…
That's surprising. I own a bicycle too, as does practically everyone here. Never got it stolen.
A tip is to not have an expensive looking bicycle, but one that looks shoddy. Locking can also happen in multiple ways, and at different places. You might need to bind it to a street light for example, through the wheel and the frame.
Most everyone I know have and daily drive one too.
The difference is in the having adhd and not having adhd department. They are very careful and dutiful with them. I can only ever attempt my best to be so, and it only takes the one slip of the mind and it’s gone.
I’m not saying having and using a bike is not safe. I’m saying having and using a bike is not safe, if you end up offering the low hanging fruit to thieves even once a while.
FWIW, book three is basically "a feminized society is incapable of making the hard but necessary choices".
That is one way of reading it. Another is that the vast majority of humans will do the decent thing even if it ends up backfiring on them. Which, if anything, is wildly optimistic. I would also point out that of the two species in conflict, the one that played decent went on to become a galactic civilisation, while the other died out.
Trisolarans did make it to the end. The message sent out to everyone included their language. The humans who became a galactic civilization were from a renegade ship that took the selfish choice in the Prisoners Dilemma.
I'd disagree. If you look at the problems which create existential problems for "our civilization" (more on the scare quotes in a minute), the list is pretty short.
Nuclear war - This is existential to both civilization and to humanity as a species. Fortunately, this one is pretty easy to forestall: don't fucking do it. And that's actually been working out OK for the last few decades. For as insane of a system as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is, it's also been pretty successful. Once every nation knew that using nuclear weapons in war meant everyone loses hard, they never got used again. Prior to that situation, they got used. And, there is no reason to believe that the US wouldn't have used them again, if the USSR didn't also have their finger on The Button. Sure, universal disarmament sounds like a better solution, but that also assumes everyone is willing to act in good faith. Just one bad actor and that all falls apart. And you can pretty much assume that there will be plenty of bad actors.
Climate Change - Depending on how bad this gets, it might rise to the level of "existential threat". But, most of the currently likely outcomes are probably not. This isn't to say they aren't bad and really horrific for a lot of people. But, even looking at something like a 2C rise over the next century, it's probably not going to cause the outright collapse of most major countries. Anyone not living in the US, China, India or a Western European country is fucked. Water shortages and famine in Sub-Saharan Africa are going to rise to levels completely unprecedented in history. But, from a question of "will society collapse"? The answer is "probably not". Though the surviving societies will only do so by accepting a mountain of corpses on their doorstep. And even some of the major countries might end up collapsed due to resource wars.
Astronomical Events - Throwing this in to avoid the "but actshuly" responses. Yes, if we suddenly discovered a big ass rock headed our way, we're likely fucked. Also, if we get caught by a massive gamma ray burst, we're all gonna get turned to jerky. But, these are so low likelihood events as to not be worth worrying about.
Other than that, there isn't all that much which could really wipe out all civilization, everywhere, at once. And this is where I get back to those "scare quotes". We don't really have one single civilization on Earth. We have a bunch of them which interact in lots of ways. While that interdependence does make things a bit fragile, it also means that there is a higher degree of redundancy. If the US went tits up tomorrow, it would have some major impacts on China, India and Western Europe. But, each of those areas has a reasonable chance of adjusting and and continuing on. There may be a lost decade or three while supply chains adjust and new infrastructure is built out, but there is nothing wholly unique to the US which couldn't be replicated elsewhere. And depending on how the US failed, the useful bits of the US economy might well be able to be rebooted by someone else. Again, there is probably a lot of death on the table, the US is a major food exporter, after all. But, China already has a history of weathering millions of people dying to famine, I'm sure the PRC government could figure out a leap forward. An with such useful farmland in the US, one would expect farms to pop back up and get producing pretty quick. Maybe not at the level of output which the US currently has, but if we've killed off half or more of the US population, then we have a bunch of useful farmland with a lot less people to feed.
We can solve problems, the status quo is just to profitable for those in power. Don't you find it strange how the status quo persists despite both mainstream political parties running a Change candidate for president and winning? (MAGA is the shitters form of change, just in the wrong way)
Clearly the people are looking for solutions, even if they don't know the answers.
Consider watching a video on first past three post voting. If we change how we vote in each of our individual states , people can vote for 3rd parties and still have their vote count if their preference didn't win. No spoiler effect!
Aren't we in the USA already at >200 electoral votes total that have pledged to put all of their votes towards whoever wins the popular vote? That said, I would expect a more serious resistance as it inches closer to where it might actually make a difference.
Also, I realize that isn't quite the same thing as fully moving away from a first past the vote system, but it is a type of reformation and it does help get away from the electoral college system in particular, so seems somewhat related.
It's both capable and willing, the problem is that not everyone agrees with the solutions being used. And so they say "we're doing it wrong" instead of "I think we're doing it wrong."
I mean, not everyone agrees what the problems are. We can't even approach talking about solutions until we settle on the problems. And that problem seems to be getting worse.
if politicians would grow a backbone, most of the problems we have would be solved
Politicians aren't scared to do what's right. Their job is to act in the interest of their fellow elites. The most successful at empowering their fellows are given more power. Solving society's problems isn't remotely on the agenda.
If anything, we want more cowardly and timid elites. Politicians with a backbone are just more dangerous predators.
Human civilizations have only been around for a couple thousand years. That's nothing.
edit: by this I mean to say that it's too soon to make sweeping generalizations about what human social organizations can or cannot do. A commenter downstream rightly points out that "civilization" isn't a well-defined term in this context, although I was thinking of it as a shorthand term for the various human political, commercial, cultural, etc. organizations of a given era. My contention is that because recorded history is only a couple of thousand years old, we do not have enough information about what the various components of "civilization" are capable of, especially when they are overlapping, interacting, and meeting a novel challenge.
btw I tried reading this book but got bored halfway through, and I watched the first episode and wasn't that impressed either. I read the wikipedia summary and it's got some neat ideas, though.
Civilization is one of those great words (like Innovation) where if you're using it, you're definitely using it wrong.
When you say civilization, do you mean: The State, Justified Violence, Official Oppression, Bureaucracy, A Standing Army, Cultures you Agree with, or just Table Manners?
Our civilization is more than capable, but those who have money and power are unwilling, because that's not something they're interested or invested in.
I disliked the books and haven't tried to watch the show.
But I think I disagree that our civilization is no longer capable of solving it's own problems. Rather, I think our civilization is going through one of the crappy parts of common cycles that civilizations go through. Frighteningly, this part usually comes right before really scary crappy parts.
Civilizations aren't static and the patterns don't always happen the same way, but I think we can predict that
Things get really shitty. People pull together for survival and build to a place of stability and prosperity.
The rich and powerful (being short sighted idiots just like the rest of us, but ALSO insulated from and out of touch with reality), start looting society for their own selfish, short term benefit. This destabilizes the institutions and systems creating the stability and prosperity. The population at large doesn't really understand what's happening or why, but they DO know that while they're still relatively comfortable, they're scared and they don't like it. They get more conservative and eventually turn to fascists, strongmen and authoritarians to try to get stability back.
This doesn't work out. It exacerbates the existing problems, makes things even more scary and less stable. Eventually war and rebellion break out.
When the dust settles, things are really shitty. People pull together for survival and build back to a place of stability and prosperity.
These steps aren't exact. They're trends. Lots of things can disrupt them (including famine, plague and barbarian invasions). But in step 1/4, we (humans) are actually REALLY good at collectively solving problems. In step 2 we're TERRIBLE at collectively doing anything. In step 3 we (collectively) are trying to solve all the WRONG problems... then back to step 1/4.
We seem to globally be right at the tail end of step 2. Which SUCKS.
tl:dr; This has all happened before and will surely happen again. Hostile aliens are just a modern take on the "barbarian invasion" disrupter. Beware of strangers bearing gifts.
Theorists and futurologists refer to it as the 'Great Filter' .... a series of challenges that civilizations go up against which determines if they make it past the filter or not.
Our current filters are climate change, nuclear war and artificial intelligence ... will we use nuclear tech or AI to benefit ourselves? Will we work towards dealing with climate change? or will us acting negatively with all this be the cause of our regression ... or destruction?
We have equal capability at this point ... we are just as capable of collectively solving these problems .... or using them to destroy ourselves.
Our collective futures are most definitely in our own hands ... whether or not we use those hands for good or ill is up to us.
AI isn't a challenge to those who know better, the rest are already building their cults about it: some say it will save us from downfall, others saying it will create the downfall. The sad part is that either group could be right, as it's all a self-fulfilling prophecy and just requires enough people participating in the myth to make it happen.
And I reject the "vapourware" label. Machine Learning has a lot of potential for the future, especially as we break out of standard Von Neumann architecture and experiment with different types of computers/computing. Will it ever do what the consumers currently expect it to do? No. Will it continue to develop and grow into it's own domain of computing? I'd bet on it.