The solution to global warming
Well, not really of course, but nonetheless. If there was any way to do this, it could work.
I read recently about a creative researcher, Dr. Corina Amor, who may have insight into curing old age1, allowing all of us to live to 130 or so.
Let’s say it worked and we could get this out to everyone on the planet. Suddenly all the geezers at the top of the game would be looking sixty, seventy, eighty years into the future.
It’s not just their grandchildren who’d have to deal with Florida being underwater and the entire Midwest USA being a dried up flatland of blowing dust. And India and China and Europe and Africa all dealing with similar and equivalent and worse catastrophes. It would become their personal future all of a sudden.
And they’re the ones with the power to actually try to steer us away from disaster.
I bet a lot of them would suddenly see the value of doing that, even at the cost of 1.2% less profit on the quarterly shareholder report.
Wouldn’t that be nice.
1. Personally, I’d wait before buying shares. The problem with curing old age is that it looks like old age may be our answer to cancer. By far the largest risk factor for cancer is old age. All that incorrect DNA accumulates over time and leads to cancer.
By slowing down the rate of cell renewal, (so, letting cells get older and older without replacement which is what old age is), cancers also grow much more slowly. In old age, some grow so slowly that they have no effect before the person dies of other causes. This allows old people to live longer, and that’s important for our success as a species. That’s why humans benefited from slowing down cancer in old age.
Humans’ superpower is knowledge of how to deal with everything in one’s life. Before the invention of writing, that knowledge could only be as extensive as the information accumulated by the old and passed on to the young. The old then were what libraries and the internet are now. Having old people around who knew what to do was a huge boost to the survival of the group.
Point being: if we cure old age, we may well just have a galloping cancer epidemic that _shortens_ life spans. Unless we can also figure out how to cure cancer.
The solution to global warming is to have fewer humans on this limited space. Period.
And the only means to that is women having full human, legal and civil rights.
When they have the power to do so, women have overwhelming chosen to have no more children than they can support.
But men will overwhelmingly still buy into anything that lets them own women and women’s bodies.
I still can’t believe how American conventional wisdom shifted from my 1970’s 1st Earth Day awareness of how very much 1st world populations affected consumption of resources.
The stat then was every American child consumed 11 times the resources of any other country.
Male owned religions sequestered those facts and substituted instead a rule by force. American men collaborated. They decided their ownership of women mattered more, literally, than anything else on this planet. And American women were too bewildered and beset to make this their one sole issue: don’t breed me against my will.
Intelligent species are weird. We have so many physics defying things like language and math that contribute to survival, but also anti-survival things, like irrational bigotry encoded into everyday existence and carried from one generation to the next via that supreme social vector, religion.
I think at this point in time I would rather have been an eight eyed spider.
Earlynerd on August 14th, 2022 at 01:42
Just have to say this, as the evidence supporting it has been coming up more and more often:
Are humans an invasive species?
Earlyner on August 27th, 2022 at 00:40
God, yes. And nobody is allowed to talk about limiting births by giving women control over their own lives because that might annoy a bunch of old men.
(Can’t bring myself to write about anything because there’s just too much. Completely in awe of Iranian women shouting “ENOUGH.” And glad to see there’s some guys helping. So long as they don’t start making a mess with their usual guy methods. Here’s hoping.)
quixote on October 10th, 2022 at 13:53
Iranian women should have done that decades ago, before the “let’s just let men do what they want and call it religion” got entrenched in international law. Better late than never, I guess.
As far as men helping, good for them, but it does go against their self-interest.
It would be so very very neat if there weren’t a rock solid caste of human beings divided along a completely innocuous rift of who carries what gamete. And if the majority of those on the wrong side of that rift didn’t find solace for their cowardice in standing up almost exclusively for any demographic (race, sexual orientation, etc) that never stood up for us.
Women are the majority of all human beings on the planet. What will it take for us to start acting like we are?
earlynerd on November 4th, 2022 at 01:54