Yeah, pretty insane to NOT imagine that a thread about random thoughts will inevitably turn to the fact that we are in a mass extinction exacerbated by capitalism and fascism. Like, pay just a liiiiiiittle bit of attention to the background extinction rate and recognize that the Holocene will be geologically significant for eons.
Edit: I've been reading a fair bit of geology lately and we really are in an absolutely fascinating age. We are experiencing the most rapid and catastrophic climate change that our entire taxonomic order has ever seen. Primates--our taxonomic family, the step above order--came about some 60-75 million years ago, and it isn't clear cut whether any primates were around for the K-Pg event that killed the dinosaurs, which is the last time we had a level of sustained climate change that was this rapid. Hominids have only been around like 17 million years, and while we have seen minor extinction events in that time, we have seen nothing like the mass extinction and level of climate change we find ourselves in at present.
Humans have been around for some 300,000 years, and we've primarily lived in a series of glacial and interglacial periods in the Pleistocene. However, ice ages like that were relatively consistent and even snap ice ages were not as dramatic a rate of change as we are currently experiencing. Large volcanic eruptions would sometimes see temporary snap ice ages (like in the 1600s) which would decrease global temperatures by even up to a few degrees C, but many of those snap ice ages were short-lived. We are in the unique position of being at a high rate of change that is wildly consistent, and the carbon cycle on this planet is being disrupted in some unique ways. The collapse of AMOC is going to dramatically change global climate and that is only one of several critical tipping points we are either up against or have already crossed.
Preparing for a 2C future is wise, but from everything I've seen, it doesn't really make sense to try to, like climate-proof your house for anything above 2C because so many global systems will be disrupted that we can't meaningfully predict the impacts. That is where human resiliency and the capacity to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances is going to be the most crucial. Above 2C, which we might even hit before 2050, is a whole new planet akin to how the Holocene and recession of the last ice age basically left humans with a new planet 12000 years ago. Of course, since we are exiting a fairly stable climate period and entering a relatively high chaos system thanks to added greenhouse effects drastically jumping global heat and exciting molecules WAY more, I do not anticipate we will see a similar period of unbridled population growth. We are likely to peak at no more than 10 billion or so humans which the planet could easily and comfortably sustain so long as we move away from fossil fuel use and move toward sustainability in lifestyle, meaning getting rid of the people who believe they are entitled to thousands of times the resources everyone else has access to.
This is going to also be the beginning of the true space age as we work toward developing interplanetary capabilities, although that work probably won't begin until we stop focusing on the profit incentive and start arranging space exploration democratically.
A relevant verse from the Book of the Living:
"Intelligence is ongoing, individual adaptability.
Adaptations that an intelligent species may make
in a single generation, other species make over
many generations of selective breeding and
selective dying. Yet intelligence is demanding.
If it is misdirected by accident or by intent, it can
foster its own orgies of breeding and dying."
Let's hope we direct our collective intelligence well starting soon. We've been doing a piss-poor job the past few centuries.
