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    21st Century Ideas: The Human Race Is Going To End, So What?

    There are things more important than mere survival and endless chasing of an impossible dream. Embrace the end, put our affairs in order.

    Started by: DefenderofMan Raves:8 Badge Winner! Longbroading

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    GEAS has indicated to us that the mankind is going to end. And we are told to strive in order to stop this. But why? We know that mankind is going to end, and that the problems, the social conditions that led to these problems, cannot be stopped by mere "superstructures". We know man is dying, but take heart in the fact that we know when we are to die! Instead of striving for outward surivial and the endless chasing to provide for our childern, strive for something greater: To fufil our desires in this life, and prepare for any life in the Hereafter. We are not mere animals, driven by instinct, but Man, who are motivated by a higher purpose.

    Reach the heavens /with your body intact/. There\\\'s a mission for you.

    If we prevent the extinction of mankind for a long enough period, we can expand from this one planet, and populate an uncountable amount of worlds. Why face our doom selfishly, when we can ensure a future for others?

    If you have doubt in this project. Why participate?

    Man is dying... but it isn\\\'t dead YET. So, your plan is to just sit around and watch?

    Who said that hitting the reset button is a bad thing. HOW about instead of the human race is going to end we instead let things run their course with a fail safe to save maybe 5 percent of the global population. ( i admit i am not wise enough to make the choice as to who.)

    While I don\\\'t agree, this is a philosophical discussion we need to have. In deep ecology we started to see the concept that humans should consider themselves just one of many species, and that\\\'s still controversial but less so. I saw my first Voluntary Human Extinction movement stickers by 2005 or 2010, I think. What I really want to understand is how VHE adherents (do you prefer a name for yourselve? I don\\\'t know any personally) want to approach extinction---I think that the media characterization of them as nihilistic hedonists is probably based on failure to understand them on their own terms.

    That\\\'s a really good point, Defender. Why try? It\\\'s definitely something important to consider if you\\\'re going to spend time doing just that, and I have considered it, and condensed my thoughts into two answers, one long, and one short. First, the long answer. Because of Walt Whitman. Because of Gilgamesh. Because of slaves building pyramids, lyrical poetry, and the smell of fresh cut fries just before you eat them. Because of Wyeth, Joseph Conrad, John Wayne, Henry Fielding, and Picasso. Because of Mohammed, and Jesus, and Moses, and Bob Dylan. Because of classical novels, comic books, and dimestore trash. Because of centuries of bloodshed over bullshit dicksizing. Really though, because of Martin Luther, and later Martin Luther King Jr. Above all, because of a picture of an old man sitting outside of bombed out grocery store, little more than a pile of rubble, with a shit-eating on his face, a few carrots on a table, and a big sign that says \\\"Business as usual.\\\" Because you never give up. You fight with every tool at hand to the very last drop of your blood, and then you fight some more. You don\\\'t let fairy tales about higher purpose take your eyes off of what\\\'s in front of you, and what\\\'s behind you. The weight of the past pushes you into the future, and that\\\'s the legacy we pass on to our kids, who happily make the same mistakes we made, have the same loves, the same losses, and they deserve a shot at that. Because one of the most important parts of being human is looking at a problem, usually one of our own making, and not going \\\"Well, I guess this is it,\\\" but striving to overcome it. It\\\'s like Tennyson said, \\\"Though much is taken, much abides; and though we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are-- One equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong of will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield\\\" (Ulysses). The short answer is pretty short. If we\\\'re gone, who\\\'s going to watch all those sunsets? - Prophessor Bedlam, Bastard for a Better Tomorrow

    Why bother fighting to save the human race? I\\\'ll tell you why. Because, no matter how bad it gets, this is all we have. Whether you believe in a supreme being or not, this wonderfully complex and powerful thing that is the human mind is a remarkable achievement, the best that this universe has to offer, as far as anyone can tell. If we let it all go to pot, there is no guarantee that anything better will ever arise again.

    I\\\'ve got to agree with Prof Bedlam and Co on this issue. I am a committed charismatic Christian. I believe that life on Earth has a higher purpose and an ultimate End. However, unlike the \\\'sit back and wait for the apocalypse\\\' adherents of the VHE movement, I\\\'m convinced that part of this divine purpose is to exist, to strive, to create, to preserve and protect. God commissioned the first people to protect and nurture the creation; this active stewardship must remain a pivotal element of our role today.

    Why try and do something? Because history isn\\\'t filled with the names of people who just sat back and did nothing.

    Those who agree with you will die and be forgotten. Those who do not might very well survive, even under largely undesirable conditions. You have just made your whole perspective co(s)micly irrelevant.

    That if we end, we end fighting, not like a coward loser. Oh, one thing though... if the salvation of the natural ecosystem on this planet requires our sacrifice as a species, it might be the only way it would be acceptable. After all, we are hurting our planet too much already. Either we do something together and save it, or we keep on our \\\"me\\\" mindset and we will all die in it.

    The reason for not dying is that mankind hasn\\\'t tapped even 1% of our potential. If we die in the process of \\\'chasing the impossible dream\\\' then fair enough, we are after all just a bunch of apes that have dreams in a backwater cul-de-sac of the galaxy. However, not striving for life would be frankly wasteful to the chance that life has given us, and not trying to truly explore our full potential would be the same as being a vegetable.

    If you believe that you will live after death, then sit back and wait for it.Church, 24/7 baby!

    DefenderofMan, GEAS has indicated that mankind is going to end, but you forget what else they have told us. GEAS has found that the end of man is not imminent, and that solutions to any of the five superthreats can postpone the end of humanity (perhaps indefinitely). Surely, no matter what afterlife you are so certain of, you do not believe that Man's "higher purpose" includes giving up on survival and destroying hope for future generations. If you want to throw your life away, I don't mind, but I will not let people with attitudes similar to your own throw away the lives of an unimaginable amount of future humans.

    The universe does not care if man lives or dies. But man does - and we ought to do what we can to survive.

    I don't think we have a right to just sit back and die. Think about it. The universe is a big, empty place, and there's no law saying there has to be life at all. But somehow, on this little blue planet, we have forests and dolphins and flowers and bacteria, and more than that, we have a species that's capable of looking at all that and realizing that it's a miracle. I'm not saying 'homo sapiens' are going to be around forever, because evolution never stops, but does that give us the right to say 'just because we won't be around anymore in 10 million years, why bother sticking around for the next 50'? It took 3.5 billion years for single-celled bacteria floating in a pond to become us, and those bacteria had to be there first, which is a miracle unto itself. We might well be the only conscious beings in the universe. Isn't that something to be grateful for? Isn't that a reason to live?

    I'm not sure I get the "sit back and die" argument, if it is based on the idea that humans are "just another species". I don't know of any species that, when they see that their resources are drying up or that their climate is changing, says, "Ok, time to pack it in." In my experience, animals who are struggling to eat will struggle to find every last morsel, and adapt by eating other foods if they can. No species I know of will collectively decide to give up when their numbers start diminishing.

    In my earlier years, I used to believe in saving the planet and all of the organisms in it. I used to believe that man's responsibility to the world was to bring order to it, to help remove it's primitive ways and help to soften the life-and-death cycles that occur naturally. I believed that man could one day make this Earth more like paradise. After going to war and experiencing life (outside of this country where the REAL world it located), I believe very differently. I am not religious and do not have those glasses to color my view. If one holds that man is an animal, then they could see man behave as animals do. Animals in the wild are in a constant struggle for survival, for food and territory, often paying the price for one of those aims. They do it again and again, yet everyone accepts it as it simply being the "will" or "way" of Nature. They condescendingly look down upon them as more primitive forms of existence and go about drinking their contaminated coffee. Yet are humans so very different? They have fought for territory, for food, and for slights since their first recorded existence. We look down our noses as if we were above them in any way, yet we fight for much less than survival (indeed for anything), we kill for pleasure, and we kill off everything around us, especially the Earth, taking it away from all other life forms. With such petty pursuits as ours, do we really deserve to survive?

    We aren't facing complete extinction, there's no erasing "Man" from the planet. What we are facing is the end of human civilization. Why should we rally to prevent that? Because if we don't learn from our mistakes (and I'd say that would be our impertinence and sense of entitlement since the industrial revolution) then we are doomed to repeat it. We look at the Aztec and Mayan, Roman and Egyptian civilizations via their crumbling ruins and we know a lot about what caused their downfall. With their vices we also lost their virtues. I want to maintain and build on the best we have developed in this culture we've been building since the rennaissance. I want to see it through another 900 years. I do have religion as part of what makes me feel this way, but a big part of my religion is that we do not look to an afterlife, it's irerelevant. We are what our lives are on this planet, in this age. This is our paradise. How we envision it, how we act, determines what that paradise will be.

    In defense of Defender: some who are spiritual would suggest that life's higher purpose is for the outward body to die, that the inner worlds open up when the flash of superficiality stops attracting. It's then, in that process, that the big picture comes into focus and higher purpose, including living with (not on) the land, is achieved.




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