Quote from: TDoS on Jun 03, 2024, 08:34 PMSo I'll go with humans being less intelligent than some species or another because humans have the ability to KNOW better....and do the stupid shit anyway.
SOME homo saps have the ability to know better, all do not. I'm sure you're familiar with the concept in chemistry of a "rate determining step". For those of you not familiar with this idea, it basically states that in a multi-step reaction, the speed of the reaction is governed by the speed of the slowest individual step. When one step moves very slowly compared to all the rest, you can ignore all the fast ones because the overall rate at which the total reaction proceeds to completion is governed by the slowest step.
With society, you have individual intelligence, which can be amazingly brilliant in some people. Collective intelligence though is only as good as the stupidest guys in the room. The stupidity of a HUGE percentage of the population is breathtaking. I give the example here of Terence Howard, the actor from the 1st Iron Man movie who played Tony Stark's best friend. He was fired from this role, likely because he's a flaming idiot, which the casting director didn't pick up on when he was given the role. It later probably surfaced because Terence has some thoroughly whack-a-doodle theories about math & physics and probably spouted off about them on set. He's recently got a lot of publicity because Joe Rogan had him on his show to spout off on these ideas. Here's a brief debunking of his idiocy.
The thing is, Joe Rogan's audience IS stupid enough to eat this shit up. Just as MAGA crowds are stupid enough to eat up the shit that Donald #VonShitzinPants defecates from his mouth every day. Collectively, Homo Saps are only as intelligent as the low grade morons who buy this drivel. It doesn't matter how brilliant all of us geniuses who populate this website are ;D , the intelligence rate determining step is Joe Rogan's audience, not ours.
Far as T Rex long duration as Apex predator, it wasn't adaptable to many different environments or grow its own food supply. I'd bet it followed the same Predator-Prey cycle as Lions do, which are Apex predators in their particular ecosystem. When weather is good and the antelope the lions eat multiply, lions start multiplying and eat up the excess antelope. Once they eat so many they're hard to find, lions die off from starvation until the next time the weather is good and the antelope breed up again. Long as the overall climate doesn't change much, stable ecosystems like this persist for a long time. Everything is in balance, so it's sustainable.
Homo Saps lived this way during the H-G period, which lasted from the emergence of the species ~300K years ago until the development of agriculture ~15,000 years ago. If you include earlier versions ofthe genus Homo, we go back millions of years too. Our "stupidity" in population overshoot is the paradoxcal result of our intelligence in being smart enough to develop metallurgy which allowed us to produce tools for doing large scale agricultural production of food. The same metallurgical acumen gave Ag societies a big advantage over the H-Gs, who they proceeded to kill off over the last 15K years, leaving only the unsustainable ag version around.
Not satisfied with the speed at which we were turning the planet into desert just with ag, 275 years ago the geniuses of the era came up with the Steam Engine and numerous other inventions which made it possible to expand population even faster to even more relatively inhospitable places. Other geniuses of the era like Mathus pointed out that if it continued we'd ultimately overrun the planet, but as a society these folks were ignored because the collective intelligence drew the conclusion steam engines are great, love those steamships and railroads, let's build more and better!
Sometime in the 1950s a few geniuses pointed out that so much of this burning was going on it was going to have some very nasty blowback in a few decades, but other geniuses told the vast majority of Joe Rogan viewers not to worry about this because 1st climate change wasn't real, then later that renewables could substitute. Since this is what Joe Rogan viewers wanted to hear because it meant they could keep Happy Motoring, nobody listened to the geniuses here and other websites that told them, no, sorry, that dog won't hunt. Our message is not as appealing to the collective intelligence as the message they get from Billionaires who tell them they should breed more kids to buy more Teslas. Despite this message however, the simple fact most people can't afford to have more than 1 kid without a huge sacrifice to their own personal standard of living, they are choosing not to have the kids regardless of what Billionaires, their Church or Da Goobermint tells them. In this case, Collective Intelligence is actually proving smarter than geniuses like Elon Musk.
Anyhow, as a species we're no smarter or stupider than other species, we operate within the same constraints of a finite planet and like all species we exploit the environment until the environment pushes back in one way or another. No species voluntarily stops reproducing, it only happens if something in the environment changed enough to make reproduction a less appealing choice. What changed? Most significantly for homo saps in the industrialized countries, women had to go into the workforce of capitalism and leave the role of full time homemaker and baby factory. It was painted as a "choice" and "Women's Liberation" by geniuses in the field of sociology, but appealed to women tired of the subservient role and being dependent on men. I think most of those women still haven't grasped they just traded one form of slavery for another one. In any case, it is slowing down the overshoot problem, but as noted by many comes with its own set of demographic problems.
The bottom line is regardless of the intelligence of ouur species, we will have a large population knockdown, the only questions are how soon before it really takes off, how fast will it be and what percentage of global population will be wipe out before it stabilizes? There are too many variables to do any better than a WAG on this. A blight of one of the major monooculture crops like corn, soybeans or rice could bring on a global version of the Irish Potato Famine in any given year. A collapse of the Larsen Ice sheet or Greenland ice sheet could raise sea levels 3m in a single year. A collapse in the currency markets could slow global trade to a crawl. The border crisis and northward migration from Africa-->Europe or SA-->NA could grow by a order of magnitude in 2 or 3 years. Or you may just have slower deterioration on many fronts over the next decade. All we can do is keep observing the progress until something pops up that will set off a cascade failure. It could be as small as a Food Vendor setting himself on fire, or the assassination of a major political figure. At some point on the timeline though, it will blow. Everybody Knows.
Everybody knows it's coming apart
Take one last look at this Sacred Heart
Before it blows
Everybody knows
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