One mildly interesting fact that MANY Christians get wrong:
There is no lead-up to the apocalypse. The Messiah will return "like a thief in the night" and "nobody, except my Father, knows the hour of my return" (I probably butchered those two quotes). Either way, the Bible is pretty clear (as was Jesus): there will be zero indication the apocalypse is coming. None. It'll just... start.
fluoridation 29 days ago [-]
The book of Revelation also cites various signs that are metaphorical enough to be applied to just about anything.
It's pointless to cite the Bible to defend a theological position, because someone else can cite a different part that can be interpreted to say the exact opposite.
fred_wilson 29 days ago [-]
> The book of Revelation also cites various signs that are metaphorical enough to be applied to just about anything.
If someone plans to, they should first read Revelation 22:18–19.
And Revelations isn’t the only prophetic work. Try Ezekiel.
> It's pointless to cite the Bible to defend a theological position
Understandable, but citing the Bible is fairly important in theology, though it should be done within context.
Sure, Judaism was word of mouth a long time, and that’s great. I personally can’t remember much, so I think referencing text is fine.
fluoridation 29 days ago [-]
>If someone plans to, they should first read Revelation 22:18–19.
See, that's when you use literal reading. "I'm not adding anything to the text, I'm just interpreting it."
>And Revelations isn’t the only prophetic work. Try Ezekiel.
Ezekiel is clearly about events in our past, though.
>Understandable, but citing the Bible is fairly important in theology, though it should be done within context.
Meh. There's no internally consistent Christian theology that cites the Bible and doesn't involve generous amounts of cherry picking.
stogot 29 days ago [-]
Its systematic theology is internally consistent; amazingly consistent given three thousand years across 66 books and dozens of authors. It’s the cherry picking and overemphas that gets one into trouble
fluoridation 28 days ago [-]
>Its systematic theology is internally consistent
It's not. Christian dogma doesn't even obey the law of identity.
stogot 28 days ago [-]
are you talking about the trinity?
fluoridation 28 days ago [-]
I'm talking about the divinity of Jesus.
stogot 28 days ago [-]
This is a widely researched topic by scholars. Is there something new or relevant you’re making a case for? Or is this purposefully obtuse
fluoridation 28 days ago [-]
LOL, "researched".
>Is there something new or relevant you’re making a case for?
New? Not, not really. It's not at all new that the official position of the church ("Jesus is entirely mortal and entirely divine") is inherently self-contradictory. I mean, what the hell. If I didn't know any better I'd think an atheist came up with it to troll early Christians. Try saying something similar about literally anything else. "The contents of this glass are simultaneously entirely water and entirely mercury." It says nothing good of either the followers or the clergy that that nonsense has been accepted for so long.
svieira 28 days ago [-]
It's not inherently self-contradictory for us to say "Jesus revealed Himself as the Son of God and the Son of Man ... how can we properly speak about that?" https://www.newadvent.org/summa/4002.htm#article2 - now that requires a lot of extra distinctions that we don't normally think about when thinking about being and essence, but it's certainly not impossible.
"Mr. Archibald Potterfarthing is at the same time the Chair of the Committee and at the same time its most senior ranking member". Accidents, naturally, but co-existing in the same space-of-being. It turns out that "person" and "nature" are distinct (who knew?) and that it is possible for there to be one person with two natures just as well as there can be one person with two titles. But that presumes you believe the authority of the one who told you this - if not, it's useless to talk about it, because why would you ever need to distinguish person and nature unless you had encountered the reality of Christ? Nothing else we have encountered in the universe has (as far as we are aware) two natures. But nothing else behaves like a singularity either - uniqueness is not a proof of non-existence.
fluoridation 28 days ago [-]
>it is possible for there to be one person with two natures just as well as there can be one person with two titles.
Of course, but that falls apart as soon as you reread the dogma. Jesus is entirely human and entirely divine. He is both things in the same way at the same time. He has to be entirely human for his sacrifice to have any meaning, but he has to entirely divine... I can't remember why. So he could be worshiped?
A man who is both a doctor and a judge isn't entirely either one. There are moments of his day where he is neither presiding over a courtroom nor seeing any patients, and there are parts of his body that are neither judicial nor medical. More importantly, when he passes sentence he doesn't exercise his medical privileges, and when he prescribes medicine he doesn't do it in a judicial capacity. Even if both aspects bleed somewhat into each other, they're still mostly compartmentalized.
None of this can apply to Jesus, if the word "entirely" or "fully" means anything. If he dies, he must simultaneously die like mortals do and live on like deities do. So which is it? Did he die or didn't he?
svieira 28 days ago [-]
> He is both things in the same way at the same time
Not quite. He has a divine nature and a human nature. There is only one person, two natures, analogous to one person two job titles. He has both natures, fully.
> Did he die or didn't he?
Having two natures, he can experience things that people without two natures cannot experience. Like the experience of death in His human nature that in no way affected His divine nature (analogous to "experiencing censure as a judge, but still being able to practice medicine"). Fortunately, death isn't a cessation of human nature, merely an interrupting of part of its actuality (that is, an evil). You and I will still possess a human nature after we die. Just as we both would possess a human nature if we lost part of our bodies, we still possess a human nature after we lose our bodies completely in death.
fluoridation 28 days ago [-]
>Not quite. [...] He has both natures, fully.
You're contradicting yourself.
>analogous to "experiencing censure as a judge, but still being able to practice medicine"
That's only possible because, as I said, being a judge is not the totality of a person. If you strip a judge of his title the parts of him that are a person still remain. If you strip a person of their humanity then there's nothing left, because there's nothing of a person that's not human.
A normal person according to Christianity is closer to having two natures in the way you describe, because their body is mortal while their soul isn't. But Jesus' body should be equally as divine as his soul. So then how can it die? If he was just an immortal soul in a mortal body then he was just a regular human.
kulahan 27 days ago [-]
> So then how can it die? If he was just an immortal soul in a mortal body then he was just a regular human.
He could die in the same way the bush could burn in front of Moses without becoming a burnt object. Divinity is not corrupting or corruptible.
krapp 27 days ago [-]
But to be entirely human is to be corrupted by original sin, doomed to judgement and eternal separation from God.
To be entirely divine is to be equal to God, untouched by sin and incorruptible.
These two states cannot coexist within the doctrine itself. Jesus cannot be entirely human and entirely divine any more than matter can be antimatter.
>He could die in the same way the bush could burn in front of Moses without becoming a burnt object.
But that makes it not entirely a bush, or else not entirely a fire. Something other than "a burning bush" is going on there. It looks like that, but it cannot be that.
If Jesus' soul wasn't corrupted by sin like any other mortal human then he wasn't entirely human. If Jesus was entirely human, he cannot also be divine, since God cannot coexist with sin. If Jesus can be both, then original sin is not an immutable transgression and the persistent state of evil and God's eternal judgement are simply arbitrary, and God can make exceptions whenever He likes.
Which is the actual answer because there are instances in the Bible of humans who just ascend to Heaven because God liked them, despite that supposedly being existentially impossible. God simply sometimes bends the rules, He just won't do so for you or I.
Assuming one wants to take all of this seriously and assume the Bible has univocality and try to interpret mythology with logic, which to me always seems like a bad idea.
svieira 27 days ago [-]
> But to be entirely human is to be corrupted by original sin, doomed to judgement and eternal separation from God.
This is false, fortunately. "Human" and "sin" are not necessary to each other. Sin is not natural to man. The gift of original justice could not be passed on from Adam to his children because he threw it away. This lack of a gift is what is called "original sin" and its effects include all of the disordered expressions we find ourselves inclined to from birth. But this lack of a gift is not necessary to being human.
Which allows God to take on human nature without being in the state of sin ("like us in all things but sin"), but accepting the punishment for sin (death) to redeem us and offer a new gift of mercy that restores the original gift of justice for those who accept it. Since God is outside of time, He can even give the fruits of that gift "before" that gift is realized in time (Elijah, Mary).
fluoridation 27 days ago [-]
>the bush could burn in front of Moses without becoming a burnt object
A "burning bush that isn't consumed" has at least the excuse of being a literary device. The narrator is describing what he sees in front of him, not describing the process at the physical level, so we can imagine that the bush wasn't literally on fire, but rather surrounded by some mystical flame, or shining, or whatever we can dream up.
The story of Jesus isn't like this. Jesus is supposed to have literally died. There's no possible metaphor there. In Christian theology Jesus is a literal scapegoat; he has to have died, as in his vital processes ending and his soul leaving his body to go to the afterlife. If he didn't do that after being tortured, crucified, and stabbed, then he wasn't fully human.
>Divinity is not corrupting or corruptible.
Exactly. So where's Jesus' uncorrupted, divine, lifeless body? Don't tell me it ascended to heaven, because normal human bodies don't do that.
kulahan 26 days ago [-]
It's literally a bush that was on fire which did not corrupt. That was the whole point. It's not a literary device.
Jesus did literally die. His soul and body were uncorruptible. That's why he was able to descend to Hell for three days, and why his fully mortal and fully divine body was able to be raised up. Dying is simply the separation of soul from body. Resurrection is the rejoining of those.
Mortal bodies of all will be raised in the Second Coming. It's not as correct to say normal human bodies don't do that, as it is to say normal human bodies don't do that yet.
So to clarify: just as the bush was literally on fire, yet did not combust, Jesus literally died, yet did not decompose.
fluoridation 26 days ago [-]
>It's literally a bush that was on fire which did not corrupt.
How can you know that? From within the canon of the text, all we have is Moses' testimony. How can you be so sure that what he described as a burning bush was literally a burning bush, as in the matter of the bush undergoing rapid oxidation without being consumed?
>It's not as correct to say normal human bodies don't do that, as it is to say normal human bodies don't do that yet.
Sure. I'll accept "they don't do that yet". So since they don't do that yet, and they didn't do that during Jesus' times, if Jesus' body did do that, then his body wasn't fully human.
svieira 27 days ago [-]
> A normal person according to Christianity is closer to having two natures in the way you describe, because their body is mortal while their soul isn't.
AH, THERE'S YOUR PROBLEM! Cartesian dualism isn't the best lens to view human nature through and it makes talking about Christ's nature harder than it needs to be. The human person is a being whose nature is body+soul. The separation of the soul and the body at death is an evil brought about by sin. Put another way, death is injurious to human beings, not natural to them. (See https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3164.htm#article1).
Jesus is fully man. His human nature is body+soul. His human soul is immortal, as all human souls are. Unlike other human beings (other than Adam and Eve before they sinned) He was not subject to death as a punishment for sin, but He accepted it on our behalf. When He died, he really died. His soul and His body were separated and for three days He could be spoken of as "not a man". See https://www.newadvent.org/summa/4050.htm#article4 for the details. Follow that up with https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1075.htm#article4 for how that relates to us. One particularly striking quote - "[c]onsequently, to say that Christ was a man during the three days of His death simply and without qualification, is erroneous. Yet it can be said that He was "a dead man" during those three days."
Jesus is also fully God. His divine nature is perfect and unchanging. His divine nature is immutable (not merely immortal) and was not subject to death. Thus Jesus was subject to death in His human nature not in His divine nature.
fluoridation 27 days ago [-]
I'm not going to respond to any arguments that rest on the veracity of mythology (such as the garden of Eden). I'm only interested in the internal consistency of Christian doctrine.
>Jesus is also fully God. His divine nature is perfect and unchanging. His divine nature is immutable (not merely immortal) and was not subject to death. Thus Jesus was subject to death in His human nature not in His divine nature.
This is maddening. Okay, so these are the logical relationships between the terms,
* Jesus is fully God.
* God is immutable.
* Something immutable is also immortal (and by contraposition, something mortal is not immutable).
* Jesus is fully man.
* Jesus is mortal and died.
Correct? None of this is in dispute, I assume, since it's what you said. Alright. To this I answer: if Jesus is mortal then he is not immutable, and if he's not immutable then he's not fully God. If you insist he is God then that's a contradiction by the terms you yourself laid out. The supposed two natures don't matter if they lead to this conclusion.
To give a simple analogy, you can make a sword that's sharp only halfway along its length and is blunt the rest of the way. The statements "the sword is sharp" and "the sword is blunt" are both simultaneously true. What you can't do is make a sword that's both sharp and blunt all throughout its length. You can say, "well, God can do the logically impossible". Fine. But then you're telling me that I'm right, that Christian theology does contain contradictions.
svieira 25 days ago [-]
Yep - you're still missing the distinction. Jesus is the person. This person has two natures (we've been working with the "being a judge and a doctor" analogy here and both can be operative together, as when the judge is hearing a case where his knowledge of medicine has bearing on his ability to judge the situation). One nature is immutable, the other is mutable. Nothing contradicts there. "Jesus, in His human nature, changes. God the Son (His divine nature) does not change." But you can make it sound contradictory, just as you could say (if we make "The doctor does not judge, but the judge does" sound contradictory if we say "Susan does not judge but Susan judges!") It is not a logical contradiction for two distinct things to be distinct.
fluoridation 25 days ago [-]
Like I've said more than enough times already, Susan is not wholly a judge nor wholly a doctor. If every part of her was simultaneously judge and doctor in equal parts and completely, then it would be false to say "Susan does not judge in a medical capacity, she judges in a judicial capacity", because she would not be able to compartmentalize those two aspects of her self. Everything she does would be in both capacities, because she is wholly those things.
You are both a eukaryote and three-dimensional. Everything you do is in the capacity of a three-dimensional eukaryote and there's no way for you to momentarily abandon one of those natures while you do something. Not without fundamentally changing what you are.
Jesus' must be equally and inextricably imbued by these natures if he is to be said "wholly" human and divine. More so, in fact, because at least your atoms are not eukaryotic. So if Jesus changes, God the Son also changes, because Jesus is God the Son. They're two names for the same thing. If they're not the same thing, if Jesus does not completely overlap with God the Son, then Jesus is not wholly divine. There are parts of him that are not divine. That's a tenable position, but it's not the position of the church.
svieira 22 days ago [-]
Actually, that _is_ the position of the Church, funnily enough. Jesus is both God and man. These natures are distinct in Him, while being entire and wholly what they are (the God-nature is not diminished or changed by admixture and human-nature is not absorbed by the totality of divinity). One person, two natures.
fluoridation 22 days ago [-]
No, that's very much not the position of the church. There are no parts of Jesus that are not divine, nor parts of Jesus that are not human. That's what "wholly" means, and that's where the contradiction stems from. Without necessarily falling into a contradiction, Jesus could be partly divine and partly human, or wholly divine and wholly non-human, or wholly human and wholly non-divine. It's him being both things wholly that is nonsense.
svieira 9 days ago [-]
Without distinction, which you're ignoring, you are correct. But "wholly" means several things depending on what you're referring to. You could mean:
1. Everything that is (in the "esse" sense) of Jesus must be both. This seems to be your position. This is also an immediate contradiction since then either God changed or Jesus' humanity always was. Variations of this position (since it has several) have been defined heresy for literally 1,500 years.
2. Jesus is both God and man completely (not "the appearance of man" or "a man apart from God, divinized by God at a later point"). This is the position of the Church.
> 464 The unique and altogether singular event of the Incarnation of the Son of God does not mean that Jesus Christ is part God and part man, nor does it imply that he is the result of a confused mixture of the divine and the human. He became truly man while remaining truly God. Jesus Christ is true God and true man.
During the first centuries, the Church had to defend and clarify this truth of faith against the heresies that falsified it.
> 465 The first heresies denied not so much Christ's divinity as his true humanity (Gnostic Docetism). From apostolic times the Christian faith has insisted on the true incarnation of God's Son "come in the flesh".87 But already in the third century, the Church in a council at Antioch had to affirm against Paul of Samosata that Jesus Christ is Son of God by nature and not by adoption. the first ecumenical council of Nicaea in 325 confessed in its Creed that the Son of God is "begotten, not made, of the same substance (homoousios) as the Father", and condemned Arius, who had affirmed that the Son of God "came to be from things that were not" and that he was "from another substance" than that of the Father.88
> 466 The Nestorian heresy regarded Christ as a human person joined to the divine person of God's Son. Opposing this heresy, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the third ecumenical council, at Ephesus in 431, confessed "that the Word, uniting to himself in his person the flesh animated by a rational soul, became man."89 Christ's humanity has no other subject than the divine person of the Son of God, who assumed it and made it his own, from his conception. For this reason the Council of Ephesus proclaimed in 431 that Mary truly became the Mother of God by the human conception of the Son of God in her womb: "Mother of God, not that the nature of the Word or his divinity received the beginning of its existence from the holy Virgin, but that, since the holy body, animated by a rational soul, which the Word of God united to himself according to the hypostasis, was born from her, the Word is said to be born according to the flesh."90
> 467 The Monophysites affirmed that the human nature had ceased to exist as such in Christ when the divine person of God's Son assumed it. Faced with this heresy, the fourth ecumenical council, at Chalcedon in 451, confessed:
Following the holy Fathers, we unanimously teach and confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ: the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, composed of rational soul and body; consubstantial with the Father as to his divinity and consubstantial with us as to his humanity; "like us in all things but sin". He was begotten from the Father before all ages as to his divinity and in these last days, for us and for our salvation, was born as to his humanity of the virgin Mary, the Mother of God.91
And here is the kicker:
> We confess that one and the same Christ, Lord, and only-begotten Son, is to be acknowledged in two natures without confusion, change, division or separation. the distinction between the natures was never abolished by their union, but rather the character proper to each of the two natures was preserved as they came together in one person (prosopon) and one hypostasis.92
fluoridation 4 days ago [-]
>1. Everything that is (in the "esse" sense) of Jesus must be both. This seems to be your position.
>2. Jesus is both God and man completely (not "the appearance of man" or "a man apart from God, divinized by God at a later point"). This is the position of the Church.
Uh huh. And what, in your mind, is effectively the difference between those two statements? Because to me those are two ways of communicating the exact same idea. That is, the exact same state of affairs is properly conveyed by two different sequences of words. Don't answer my question by pasting four paragraphs of sophism. I have no interest in it. All you need to answer is: in what situation would exactly one of those statements be true?
stogot 28 days ago [-]
Do you have similar concerns about the three in one resonance structures of nitrate? Or are you cherry picking random laws to fit a preconceived position?
fluoridation 28 days ago [-]
I would have personally gone with the particle-wave duality as an example.
The day the church successfully uses its position on the divinity of Jesus Christ to engineer something rather than letting it remain as an abstract bit of sophistry, I promise I'll shut up about it.
kulahan 26 days ago [-]
Are you not aware of the Church's science symposiums?
fluoridation 26 days ago [-]
Are you conflating the propositions "members of the church do science" and "the church has based science on theological doctrine"?
stogot 28 days ago [-]
id have you believe instead of just “shutting up”. you’ve avoided answering the fact that analogies exist. I’ll take it that you cannot articulate a reasonable response
fluoridation 28 days ago [-]
>You’re essentially asking for a mathematical proof
Mathematical proofs are internally consistent. Also, yes, mathematics is used in engineering. For example (as if one was needed), GPS is all about geometry.
>Do you deny the existence of Jesus of Nazareth, His divinity, or how the “church” defines it?
I don't have a problem answering this question, but I would like to know what my personal position has to do with anything.
cindyllm 29 days ago [-]
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eru 29 days ago [-]
That's why the Catholics have a guy in charge who infallibly tells you how to interpret the damn thing. Instead of having every Tom, Dick and Harry have a stab at misunderstanding scripture.
akerl_ 29 days ago [-]
It's a good thing there's always exactly one pope.
gnabgib 29 days ago [-]
Well that's provably false.. there've been three popes[0] and zero popes happen now and then (2025[1], 2013[2], 2005, 1978..)
Okay, where's the "falsehoods programmers believe about ..." article for popes?
fluoridation 29 days ago [-]
Not that that stops individual Catholics from having their own opinions anyway. It's fractal cherry picking.
Starman_Jones 28 days ago [-]
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krapp 28 days ago [-]
I wish Christians would realize the Book of Revelations is about the past (probably about Nero Caesar and Roman persecution of Christians) and not the future and stop embarrassing themselves.
Stop trying to figure out which scary new technology is the Number of the Beast. Stop trying to figure out which scary new politician is the Antichrist. Stop trying to figure out what any of that shit means, it doesn't mean anything anymore and the only apocalypse that's going to happen is the one we ourselves create, in part because we persist in our delusion that we don't really have to worry about this world because God's going to burn it all down anyway.
jancsika 29 days ago [-]
One mildly interesting fact MANY programmers get wrong about the is_computer_on function:
It is threadsafe. The documentation is very clear about this.
stogot 29 days ago [-]
Could you clarify this analogy? I’m confused
conorcleary 29 days ago [-]
Maybe something about programs being able to skip the 'is there a power cord connected to this PSU?' type jesting?
LorenPechtel 28 days ago [-]
You could legitimately have a is_computer_on function. Some devices have wake-on-lan type functionality. What about the code involved?
asdfasvea 28 days ago [-]
The term "religious fact" always puts a smile on my face.
iamthejuan 29 days ago [-]
Signs were given, not dates.
bloppe 29 days ago [-]
The homeless man currently yelling outside my window is an equally authoritative source of information about the apocalypse as the Bible, and he thinks it's coming soon.
kulahan 29 days ago [-]
A billion people don't believe there's some truth to what the homeless man outside of your window is saying, and someone leading a legitimate-enough revolution that they're put to death by the King of Rome is probably a tiny bit more believable.
But I get what you're saying either way. I just think it's an interesting factlet.
bloppe 28 days ago [-]
How many millions of people think the world is literally 6000 years old because of that book? Does that make it believable to you?
sbuttgereit 29 days ago [-]
argumentum ad populum and argument from authority in one sentence... :-)
eru 29 days ago [-]
Who's the King of Rome? The Romans famously got rid of their kings long before anyone ever thought of Christianity, and later it took until the fall of the Empire before anyone was both a king and in charge of Rome.
potatoman22 29 days ago [-]
After the Roman Republic, they switched to having an emperor. Jesus was crucified during this Roman empire. The kings of Rome were around 600 years before this. They meant the emperor, not the king.
flogflogflog 29 days ago [-]
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CobrastanJorji 29 days ago [-]
I think they've gotta maybe define what counts as an "Apocalypse." The active "Fourth Turning" hypothesis expects a crisis on the scale of the Civil War. That degree of crisis has happened lots of times. Certainly the Civil War itself was accurately predicted for decades leading up to it.
bloppe 29 days ago [-]
Agree. You can always claim prescience by being vague enough. "Something really bad will happen" will eventually come true. I suppose the point of this site is to call out the ones who dare to be more specific.
Yizahi 29 days ago [-]
There are countless civil wars going on nowadays, with variable intensity. That's kinda low bar as far as Apocalypse go.
shoo 29 days ago [-]
For anyone curious about academic studies of historical societal collapses, check out Joseph Tainter [1]
> As described in Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies, societies become more complex as they try to solve problems. [...] Such complexity requires a substantial "energy" subsidy (meaning the consumption of resources, or other forms of wealth).
> When a society confronts a "problem," such as a shortage of energy, or difficulty in gaining access to it, it tends to create new layers of bureaucracy, infrastructure, or social class to address the challenge. Tainter, who first identifies seventeen examples of rapid collapse of societies, applies his model to three case studies: The Western Roman Empire, the Maya civilization, and the Chaco culture.
> For example, as Roman agricultural output slowly declined and population increased, per-capita energy availability dropped. The Romans "solved" this problem by conquering their neighbours to appropriate their energy surpluses (as metals, grain, slaves, other materials of value). However, as the Empire grew, the cost of maintaining communications, garrisons, civil government, etc. grew with it. Eventually, this cost grew so great that any new challenges such as invasions and crop failures could not be solved by the acquisition of more territory. [...]
> It is often assumed that the collapse of the western Roman Empire was a catastrophe for everyone involved. Tainter points out that it can be seen as a very rational preference of individuals at the time, many of whom were actually better off. Tainter notes that in the west, local populations in many cases greeted the barbarians as liberators.
It's missing the January 19, 2038, the unix epoch end. Only 12 years and a bit from now. Very much in our time.
layman51 29 days ago [-]
Right, but there's no doomsday prophecies around the Year 2038 problem as far as I can tell. I think it falls in the same kind of category of known problems that are certain to happen at some point. Some other things I was thinking of were the theorized ARkStorm, and also an earthquake that could happen in the Cascadia subduction zone.
lloeki 29 days ago [-]
It's also not impacting _only_ at that time, many tasks involve dates in the future, and a system dealing with a far enough off date _today_ is already impacted.
So it's not as if "everything works" then suddenly "everything doesn't"
And it's only for operations that care about the sign / compute deltas / use signed numbers, otherwise it's 2106-02-07 06:28:16 UTC.
LorenPechtel 28 days ago [-]
Or humans make a mistake. I got burned by the MsDos date rollover with signed values ~20 years ago. A salesman fat-fingered a job into the 2060s. Of course while I was on the other side of the world with no phone access.
undershirt 29 days ago [-]
9/11 happened 1 trillion milliseconds after the unix epoch.
nneonneo 29 days ago [-]
Not quite; the first attack happened at approximately UNIX time 1000210380, which isn't quite as round as "1 trillion milliseconds". (It was about 2 days after 1e9).
undershirt 28 days ago [-]
The St Nicholas Orthodox church sat at the base of the Twin Towers, because it was there for 100 years and they wouldn't take the money to rebuild it elsewhere. They probably served their last Divine Liturgy there on Sunday 9/9/01 as a last blessing before it was destroyed that Tuesday.
conorcleary 29 days ago [-]
accumulated daylight savings since y2k?
bloak 29 days ago [-]
Then I am a victim of the Mandela Effect because I can clearly remember (time_t)1e9 happening earlier than that.
Cool link though, thanks. So the worst historical event of the information age happened right at the billenium.
HaZeust 29 days ago [-]
Who finds this shit out lol
undershirt 28 days ago [-]
I was on a break at work reading a lot about 9/11 for some reason. Went back to fix an easy bug where our timestamps were printing wrong dates (milliseconds vs seconds) so I became curious what dates would show up if I added zeros in front of 1, to get a ballpark of where dates are. I freaked out after the ninth zero, you know, being so close to the event I was just reading about.
29 days ago [-]
shoo 29 days ago [-]
The Limits to Growth book is an interesting read. To quote Box, "All models are wrong, but some are useful". I wouldn't take the dates-ranges estimated from the modelling that seriously, but the modelling assumptions are worth reading about and reflecting on. The overall modelling and dynamics seem pretty plausible to me.
From memory, the rough argument was that society depends upon input flows of energy, resources (metals etc) and food. Society needs to allocate resources and energy to extract these inputs. Energy sources such as fossil fuel reserves are finite stocks, some are cheap to extract (high energy return on energy invested). Over time we consume and deplete the high EROEI reserves and have to move on to consuming the lower EROEI reserves. This means that the fraction of energy society needs to allocate for energy extraction increases over time, so there's less energy for other uses. Similarly, we deplete the cheap to extract stocks of metal required to build and maintain industry, leaving stocks that require higher inputs of metal and energy to extract. Similarly for agricultural yields, as we mine and deplete accumulated stocks of nutrients out of the soil.
The business as usual scenario leading to "overshoot and collapse" behaviour is that we have increasing population, increasing industrial capital and increasing demands for energy, food and resource inputs, while the fraction of energy and resources that need to be allocated to energy, resource and food production grows over time. The fraction of remaining surplus energy and resources that can be allocated to things like education, healthcare, research, art decreases over time. At some point the growing fraction of energy and resources that needs to be allocated to energy and resource extraction becomes so large vs the existing population and industrial base that there simply isn't enough surplus to maintain healthcare, education, research, etc at the same level.
The "Overshoot and collapse" dynamic describes stocks of population, industry etc growing to peaks well beyond sustainable levels before the above dynamics catch up and cause them to rapidly decline.
The researchers did a bunch of modelling of alternative scenarios, exploring how to avoid these "Overshoot and collapse" dynamics.
M95D 25 days ago [-]
It's interesting that the "Apocalypse Type" is listed as "Civilization collapse", but they take the date of population peak as the criteria for failing the prediction. I personally don't equal "peak" to "collapse".
mcshicks 29 days ago [-]
They seemed to have missed peter turchin
"In 2010, Turchin published research using 40 combined social indicators to predict that there would be worldwide social unrest in the 2020s"
The way Cliodynamics, Turchin’s field, is explained feels like a very early and remedial version of psychohistory from the Foundation universe.
Sardtok 29 days ago [-]
Have a look in the Fiction section of the Cliodynamics article.
mcmcmc 29 days ago [-]
When is there not social unrest?
bee_rider 29 days ago [-]
Do they specify exactly what qualifies as a successful apocalyptic prediction?
In particular they count a US civil war as an apocalyptic event… lots of countries and societies have been completely wiped out, though, which must(?) be more apocalyptic.
Maybe the point of the site is just that apocalypses tend to happen unexpectedly?
zwnow 29 days ago [-]
Yea im not sure how a civil war in the United States would affect me as an European... It certainly would, but I'd survive. Isn't the whole point of apocalyptic events to not survive them?
esseph 29 days ago [-]
Without US involvement in your Eastern flank, it might get tougher.
noir_lord 29 days ago [-]
Europe would curb stomp Russia in a conventional war even without the US.
Ten times the GDP, three times the population and our military stuff mostly works, Ukraine has done a phenomenal job with what they had but Russia turned out to be even more of a Basket case than expected.
The problem is how much damage they can do before we put them back in their box and whether getting the shit kicked out of them would triggger a nuclear exchange which would get really out of hand.
portaouflop 29 days ago [-]
I think Comrade Krasnov is too busy purging his own country of dissidents to care; we are on our own on this one.
LorenPechtel 28 days ago [-]
And what exactly is apocalyptic? Suppose someone finds a dinosaur killer and there is a successful deflection mission. I would have no problem calling that apocalyptic.
agarttha 29 days ago [-]
Here's python code to simulate one of the still-active doomsday predictions (The Limits to Growth)
Was the Bronze Age Collapse a doomsday event? Mount Toba eruption? I think they were.
I'm not saying anyone predicted those or something. It's just that the notion of doomsday is quite vague.
I'm trying to broaden some notions here. Prediction might not be exactly absolute prediction, and doomsday might not be exactly absolute doomsday.
Perhaps some great threats were averted precisely because someone predicted them (for example, the great leaded gasoline poisoning).
georgeecollins 29 days ago [-]
People know that they are not living at the start of anything. All through history people imagine they be living near the end of everything.
No one want to live in the middle.
lloeki 29 days ago [-]
Missing from the list:
1999: Spanish designer Paco Rabanne announces that the Mir space station would crash on and destroy Paris in between the 28 July 1999 lunar eclipse and the 11 August 1999 total solar eclipse, the two somehow interacting to create magnetic interference, leading to the station crashing at 11:22 on the 11, as predicted by a 17th century fresco in some abbey that shows an eclipse, a clock at that hour, and a sentence "you will know the hour of your death but not the day"... Also Mir would have hypothetically contained a Russian atomic bomb, which is what would destroy Paris, and possibly leading to some all-out nuclear war.
The whole universe may end at any moment without warning. There could be another universe on a collision course and speed so fast you will never know it.
Or we could be living in universe inside like a raindrop of larger universe that may hit the ground and burst any moment.
First thing I thought of as well! Despite being short lived, MarchFIRST was influential on Apple's branding and comeback.
roadside_picnic 29 days ago [-]
I've been in the "doomer" camp for over a decade and been surprised how many things I thought were far off in the future have come to fruition earlier.
But, the one thing I always find interesting, philosophically, about believing the world-as-we-know-it is coming to an end is that all of the things people are concerned about will happen no matter what.
Being afraid of the end of the world is ultimately being afraid that we will lose the things we have, that our work will be lost to time and history, that ultimately we will return to a void and all of "this" will have been for nothing.
However, all of that is true either way. You will lose everything you've ever loved over time in life, all the work you've done will be lost to time, in the end all of your efforts will be for nothing and even that won't matter.
The "end of the world" scares people because it forces them to discard the normal tools they use combat these many existential anxieties, but the world continuing to go on doesn't actually resolve any of those anxieties.
gchamonlive 29 days ago [-]
For me the problem is managing the transition minimizing unnecessary suffering.
The world is inevitably going to end, our work isn't going to be forever preserved into the future and there will be no "end of history" until there are living humans.
The thing is that the world can end in many ways. My world can end in many ways. I'd rather pass on with a clear consciousness, with my faculties preserved more or less, and with a legacy of having at least tried to make the lives of other that tiny bit better, so I'm aware if I'm not vigilant I can spend my final days suffering from an avoidable disease or accident or regretting I wasted my life chasing a better tomorrow that never came while neglecting what I already have today.
This is virtually the same for all society. It's going to fade into oblivion, but it matters a great deal that the process is as gentle as possible for everyone involved.
shoo 29 days ago [-]
I am reminded of Roy Scranton's essay Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene [1]
> I found my way forward through an 18th-century Samurai manual, Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s “Hagakure,” which commanded: “Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.” Instead of fearing my end, I owned it. Every morning, after doing maintenance on my Humvee, I’d imagine getting blown up by an I.E.D., shot by a sniper, burned to death, run over by a tank, torn apart by dogs, captured and beheaded, and succumbing to dysentery. Then, before we rolled out through the gate, I’d tell myself that I didn’t need to worry, because I was already dead. The only thing that mattered was that I did my best to make sure everyone else came back alive. “If by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead,” wrote Tsunetomo, “he gains freedom in the Way.”
People like Ray Kurzweil, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Leopold Aschenbrenner, Paul Christiano see a pathway out of this inevitability through technological singularity. In their vision humans are a seed to something greater, something noticeable on cosmic scales. In their vision, like early humans who emerged on the other end of genetic bottlenecks, today's humans will have a disproportionate effect on the future. According to the current models of cosmology heat death of universe in still inevitability but that's on a completely different timescale than human life.
the_af 29 days ago [-]
Please don't take this to be dismissive of your comment, because that's not my intention, but...
I think people like Ray Kurzweil are essentially religious. Instead of a messiah and heaven, they think of salvation in terms of a singularity, immortality, or a way of ascension. It feels very religious to me, and as such, detached from reality and physical possibilities.
LorenPechtel 28 days ago [-]
Yeah. He makes a good case for the computer side of upload being possible--and totally skips over the biological side, assuming it will be available on the same time frame.
Even if upload does not produce a singularity or the like it still is a huge step towards getting more time to address other issues and it makes interstellar solutions viable. But when we can read out the human mind remains an unknown.
mfro 29 days ago [-]
'The world continuing to go on' is the status quo and has been for millenia at this point. Sure, the argument can be made that the world will end eventually, but if we do not have our reference timescale, what do we have? People aren't afraid that the world will eventually end (because 'eventually' should be thousands of years from now), people are afraid the world will end NOW, which does nullify your experience and efforts on the subjective human timescale. Life as we know it continuing to go on without ambiguity on our confidence to prevent world-ending events does resolve those anxieties.
skeaker 29 days ago [-]
If you have ever believed in the butterfly effect and if you believe that the world will keep marching on, then your actions undeniably do leave a permanent change to the world, forever after you are forgotten.
blastro 29 days ago [-]
beautifully stated thank you
iammjm 29 days ago [-]
the two active predictions with the time frames of <5 years by MIT, and How & Strauss still look scary and not impossible
stego-tech 29 days ago [-]
It’s also worth noting that Strauss, Howe, and Turchin all repeatedly stress in their books that firm dates aren’t a guarantee, that sometimes the cycle doesn’t line up correctly (like the Civil War cycle), and that none of their words are meant to be taken as literal predications so much as cautious warnings that history often rhymes.
Having finished both The Fourth Turning and End Times recently, Strauss and Howe’s specific guesses as to what might fuel the next crisis are laughably off track even if their broad strokes still paint a compelling (and at times, frightening) picture, while Turchin feels more prescient in his observations.
Ultimately, though, Turchin has the better message: even when a crisis destroys an empire, the world continues onward. That gave me some bleak hope to hang onto.
HardCodedBias 29 days ago [-]
The Limits to Growth predictions are laughable.
I think that they Simon–Ehrlich wager showed how laughable they were but I guess we have to revisit every couple of decades.
SCUSKU 29 days ago [-]
Yeah I was fully expecting this site to be making fun of all the wacko conspiracies about armageddon, such that it would make me feel better. But instead, the "Limit to Growth" summary seems entirely plausible.
throwaway173738 29 days ago [-]
It might not even be an apocalypse.
citizenpaul 29 days ago [-]
What qualifies moving from "pending" state to "active". There seem to be many predictions at the bottom that are only a few years out that are not "active" Some are even end of year.
I could see why the ones with several hundred years deadline are "pending"
kej 29 days ago [-]
Pending means we haven't reached the start of the predicted time range for that event yet. If I predict a collapse in November of 2025, it would be pending for the rest of October, then active on November 1st until either the collapse happens and it becomes successful or December 1st arrives and it becomes failed.
xivzgrev 29 days ago [-]
I'm surprised at the number of famous folk who have predictions, like Christopher Columbus. Gives new context to Thiels recent musings on the Antichrist.
Step 1: become accomplished in some field
Step 2: ???
Step 3: write about the anti Christ and predict when it will occur
richrichardsson 29 days ago [-]
I think the South Park underpants gnomes meme might be more apt here.
Switch your steps 2 & 3.
Step 4 is profit.
cool_man_bob 28 days ago [-]
You would be surprised how superstitious Americans are in general.
Sweepi 29 days ago [-]
Are the predictions from the 2nd and later IPCC reports in there? Last I checked they were on track.
bloppe 29 days ago [-]
But is that the apocalypse? I hate the fact that we're destabilizing the environment, but humans (and wildlife) are pretty good at adaptation. Our ancestors have obviously survived massive extinction events in the past.
LorenPechtel 28 days ago [-]
Survivorship bias. We look at our history and always survive the crisis. Because the ones that don't aren't around to see the failure.
Most species have gone extinct.
Personally, I do not believe climate change can kill us off. The worst case predictions are pretty dire (and beware the worst case makes the IPCC look tame--there is not enough data on methane hydrates for it to be in the IPCC model, but the worst case estimates are worse than the IPCC estimates and they will probably stack.) But I consider extinction likely because we can move around. An animal that loses 90% of it's habitat loses 90% of it's population but the survivors are pretty much the same as before. But are those humans who will be killed off just going to sit there?
vdupras 29 days ago [-]
Yes, obviously, but our ancestors weren't human then.
bloppe 28 days ago [-]
Sure, and they didn't speak English either, but I don't see how that's relevant.
vdupras 28 days ago [-]
You wrote "humans are good at adaptation, case in point, mass extinction survival". I reply "they weren't human then". The relevance is direct.
bloppe 28 days ago [-]
Humans: by far the most populous large animals on the planet, thriving in by far the most diverse set of environments in and around the planet, are clearly good at adaptation. The fact that Eskimos and Bedouin and uncontacted amazonian tribes are all the same species is rather remarkable.
If anything, we have a much better shot at surviving the next mass extinction than we had at surviving prior ones, now that we have so many advantages.
I probably won't survive it because I'm a smooth brained weakling, but some humans surely will
vdupras 28 days ago [-]
I'm not arguing that humans are not adaptable, I'm just pointing out a fallacy in your original argument. Whether humans are adaptable or not is another matter.
29 days ago [-]
spencerflem 29 days ago [-]
Until we have nuclear disarmament, there’s a sword having over us.
It’s bound to happen eventually
KronisLV 29 days ago [-]
Then we’re back to conventional warfare and the casualties of that. Just look at Russia and Ukraine.
marcosdumay 29 days ago [-]
Do you think Russia vs. Ukraine would happen with any similarity with the real conflict if Russia didn't have nuclear weapons?
Because, IMO, Russia would be destroyed the first time they threatened NATO.
KronisLV 29 days ago [-]
> Because, IMO, Russia would be destroyed the first time they threatened NATO.
Maybe. Or maybe the big powers might realize that sending hundreds of thousands or even millions of people to die in an all out war (depending on how big it gets and who else gets involved) is a harder sell than settling on appeasement and so smaller states would lose their sovereignty.
I live in Latvia. If there's no risk of MAD, then what's to prevent some opportunistic Russians from invading my country and seeing whether NATO would actually do something about Article 5? Some are pondering whether that's not a direction that Russia could move in even now - stage something relatively small and see how NATO responds. They're already regularly violating our airspace and doing cyber warfare against us and trying to drum up opposition to our government (as flawed as it may be) by the ethnic Russian people.
Could go either way.
LorenPechtel 28 days ago [-]
But it wouldn't be millions who die.
We (I'm an American) have four ballistic missile subs that no longer carry ballistic missiles because of arms reduction treaties. The subs still exist, though, with each of the Trident launch tubes instead holding 7 Tomahawks. They are built to hide and they're very good at it--we can't even reliably track them ourselves. That means they could sneak in to launch points some distance from Russia. The Ukraine war has shown that heavy air defenses sometimes work against ground hugging missiles (but remember the Moskova--despite fearsome anti-air capability it for some reason couldn't engage two sea hugging missiles), but ares without heavy defenses fare poorly against even crude low altitude stuff. Expect most of those Tomahawks to get through, and there goes Russia's logistics capability. Most stuff of importance is within Tomahawk range of the coast.
philipkglass 29 days ago [-]
That's why global nuclear disarmament seems only slightly more plausible to me than (e.g.) global artillery disarmament. For the foreseeable future there are going to be some nations that see nuclear weapons as the more affordable (or the only affordable) deterrent against rival nations that can field much larger armed forces.
jenadine 29 days ago [-]
In your scenario, does NATO have nuclear weapons?
retrocog 29 days ago [-]
Gradually and then suddenly.
Bjorkbat 29 days ago [-]
Reminds me of the old gem of the Web 1.0 internet that was Exit Mundi
altcognito 29 days ago [-]
Survival bias. I get this is a joke but...
There are many societies which have collapsed. We can't know who predicted it because they are dead.
And of course, this list will no longer exist after societal collapse.
hamdingers 29 days ago [-]
Societal collapse does not necessarily mean the loss of all writing or knowledge of that society. The wikipedia article you linked to proves this.
fragmede 29 days ago [-]
Out there, somewhere, is a nerd, laser etching Wikipedia onto metal plates, and burying them to be dug up later, just to be able to say, I knew this would happen!
chairmansteve 29 days ago [-]
Needs to carved in stone if they are serious.....
QuiDortDine 29 days ago [-]
I think it's glass actually? Or something like glass.
fukka42 29 days ago [-]
Then Ruin would be able to influence what is written.
xiphmont 29 days ago [-]
sort of like The Order of St. Liebowitz the Engineer from _A Canticle for Liebowitz_
churchill 29 days ago [-]
Basically, the ultimate, "Nothing ever happens" scoreboard [0].
If any of your acquaintances are ever in doubt of anything ever happening, this will be a handy guide for them to consult.
1. Events, including big ones like 9/11, don't unfold like in the movies as even direct consequences are often far removed.
2. Pax Americana + Hypernormalization + Cheap Food + Digital Escapism = a drug which convinces its users of neverending stability and order.
churchill 29 days ago [-]
That's basically the point the meme is making. It's not arguing that nothing literally happens in spacetime; it just asserts that we rarely, if ever, see events that fundamentally change the world from its slugging baseline.
boje 29 days ago [-]
All of these can be summed up as: "Bangs are more interesting than whimpers."
smith-kyle 29 days ago [-]
"Days until next prediction might begin". Cute.
marcyb5st 29 days ago [-]
A bit in the doomer camp, and what worries me the most are the lifestyle changes needed to not fuck up the climate in the next few hundreds years. I believe I heard that we should slash 7/8th of our emissions (as individuals living a modern lifestyle) to keep the wet bulb temperature in check worldwide by the end of the century. This is, in my opinion, a target that we'll surely miss and it won't be nice.
Europe is already struggling with few millions people trying to enter over several years. I can't imagine what happens when large parts of India/Pakistan/Bangladesh become literally deadly during the hot season. That would displace ~1B people basically at once (if you stay and you don't have Air Conditioning you die). The following turmoil will be like nothing we ever saw before as a species (IMHO).
_carbyau_ 29 days ago [-]
As a society if we care about our fellow humans - generally seen as a virtue to have - then we need to reduce our emissions etc etc.
As a rat race where the competition is between humans then rich people have a comparative advantage regarding how to survive the ravages.
So the future is less about avoiding climate catastrophe completely - that won't happen when the rich and powerful don't care.
The future is about surviving the issues until enough people die that emissions takes care of itself.
Either a lot of people die thus reducing emissions, or specific groups die thus reducing the capability to generate emissions on behalf of others. Or maybe enough tragedies happen that moral conscience does hold sway. Likely a combination of the above.
For supporting the continuation of my genes, maybe I should invest in property in Siberia/Alaska/Canada/Greenland/etc etc.
manoDev 29 days ago [-]
The emissions are only a problem initially; it doesn’t matter if enough population perish, the warming will continue by self-reinforcing effects for an era.
user____name 29 days ago [-]
There might be the emergency brake of geoengineering making life miserable enough that rapid decarbonizing and negative emmisions become attractive, preferably before global supply chains turn to mush.
ipaddr 29 days ago [-]
Serbia is a nice place.
29 days ago [-]
languagehacker 29 days ago [-]
Very disingenuous to put second-coming style prognostications from religious nutsos in the same list as people trying to use science, pattern analysis, or surveys of scholarly literature to identify when society will gradually break down from writing too many checks the environment or the economy can't cash.
I gotta say I didn't know about this Johnny Silverhand post, but I hope that if these things don't come to fruition he still finds time to stick it to the corpos in the most rockerboy way possible.
AstroBen 29 days ago [-]
One of the currently active events is predicting something on the scale of the Great Depression
I mean that's bad but it's much better than what I picture in my head as an apocalypse
meteor333 29 days ago [-]
I know this is mostly for fun, but it would be great to see how we are trending on the predications which has more scientific approach to it.
It can show 0 successful predictions all it wants, but we'd been through global lockdowns and forced vaccination, there's an ongoing war in Europe with casualties in hundreds of thousands on both sides, Gaza is being demolished by Israel, Internet as we knew it is about to turn into whitelisted fiberoptic/5G TV, surveillance is rampant, and the rise of the global technofascist police state as the public is being entertained by the clown shitshow of top level politicians is not obvious only to those who've been trying to save their sanity by remaining in denial.
jungturk 29 days ago [-]
Don't disagree with any of that, and I don't want to minimize the seriousness of the issues you've cited, but that kind of reinforces the implication of the scorecard?
People are persistently presented with perils (plagues, parasites, pollution, power-hungry politicians, propaganda, plutonium-powered projectiles, etc...) and humanity keeps finding a way through (though certainly at great personal and population-wide cost sometimes).
Some pretty serious chokepoints in the full history (including research suggesting that something reduced our ancestors numbers by ~99% a little under a million years ago) and yet this particular strain remains.
wartywhoa23 29 days ago [-]
The whole history of the humankind is akin to that passage of Odysseus between Scylla and Charybdis. The further into it, the narrower it becomes. And exponentially at that...
Thank you for sharing your hopes for the better outcome no matter what, I'm with you on this.
LorenPechtel 28 days ago [-]
What would a Neanderthal say about this?
What would a Denesovian say about this?
jungturk 28 days ago [-]
More generally, what would _any_ collapsed society or extinct evolutionary branch have to say?
"Not much", outside of what they'd contributed to any surviving lines.
To your point, whether we're winning or losing very much depends on how we define our team.
catigula 29 days ago [-]
Doesn't make much sense given that we wouldn't exist to observe a timeline/reality where doomsday has been realized/effectuated.
amock 29 days ago [-]
The prediction aren't for total extinction events or even events where the internet wouldn't be around. Also, it' just a silly site provided for our entertainment.
catigula 29 days ago [-]
That is also tautological. Anyways, beneath the silliness is a smugness everyone here knows all too well, including me. Let's not pretend.
acuozzo 29 days ago [-]
"The end of the world as we know it" != "Eradication of humanity"
Muromec 29 days ago [-]
The world as we know it dies every second creating the new new one. What's the cutoff?
catigula 29 days ago [-]
Which world do you know?
Rendered at 01:50:50 GMT+0000 (UTC) with Wasmer Edge.
There is no lead-up to the apocalypse. The Messiah will return "like a thief in the night" and "nobody, except my Father, knows the hour of my return" (I probably butchered those two quotes). Either way, the Bible is pretty clear (as was Jesus): there will be zero indication the apocalypse is coming. None. It'll just... start.
It's pointless to cite the Bible to defend a theological position, because someone else can cite a different part that can be interpreted to say the exact opposite.
If someone plans to, they should first read Revelation 22:18–19.
And Revelations isn’t the only prophetic work. Try Ezekiel.
> It's pointless to cite the Bible to defend a theological position
Understandable, but citing the Bible is fairly important in theology, though it should be done within context.
Sure, Judaism was word of mouth a long time, and that’s great. I personally can’t remember much, so I think referencing text is fine.
See, that's when you use literal reading. "I'm not adding anything to the text, I'm just interpreting it."
>And Revelations isn’t the only prophetic work. Try Ezekiel.
Ezekiel is clearly about events in our past, though.
>Understandable, but citing the Bible is fairly important in theology, though it should be done within context.
Meh. There's no internally consistent Christian theology that cites the Bible and doesn't involve generous amounts of cherry picking.
It's not. Christian dogma doesn't even obey the law of identity.
>Is there something new or relevant you’re making a case for?
New? Not, not really. It's not at all new that the official position of the church ("Jesus is entirely mortal and entirely divine") is inherently self-contradictory. I mean, what the hell. If I didn't know any better I'd think an atheist came up with it to troll early Christians. Try saying something similar about literally anything else. "The contents of this glass are simultaneously entirely water and entirely mercury." It says nothing good of either the followers or the clergy that that nonsense has been accepted for so long.
"Mr. Archibald Potterfarthing is at the same time the Chair of the Committee and at the same time its most senior ranking member". Accidents, naturally, but co-existing in the same space-of-being. It turns out that "person" and "nature" are distinct (who knew?) and that it is possible for there to be one person with two natures just as well as there can be one person with two titles. But that presumes you believe the authority of the one who told you this - if not, it's useless to talk about it, because why would you ever need to distinguish person and nature unless you had encountered the reality of Christ? Nothing else we have encountered in the universe has (as far as we are aware) two natures. But nothing else behaves like a singularity either - uniqueness is not a proof of non-existence.
Of course, but that falls apart as soon as you reread the dogma. Jesus is entirely human and entirely divine. He is both things in the same way at the same time. He has to be entirely human for his sacrifice to have any meaning, but he has to entirely divine... I can't remember why. So he could be worshiped?
A man who is both a doctor and a judge isn't entirely either one. There are moments of his day where he is neither presiding over a courtroom nor seeing any patients, and there are parts of his body that are neither judicial nor medical. More importantly, when he passes sentence he doesn't exercise his medical privileges, and when he prescribes medicine he doesn't do it in a judicial capacity. Even if both aspects bleed somewhat into each other, they're still mostly compartmentalized.
None of this can apply to Jesus, if the word "entirely" or "fully" means anything. If he dies, he must simultaneously die like mortals do and live on like deities do. So which is it? Did he die or didn't he?
Not quite. He has a divine nature and a human nature. There is only one person, two natures, analogous to one person two job titles. He has both natures, fully.
> Did he die or didn't he?
Having two natures, he can experience things that people without two natures cannot experience. Like the experience of death in His human nature that in no way affected His divine nature (analogous to "experiencing censure as a judge, but still being able to practice medicine"). Fortunately, death isn't a cessation of human nature, merely an interrupting of part of its actuality (that is, an evil). You and I will still possess a human nature after we die. Just as we both would possess a human nature if we lost part of our bodies, we still possess a human nature after we lose our bodies completely in death.
You're contradicting yourself.
>analogous to "experiencing censure as a judge, but still being able to practice medicine"
That's only possible because, as I said, being a judge is not the totality of a person. If you strip a judge of his title the parts of him that are a person still remain. If you strip a person of their humanity then there's nothing left, because there's nothing of a person that's not human.
A normal person according to Christianity is closer to having two natures in the way you describe, because their body is mortal while their soul isn't. But Jesus' body should be equally as divine as his soul. So then how can it die? If he was just an immortal soul in a mortal body then he was just a regular human.
He could die in the same way the bush could burn in front of Moses without becoming a burnt object. Divinity is not corrupting or corruptible.
To be entirely divine is to be equal to God, untouched by sin and incorruptible.
These two states cannot coexist within the doctrine itself. Jesus cannot be entirely human and entirely divine any more than matter can be antimatter.
>He could die in the same way the bush could burn in front of Moses without becoming a burnt object.
But that makes it not entirely a bush, or else not entirely a fire. Something other than "a burning bush" is going on there. It looks like that, but it cannot be that.
If Jesus' soul wasn't corrupted by sin like any other mortal human then he wasn't entirely human. If Jesus was entirely human, he cannot also be divine, since God cannot coexist with sin. If Jesus can be both, then original sin is not an immutable transgression and the persistent state of evil and God's eternal judgement are simply arbitrary, and God can make exceptions whenever He likes.
Which is the actual answer because there are instances in the Bible of humans who just ascend to Heaven because God liked them, despite that supposedly being existentially impossible. God simply sometimes bends the rules, He just won't do so for you or I.
Assuming one wants to take all of this seriously and assume the Bible has univocality and try to interpret mythology with logic, which to me always seems like a bad idea.
This is false, fortunately. "Human" and "sin" are not necessary to each other. Sin is not natural to man. The gift of original justice could not be passed on from Adam to his children because he threw it away. This lack of a gift is what is called "original sin" and its effects include all of the disordered expressions we find ourselves inclined to from birth. But this lack of a gift is not necessary to being human.
Which allows God to take on human nature without being in the state of sin ("like us in all things but sin"), but accepting the punishment for sin (death) to redeem us and offer a new gift of mercy that restores the original gift of justice for those who accept it. Since God is outside of time, He can even give the fruits of that gift "before" that gift is realized in time (Elijah, Mary).
A "burning bush that isn't consumed" has at least the excuse of being a literary device. The narrator is describing what he sees in front of him, not describing the process at the physical level, so we can imagine that the bush wasn't literally on fire, but rather surrounded by some mystical flame, or shining, or whatever we can dream up.
The story of Jesus isn't like this. Jesus is supposed to have literally died. There's no possible metaphor there. In Christian theology Jesus is a literal scapegoat; he has to have died, as in his vital processes ending and his soul leaving his body to go to the afterlife. If he didn't do that after being tortured, crucified, and stabbed, then he wasn't fully human.
>Divinity is not corrupting or corruptible.
Exactly. So where's Jesus' uncorrupted, divine, lifeless body? Don't tell me it ascended to heaven, because normal human bodies don't do that.
Jesus did literally die. His soul and body were uncorruptible. That's why he was able to descend to Hell for three days, and why his fully mortal and fully divine body was able to be raised up. Dying is simply the separation of soul from body. Resurrection is the rejoining of those.
Mortal bodies of all will be raised in the Second Coming. It's not as correct to say normal human bodies don't do that, as it is to say normal human bodies don't do that yet.
So to clarify: just as the bush was literally on fire, yet did not combust, Jesus literally died, yet did not decompose.
How can you know that? From within the canon of the text, all we have is Moses' testimony. How can you be so sure that what he described as a burning bush was literally a burning bush, as in the matter of the bush undergoing rapid oxidation without being consumed?
>It's not as correct to say normal human bodies don't do that, as it is to say normal human bodies don't do that yet.
Sure. I'll accept "they don't do that yet". So since they don't do that yet, and they didn't do that during Jesus' times, if Jesus' body did do that, then his body wasn't fully human.
AH, THERE'S YOUR PROBLEM! Cartesian dualism isn't the best lens to view human nature through and it makes talking about Christ's nature harder than it needs to be. The human person is a being whose nature is body+soul. The separation of the soul and the body at death is an evil brought about by sin. Put another way, death is injurious to human beings, not natural to them. (See https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3164.htm#article1).
Jesus is fully man. His human nature is body+soul. His human soul is immortal, as all human souls are. Unlike other human beings (other than Adam and Eve before they sinned) He was not subject to death as a punishment for sin, but He accepted it on our behalf. When He died, he really died. His soul and His body were separated and for three days He could be spoken of as "not a man". See https://www.newadvent.org/summa/4050.htm#article4 for the details. Follow that up with https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1075.htm#article4 for how that relates to us. One particularly striking quote - "[c]onsequently, to say that Christ was a man during the three days of His death simply and without qualification, is erroneous. Yet it can be said that He was "a dead man" during those three days."
Jesus is also fully God. His divine nature is perfect and unchanging. His divine nature is immutable (not merely immortal) and was not subject to death. Thus Jesus was subject to death in His human nature not in His divine nature.
>Jesus is also fully God. His divine nature is perfect and unchanging. His divine nature is immutable (not merely immortal) and was not subject to death. Thus Jesus was subject to death in His human nature not in His divine nature.
This is maddening. Okay, so these are the logical relationships between the terms,
* Jesus is fully God.
* God is immutable.
* Something immutable is also immortal (and by contraposition, something mortal is not immutable).
* Jesus is fully man.
* Jesus is mortal and died.
Correct? None of this is in dispute, I assume, since it's what you said. Alright. To this I answer: if Jesus is mortal then he is not immutable, and if he's not immutable then he's not fully God. If you insist he is God then that's a contradiction by the terms you yourself laid out. The supposed two natures don't matter if they lead to this conclusion.
To give a simple analogy, you can make a sword that's sharp only halfway along its length and is blunt the rest of the way. The statements "the sword is sharp" and "the sword is blunt" are both simultaneously true. What you can't do is make a sword that's both sharp and blunt all throughout its length. You can say, "well, God can do the logically impossible". Fine. But then you're telling me that I'm right, that Christian theology does contain contradictions.
You are both a eukaryote and three-dimensional. Everything you do is in the capacity of a three-dimensional eukaryote and there's no way for you to momentarily abandon one of those natures while you do something. Not without fundamentally changing what you are.
Jesus' must be equally and inextricably imbued by these natures if he is to be said "wholly" human and divine. More so, in fact, because at least your atoms are not eukaryotic. So if Jesus changes, God the Son also changes, because Jesus is God the Son. They're two names for the same thing. If they're not the same thing, if Jesus does not completely overlap with God the Son, then Jesus is not wholly divine. There are parts of him that are not divine. That's a tenable position, but it's not the position of the church.
1. Everything that is (in the "esse" sense) of Jesus must be both. This seems to be your position. This is also an immediate contradiction since then either God changed or Jesus' humanity always was. Variations of this position (since it has several) have been defined heresy for literally 1,500 years. 2. Jesus is both God and man completely (not "the appearance of man" or "a man apart from God, divinized by God at a later point"). This is the position of the Church.
https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P1J.HTM
> 464 The unique and altogether singular event of the Incarnation of the Son of God does not mean that Jesus Christ is part God and part man, nor does it imply that he is the result of a confused mixture of the divine and the human. He became truly man while remaining truly God. Jesus Christ is true God and true man. During the first centuries, the Church had to defend and clarify this truth of faith against the heresies that falsified it.
> 465 The first heresies denied not so much Christ's divinity as his true humanity (Gnostic Docetism). From apostolic times the Christian faith has insisted on the true incarnation of God's Son "come in the flesh".87 But already in the third century, the Church in a council at Antioch had to affirm against Paul of Samosata that Jesus Christ is Son of God by nature and not by adoption. the first ecumenical council of Nicaea in 325 confessed in its Creed that the Son of God is "begotten, not made, of the same substance (homoousios) as the Father", and condemned Arius, who had affirmed that the Son of God "came to be from things that were not" and that he was "from another substance" than that of the Father.88
> 466 The Nestorian heresy regarded Christ as a human person joined to the divine person of God's Son. Opposing this heresy, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the third ecumenical council, at Ephesus in 431, confessed "that the Word, uniting to himself in his person the flesh animated by a rational soul, became man."89 Christ's humanity has no other subject than the divine person of the Son of God, who assumed it and made it his own, from his conception. For this reason the Council of Ephesus proclaimed in 431 that Mary truly became the Mother of God by the human conception of the Son of God in her womb: "Mother of God, not that the nature of the Word or his divinity received the beginning of its existence from the holy Virgin, but that, since the holy body, animated by a rational soul, which the Word of God united to himself according to the hypostasis, was born from her, the Word is said to be born according to the flesh."90
> 467 The Monophysites affirmed that the human nature had ceased to exist as such in Christ when the divine person of God's Son assumed it. Faced with this heresy, the fourth ecumenical council, at Chalcedon in 451, confessed: Following the holy Fathers, we unanimously teach and confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ: the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, composed of rational soul and body; consubstantial with the Father as to his divinity and consubstantial with us as to his humanity; "like us in all things but sin". He was begotten from the Father before all ages as to his divinity and in these last days, for us and for our salvation, was born as to his humanity of the virgin Mary, the Mother of God.91
And here is the kicker:
> We confess that one and the same Christ, Lord, and only-begotten Son, is to be acknowledged in two natures without confusion, change, division or separation. the distinction between the natures was never abolished by their union, but rather the character proper to each of the two natures was preserved as they came together in one person (prosopon) and one hypostasis.92
>2. Jesus is both God and man completely (not "the appearance of man" or "a man apart from God, divinized by God at a later point"). This is the position of the Church.
Uh huh. And what, in your mind, is effectively the difference between those two statements? Because to me those are two ways of communicating the exact same idea. That is, the exact same state of affairs is properly conveyed by two different sequences of words. Don't answer my question by pasting four paragraphs of sophism. I have no interest in it. All you need to answer is: in what situation would exactly one of those statements be true?
The day the church successfully uses its position on the divinity of Jesus Christ to engineer something rather than letting it remain as an abstract bit of sophistry, I promise I'll shut up about it.
Mathematical proofs are internally consistent. Also, yes, mathematics is used in engineering. For example (as if one was needed), GPS is all about geometry.
>Do you deny the existence of Jesus of Nazareth, His divinity, or how the “church” defines it?
I don't have a problem answering this question, but I would like to know what my personal position has to do with anything.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Schism
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Leo_XIV
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Francis
Stop trying to figure out which scary new technology is the Number of the Beast. Stop trying to figure out which scary new politician is the Antichrist. Stop trying to figure out what any of that shit means, it doesn't mean anything anymore and the only apocalypse that's going to happen is the one we ourselves create, in part because we persist in our delusion that we don't really have to worry about this world because God's going to burn it all down anyway.
It is threadsafe. The documentation is very clear about this.
But I get what you're saying either way. I just think it's an interesting factlet.
> As described in Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies, societies become more complex as they try to solve problems. [...] Such complexity requires a substantial "energy" subsidy (meaning the consumption of resources, or other forms of wealth).
> When a society confronts a "problem," such as a shortage of energy, or difficulty in gaining access to it, it tends to create new layers of bureaucracy, infrastructure, or social class to address the challenge. Tainter, who first identifies seventeen examples of rapid collapse of societies, applies his model to three case studies: The Western Roman Empire, the Maya civilization, and the Chaco culture.
> For example, as Roman agricultural output slowly declined and population increased, per-capita energy availability dropped. The Romans "solved" this problem by conquering their neighbours to appropriate their energy surpluses (as metals, grain, slaves, other materials of value). However, as the Empire grew, the cost of maintaining communications, garrisons, civil government, etc. grew with it. Eventually, this cost grew so great that any new challenges such as invasions and crop failures could not be solved by the acquisition of more territory. [...]
> It is often assumed that the collapse of the western Roman Empire was a catastrophe for everyone involved. Tainter points out that it can be seen as a very rational preference of individuals at the time, many of whom were actually better off. Tainter notes that in the west, local populations in many cases greeted the barbarians as liberators.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter
So it's not as if "everything works" then suddenly "everything doesn't"
And it's only for operations that care about the sign / compute deltas / use signed numbers, otherwise it's 2106-02-07 06:28:16 UTC.
I've checked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_formatting_and_storage_bu... and I can't see what I could be muddling it up with, either. Spooky!
From memory, the rough argument was that society depends upon input flows of energy, resources (metals etc) and food. Society needs to allocate resources and energy to extract these inputs. Energy sources such as fossil fuel reserves are finite stocks, some are cheap to extract (high energy return on energy invested). Over time we consume and deplete the high EROEI reserves and have to move on to consuming the lower EROEI reserves. This means that the fraction of energy society needs to allocate for energy extraction increases over time, so there's less energy for other uses. Similarly, we deplete the cheap to extract stocks of metal required to build and maintain industry, leaving stocks that require higher inputs of metal and energy to extract. Similarly for agricultural yields, as we mine and deplete accumulated stocks of nutrients out of the soil.
The business as usual scenario leading to "overshoot and collapse" behaviour is that we have increasing population, increasing industrial capital and increasing demands for energy, food and resource inputs, while the fraction of energy and resources that need to be allocated to energy, resource and food production grows over time. The fraction of remaining surplus energy and resources that can be allocated to things like education, healthcare, research, art decreases over time. At some point the growing fraction of energy and resources that needs to be allocated to energy and resource extraction becomes so large vs the existing population and industrial base that there simply isn't enough surplus to maintain healthcare, education, research, etc at the same level.
The "Overshoot and collapse" dynamic describes stocks of population, industry etc growing to peaks well beyond sustainable levels before the above dynamics catch up and cause them to rapidly decline.
The researchers did a bunch of modelling of alternative scenarios, exploring how to avoid these "Overshoot and collapse" dynamics.
"In 2010, Turchin published research using 40 combined social indicators to predict that there would be worldwide social unrest in the 2020s"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Turchin
In particular they count a US civil war as an apocalyptic event… lots of countries and societies have been completely wiped out, though, which must(?) be more apocalyptic.
Maybe the point of the site is just that apocalypses tend to happen unexpectedly?
Ten times the GDP, three times the population and our military stuff mostly works, Ukraine has done a phenomenal job with what they had but Russia turned out to be even more of a Basket case than expected.
The problem is how much damage they can do before we put them back in their box and whether getting the shit kicked out of them would triggger a nuclear exchange which would get really out of hand.
https://github.com/TimSchell98/PyWorld3-03
I'm not saying anyone predicted those or something. It's just that the notion of doomsday is quite vague.
I'm trying to broaden some notions here. Prediction might not be exactly absolute prediction, and doomsday might not be exactly absolute doomsday.
Perhaps some great threats were averted precisely because someone predicted them (for example, the great leaded gasoline poisoning).
No one want to live in the middle.
1999: Spanish designer Paco Rabanne announces that the Mir space station would crash on and destroy Paris in between the 28 July 1999 lunar eclipse and the 11 August 1999 total solar eclipse, the two somehow interacting to create magnetic interference, leading to the station crashing at 11:22 on the 11, as predicted by a 17th century fresco in some abbey that shows an eclipse, a clock at that hour, and a sentence "you will know the hour of your death but not the day"... Also Mir would have hypothetically contained a Russian atomic bomb, which is what would destroy Paris, and possibly leading to some all-out nuclear war.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIsjK7gpSoc
Or we could be living in universe inside like a raindrop of larger universe that may hit the ground and burst any moment.
But, the one thing I always find interesting, philosophically, about believing the world-as-we-know-it is coming to an end is that all of the things people are concerned about will happen no matter what.
Being afraid of the end of the world is ultimately being afraid that we will lose the things we have, that our work will be lost to time and history, that ultimately we will return to a void and all of "this" will have been for nothing.
However, all of that is true either way. You will lose everything you've ever loved over time in life, all the work you've done will be lost to time, in the end all of your efforts will be for nothing and even that won't matter.
The "end of the world" scares people because it forces them to discard the normal tools they use combat these many existential anxieties, but the world continuing to go on doesn't actually resolve any of those anxieties.
The world is inevitably going to end, our work isn't going to be forever preserved into the future and there will be no "end of history" until there are living humans.
The thing is that the world can end in many ways. My world can end in many ways. I'd rather pass on with a clear consciousness, with my faculties preserved more or less, and with a legacy of having at least tried to make the lives of other that tiny bit better, so I'm aware if I'm not vigilant I can spend my final days suffering from an avoidable disease or accident or regretting I wasted my life chasing a better tomorrow that never came while neglecting what I already have today.
This is virtually the same for all society. It's going to fade into oblivion, but it matters a great deal that the process is as gentle as possible for everyone involved.
> I found my way forward through an 18th-century Samurai manual, Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s “Hagakure,” which commanded: “Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.” Instead of fearing my end, I owned it. Every morning, after doing maintenance on my Humvee, I’d imagine getting blown up by an I.E.D., shot by a sniper, burned to death, run over by a tank, torn apart by dogs, captured and beheaded, and succumbing to dysentery. Then, before we rolled out through the gate, I’d tell myself that I didn’t need to worry, because I was already dead. The only thing that mattered was that I did my best to make sure everyone else came back alive. “If by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead,” wrote Tsunetomo, “he gains freedom in the Way.”
[1] https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20...
I think people like Ray Kurzweil are essentially religious. Instead of a messiah and heaven, they think of salvation in terms of a singularity, immortality, or a way of ascension. It feels very religious to me, and as such, detached from reality and physical possibilities.
Even if upload does not produce a singularity or the like it still is a huge step towards getting more time to address other issues and it makes interstellar solutions viable. But when we can read out the human mind remains an unknown.
Having finished both The Fourth Turning and End Times recently, Strauss and Howe’s specific guesses as to what might fuel the next crisis are laughably off track even if their broad strokes still paint a compelling (and at times, frightening) picture, while Turchin feels more prescient in his observations.
Ultimately, though, Turchin has the better message: even when a crisis destroys an empire, the world continues onward. That gave me some bleak hope to hang onto.
I think that they Simon–Ehrlich wager showed how laughable they were but I guess we have to revisit every couple of decades.
I could see why the ones with several hundred years deadline are "pending"
Step 1: become accomplished in some field Step 2: ??? Step 3: write about the anti Christ and predict when it will occur
Switch your steps 2 & 3.
Step 4 is profit.
Most species have gone extinct.
Personally, I do not believe climate change can kill us off. The worst case predictions are pretty dire (and beware the worst case makes the IPCC look tame--there is not enough data on methane hydrates for it to be in the IPCC model, but the worst case estimates are worse than the IPCC estimates and they will probably stack.) But I consider extinction likely because we can move around. An animal that loses 90% of it's habitat loses 90% of it's population but the survivors are pretty much the same as before. But are those humans who will be killed off just going to sit there?
If anything, we have a much better shot at surviving the next mass extinction than we had at surviving prior ones, now that we have so many advantages.
I probably won't survive it because I'm a smooth brained weakling, but some humans surely will
It’s bound to happen eventually
Because, IMO, Russia would be destroyed the first time they threatened NATO.
Maybe. Or maybe the big powers might realize that sending hundreds of thousands or even millions of people to die in an all out war (depending on how big it gets and who else gets involved) is a harder sell than settling on appeasement and so smaller states would lose their sovereignty.
I live in Latvia. If there's no risk of MAD, then what's to prevent some opportunistic Russians from invading my country and seeing whether NATO would actually do something about Article 5? Some are pondering whether that's not a direction that Russia could move in even now - stage something relatively small and see how NATO responds. They're already regularly violating our airspace and doing cyber warfare against us and trying to drum up opposition to our government (as flawed as it may be) by the ethnic Russian people.
Could go either way.
We (I'm an American) have four ballistic missile subs that no longer carry ballistic missiles because of arms reduction treaties. The subs still exist, though, with each of the Trident launch tubes instead holding 7 Tomahawks. They are built to hide and they're very good at it--we can't even reliably track them ourselves. That means they could sneak in to launch points some distance from Russia. The Ukraine war has shown that heavy air defenses sometimes work against ground hugging missiles (but remember the Moskova--despite fearsome anti-air capability it for some reason couldn't engage two sea hugging missiles), but ares without heavy defenses fare poorly against even crude low altitude stuff. Expect most of those Tomahawks to get through, and there goes Russia's logistics capability. Most stuff of importance is within Tomahawk range of the coast.
There are many societies which have collapsed. We can't know who predicted it because they are dead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse
And of course, this list will no longer exist after societal collapse.
If any of your acquaintances are ever in doubt of anything ever happening, this will be a handy guide for them to consult.
[0]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nothing-ever-happens
1. Events, including big ones like 9/11, don't unfold like in the movies as even direct consequences are often far removed.
2. Pax Americana + Hypernormalization + Cheap Food + Digital Escapism = a drug which convinces its users of neverending stability and order.
Europe is already struggling with few millions people trying to enter over several years. I can't imagine what happens when large parts of India/Pakistan/Bangladesh become literally deadly during the hot season. That would displace ~1B people basically at once (if you stay and you don't have Air Conditioning you die). The following turmoil will be like nothing we ever saw before as a species (IMHO).
As a rat race where the competition is between humans then rich people have a comparative advantage regarding how to survive the ravages.
So the future is less about avoiding climate catastrophe completely - that won't happen when the rich and powerful don't care.
The future is about surviving the issues until enough people die that emissions takes care of itself.
Either a lot of people die thus reducing emissions, or specific groups die thus reducing the capability to generate emissions on behalf of others. Or maybe enough tragedies happen that moral conscience does hold sway. Likely a combination of the above.
For supporting the continuation of my genes, maybe I should invest in property in Siberia/Alaska/Canada/Greenland/etc etc.
I gotta say I didn't know about this Johnny Silverhand post, but I hope that if these things don't come to fruition he still finds time to stick it to the corpos in the most rockerboy way possible.
I mean that's bad but it's much better than what I picture in my head as an apocalypse
...remember it only takes one to be right!
People are persistently presented with perils (plagues, parasites, pollution, power-hungry politicians, propaganda, plutonium-powered projectiles, etc...) and humanity keeps finding a way through (though certainly at great personal and population-wide cost sometimes).
Some pretty serious chokepoints in the full history (including research suggesting that something reduced our ancestors numbers by ~99% a little under a million years ago) and yet this particular strain remains.
Thank you for sharing your hopes for the better outcome no matter what, I'm with you on this.
What would a Denesovian say about this?
"Not much", outside of what they'd contributed to any surviving lines.
To your point, whether we're winning or losing very much depends on how we define our team.