Yeah, turns out we experienced the peak of civilization. Someday, people will be begging to party like it's 1999.

China also pollutes significantly more than India, even if the Chinese per person emission is lower than some other developed nations.

Plus, Capitalists invented the newer green power used by China and instead China invented bigger coal power plants.

Evolution only cares about passing on genes. It's rare in the animal kingdom for menopause to exist. For the most part there's no point in an animal living if it's unable to mate. Scientists have the "grandmother hypothesis" for why this happens in a few whales, humans and some chimps: in a species where the grandmother might help care for a baby that has some of her genes, the grandmother can be useful to the mechanism of passing on genes even if she's no longer able to pass on her own.

That means that a creature might care about how the world looks maybe 25 years past the point where it can have offspring. Caring about environmental degradation that takes place on a multi-century scale is just not something that evolution prepared us for. Why would it? No creature in history has ever been able to modify its environment the way humans can.

Viruses are actually a good analogy. A virus depends on a living host. But, viruses often kill their hosts. Like humans, it can actually modify its environment in a way that that environment becomes toxic to the virus's existence. That seems bad. For any individual virus though, its "life" is so short compared to the life of the host that any mechanism that made it try to avoid killing the host would just be a useless genetic trait that would not be optimal.

Humans have these immense brains, and they allow us to do things that aren't simply the result of evolutionary drives. But, we're still animals. Those drives really structure everything we do.

Yeah, the AI are the bad guys in that movie. But it's the humans that blot out the sun.

Yes but some systems push the bad side of human and other the good side

COVID-19 has drawn much of this discussion into the public sphere. Whereas it’s generally seen as poor taste to refer to groups of people as infections, diseases, and plagues – for good reason – this seems to be forgiven when the group being referred to is non-specific. Hand waving at humanity in general, as if being vague is ethical bulletproofing, gets a pass. It is relatively common today to find another viral tweet with tens of thousands of likes gesturing towards the clearing waters of Venetian canals, or the wandering deer of Japan navigating neon-lit city centres and declaring that the Earth is healing itself; the smog-cleared skies of California receive a probing enquiry – perhaps we were the real virus all along?

Strange as though it may seem, musings of this kind have become more and more common as the weeks have gone by and the evidence of nature ‘reclaiming’ previously populated areas has begun to accumulate. Suffice it to say, there is more than a little of the eco-fascist ideology floating around in the assumptions of that question; when somebody asks if humanity is the ‘real virus’, they set up a system in which the Earth is a being and humanity a problem that needs to be solved. The solution being proposed is rarely stated outright, but it doesn’t have to be because it’s implicit in the question; you cure a virus by getting rid of it. Beneath the surface level wonder at seeing a wild boar shuffle across Italian cobblestones, there is a lurking belief that maybe the world would be better off without us. Or, more commonly, the world would be better off without some of us, with who that some is being left as a blank to be filled in by the subconscious of the questioner. Unquestionably, whoever that somebody is, will be someone else.

[...]

The language of the eco-fascist claims that human beings are the problem, and that with their self-isolation – that is, their removal from the system – has come ecological recovery. Such individualised and atomised analysis prevents the ever-important systematic approach; the real problem is capitalism, and it is with the interruptions and staggerings of capitalism that recovery has come along. Deeply embedded in the language of the right wing, the misattribution of the worst elements of capitalism to the mere existence of human beings exists as a dual weapon.

Firstly, it allows them to turn their vitriol upon individuals... Secondly, it allows them to imply a connection between the two; to link the existence of capitalism to the existence of individuals and bind them together ideologically; to present capitalism as human and therefore inevitable and inescapable.

Fraser, J. (2020). Eco-Fascism: The Rhetoric of the Virus. Organise Magazine. Archived at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jay-fraser-eco-fascism-the-rhetoric-of-the-virus.

I mean, I guess in theory that’s how it’s supposed to work. Imagine something just outside our grasp, like a structuralists geometry of social dynamics. You might never know what kind of intelligent social system with generational knowledge actually has the opportunity to bypass the great filter. Evolution is a never ending game of FAFO. Maybe it stands to reason, the Neanderthals went extinct… such intelligent life forms tend to kill each other and eventually themselves?

I wonder if an advanced fungus based intelligence could do better. Or a silicon crystalline one, on hotter planets, with much lower temporal awareness of course.

Part of me wonders, if evolution can make a generally intelligent life form capable of advancing itself as a unit part in thanks to connective technology like the internet… and that’s in just a few hundred million years, what kind of life forms could theoretically exist with such abilities innate to their being? Perhaps in 30 billion years of evolution, might you come across a species that would find internet technology redundant and inefficient in contrast to their biological abilities?

That scene has always haunted me with how accurate it was