Is Civilization A Bad Idea?

[The Dharma Bum]

[exploited]

A near impossible question to answer, I suspect.

[John Galt]

i was going to answer yes, the game is rather boring after being consuming for a weekend or so of your time, but i read the article.

so because some science fiction authors tend to have intelligent civilization meeting brutish ends, that means that civilization isn't a good idea? oh you're right, the inhibitors of Revelation Space by Reynolds must be true: mechanical sentience whose purpose is to inhibit the emergence of intelligent life so that it will not be destroyed later when andromeda swallows the milky way and if intelligent life gets out there it will destroy it. gotta be true, civilization was doomed from the start and we should have stayed in Eden

layout is terrible, but these are ray kurzweil's predictions that someone put together: http://i.imgur.com/quKXllo.jpg ray kurzweil is the director of engineering at google.

we can't know how other civilizations on other planets played out. we can only know ours at this moment. and the future is glorious. just the other day i read they sent a quantum message instantaneously 25 miles away. the future will evolve ever more rapidly and we'll be able to move and settle human life beyond terra in a few decades. i'm not sure if american culture, western civilization -- the most dominate culture ever conceived by humans -- will endure eons, but it will endure for the foreseeable future

[eric]

Civilization is definitely a good idea depending on how you answer this simple question: should the human race do anything to survive as a species?

If you answer yes, you have to have civilization.

[exploited]

You'd have to weigh the chances of us exterminating ourselves versus us being exterminated by an asteroid we were unaware of or something.

[eric]

That's true. Though there is a 100% probability of the earth being wiped out eventually because of the sun once it burns through its fuel.

[exploited]

[Spider]

If we're still stuck on this one rock a couple billion years from now when the sun starts bloating...then it's probably for the better.

[Homer]

[The Dharma Bum]

you are making the unfounded assumption we have access to the entire universe and whatever resources it may hold. a better analogy would be that we have filled up and contaminated the petri dish we are trapped in. We won't be traveling to the stars anytime soon. There are too many biological limitations to transcend. We don't even know if humans can survive in low gee indefinitely yet. And that's just the beginning.

meanwhile the political, economic, and environmental situations here on earth are worse far than the public has been led to believe, which is why there is growing concern regarding the subject among the world's thinkers. We are definitely facing a existential crisis.

the thing is, everything is not going to be alright if we just ignore these trends and continue along the path of overproduction and consumerism. Fantasizing about how dominant one's culture is because its big and shiny is not what makes for a great culture.

Solving problems is.