what is the biggest failure in human history?
what is the biggest failure in human history?
85 comments
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Our collective response to climate change
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That's right. We theorized the effects shortly after the first coal power plant, and we have observed the effects for a century now. Yet the response has been minimal, to say the least
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large efforts are being made, its just not up to par with what people are expecting from their governments
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Fostering societal systems of greed and competition rather than of cooperation and compassion.
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The problem with cooperation and compassion is that it literally takes one dick to ruin it. If we could incentivize the psychopaths in society to collaborate for their own good, then at least we'd strike a nice balance, but our economies aren't structured that way.
A system that can be so easily destabilized is not a system that has planned for the long term. I think we're slowly getting there, as even the dicks in society are beginning to realise that they can be shunned for their public actions, and that shunning does come with real financial consequences.
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I just can't subscribe to that idea. If it took 1 dick to ruin everything society would never have gotten off the ground in the first place. Hell, even today, our power grid pretty much operates off the principle of 'don't be a dick and shoot this with the guns we all have" and it took MAGA craziness for people to attack them. I'd say compassion operates within any given system in spite of people being dicks and thats why we have prevailed the way we have.
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This, we moved from Tribes to towns to cities to be more efficient but lost the cooperative aspect of the tribe which made it more efficient in the first place. Now corporations do market research until they figure out exactly what we can afford to get our needs met and then charge that price instead of anything related to their actual costs. It's resulted in a situation to where most people live month to month and can't afford vacation or even an unexpected car repair.
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- We mine and manufacture nutrient dense fertilizer at massive environmental cost.
- We use the nutrients to grow plants
- We eat the nutrients in our food
- We expel 95% of these nutrients in our waste
- We dump our waste into the rivers and oceans with all the nutrients (often we purposefully destroy the nitrogen in the waste since it causes so much damage to rivers and oceans)
- We need new nutrients to grow plants
Before humans there was a nutrient cycle. Now it's just a pipe from mining to the ocean that passes through us. The ecological cost of this is immeasurable, but we don't notice because fertilizer helps us feed starving people and waste management is important to avoid disease.
We need to close the loop again!
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Are you saying we need to start mining the rivers and oceans for nutrients? Or poop directly on the crops?
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Poop indirectly on crops. Systems like this or the Aztec chinampa system, basically try to keep nutrients in the loop with fish and other aquatic organisms. Obviously, there's a disease risk if you do it wrong, but that's also true for modern water treatment.
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Like evasive chimpanzee said we need to poop INDIRECTLY in crops. Hot aerobic composting for example has excellent nutrient retention rates and eliminates nearly all human borne diseases. The main problem would be medication since some types tend to survive.
Also urine contains almost all of the water soluble nutrients that we expel and is sanitised with 6-12 months of anaerobic storage. So that's potentially an easier solution if we can seclude the waste stream. Again the main issue would be medications.
I don't have the answer, if it was easy we would have done it already. The main issue is we don't have a lot of people working on the answer because we're still in the stage of getting everyone in the world access to sanitation. Certainly the way we're doing it is very energy and resources intensive, unsustainable in the living term, and incredibly damaging to the environment. We've broken a fundamental aspect of the nutrient cycle and we're paying dearly for it.
The other problem is, like recycling, there isn't a lot of money in the solution, so it's hard to move forward in a capitalist system until shit really hits the fan.
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Having the intelligence to create technology but not enough intelligence to understand the implications.
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we understand the implications, we just assume that the negatives will happen to others and that the positives will grant us a temporary reprieve in which to plug existing holes
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The thing is technology is neutral. How we use it isnt.
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letting unqualified businessmen rule the planet instead of experts in their given fields.
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For me, this post is right under the person who said "Agriculture" and the response "Because it lead directly to feudalism and other forms of autocracy?"
And if unqualified businessmen ruling instead of experts in their "given fields" isn't a perfect way to describe feudalism, I don't know if irony has survived.
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Every time someone tried to make "a weapon so powerful it would make people not want to wage war".
Several weapons are on this list, from the cannon to the machine gun to, most famously, the atomic bomb.
The fact that this happened once would've been understandable. The fact this escalated to nuclear weapons because people just tried pushing this idea is nuts though.
This is not toward so much the technology, with all tech being no less inevitable, but more to do with the intentions/hindsight/foresight of the people making something that can only be produced by an assembly in a seemingly dire setting, as opposed to something like AI, which does not stem from that and which would've come around at some time.
By extension, this extends to populism in general, a mindset that from experience I refuse to compliment. I'm surrounded by people every day who come off as thinking with their feet and not with the methodological part of them, and my experiences with this have never allowed me to be fully at peace.
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Opting for gasoline over electricity early on when cars started to become a thing, we were already going electric, but a smear campaign put fear into people's minds about electric and switched tk gasoline.
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We always have to pander to the capitalists profits, how could the make money with clean electricity???
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Batteries could have been standard for a bit longer, but it seems to me that eventually the need to go faster for longer would have forced combustion engines to be a thing. All they had were lead-acid batteries (or primary cells, but that would be dumb) and new more energy-dense chemistries didn't show up for a long time after. Maybe they could have found one if they really needed, but it's a tricky science even today, so I'm skeptical.
It's possible, I suppose, that infrastructure could have been rolled out for both en mass, but I don't see an even mix lasting through the whole 20th century. Probably not even past WWII.
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Leaded fuel
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I remember one of my engineering profs describing Midgley as the most environmentally destructive organism ever, Dude also was involved in the creation of freon.
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But he also killed the biggest environmentally destructive person on the planet.
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At least it was (mostly) dealt with. Cars generally don't need it anymore, and the few that do can reduce engine knock through additives. I don't think I've ever seen a pump offering leaded fuel.
One big exception to all of this is small general aviation aircraft. They mostly run on AVGAS100LL, but it's not because of the planes anymore. Just like cars, the few planes that need it can use additives. But regulation for fuel standards change slowly, and ICAO moves at the pace of glacial drift.
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They were probably also alluding to the long term effects it had on likely the people who are still the most influential age group still running the world.
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Investing everything in engines and abandoning battery development in the early 1900s. Lead-acid batteries were heavy but usable, and electric cars were more popular until electric starters were added to engines. A disproportionately big, short-lived reason was the lack of sufficient electrical grid for electric cars trying to go far.
Nobody in government was thinking ahead, so everyone was forced to trying to make their own money NOW, and that's how we get inhumane tech in general. Same thing happening in computers for decades now. We need centralised R&D free from market influence for the benefit of all life.
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We need centralised R&D free from market influence for the benefit of all life.
So you're actually saying holding on to capitalism past it's useful point was the mistake because it created the conditions for these things to happen?
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“Let’s just divide up Poland and keep the peace. We can focus our whole energy on the western front, you can save yourselves bloodshed by the tanker load, and in a few short years we can share dominion over a subjugated world.”
“You so right, that sounds like a great plan”
“Hey guess what I just decided”
The whole world would have been different. It was still a pretty close thing with help from the Soviets and with Germany fighting a ludicrous two-front war for literally no military or geopolitical reason at all.
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How do I politely suggest that learning history through HOI4 or WWII subreddits might not be the best idea?
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What about that didn’t happen? Enlighten me.
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I think the Austin Allegro would like to challenge you for a car with absolutely zero redeeming qualities.
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If you needed a light car with simple mechanics, it was kinda fitted though
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0-40 km/h (25 mi/h) in 42 seconds…. That’s 42, not 4.2 in case someone thought I missed the decimal. How did this sell almost 92k units per year up through the 80s?
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Many of us will be miserable for the rest of our lives and society won't care.
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Humans.
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Human history, as a whole, is so depressing and meandering it's a weird question to try and answer. Were the great empires a success, or a failure? It depends on if you're measuring monuments built or social justice enacted, and if you're comparing against modern polities or whatever shitty local warlord they replaced. History doesn't really have an end goal, as much as we'd like it to.
Maybe you just meant a personal failure:
Thomas Midgley is one of my favourites, because he's famous for three things: Inventing leaded gasoline, inventing ozone-destroying PCBs, and inventing an accessibility contraption that strangled Thomas Midgley. He did nothing else of note; he's like the real life Bloody Stupid Johnson.
Pheidippides of Battle of Marathon fame is famous for running a long way just to deliver some news first, and then dying from exhaustion.
People regularly make the same trip and are fine.He was regarded as a hero, and the races were originally in his honour, but I wouldn't want to be him. Edit: Maybe not a great example, actually. The story names a much longer distance than a marathon, although it's kinda mythical.Muhammad II of Khwarazm received an envoy from Ghengis Khan, who wasn't bent on invading at all but wanted trade, and decided to steal their shit and kick them out instead. Then he killed the people sent next to ask for a nice apology. You can guess where that went.
The Soviets once tried to sextort Indonesian quasi-communist leader Sukarno with a tape. It did not work, because he was shamelessly proud of his "virility". In at least some tellings he misinterprets the KGB's presentation as a gift, although I doubt he could have been that dumb.
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If it's the same person I'm thinking about he understood that it was blackmail but didn't care. He requested copies of the tape to keep for himself.
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"Thanks bro/comrade!" would be a great way to play this off diplomatically with someone you still want to be allies with, so that could be the origin of that bit.
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Isn't what we call a marathon just the last short leg of his journey, and he ran like 100-150 miles?
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In addition to mixing up the man and the place, I got that wrong. Fixed.
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The election of Richard Nixon. I sincerely believe that's where we traded the "flying cars robot butlers" timeline for the "worst inequality of literally ever" timeline.
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Thought that was Reagan?
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My friend and I argue this occasionally. The difference IMO is that Nixon was a politician while Regan was an ideologue in a politician suit. He wanted to push his agenda no matter the negative consequences. Nixon pushed the car down the hill, but Regan started it up and floored the accelerator.
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He helped, but Nixon was anti union and pro debt.
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Ego.
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Let's go with the atomic bomb...if you disagree, consider that we made a weapon too powerful to ever be used again, but nations that have them get taken way more seriously in diplomacy.
And let's be serious, it's pretty much tick-tock, tick-tock before they get used again when they get put in the hands of zealots. Let's be doubly serious, it will be religion that convinces some leader that they are within their divine rights to cleanse the world of their enemies.
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Agriculture.
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Ohh it's much worse than that. Usually humans would live to around 60 if they survived infancy before that. Their diet was varied and since food was a limited resource, there was no way of population blasts. But agriculture just fucked it all up. We stopped moving around since the land needed constant maintainence and since the diet became mostly carbohydrates, combined with back breaking work, our life expectancy dropped to 40. We didn't domesticate wheat, wheat domesticated us. It took modern medicine... ie 20th century to get the average life expectancy up again.
I recommend you read the book called Sapiens. It's an eye opener.
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Because it lead directly to feudalism and other forms of autocracy?
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When people started taking dudes in fancy hats seriously
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MS Excel
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Are you referring to Microsoft's spreadsheet software in particular or to spreadsheet software in general?
In both cases, why?
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Money
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The United States of America
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Me
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The USA
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Modern society. At the end 60s hippies were right after all...
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Agriculture
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Humans.
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I say we fucked up the moment we existed.
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Stuart Pearce of England’s missed penalty kick in the 1990 World Cup semi finals.
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Surprised the chat isn't calling me out.
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ITT people trying to be edgy but I’m going to say invading Russia in the winter.
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Also, while we're on the invasion topic: invading Ukraine.
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Discovering agriculture
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The downvotes suggest nobody has read "Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind". A great book that I very much recommend.
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Ur mom giving birth to you
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Communism
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85 comments