Climate Policy

[Jester]

If the universe is really a closed system, then everything is cooling down. We're doomed to heat death whether we drive a Prius or a Hummer. We might as well have some fun on our slide to hell.

I think we are at a crucial juncture. We have become powerful enough to either eradicate ourselves quickly, or to spread to other planets and solar systems. Either of these things could happen in mere centuries, an insignificant speck cosmically, but probably a tipping point in our history.

If we screw up earth while it's still our one and only planet, our species' survival time might be measured in decades or centuries. If we hold off until we are at least dispersed over a few habitable biospheres, our species's survival time might be measured in millions or even billions of years.

That's a pretty big choice to make, and if you're fatalistic about the difference, that seems pretty much like nihilism, or at least some kind of suicidal hedonism. Maybe this particular crisis is not the one that will bring us down. But if we don't start thinking about our species' survival in the biggest of pictures, we're almost certainly going to end up as another cosmic statistic, a chemical pattern that failed to keep replicating.

-Jester