Is the Human Race on a Suicide Mission?

Bernie Sanders
Brazil’s new President Jair Bolsonaro is a far-right authoritarian who has praised the former military dictatorship and referred to black activists as “animals.”

It's very troubling that Bolton sees Bolsonaro as “like-minded” with Trump. Even more troubling, he’s probably right.

It is foolish to refer to percentages, simply because most people were not subject to violent death, and I see no one here applying reliable statistical evidence of the causes of death in any population. More than that, wars did not impinge on the lives of commoners unless the operation course of a war passed through their locality. Edward III started what we call the Hundred Years war in 1337. The first significant battle was a battle at sea in 1340. The French fleet was destroyed, and as the men-at-arms and knights wore armor, they lost from 15,000 to 20,000 men. Six years later, at the battle of Wadicourt (as the English called it then, it is now known as the battle of Crécy) the French lost from 1500 to 4000 men. In the following year, what we call the Black Death hit Europe (it was known to the English as the Great Mortality). About one third of the population of Europe died of the plague or of anthrax. Estimates range as high as 60% of the population of Europe between 1347 and 1351. The total mortality world-wide is estimated to have been 100,000,000 or more.

People who did not live in eastern Normandy or in Picardy were not affected by the sea battle of Sluys or the battle of Crécy. The Great Mortality, however, was no respecter of borders or of locales. The great disaster had profound consequences for society and the economies of Europe. It took about 200 years for the world population to recover.

So put that in perspective. More people were killed outright, by violent means in the eight years from 1937 to 1945. It is an absurdity to claim that people were more commonly exposed to violent death in centuries gone by. As EB points out, it is still going on.

Even 1 in a million can be expressed as a percentage Set.

I absolutely agree that more people, in shear numbers, are murdered/killed today than in year 1. (pretty sure I'm repeating myself here)

My only point was that I think the average person experienced more violence in year 1 than the average person does today. I could be wrong, but I don't think anything you've posted proves that.

To answer the question of the OP:

Is the Human Race on a Suicide Mission?

No. It's not.

Why would I prove that? I don't even believe it. That's your claim, any proof would have to come from you.

To me, it is like a collapsing structure, in these times. People who are temporarily safe will eventually be engulfed by combined economic malfeasance, war, habitat destruction, food chain problems caused as much by corporate manipulation as anything, and global warming.

Well, you were replying to my post (I'm pretty sure) being that your first comment was about how percentages are foolish (I was the one who used percentages).

Then you posted a bunch of dates and numbers of incidents throughout history which served to only prove a point that I had agreed with you on (that more people in shear numbers die today than centuries ago).



So in your post, the part you disagreed with me on you simply said was "foolish" and the rest of your post was intended to agree with me further?


I'm not offering any proof. I said in my initial post that it was my perception and that I may be wrong. I don't think I am. I wasn't asking you to prove it, I thought if you disagreed you'd try to rebut it. You didn't, but that's fine. You obviously don't have to.


Sometimes, I think your perception of peoples posts gets ahead of you actually reading people's posts.

Climate change will ultimately result in massive crop failures, so yes, we are on our way to a severe demographic correction. Probably not a full extinction though.

Ah, but if humanity's numbers drop too far, then the drastic impact on the production cycle of necessities such as food and drinks and the like, might well exacerbate matters... Furthermore, multitudes of corpses combined with failing healthcare (because, everything fails) will either create new, or bring back old, epidemics on a global scale.

Sometimes I wonder if you actually attempt to understand what I've written. If by the year 1 you mean since the beginning of mankind, which is what I assumed, you are way off the mark.

You can read about Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosome Adam by clicking here. The obvious implication is that the descendants of all other female humans died out. That was about 140,000 years ago. The descendants of all other males died out, between 60,000 and 90,000 years ago. You can read about the founding population of Europe based on David Reich's genetic research at Harvard, by clicking here. The point is that there were so few humans on the planet before the rise of agriculture that it is highly unlikely that existing bands ever encountered or interacted with other existing bands. After all, if no more than 10,000 humans existed 30,000 years ago (as Professor Reich has hypothesized), and they were spread out from Africa to northwest Europe, to China and through the islands to Australia, just what do you think the population density was? (Reich has also hypothesized that there might have been as few as one thousand humans living 30,000 years ago.)

So, two considerations need to be examined. How probable is it that any group in which violence was common had any descendants? There other is that the necessity to acquire and effectively store forage food and meat from game was probably about all any such band of humans had time for.

So, I dissent from the specific sentence of yours which I quoted in my earlier response. If you don't want to believe the implications of genetic studies, that's a matter of indifference to me. I advise you not to doubt that the human race has danced along the precipice of extinction many, many times in the last few hundred thousand years. There was no place for violence in such a situation.

Sometimes I wonder if you attempt to understand what I have written.

I provided a table that said:



Year 1, as in 2018 years ago. Common Era. Egypt and the Pharaoh's time.

Did you think there were 300 million people at the beginning of mankind? Did you take the time to look at my post or did you just assume that you knew what I was saying and proceeded to disagree?

You say you assumed, despite my providing a very specific year and population.


But if you want to go back to Adam and Eve. There were 4 people on the planet at the time and Cain killed Able violently. That's a 25% murder rate worldwide. Quite violent.

In truth (if you buy the biblical account), there were several more than 4. Cain at some point got married, so she existed. Additionally, Adam and Eve had several children beyond Abel and Cain. That lowers your percentage of murder a bit.

It was a bad joke at the end of a post. Wasn't meant to be taken as anything more. I don't even know the biblical account beyond what I remember as a child.

The land of Nod had a plentiful supply.

No. Because the word "mission" implies intention.

You have to read between the lines, I guess. To me the outcome of our major endeavors are leading to probable extinction. We know we are being destructive, without being made to do it, yet we persist. You might not want to call it suicide, but the result will be identical.

I read an article about how futile Washington's carbon tax would be, and it occurred to me that there is a subtle cultural shift that happens as people accept the idea that the world is ending (or climate is changing) and it is futile to try to change it.

When people accept futility, what motivation can there be for them except cynically struggling for whatever they can get regardless of the consequences?

To the extent that such a culture is growing, it results in something like a collective suicidal attitude, but it's not really suicidal because there's no collective centralized self to target for destruction. So it's just a general destructive spirit and indifference that floats around and causes various levels of irresponsibility, hate, violence, and destruction.

Will that eventually result in the total annihilation of the human species and/or biosphere totally? Maybe or maybe not. Maybe it will just persist until some point where there is new cause to reject futility in favor of a more hopeful attitude. In fact, that already happens all the time, but when the hopeful people post their thoughts and ideas, they circulate a bit and then get dismissed as unrealistic or futile.

So maybe the spirit of cynicism and futility will just continue to kill off all forms of hope that sprout up here and there culturally and the overall result will be gradual destruction and degeneracy, but not 'suicide' per se.

How odd that you would wonder that. You did not refer to your table in the post which I quoted. I don't read minds, and even if I did, I would not choose comic books.

If America had accepted the idea of huiman-induced climate change sooner, we would have had a chance at reducing its magnitude. But successivef US government either denied it or didn't care much about it, and now it's too late. I kind of resent the US for that.

As you should. Stronger emotions would also be appropriate.