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81 points

Controversial opinion: whats the point of stonehenge if there is no humanity? Its not like it fosters some ecosystem or smth for other species, its a historical piece which holds sentimental value to us humans.

If we continue to use oil, we will for sure fuck up humanity. The act was controversial but the message needs to be looked at

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-23 points

Humanity wont end because of a rise in temperature. Humanity will change. Believing it’s an extinction level event is the opinion of someone who uses the bible as the timeline of humanity.

Spend a minute on the topic of historical changes in climate and you will see humanity will endure. Change sure, but not gone.

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2 points
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What about our technology? Our culture? Those aren’t nearly as likely to survive, and a few handful of our species survival is meaningless without the above two.

And the dinosaurs are an example of a species that hasn’t survived.

The fact that you seem to guarantee in your mind that humanity would survive is survivorship bias, I think? Or some other type of bias. Anyways. It’s the same type of bias that religious people have in their minds, where they think the simple fact they happen to exist is just so improbable that there must be another factor at play to ensure their existence.

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20 points

Well, if there’s massive ecological collapse and mass extinction events abound, there’s honestly no way to know if we’ll survive or not. To claim we’ll survive when climatic changes are currently killing off everything is the opinion of someone who uses the Bible as evidence of human supremacy.

Worst case, the centipedes will probably take over again… If they make it too.

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5 points

Probably at least tardigrades

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12 points
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Rising temperatures are contributing to the decline of animal species and ecosystems that we depend on for our survival, for example bees and other pollinators. If these ecosystems break, it cascades and it will most likely cause the extinction of a bunch of plant and animal species that are necessary for our survival.

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1 point
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Deleted by creator
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8 points

The last time the climate changed this much it spelled the end of hereditary monarchies.

Maybe this one will end capitalism.

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-1 points

Dream on

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4 points

Just how the Black death was great for the working class. The plague didn’t discriminate. So the guilds collapsed and regular people could take up professions exclusive they was locked out of earlier.

Best thing that happened for reform was the black death. Almost as if toppling the social elite is net positive for everyone.

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3 points

Maybe this one will end capitalism.

Maybe but I get the impression the next iteration will be worse, not better - an authoritarian slave state dressed up as socialism or something. You don’t need money to be poor after all.

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10 points
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Less technical summary:

As of 2021, according to SRI, we had already gone beyond the safe limit for five of these planetary boundaries:

• climate change;

• biogeochemical flows (i.e., excessive phosphorus and nitrogen pollution from fertilizer use);

• biosphere integrity (e.g., extinction rate and loss of insect pollination);

• land-system change (e.g., deforestation);

• and novel entities (e.g., pollution from plastics, heavy metals, and what are commonly referred to as “forever chemicals”).

In an April 2022 update, SRI found that a portion of a sixth planetary boundary – fresh water use – had also been crossed. In addition, in a June 2021 interview with the journal Globalizations, Dr. Will Stefan of SRI said that a seventh planetary boundary had also likely been crossed: ocean acidification (one that has been theorized as a key contributor to previous mass extinction events in geologic history). One other boundary has been too uncertain to judge: atmospheric aerosols from fine particle pollution caused by fossil fuel combustion. Yet, we are clearly pushing this boundary too, when considering that air pollution from burning fossil fuels has been blamed for 8.8 million deaths worldwide per year.

More technical version from 2023, please note that these scientific findings were OPTIMISTIC because scientists were told to not fear monger and that people would think they were crazy if they had less optimistic findings. As time has gone on, we are finding cascading events we didn’t anticipate significantly worsening everything.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458

Scientific insight into planetary boundaries does not limit, but stimulates, humankind to innovation toward a future in which Earth system stability is fundamentally preserved and safeguarded.

Many of the ecological factors not sufficiently represented in current biogeochemical models could lead to even less desirable consequences of leaving the safe operating space.

They furthermore support the placement of the planetary boundaries for climate and land system change at the lower end of the zone of increasing risk.

Note that these findings reflect optimistic modeling assumptions

Six planetary boundaries are found currently to be transgressed (Fig. 1 and Table 1). For all of the boundaries previously identified as transgressed [climate change, biosphere integrity (genetic diversity), land system change, and biogeochemical flows (N and P)], the degree of transgression has increased since 2015.

Note that these findings reflect optimistic modeling assumptions

The planetary boundary for atmospheric CO2 concentration is set at 350 ppm and for radiative forcing at 1 W m−2. Currently, the estimated total anthropogenic effective radiative forcing is 2.91 W m−2 [2022 estimate, relative to 1750 (17)], and atmospheric CO2 concentration is 417 ppm [annual mean marine surface value for 2022 (41)], i.e., further outside the safe operating space on both measures than in the last update (2).

Thus, anthropogenic ocean acidification currently lies at the margin of the safe operating space, and the trend is worsening as anthropogenic CO2 emission continues to rise.

Although the baseline rate of extinctions (and of new species’ evolution) is both highly variable and difficult to quantify with confidence through geological time, the current rate of species extinctions is estimated to be at least tens to hundreds of times higher than the average rate over the past 10 million years and is accelerating (24). We conservatively set the current value for the extinction rate at >100 E/MSY (24–26). Of an estimated 8 million plant and animal species, around 1 million are threatened with extinction (16), and over 10% of genetic diversity of plants and animals may have been lost over the past 150 years (23). Thus, the genetic component of the biosphere integrity boundary is markedly exceeded (Fig. 1 and Table 1).

Note that these findings reflect optimistic modeling assumptions

With such an enormous percentage of untested chemicals being released to the environment, a novel entities boundary defined in this manner is clearly breached. Persson et al. (43) did not identify or quantify a singular planetary boundary for novel entities but, nevertheless, also concluded that the safe operating space is currently overstepped.

while the climate warming problem became evident in the 1980s, problems arising in functional biosphere integrity due to human land use began a century earlier. Since the 1960s, growth in global population and consumption further accelerated land use, driving the system further into the zone of increasing risk. HANPP has always sustained humanity’s need for food, fiber, and fodder, and this will continue to be the case in the future, as well as for sustainable societies. The NPP required to support future societies must, however, increasingly be generated through additional production of NPP above the Holocene baseline, not including the NPP generated for biology-based carbon sinks. Feeding 10 billion people, for example, is theoretically possible within planetary boundaries but requires a number of far-reaching transformations to improve the impacts of production and regulate demand (36).

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7 points

I think you mean only rich people will be okay long enough to adapt. The rest of us will be left to die.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want a future where the greed driven, amoral, ethicless elites get to live on while everyone else gets to suffer and die.

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-5 points

The rich will be the only one to survive how exactly?

Do you have any idea of how much empty space there is available in the northern hemisphere? A huge portion of the planet are inhabitable as it is now. Not because of heat but the opposite. The ocean level rising is neither a new phenomenon. The ocean has raised and fallen multiple times through the existence of our species. The first people who got to UK walked there. And when they settled hippos lived there.

Humans have never lived in a static environment. Most humans aren’t capable of imagining time beyond their own lifetime. Therefore some choose to resign. I guess that’s Darwinism at its finest.

I’m all in with climate change suck. I’m all for dragging the rich out in the street and setting them on fire for fucking everything up. But how some think we live in this static environment that only changed just now, and it will be our end is just wrong.

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-31 points

We’re not going to die from climate change. Screw up the environment? Sure. But humans have the capability to literally live in space, on the moon, and soon enough, mars.

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26 points

*while supported from Earth.

We don’t have second Earth to be supported from.

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2 points

Dude radiation from just being in space permanently damages your organs. They don’t even think we can survive the trip to mars, much less live there.

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3 points

Best of luck when earth is slightly less viable for crops and a couple billion starve.

But no we can temporarily not kill 4 or 5 people so we must be unkillable from anything

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8 points
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What’s the point of destroying Stonehenge if humanity survives as a cascading result of stopping air travel? Defacing or destroying Stonehenge is not the lynch pin that solves or even moves the needle on climate change.

Worse, if it WORKS it means the next cause that is perhaps not existential is going to come and destroy something else that belongs to humanity. Weirdly, when nation states destroy heritage sites it’s considered a type of war crime, but when it comes up for raising awareness for climate change fuck yeah everyone’s in!

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21 points
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No one destroyed Stonehenge. They covered it in wheat-based cornstarch-based dye that washes off in the rain (something England gets a lot of). Calm your tits.

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3 points

Last time it was cornstarch.

And the stones are covered in lichen that protect the stone

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1 point
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While you are correct (and while I said destroy OR deface), the two different posts about this both contain people advocating for actual destruction for the same reasons.

Please read the other posts and alarm your tits to the reality / tenor of the discussion.

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2 points

What’s the point of being alive if you’re just gonna die one day?

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7 points

Ice cold take

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-2 points

If we’re assuming that humanity will go extinct, then sure there’s no point to stonehenge. But then there’s also no point to a protest either.

If we’re assuming humanity isn’t going extinct, then there is a point to preserving stonehenge and there’s also a point to having these protests.

Seems like there’s a logic fail happening here where there’s no point to preserving stone henge for the future but there is still a point to a protest about preserving things for the future.

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2 points

Yeah but protesting has a lot better odds at improving that future than Stonehenge I’d argud

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1 point

There’s zero chance that protesting Stonehenge will improve the future, they’re just rocks.

Protesting an oil refinery might have better odds tho.

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1 point

Yeah but that is the problem. These people keep on trying to destroy art and historical sites just to get the point across.

I know the point, we all know the point and there is NOTHING we can do about it. It’s ll in the hands of politicians and wealthy assholes. Destroying beautiful things or historical artifacts isn’t doing anything to further the cause, it’s not doing a single shit to teach humanity (or better, those politicians that actually can stop climate change). It’s the same as those protests that stop traffic. You only piss people off and cause ambulances to not arrive in time at hospitals.

You’re doing it wrong.

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1 point

With that attitude we can just about go ahead and kill ourselves, what’s the point, right?

My point is that trying to destroy stonge henge and art just to get attention to your cause is doing the cause a disservice. If anything it gives oil producers ammonto say “see how idiotic they are? They don’t know what they’re doing, climate change isnt real”

Stop punishing all of humanity for what is caused and controlled by a select few. Destroy rich assholes airplanes, that I can get behind. Leave art and historical sites alone.

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