There was a finding that all males have microplastic particles in our testes.
It became a meme.
Everybody laughed.
New meme overtakes old meme.
We forget about our plastic testes and move on.
But, is there any issues going forward, that anyone is aware of?
Can something be done? Possibly, who knows?
Will something be done? I wouldn’t hold my breath.
This isn’t the only potentially human civilization-ending event I first heard about this past month, and that doesn’t include climate change that we’ve known about for literally decades, which many of the major players involved including the USA and China still don’t seem to care much about even now.
There is a saying: “put your money where your mouth is”, meaning that if people want to truly “care” about something - e.g. to be Pro-Life - then we need to actually get up off the couch and do something about what we otherwise claim to but don’t really care. For instance we could… I dunno, wear masks when we feel the slightest hint of a respiratory illness coming on - cheap, trivially easy, and can save literal lives. And not to trivialize this, some people truly do care - even as I type this I’m listening to a livestream talking about restoration taking much more effort but yielding much greater results than merely shaming people by pointing out something bad.
However, and a bit ironically, Big Tobacco and Big Oil and Big Sugar and Big Tech and Big Plastic etc. all do this, investing great efforts into stopping efforts to try to stop them. Without equal or greater efforts in opposition… well, like I said, I would not hold my breath.
To be fair, every damn headline is framed as civilisation-ending for clicks. Nuclear war is the only one I can think of that’s both fairly plausible and could actually end it. Others are at various significant but lower levels of suck, or are just geologically rare.
In particular, climate change is going to suck hard, and I’ll miss coral reefs, but some form of civilisation will endure. I know, someone’s going to argue with me, and I look forward to making you move around the goalposts on what “end of civilisation” means.
Otherwise, yeah, you’re just right. Humanity runs on apathy.
Yeah, the increasing likelihood of Russia or China using nukes to get their way was what I was thinking, especially with talk that the Western nations might be giving Ukraine the go-ahead to use those weapons to strike within Russia itself.
The plastic sperm issue actually doesn’t sound so bad in comparison, bc fertilization treatments might work even if needing to extract outside of the body first. Overall, it still sounds less dangerous to me than e.g. a young woman living in Florida these days without access to money to leave the state for medical care.
I frankly have no idea what to expect about climate change at this point - we’ve blown far past all the targets and seem now to be in uncharted territory, according to what little I understand. I do notice far fewer birds, bees and other insect life, and I recall hearing how in the Antarctic a few months back there was a single day where the temperature spiked by +70 degrees F (~40°C). I can only imagine what that would do to e.g. Texas if it went from already 100 to then 170 degrees, even if only for a few hours. “Coral” is the least of the issue iirc, they were (by virtue of being sensitive) mainly indicators of the actual events, which we won’t know until we see it, but scientists are saying that it’s no bueno. Anyway, it seems like the changes could wipe out all mammalian life on the planet, but then again maybe not!?:-P i.e. it could be really bad, but it could be less so, we just don’t know, and as you said, we mostly barely care (“we” meaning voters, so chiefly Boomers & evangelical Christians, as Trump and the Republican party’s biggest bases).
And yet we seem to care a great deal about tHe EcOnOmY tHo - so it’s a choice of prioritization to pick what “matters” to us.
Yeah, I’ve noticed the lack of insects, and also different plants growing than I remember from when I was a kid, not all too long ago. Every once in a while someone will be talking to me about the weather and how freakish it is, and they’ll suddenly get quiet if I use the word “climate” instead of just weather, because they were (and maybe still are?) denialists.
The thing about mammals is that at least some - ourselves included - can migrate. If we have to, we’ll set up banana plantations on Antarctica, and there’s no known scenario where it gets that bad. Others are not so lucky, though.
Right, civilization might survive… maybe, possibly, hopefully, just like if we all were to play Russian Roulette. Still doesn’t sound like a smart idea to me to mess with something known to be so dangerous.
At the absolute minimum the changes will be cruel, and hundreds of thousands of people are already dying from each of many individual events like hurricanes outside of their normal seasons, at intensities never before seen in a particular area.
So my thought: at the very least we could care? Except I was wrong - we can go lower, so much lower. We do have the satisfaction though that whatever comes, we brought it upon ourselves.
If it makes you feel any better, modern climate and economic studies have shown that even a full scale nuclear war involving every nuclear power at the height of the Cold War and when nuclear stockpiles were far larger than today we still wouldn’t have come very close to actually killing off all the humans on earth, with the vast majority of the casualties being owed to famine in regions that were/are heavily dependent on western fertilizer. Indeed entire nations in the southern hemisphere tend to get through such senecios without much of an direct effect from world war three.
Mostly this change from earlier predictions came from being able rule out the theory of a nuclear winter as climate modeling became more accurate and we could be sure that the secondary fires from such a war could not carry ash into the upper atmosphere in significant quantities, which was practically shown when a climate change fueled wildfire in Australia got so large that it should have been able to carry the ash into the upper atmosphere under nuclear winter theory but none was observed, validating modern climate models.
Also, dispite what some less scrupulous journalists trying to drum up clicks have posted on the Ukraine War, the Russian government itself hasn’t really made any major signaling moves with regards to bringing nukes into the conflict, and indeed has maintained and repeatedly reiterated Putin’s 2010s no first use policy when asked.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not the result of some greater Russian morals or whatever, but just a consequence of the inherent risk that such posturing could lead to nuclear escalation and breaking the nuclear taboo or even just other nations actually believing they plan to, and such scenarios end very badly for Russia in general and Putin in particular.
I keep up with it - whether nuclear winter would happen is still controversial. It all comes down to how much of the houses-and-people smoke reaches the stratosphere, and there’s actually a ton of variables to do with ash type, rubble, sunlight absorption and so on that make it tricky. It’s not exactly the same as a wildfire.
I don’t really expect Russia to do it, no. It’s just kind of an omnipresent long term risk. And yeah, it certainly wouldn’t be the end of all humanity, and Australia would have a chance to pull through, although they’d have to fend off a lot of hungry invaders. There’s no worse scenario, though, except something cosmological deciding to show up this year out of 4.5 billion. If I hadn’t of mentioned it someone 100% would have come at me with it as a thing that could end civilisation, if not neccesarily the species.