I can't handle stupid people anymore

[Foreigner]

I just can't. On the one hand you have people who are totally unwilling to learn anything new, and on the other you have people who are actively lying because it serves some kind of personal or political agenda. You could be a total expert in your field but no matter how much you inform them, they will continue to cling to ignorance or, worse, they will continue spouting the same lie over and over. Eventually, if that lie gains enough agenda-based popularity, it becomes the truth.

The populism I'm seeing is incredibly frustrating but there's nothing I can do to curb it. All it takes is enough populists getting into government, and enough time, and their stupidity becomes societal dogma.

The house is on fire and people are still trying to act like it's not, either by feigning ignorance or outright trying to keep people ignorant of the truth.

This is how wars start, both civil and foreign. This is how people become indecent and commit murders, when they get so angry at how stupid some people are that they just want the madness to stop.

Stupid people. They are the cause of all that ails this planet.

So the question is... do I just sit back, stop fighting, and watch it all burn? Or do I continue trying to be a point on the map that still wants to uphold things like intellectual integrity, honesty, and compassion for life?

At what point do you throw in the towel and just preserve all the enlightened wonders you've achieved for yourself and your loved ones, and stop trying to share it with humanity?

Because clearly there is mass hypnosis going on and there is a growing trend of anti-truth that denies reality.

It just angers me that there are so many solutions lying in wait but they won't be endorsed because populists won't STFU. To know that things COULD be better, but they aren't because of stupid people, is something I'm having a really hard time letting go of.

I wouldn't even care about these stupid people, but they are achieving real power now which is a big problem.

 

[F.U.B.A.R.]

Let's face it, we're all fucked.

Stupidity, greed and denial seem to be the norm among the people in charge. Maybe it's always been this way and I just notice it more the older I get - but It definitely feels like we're heading toward another 'dark age'.

 

[Xorkoth]

Yeah it's immensely frustrating. I do my best not to get too fixated on the anger though because like you said, what can I do about it? it's either get consumed with anger and frustration, or try to just make my local world around me as good as possible, do what small things I can, find people who aren't stupid and hang onto them. it's tough though, especially sometimes...

Human nature is so frustrating and tragic. We COULD have paradise on Earth, but the sociopathic power mongers always destroy it, with the help of the large mass of people who want to be controlled.

 

[Foreigner]

Yeah it's immensely frustrating. I do my best not to get too fixated on the anger though because like you said, what can I do about it? it's either get consumed with anger and frustration, or try to just make my local world around me as good as possible, do what small things I can, find people who aren't stupid and hang onto them. it's tough though, especially sometimes...

Human nature is so frustrating and tragic. We COULD have paradise on Earth, but the sociopathic power mongers always destroy it, with the help of the large mass of people who want to be controlled.

But isn't wanting that insular life part of the problem? I could give up and make my surroundings my palace, but if everyone collectively does that, then the world burns.

And yet I feel my efforts are fruitless.

You're right, people want to be controlled. They are afraid of their own autonomy.

 

[Vastness]

do I just sit back, stop fighting, and watch it all burn? Or do I continue trying to be a point on the map that still wants to uphold things like intellectual integrity, honesty, and compassion for life?

At what point do you throw in the towel and just preserve all the enlightened wonders you've achieved for yourself and your loved ones, and stop trying to share it with humanity?

Just keep on fighting and standing up for your values for as long as you can.

I know it's hard, stupid people abound in the world, and more so than any other obstacle to human progress it's hard not to feel the effects of other people's stupidity or ignorance much more personally, and hard to suppress a certain unique kind of frustration or anger directed either towards them or just society at large.

Personally, I find it helps to try to take a more detached view, and realise that nothing happens in a vacuum. People don't just decide one day to be stupid and ignorant, but end up in this state for reasons that ultimately have little to do with personal choice or personal moral failings and a lot to do with unavoidable circumstance and the chaotic, probabilistic but largely unpredictable fluctuations that occur over time in any large and relatively cohesive human society.

As we all know, it makes little sense to get frustrated with things we cannot change, and while it is arguably within our power to point people in the right direction to become less stupid, again as we all know expecting or hoping that people will change is generally a recipe for unhappiness and disappointment. If a dinosaur-killer-sized asteroid was drifting towards the Earth with a high probability of a catastrophic impact, we may not be happy about it, but I think it would be unlikely to induce the same level of teeth-grinding exasperation as the idea that a group of people might inflict significant damage on the future of the human race as a consequence of their collective "stupidity".

However in both scenarios the average citizen would likely have a similar level of direct control over the outcome - and in both scenarios it would be largely up to governments of the most technologically advanced nations in the world to come up with a solution - although in the latter case, arguably, the average citizen has more influence since anyone can try to influence the views of the general populace, while in our killer asteroid scenario there would not be too much that someone not directly involved in a relevant field could do - except, perhaps, not panic, encourage other people not to panic, and try to avoid any more social discord in that way... in fact, that's something that we can do now as well! Since the current situation arguably does warrant a low level of panic.

So to summarise, please try to stay strong and upload values such as intellectual integrity, honesty and compassion for as long as you can... Not everyone will have the strength to do so - but if we are going to pull out of the current somewhat precarious moment in human history at least somewhat unscathed, then we need as many people who do have the strength to upload such values, to continue to do so for as long as they can.

 

[Xorkoth]

But isn't wanting that insular life part of the problem? I could give up and make my surroundings my palace, but if everyone collectively does that, then the world burns.

Yeah, but, if everyone lived their lives in such a way as to inspire one other person to live their lives in such a way that they want to inspire others... and everyone did that... the world would change. Sometimes I feel like it's all I really CAN do.

 

[Yourbaker]

Yeah, but, if everyone lived their lives in such a way as to inspire one other person to live their lives in such a way that they want to inspire others... and everyone did that... the world would change. Sometimes I feel like it's all I really CAN do.

Just this, nicely said. And for what it is worth over the last 3 years I've been using bluelight I have looked forward to the calm words of wisdom that you (foreigner) have left on this board. We don't necessarily believe the same things but because of many of your posts I really don't believe much of the hogwash I once did.

So thanks for that.

I'd like to think I'm one less stupid person in the world today largely due to calm reasonable logic.

 

[neversickanymore]

Planets are surrounded by space. We like to dream and dramatize we can concur space. I don't think we will be able to until we concur our undeniable stupidity. What if we only get to move on from regenerations on this planet after we have learned not to be stupid.

 

[Xorkoth]

I actually hope we won't. Otherwise we'll spread across the galaxy like a cancer, destroying everything in our path, like our idea of an evil alien species that some people live in fear of coming to Earth.

 

[Vastness]

^In the friendliest way possible, I could not disagree with you more!

The Fermi Paradox suggests that sentient conscious, technologically capable life, is an extreme rarity in the universe. Given this fact, that we might be one of the few guardians of self-aware, biological intelligence, surely it stands to reason that life, and specifically human life, is something we should want to preserve?

Are fungi introduced to a new patch of land (possibly a slightly hostile, alien environment for it) that evolves to thrive and flourish, just an "evil" cancer?

What about a small group of animals migrating to a part of the world they previously did not inhabit - they flourish, eat and outbreed the local fauna to extinction - like countless species in the billions of years of evolution of life on Earth have done, prior to the emergence of humanity. Are these invading species an evil cancer?

What about the first abiogenetic event in the primordial, anoxic seas of a Hadean Earth - were these pre-DNA examples of simple, self-replicating molecules an evil force, as they multiplied and spread out on a world that was previously completely dead? As their more capable descendants gradually changed the entire ecosystem, terraforming a world that could have ended up a lifeless as Mars or Venus into a world with an oxygen atmosphere, capable of supporting the energy requirements of their descendants - highly mobile, thinking entities with advanced nervous systems, capable of simulating entire realities within their minds? (And just to be clear, I don't mean humans - I think it's not unreasonable to suppose that countless other species have access to some form of internal world which has a "qualia" that eludes their understanding.) Are all these countless generations of varied forms of life just "evil cancers"?

If you think humans expanding into space is equivalent to a cancer spreading out into the universe then I don't see how you wouldn't believe that life itself is some form of cancer and the universe would just be better off if it never evolved, if you follow this argument to it's logical conclusion.

What, if it is not humans going beyond earth and becoming a spacefaring civilization, probably one of the few in the known universe, doesn't seem like a bright and incredible future, what do you hope for for the human race? Just to sit back and wait for inevitable extinction?

All that stuff said - I think it's quite conceivable that a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox is that the unique conditions that allow intelligent life to evolve unavoidably include self-destructive tendencies that always destroy the unfortunate species at the high-tech, enlightened, but intrinsically doomed end of the line. But even if this is our unavoidable fate I can't see any rational reason why we wouldn't all try our hardest to put this off as long as possible and in the meantime, see what incredible things we can achieve in this bizarre and inexplicable reality that we find ourselves in.

 

[Yourbaker]

^^ wow. Well said. That's some woke shit Vastness.

 

[Xorkoth]

Well that was thought provoking. I guess what I hope for the future of humanity is that we are able to finally move beyond the place we're in now where we are cancerous to the planet we're already on, and then we move out into space and expand. I would absolutely love to experience our species' movement across space (not that I will personally of course). I think it's the only way we can survive indefinitely, and it's actually the only overpopulation solution that isn't really grim that I can see working out long-term. I guess I am just really upset by how we're treating our home planet and I would hate to see us move across the galaxy destroying everything in our path, like the "evil heartless planet harvesting aliens" that science fiction has instilled a fear of, where we go around finding planets with life and then pillaging each of them one by one for their resources, just like we do to this planet. I don't think our blatant disregard for the future in terms of our effect on the environment is just due to overpopulation, although I think overpopulation is a huge part of the problem, which would be solved with the ability to spread to other planets. I WANT us to be able to get to where we can spread, but I don't want us to leave a legacy of destruction.

It may be that the result of high-end intelligence/technological advancement is self-destruction, or it may be that it's not inevitable and that there are intelligent, advanced species out there who live in harmony with each other and their environments. In my strong opinion, the Fermi paradox proves absolutely nothing and the fact that we haven't detected any alien communications yet is about the weakest possible argument for there being no other advanced life, or even for there being very little advanced life. I mean we've been trying to detect radio transmissions for what, 60 years? Something like that? And we've been sending them out for I don't know, 100? The exact numbers don't matter. The point is that an intelligent species would have to be within 60 light years and have already been sending out radio signals 60 years ago, for us to be able to pick anything up. For anything to be able to reply to us they would have needed to receive our signals 50 years ago and then 50 more years to receive their reply. We could have a reply in 10 years that they got 55 years ago. And then of course there's the low probability that we would both have evolved technologically in the same relative time period. If another planet got bombarded into molten rock one extra time, a million years after ours, but it has life, the timelines for when life gained the the advancement necessary to reach out could be dramatically staggered. In geological/universal time it might be similar (what's 100,000 years to the planets and stars?), but it might as well be forever as far as humans are concerned. Not to mention, what if some other intelligent species is hiding 40 light years away but they're just not trying to communicate in the same way? Or they're not there yet but are still intelligent and will get there someday?

I guess that was kind of an aside by I wanted to say it anyway. There could be 1000, 10000 intelligent races in our galaxy and we could have absolutely no possible way of knowing about each other. The galaxy is tremendously huge (and is just one of a staggering number of galaxies). Only if one is very, very close in terms of the size of the galaxy would we even have the slightest chance so far of detecting it. We've simply only been looking for the most infinitesimal blip of time and we're limited by the speed of light.

 

[Vastness]

The Fermi Paradox doesn't prove anything, true, but it does put some constraints on the kind of life, if any, we can expect to find. You're completely right of course that on cosmological timescales just because we can't see any alien civilisations now doesn't mean that they haven't existed in the past, or will do in the future, or even do right now but just out of sight of our most advanced radio telescopes... as much as the chances of meeting another species at a similar stage of technological development to our own is probably extremely small.

But, we can say with relative certainty that within our own galaxy, at least up to around ~100000 years ago, there does not appear to be a species that is either advanced enough or expansionist enough in nature to have littered the night sky with unmistakable evidence of their existence. Given that it's conceivable some other species would have had a several billion year head start on us, and given that any such civilisation would presumably have both a will and desire to keep finding ways to satisfy their presumably vast energy requirements and vast population - both of which are surely a given for any serious attempt at space colonisation - I would say that this is at least somewhat perplexing.

The galaxy could be filled with thousands of worlds with pre-industrial, Neanderthal-esque type species which we cannot yet detect but would recognise as intelligent, but if this is the case, is this a recent development in the universe? Perhaps it could have something to do with the increasing metallicity of the stars, leading to a greater abundance of heavier elements on terrestrial worlds... But if it is not a recent development, and there have always been tens of thousands of such species flickering in and out of existence in our galaxy alone, then the barriers to becoming a truly interstellar species must be almost impossibly high.

OR, perhaps our own galaxy is just a statistical outlier, where life is far rarer than it is in the wider universe. Perhaps most distant galaxies ARE filled with complex life, interstellar empires, alien megastructures and the kind of inter-species dynamics that we can currently only imagine... obviously at the moment none of us can really know for sure, but, it's fun to think about.

 

[Asclepius]

lol

 

[Lil'LinaptkSix]

smart-phones creating a super-race of super-dumb muthafuckas

 

[JessFR]

There are huge flaws with the so called Fermi paradox, so much so that it frustrates me when people give it any credibility.

It's major flaw is it makes so many assumptions.

The idea is that if there's other intelligent life out there, we should have found it by now. But that requires so many assumptions to be made. First it assumes that even if there is intelligent life nearby, that it's even physically possible for it to somehow contact us, or get to us. Which is by no means a certainty.

Then you have the simple numbers problem, given just how many planets are out there, even if only a tiny tiny tiny number have intelligent life, it by no means means that it's at all likely that that life would be remotely close to us.

Even if there were on were on average less than one intelligent life form per galaxy, say 0.3%, that's still a LOT of intelligent species in the universe. Separated by huge distances, and potentially huge time as well.

So even if we assume that interstellar or even intergalactic travel in human lifetimes is even possible under the laws of the universe, a big if and by no means certain. Even if we had such technology RIGHT NOW. It's by no means certain that we'd find another intelligent lifeform any time remotely soon.

In short, there could be millions or billions of intelligent civilizations in the universe, but with contact between them extremely rare and unlikely.

The Fermi paradox is not a paradox, it's stupid. It assumes that either there are no other intelligent species in the universe, which is stupid unlikely. Or that there are and that the constraints of the universe enable them to contact us. Which is a false dichotomy.

Most likely there are many other intelligent species in the universe, and many more non sapient species. But that the technology for fast interstellar or intergalactic travel is either extremely rare or outright impossible. And that they are separated by such distances and so many places to look that finding them is like finding a needle in a haystack.

 

[Vastness]

^ The Fermi Paradox is a quite frequently misunderstood concept. It doesn't assume that there are no other intelligent species in the universe, nor is this implied by the assumptions on which the Fermi Paradox is based.

In fact one of the primary assumptions of the Fermi Paradox is that the conditions required to give rise to both life and indeed, intelligent, possibly spacefaring extraterrestrial civilisations should be quite common - speaking on cosmological scales, given the apparent size and age of the universe. This is why it's a paradox - if one were to assume that intelligent, technologically capable life is not common, then the fact that we have not seen any evidence of this is not surprising, so there is no paradox.

I don't think it makes sense to say that the Fermi Paradox is "stupid" or "lacks credibility" because it isn't an argument, or even a theory, and it doesn't pretend to be either. It's just a conceptual basis for discussion about how hard or easy it is for intelligence to evolve, develop technology, venture into space, and survive in the long term, all of which are by no means clear, and besides being fertile ground for interesting discussion, these are important questions with answers that are directly relevant to the future of our own species.

You might reasonably say that you think a given solution to the paradox is stupid - for example, that Earth is the only planet in the universe on which life evolved. There are of course several possible alternative solutions which you have mentioned, and these solutions generally do mean that some of the basic assumptions of the Fermi Paradox are incorrect. Personally I would generally agree with you that it seems likely that there are other intelligent species in the universe (whether "many" or not), but that advanced technology at the level required to establish lasting interstellar civilisations is likely quite rare - this is probably the solution widely considered the most credible at the moment.

But this doesn't mean that the assumptions on which the Fermi Paradox is based were or are stupid, even if you personally consider them to be overly optimistic. We just don't have enough knowledge of the universe, or of what is physically or technologically possible, to know either way.

 

[Shady's Fox]

We explored about 5% of the ocean not even 1% of space, so if you break the reality in half like a candy and don't have anything left to live and don't have any questions left then what it's the point? We are lucky because the imagination of the human brain it's infinite and we invent stuff like aliens/mythological creatures & eras and so on. Though in ancient cities they are symbolised there under some forms I would say and let's think the same about them, psyhedelics were available since the formation of Earth nothing isn't surprinsing. All of this is invented not sure why was the reason of this conception maybe to not die from boredom.

 

[Zopiclone bandit]

I wouldn't even care about these stupid people, but they are achieving real power now which is a big problem.

Stupid people have always been in power like the land rapers, the huge banking systems that are corrupt to their core etc etc........
The people in power have never given a toss about 99% of the rest & that is the way it's been for many years.

As you asked above about if you should sit back & watch it burn I say yes, the time we are in is the final day sadly.
I used to think "God" was writing the last chapter, these days I think his writing the final word.

 

[Xorkoth]

They Z Bandit, nice to see you post.