Reply #42: I think many people confuse cynicism with wisdom [View All]

[Silent3]

In part, that's understandable, because many times simply taking a reflexively cynical position on an issue works out equally well to actually thinking the issue through. :)

Besides, if you don't pin down specific dates when your dire predictions are supposed to come to pass (or put them so far off into the future than no one will remember or care about your long-ago proclamations) you can always play the "Well, just you wait and see!" game, smugly certain that your predicted form of doom is just around the corner.

I think a lot of the problem is a lack of a bigger perspective and looking at the past through rose-colored glasses when judging current conditions. I saw one person here complaining about how our food is now "poison". There may well be stuff in some of our food that isn't particularly good for us, but whatever this "crap" is that we're eating, we're living longer now while we're eating "crap" than a century or two ago when nearly everything people ate was "organic" and "natural".

Our crappy US healthcare system is nevertheless a damn sight better than the treatment you'd get (in exchange for a chicken, perhaps?) from your local country doctor two hundred years ago.

We're now causing big problems for the planet, but we're also more advanced in our capabilities to detect those problems and devise solutions. For all the harm we've caused the planet, we're also the first species with any hope of developing the technology to stave off the next big mass (or even total) extinction caused by a rogue asteroid or comet, and the first species with a good chance of helping re-establish itself and other life on another planet, so we don't have all of our eggs in one basket.