We don't matter...

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Dazed
@_Dazed
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The conversation on the front page about metal straws got me thinking..

Sure, the rain forest is on fire..

Sure, the ocean is littered..

Sure, people are killing people..

Sure, the world is a mess..

But that doesn't matter. Planet earth doesn't matter. In the end.. we don't matter.

In a few generations time, you will be forgotten. Nobody will remember you.

In a few billion years time, the Sun will expand so much.. Earth will be destroyed.

Not too long after, the universe will have grown so large, that there won't be enough heat to sustain life. Anywhere.

We are but a blip in time.

In a universe that has more galaxies than planet earth has grains of sand.. we're nothing more than a sand mite at the bottom of the ocean. Meaningless.
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tctaap
@tctaap
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there is some truth to that - in the few hundred years this particular civilization has been existent we have done so much damage to the earth and ourselves - why is that ? because we were greedy and not smart enough to do it right from the get go - so we're just to supposed to not care anymore and give in and join the mass self genocide ?

what message does that lend to our grandchildren and the generations that come after us - we owe them to take care of this beautiful planet as long as we can and to make sure that those that are left on this dying planet do not suffer before it all implodes

how can you say it doesn't matter because we don't matter - my soul may be reincarnated - who really knows what happens after we pass from our bodies - if there are no bodies to reincarnate into and no planet to live on I guess we'll just be in limbo until such time that we find another planet with habitable bodies

and of all things that matter to me; is that I simply can not destroy the most beautiful things that were given to me to enjoy in my lifetime





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Dazed
@_Dazed
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Posted by nanobot
Posted by Phantom_Dangus
Posted by nanobot

You only just now realized

This knowledge is how I calm down when I get stressed about politics or other little things. Oh right! We're all gonna die. Thank the lack of God.

I still don't think we should trash the place while we're here

And there's the possibility of inter planetary and inter galactic travel
click to expand



Except for Mars, inter planetary travel is pointless.

And possibility of inter galactic travel.. well.. we're not even close. The nearest star to us is more than 4 light years away. With our current tech/fuel requirements, it would take upwards of 80k years to get there.
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tctaap
@tctaap
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Posted by Silverado
Posted by TheRabbit
Posted by Silverado
Posted by TheRabbit

User Submitted Image

God bless Texas! 🇨🇱

I found a pile of Blue jay feathers and some owl feathers in my yard the other day. This is what I imagined happening.

Death surrounds your yard. Time to call the little old lady from Poltergeist to clear the property. 🤣
click to expand



you're right lol first the squirrel now the birds - now did the owl attack the blue jay and then something attacked the owl ?
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Dazed
@_Dazed
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Posted by nanobot
Posted by _Dazed
Posted by nanobot

You only just now realized

I've understood this for a while..

I've just been dwelling on it lately though.

You need to find some personal meaning or goals in life though or you'll end like neno. I think he's made this thread like 4 times already
click to expand



Let me rephrase.. I'm stuck on this because the whole concept of space/time is a mind fuck.

Yes.. this planet (and eventually the universe) will cease to exist.

But is there a place in the universe.. where we currently exist, have yet to exist, and have already died out? It makes my brain hurt.
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Dazed
@_Dazed
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Comments: 9549 · Posts: 12626 · Topics: 250
Posted by nanobot
Posted by Phantom_Dangus
Posted by nanobot
Posted by Phantom_Dangus
Posted by nanobot

You only just now realized

This knowledge is how I calm down when I get stressed about politics or other little things. Oh right! We're all gonna die. Thank the lack of God.

I still don't think we should trash the place while we're here

And there's the possibility of inter planetary and inter galactic travel

I agree. It would be nice to be able to breathe and drink the water while we're here.

Maybe we'll get wiped out by a intergalactic highway construction project like in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

I wish if we ended, it would be by alien invasion. How fucking cool it would be
click to expand



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Gemitati
@Gemitati
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Posted by _Dazed

The conversation on the front page about metal straws got me thinking..

Sure, the rain forest is on fire..

Sure, the ocean is littered..

Sure, people are killing people..

Sure, the world is a mess..

But that doesn't matter. Planet earth doesn't matter. In the end.. we don't matter.

In a few generations time, you will be forgotten. Nobody will remember you.

In a few billion years time, the Sun will expand so much.. Earth will be destroyed.

Not too long after, the universe will have grown so large, that there won't be enough heat to sustain life. Anywhere.

We are but a blip in time.

In a universe that has more galaxies than planet earth has grains of sand.. we're nothing more than a sand mite at the bottom of the ocean. Meaningless.


Listen to George Carlin about this shit.

And STFU!

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Metatron
@Metatron
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Carlin's views on environmentalism, and purpose in general, in the clip Gemitati posted have some overlap with yours and are worth a listen....

I shared your view for a long time when I was younger...I no longer agree with it, but am a bit short on time...

just to mention a few of the issues.....

to say that everything or anything is meaningless or without value because it is ultimately meaningless (e.g. it has only finite duration), just doesn't follow. things can have value or meaning discreetly and temporally....when is the last time you saw a movie and said it was shit, because it had an ending? Your position is actually an old argument that some theistic philosophers used to make to argue that life without god is meaningless and w/o value, as on an atheistic view, there is no afterlife. Though I'm a theist myself, I ultimately think the atheist rejoinder is superior.

Not only does finite duration not eliminate value, in some cases, it can actually increase it. For instance, knowing you have only limited time with someone in a relationship, to experience life on this planet, etc. can actually increase its significance. You might see it as more precious, value it more, and want to make the most of your time as a consequence. I think that's often more true to how we typically reason actually. There are some varieties of eternality that would arguably tend to trivialize any experience along those lines. In an eternal existence, you'd literally have enough time to do everything an "infinite" number of times.

Its not really clear what it is exactly about eternality that lends validity to our perception of value/meaning in any particular instance. Thought experiment - imagine you live a life that you perceive as meaningful in every one of its instances, and you have a rare psychological condition where you're unable to be aware of, or entertain thoughts around your own mortality. If you have a sudden death, does this retroactively affect those "valuable" experiences somehow? If so, how exactly? Conversely, imagine you live another life in a parallel world with all of these same instances also perceived as meaningful, but there you don't experience a sudden death and are actually eternal. Since its the eternal nature that you're arguing gives something its meaning, how does this world's ultimate eternality reach back and lend real meaning or value to any individual event within it? Since you had a definite origin within time when you were born into this world, at any subsequent spot on your life's timeline, even though you are eternal, you have always only existed for a finite duration, and that will always be the case. Its the same in both eternal and non-eternal worlds. You will never successfully traverse an actual infinity of moments so your life is finite at every step of the way. Its somewhat paradoxical because you're eternally finite in this latter world. But it just isn't clear how a never-ending, but still finite, sequence of life events perceived as meaningful, are any more meaningful in and of themselves, just because there will be another one that follows....forever. If you were to match up the timelines of both worlds, and all of the events up until the sudden death in the first finite world, are in a 1-to-1 correspondence, the only difference in meaning/value between worlds would really be that the latter eternal world just has more of it. But if any of the parallel moments in either world have value in one, it seems they should in the other.

though they have initial rhetorical force and are very common, none of these arguments from scale work IMO - whether we're talking about relative duration in time, or relative size (e.g., we're just a speck of dust compared to that much bigger speck of dust over there, etc.)....
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Soul
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Sure it will die. Technically its already dead along with everything in it, and nothing really existed in the first place. Some things will live and imprint the universe though. In an intelligent, or even primitive way. Nonetheless everything has already died, time just hasn't caught up yet. It could feel like millions of days on a small scale, or a split second on a large scale. Or vise versa. It just depends how you perceive time.