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There are 2,000-plus dead rockets in orbit—here’s a rare view of one (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/spaceflight

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I’ve always figured that if one day there is a star trek like civilization cruising the galaxy, they’ll come up on our dead planet, see all the shit floating around and say something insightful about the great filter and blip on out of there.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Honestly I think "civilization" is the great filter.

Of course this is just pure conjecture, but it seems that once you're past a hunter-gatherer society, you're going to have much more capacity for changing and damaging your environment than you do for understanding the damage you're causing, and I'm not entirely convinced there's a way to run a highly technological society without consuming more resources than are strictly available. or inventing nuclear weapons which are a real Pandora's box. Then add to that the tendency of evolution to produce pretty cutthroat species, which seem like they'd be more successful at prevailing over the less aggressive ones.

I think it's just more likely for technologically advanced societies to eventually fuck themselves over by either using up their resources, or just straight-up destroying themselves in some pointless war or another

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That actually sums up my view pretty accurately as well. I’ve tried to look back and see where the overall path could have changed. Even if you were to hypothetically remove oil from existence, we were still well on our way to wiping out whales and other fatty sea mammals for the same purposes.

As to the evolutionary pressures leading to cutthroat species, yeah I think that’s exactly what it is. By the time a world altering species can begin to see beyond itself and think holistically about its environment it has already done so much damage.

Random tangent- I highly recommend the Children of Time trilogy from Adrian Tchaikovsky if you’re into sci fi. I describe it as evolutionary biology sci fi, and eventually it goes into kind of a ‘what is consciousness/what is living’ bend. Took a little to get used to the structure of the first book, but man that first one especially I dug.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

As to the evolutionary pressures leading to cutthroat species, yeah I think that’s exactly what it is. By the time a world altering species can begin to see beyond itself and think holistically about its environment it has already done so much damage.

And it's not that some members of those species won't see the problems just like many of us meatbags have for a loooong time now, but that on average it won't be nearly widespread enough to make a difference before shit really hits the fan.

Oh and thank you for the book tip! I don't think I've ever read any of Adrian's stuff even though I am a huge sci-fi nerd. The description in the book's wiki article definitely makes it sound like my thing