Rhaedas

That last line always gets me laughing.

That’s easy to say centuries in the future where so much has changed. What would you have suggested given their experience and history to that point? Be careful, because what seems like a morally just and simple proposal would have been accepted a lot differently then. The “bad” motives were to find a common ground for very different colony populations, and it had to start somewhere. And they tried something that hadn’t ever been tried, so don’t condemn them too quickly.

Everything find equilibrium eventually. I’m sure any limits for a runaway situation depend on a lot of factors, but their ceilings are all far above anything we could tolerate. Runaway doesn’t mean there’s no point to level out, only that at the time it’s not controllable and escalating fast.

The last “runaway” situation the Earth had was called the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) 56 million years ago and globally had a 5-8 degree Celsius rise over thousands of years. That might be a good example of a natural situation and its limits. Keep in mind the differences in rate, we’re increasing the global temperature faster than the PETM (or anything we’ve found in geological history) so we don’t know how that faster rate will act in determining a peak. There’s theories of pushing the Earth into a hothouse world that would have its own equilibrium that is far hotter than we can survive.

The good news is that it will never get to that point. Venus is a different planet with a different makeup and history.

The bad news, it doesn’t have to get nearly that bad to be bad for us and the rest of existing life. Not even close. Just a few degrees more, and we’re doing really well in getting there.

But they got it started and we changed some things. We just didn’t change enough, or perhaps changed the wrong things.

The first two political parties were formed around that very debate.

I believe there’s some thinking now that dinosaurs weren’t doing all that well, stagnating, so without a meteor and volcanic activity they still would have changed in some manner eventually. But perhaps not enough to let the mammals fill any niches.

What gets me is how long life was on Earth just as single cell forms, and then suddenly, recently, it took off to bigger things.

19 years, in a letter from Jefferson to Madison.

To James Madison from Thomas Jefferson, 6 September 1789

He thought that firstly no document or law could be forever relevant, so it needed revisioning occasionally, and the 19 years seems to tie into the idea of each generation taking a new look and either accepting existing laws as still good or making changes.

They came up with the best thing they could agree on at the time. They did not intend on it to become sacred, untouchable, and without the ability to change with the times, and sometimes we have changed it. Just not quite enough times.

Lots of scifi takes that route since we are very good at killing things. A well known version is the Asgard asking for help in Stargate SG-1 since they need more primitive tactics they’ve long ago forgotten.

Inconceivable.

One day: “Honey, where’s the dog?”

Correction in your summary, they date back to 280 million years, before the dinosaurs. Not 280M more years. That would be very old.

The Southern Strategy goal was to make it so you didn’t have to use fraud to stay in power. You can even abuse the people who put you there, and they’ll still keep you there loyally.

They were prepared to do all sorts of things, but it turned out it wasn’t necessary. American voters behaved just as they have been trained to. I think some Republicans might have been shocked how easy it was too, after the celebrating and once they looked back.

“Why do they call you Thumper? Oh…”

“Why do they call you Flower?”

“Flower Power.” sets off nuke

(just like Black Mirror)

Technology’s red flag.

It’s more that incompetence and infighting might prevent an organized effort to destroy the world. Wishing them luck, that’s accelerationism.