A Selfish Argument for Making the World a Better Place – Egoistic Altruism

[Dave-W]

My observation is that's its truly easy to do the golden rule

How about if you are suicidal?

 

[Halbhh]

How about if you are suicidal?

I'm thinking you want to talk about a different subject than I was addressing in that post (in the continuation of that sentence)?

People do get suicidal often from the lack of love from others to them.

 

[Halbhh]

It's not "christianity's way", since christianity isn't at all required to come up with such ideas, nore did these ideas originate with or from christianity.

This is a valuable thing for us to look closer at -- can a human principle that is universally good be originated?

I think the answer is clearly no -- that's not possible.

Originating mean to create a new thing that does not exist yet.

For instance, one could originate a work of art, a song, or an automobile design.

The design can be arbitrary, take a thousand forms, each unique.

But for existing intrinsic qualities of humans which are built into our genes, we can only discover these qualities, not create them arbitrarily.

What is intrinsic to us cannot be originated at all. Rather, it's precise, already exists, and can only be found (and that even over and over).

When Newton found his law of gravity, he was not originating it, but instead discovering it. This approximation he found was already a fact, already existing, already in operation.

 

[OldWiseGuy]

one day, i hope people just share. sharing is good. advanced ways jesus wants us to be like i think.

Sharing must be done very carefully

Doing anything from self centered motives is sinful.

I don't watch horror movies as I don't want those images in my head. A friend and I were discussing whether we would shoot a terrorist in the act of killing others. I said that it wouldn't bother me to empty my gun into him, but I didn't want the memory of it in my mind for the rest of my life. Selfish?

Just as an aside we both agreed that if the incident happened at a Walmart store we would toss our weapons as far as we could after the shooting and we would lay down on the floor before the police arrived. There's no glory in being killed by the cops.

 

[Drifter Kybe Scythe Kane]

Sharing must be done very carefully


I don't watch horror movies as I don't want those images in my head. A friend and I were discussing whether we would shoot a terrorist in the act of killing others. I said that it wouldn't bother me to empty my gun into him, but I didn't want the memory of it in my mind for the rest of my life. Selfish?

Just as an aside we both agreed that if the incident happened at a Walmart store we would toss our weapons as far as we could after the shooting and we would lay down on the floor before the police arrived. There's no glory in being killed by the cops.

Exactly, cops are watching us. Justice never sleeps in the world for as long as law enforcement is around for a reason. I reckon we don't need a whole ton of guns since that's what cops are for. God put justice in reality as the eventual factor in life I've observed so why fight it?

 

[Dave-W]

I reckon we don't need a whole ton of guns since that's what cops are for.

Right. Just ask that Australian woman up in Minnesota who called the cops on a domestic disturbance last year. Oh, wait, you can't. The cops shot her dead.

 

[OldWiseGuy]

Right. Just ask that Australian woman up in Minnesota who called the cops on a domestic disturbance last year. Oh, wait, you can't. The cops shot her dead.

It's worse than that.

"When seconds count the police are only minutes away."

The police protect very few people. What they do is investigate your murder and arrest your killer (when they're not doing this they are walking around intimidating everyone in their 'Darth Vader' outfits and sunglasses).

 

[OldWiseGuy]

Put here because this short (7:14) animation shows why what has happened in the past is not a good enough template for the future of humanity. So, right vs wrong, ethics and morality.

I post this because I agree with the animation. I have for many years thought that by working to bring everyone up to the same economic speed as, say, the US economy, would be beneficial to far more people in the world than how we currently operate.

I don't think it would be good to increase the 'carbon footprint' of everyone on earth to that of those in the developed world.

Whenever food is widely available in the developing world their population shoots up, making he next food crisis worse. If we want each to have a piece of the pie we need fewer people, not a bigger pie.

High birthrates are encouraged by greedy businesspeople as a cheap labor force and a consumer class, and by political parties who hope to gain voters who will keep them in power.

I'm afraid mankind has the opposite of the "Midas touch" in that everything we touch turns to....crap.

 

[OldWiseGuy]

I'm thinking you want to talk about a different subject than I was addressing in that post (in the continuation of that sentence)?

People do get suicidal often from the lack of love from others to them.

Mostly though they paint themselves into a corner and suicide is the only way out.

 

[zephcom]

Put here because this short (7:14) animation shows why what has happened in the past is not a good enough template for the future of humanity. So, right vs wrong, ethics and morality.

I post this because I agree with the animation. I have for many years thought that by working to bring everyone up to the same economic speed as, say, the US economy, would be beneficial to far more people in the world than how we currently operate.

The animation totally ignores the elephant in the room while it paints a picture of a rosy future which is completely impossible to achieve. The foundation of the Industrial Revolution is built on is stored energy sources. And that means it is not sustainable.

If I have a cache of food that I've stored away for an emergency and the emergency lasts longer than I anticipated, I will still end up starving when my food supply runs out. And I will end starving faster if I share that food supply with others involved in the emergency.

The foundation of the Industrial Revolution is fueled by sunlight which was stored in the earth in the form of hydrocarbons over hundreds of millions of years. Just as my cache of food is limited and sharing it shortens my life, the cache of hydrocarbons is also limited and sharing it with others does nothing but speed up the time when we don't have anymore hydrocarbons.

Bringing everyone on the planet up to America's standard of living...assuming that is even possible...means greatly speeding up the time when we run out of hydrocarbons and everything crashes for all of us. The Industrial Revolution is NOT a positive sum game. It is a negative sum game because it is fuel by stored energy and using stored energy means that eventually the storage is empty.

Reducing the human population through birth control, wars and starvation extends the time before the stored energy runs out but it doesn't fix the basic problem until Industry can totally operate and life can exist on no more energy than the sun places on the planet in real time.

The higher the standard of living, the fewer people the planet can support. The lower the standard of living, the more people the planet can support. Nothing else is sustainable.

 

[jardiniere]

Your argument assumes that petroleum hydrocarbons won't eventually become recycleable or manufactureable at a reasonable cost, something I'm not willing to bet on. We already know how to make petroleum. The more people that can have an enhanced standard of living, the more people can work on solving problems. The more people working to solve problems will hasten the solutions you are seeing as unsustainable. So I don't really see your argument as a really good criticism of the video.

 

[zephcom]

Your argument assumes that petroleum hydrocarbons won't eventually become recycleable or manufactureable at a reasonable cost, something I'm not willing to bet on. We already know how to make petroleum. The more people that can have an enhanced standard of living, the more people can work on solving problems. The more people working to solve problems will hasten the solutions you are seeing as unsustainable. So I don't really see your argument as a really good criticism of the video.

I might not have made the problem of hydrocarbons clear. The problem is not that we might run out of them. The problem is that we are using them to exceed the amount of energy the sun puts on the planet every year.

One of the statistics I've seen is that humans on the earth are using energy at a rate of the total amount of energy one and half suns would put on the planet. We accomplish that by using energy the sun put on the planet a million or more years ago. We get that in the form of hydrocarbons...oil, natural gas and coal.

The earth is not making hydrocarbons as fast as we are using them. That means we will run out of the stuff the planet has made using sunlight from a long time ago. Certainly we can make those products but it will take energy to make them and the only energy we will have available at that point is the amount the sun puts on the planet in real time.

If we can't taper our energy consumption down to a level which allows the sun to provide real time quantities for both the ecosystem we require to live AND our use for high standards of living before the hydrocarbons run out we face a total collapse of society.

Since the energy usage per person is highest in America, to bring the rest of the people in the world up to our standards only makes the hydrocarbons run out faster. And it will make the resulting collapse more devastating.

And this is all based on hard science so no one is going to design a machine that makes more energy than it consumes. Energy can not be created or destroyed. It can only be made to change forms.

It is a reality. We can use our collective genius to move the collapse back a few years but we can only stop it by limiting our energy use to no more than what the planet receives from the sun. And that will require us to give up relying on hydrocarbons to sustain our life style.

 

[jardiniere]

I did understand that. But I also think that the limitation of hydrocarbons are not a limiting factor in our growth. Not all our energy comes from hydrocarbons, and in the future, it will be even less so. There are many forms of energy we have yet to utilize as well as we do hydrocarbons today. Dependence on hydrocarbons are part of what is limiting our abilities at this time.

 

[zephcom]

I did understand that. But I also think that the limitation of hydrocarbons are not a limiting factor in our growth. Not all our energy comes from hydrocarbons, and in the future, it will be even less so. There are many forms of energy we have yet to utilize as well as we do hydrocarbons today. Dependence on hydrocarbons are part of what is limiting our abilities at this time.

Now that you understand this part, let's move on. Alternate forms of energy that would be sufficient to drive more development and raise seven billion people's lives to the life style of Americans is severely limited. Of the sources which are driven by the sun we have direct solar conversion, wind, wave action and rain (hydro-power). Interrupting any of these to siphon energy elsewhere at the level needed to accomplish what your OP suggested could have serious and negative effects on the ecology we need to survive.

That only leaves us with nuclear energy. And most definitely there is sufficient energy potential to accomplish the goals in the OP, but the danger involved is also extremely large. We have already suffered two major meltdowns of nuclear power plants and many known and likely unknown close encounters with meltdowns.

Because that risk is so high and the consequences of failure lasting well beyond the amount of time humans have been using technology this far that moving into large enough nuclear generation to replace hydrocarbons should only be done with widespread consent of all the humans on the planet. They are, after all, the ones who will suffer most from the failures in the system.

But with all that aside, we still have the one issue with nuclear that we have with hydrocarbon...the heat generated from the use of the energy. It is a law of physics that energy used to accomplish something does not disappear. It is converted to heat as that something is accomplished.

The massive amount of energy needed to accomplish the goal of the OP is going to generate a massive amount of heat. That heat has to go someplace. And that someplace can't be anywhere on the planet or in its atmosphere if we are going to survive on this planet.

That isn't as much of a problem with solar generation since the planet is already capable of dealing with that level of energy injection into the system. Prior to the creation of gases which are now causing the 'greenhouse' effect, that heat was lost to space.

Injecting the amount of heat which nuclear energy can create and will need to be created to accomplish the OP goals without knowing how that heat will be gotten rid of creates a different problem than losing the benefit of hydrocarbon but the heat problem will be just as catastrophic as the first problem.

Basically we just have too many people on the planet...by about five billion. If we could wake up tomorrow with five billion people missing from the planet, virtually all these problems would just go away.

Well, they would go away until we got too many people again.

 

[Drifter Kybe Scythe Kane]

It's worse than that.

"When seconds count the police are only minutes away."

The police protect very few people. What they do is investigate your murder and arrest your killer (when they're not doing this they are walking around intimidating everyone in their 'Darth Vader' outfits and sunglasses).

Well, sometimes people need to go to jail. But at least there are some cops who want to right a wrong, correct a situation, then they're happy cops. If they can do that and nobody gets hurt, it's their goal. All cops I've met are nice. But yea racist cops and other types of bad cops I've heard of. Course we will be so advanced in Jesus' ways that we will share and not have violence self disciplining ourselves...one day...there really is no need of violence amongst ourselves.

 

[jardiniere]

Now that you understand this part, let's move on. Alternate forms of energy that would be sufficient to drive more development and raise seven billion people's lives to the life style of Americans is severely limited. Of the sources which are driven by the sun we have direct solar conversion, wind, wave action and rain (hydro-power). Interrupting any of these to siphon energy elsewhere at the level needed to accomplish what your OP suggested could have serious and negative effects on the ecology we need to survive.(snip)

This is just not convincing me. To me, the most probable obstruction to progress in bringing more people up to our standard of living is not access to energy. It's potable water. We are already moving forward with many options for making more energy, and energy that has fewer problems than burning hydrocarbons. Not only that, but we are developing manufacturing methods that use less energy, and store more energy-thus making our energy expense less costly to expand.

The idea that we haven't the means to expand our resource pie is likely more a holdover concept from eras when it wasn't possible.

 

[Drifter Kybe Scythe Kane]

This is just not convincing me. To me, the most probable obstruction to progress in bringing more people up to our standard of living is not access to energy. It's potable water. We are already moving forward with many options for making more energy, and energy that has fewer problems than burning hydrocarbons. Not only that, but we are developing manufacturing methods that use less energy, and store more energy-thus making our energy expense less costly to expand.

The idea that we haven't the means to expand our resource pie is likely more a holdover concept from eras when it wasn't possible.

as earth wears out it's resources, it will obviously become less effective and will burn out of resources eventually. an eventual broken earth is completely useless until as a human race we must realize the fact we need to become an intergalactic human empire. one original earth destroyed is only a fraction of the damage that we will sustain as a human empire colonizing to other planets that new, well maintained planets will give us as a whole in terms of the amount of planets we gain planet by planet. we must learn the basics of planet colonizing and go over the technological instruments needed and built piece by piece before every big project for another planet takeover. we must visit other planets and study it's usefulness regularly to keep our species in good shape. i personally believe God will never put us in a fight with lucifer because God i believe loves the art of struggle and loss he finds us in his creation of us human beings.