[si1entstill]

I feel like I am and always have been a "day-to-day" optimist, but I struggle to apply that to larger, societal problems.

Our impact on the environment is measurable and the impacts look dire. Income disparity seems to be increasing locally and globally. The military industrial complex of the largest nation-states feels eternal, as if it is a fundamental part of neoliberal capitalism.

I can "half-full" almost everything day to day. Financial issues, medical issues, family problems... never easy, but doable. I can handle it, smile on my face, and tough it out. But when I'm left alone with my thoughts, its hard for me not to draw the conclusion that the world my children (or their children) grow up in will be worse-off, and they will live harder lives than we have.

[vlunkr]

The way that I stay optimistic is to think about how awareness of these issues is growing. As they say, knowing is half the battle.

https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/11/25/u-s-public-vi...

More people are concerned about climate change now, and the younger generations are more concerned than ever. Hopefully that leads to people in general making better choices, and more importantly, electing people who aren't deep in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry.

[r3trohack3r]

We made it through a cold war. Previous generations had to live with the very real risk of a fast escalating total nuclear disaster. We still have nukes but I generally don't worry about a fast escalating "everyone launches everything they have and we are ill prepared to shoot them all out of the sky before they make contact" doomsday scenario. Not only did we make it through that, but we put humans on the moon during that window of time and humans made some pretty significant scientific advances with the backdrop of all that stress.

> Our impact on the environment is measurable and the impacts look dire.

Humans are pretty resilient and have been pretty good at mitigating large scale problems. Yeah we are impacting our environment, but we aren't the only species that does this. Many species, left unchecked, go through natural boom+bust cycles where they blast past the carrying capacity of their ecosystem and then bust the next generation.

At no point do deer look around and go "hey, we are eating all the food, maybe we shouldn't do that?" - they just eat and reproduce and nature sorts it out. They aren't morally corrupt for causing a boom/bust cycle, they're just animals like us. However, when it comes to humans, we have blasted past our ecosystem's natural carrying capacity (we've been past it for a long time now). Not only do we look around and go "hey, this is a problem" - something that puts us in a league all our own - but we have repeatedly solved that problem. And now we get to tackle the next set of problems.

Simply being aware that we are responsible for climate change and the ending of the Holocene is a huge achievement for a species, let alone putting together plans to over come it.

That is pretty cool!

What's even cooler is that all of the growing pains we are going through are putting us on a trajectory to literally save all life on Earth. Folks like to kick around the can about how humans are destroying Earth's environment. That's true, and we need to work our butts off to keep everything balanced moving forward. There are very smart humans working very hard to keep our ecosystems from collapsing.

But, no matter what we do to save our ecosystems, we are over 75% through the window of time life can survive on this planet.

A world without humans is a world where Earth slowly moves out of the habitable zone and finds itself in a complete extinction event in ~500m years - with little to no hope of any life bouncing back.

Getting life off this planet is a noble cause. Doing that requires either:

* a biological pathway to interstellar travel beyond the micro-organism scale (maybe nature will produce this in 500m years? find that _exceptionally_ unlikely)

* a species to develop the technology to get itself off this rock and survive the extremely hostile environments in space

Humans are doing that latter, and I have no reason to believe any other species would do a better job than we have getting to "building rockets and settling planets." Not only is our species going to the stars, but we are going to bring life on Earth with us when we do.

That is pretty rad.

[fullsend]

Because we are in fact so disconnected from our military today, modern people have forgotten that human civilization itself has been a military industrial complex forever. Not much to do with capitalism in particular.

[si1entstill]

I think there is a crucial semantic disconnect here, that may be partially stemmed from how much heavy lifting the relatively new term "military industrial complex" is doing. I'm likely partially to blame.

I use the term to refer to the the status quo of the relationship between interest groups, legislative bodies, and the bureaucratic system. I don't think I've forgotten anything. Some degree of defense was, and still is, necessary. I'm not refuting that. But, I believe that current manifestations of this relationship has lead to a system that is largely driven by private interests that have little to do with the defense or security of the people.

[fauxpause_]

Is the military industrial complex really that big? I’m under the impression that it’s honestly pretty weak and fragile.

[PeterisP]

Yep, the current Russian war in Ukraine exposed the fact that the western 'military complex' isn't that industrial anymore, as (for example) the total annual production of artillery shells is less than what we'd shoot in a single average day of WW2.

There's still a lot of money spent, but it's spent less on actual industrial capacity but rather mostly on various high-tech R&D things - probably because then you can convert a larger portion of the order to profits instead of hardware.

[fauxpause_]

Yes that was what I meant. Lots of RD. probably an army of contractors.

But industry? I really don’t think so. Still curious if others have evidence otherwise

[si1entstill]

I'd say that, colloquially at least (and maybe in a literary sense as well), the "military industrial complex" broadly covers the flow of money from a government and its military to the defense industry at large. (terms again can be a bit strange here, but the "defense-industry" describes an area of economic activity not "the refinement of raw materials into products").