Card Reading: Will Science Save Humanity & the Earth?

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Will science save us from ourselves? Let us explore what the cards say...



From left to right I pulled:

10 of Hearts - The Dog
6 of Clubs - The Cross
Jack of Spades - The Child
6 of Diamonds - The Clover
Queen of Clubs - The Snake


What I'm seeing here is people dedicated to uncovering scientific breakthroughs to reverse climate change and save the world, but their progress is being tested by the burden of The Cross (and perhaps religion itself is getting in the way of scientific progress?)

The Child combined with The Cross could mean the youth of our world are the ones most anxious about the earth's future, and are looking to The Clover for a bit of luck in reversing the damages done by Climate Change. However they must beware of The Snake lurking in the clover field as it is giving us all false hope (or even false despair) and twisting the truth around regarding the environment so that it's hard to know what is actually happening to our world.

There is still hope, but it will take a lot of hard work on our part as Children of the Earth to overcome the collective ignorance.

We're up against a universe that spins up conscious agents through Darwinian evolution and then never turns Darwinian evolution off. That is it's a world that can only understand and respect bodies and physical power, force, and threat, not minds, not beauty. Similarly it never sees the individual, only whether or not they had viable grandchildren.

I'm really of the John Gray (Straw Dogs) view that 'Moloch' in the Scott Alexander sense is a permanent problem endemic to minds in physical bodies with scares resources and zero-sum eukaryotic sex / survival competitions. Similarly I don't believe better tech can make better people when it just accelerates the race conditions for all of the zero-sum games rather than obsoleting them.

It could be that AI gets really well self-regulated and plays benevolent despot (sort of like the 'human zoo' scenario) but outside of something above us doing better? We'll probably be in zero-sum competition, having multipolar traps sprung on us by each other, and running in tragedies of the commons for as long as our species continues to exist - ie. Dune future without the heavy paranormal or lack of guns, not Star Trek. We're slaves to survival, status competition (for survival odds), sexual competition (also for survival) and anyone who gets out of the race fails / loses by default no matter how awesome, decent, or whatever else they are. It's neither right nor fair but neither is a lion tearing into a gazelle particularly fair to the gazelle.