I have several times proposed a twentieth century version of Pascal’s Wager: the Climate Change Denier’s Wager. Pascal was of course the fifteenth century ardent atheist, scientist and math master The Church so feared that upon his death cut off his head and it is now stored pickled somewhere in the Vatican basement. At some point in his life he was famously challenged by a “priest” that he would “convert” upon his deathbed. No word yet as to whither or no he did so, but my proposed wager is really rather simple: If I am wrong, I don’t lose a damned thing. If you – the climate change denier – are wrong, we lose the only planet we know of capable of sustaining our species – the human species – and our grand-children die. We don’t “destroy” the world, we just make it uninhabitable for humans.
You want to take that bet?
And I don’t even want hear “but there’s other planets”¦ we just found one, Kepler 14 or 49 or something”. Finding new planets is cool. I’m a Mad Scientist, I love this stuff. But we have neither the time nor the resources or for that matter even the ability to move seven billion people to another planet.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kFHQpZpgdg&w=560&h=315]
Maybe we ought to just put our energies and expertise into not f*cking up the one we have.
We can get to the rest of the planets later. If we survive…
I agree with you wholeheartedly. If we don’t stop being bad tenants, we’ll get evicted and there’s no where else to go.
We need the earth; the earth doesn’t need us.