Vault-Co says things which are very profound if you think about them.
…I’m a Neanderthal. My pedigree was never in question. I’m descended from a one million year old race of hominids who are the most genetically superior race of men that has ever existed. I can plant my foot in a fossil bed in Europe dated at 800,000 years and my foot is a perfect match for that footprint which was made before Snowball Earth, meaning my kind survived in conditions that would have certainly exterminated you and everybody you know. Homo Sapiens is a breed that can barely establish it’s own existence anywhere before 38,000 years and is a short term phenomenon at best.
Ignore all of it but the concept of Iceball Earth.
Survival is a different mental process. Your brain changes modes, defocuses on the unpleasant, stops worrying about ease and pleasure, and focuses on what needs to be done to make it to the next day. Occasionally you review what will make things easier over the next four or five months and you try to get a little ahead of the curve. Not everyone can think that way, under that kind of harshness.
I picture Iceball Earth, and what would survive if the iceball were the normal state. I picture a few mastodon, miles up north, and food only appearing after ten to twenty guys ventured up there and took one down with spears, hauling back as much of the body as each one could carry. I picture a world where one misstep could get you killed. Where the quality of your clothes and weapons was the difference between making it home, and freezing into a solid block of ice miles up a mountain side. I see a world where physical or mental frailty would be culled instantly. I see a world where those who made it, did so in part because they had only the highest quality offspring, who could hold their own in the harshest of conditions. Where the ability to join a group, shut your trap, and do your job quietly was the only way to survive. Where being regularly “triggered” meant being beaten to death with a rock, by other members of your tribe, because that kind of stupidity could get the whole tribe killed if it was allowed to persist during a battle or hunt.
What would the population of the world today look like after a thousand years, if Iceball Earth happened today, and became the new normal? Would we have the national debt problems? Would we have elected idiots like we deal with in every corner of politics all the time? Would family mean so little, the military’s raw destructiveness be so little valued, or SJW’s be tolerated?
It is a fascinating question, because it highlights how ease is the enemy of all that is great in humanity, and how ease barely begins to describe the extent of what we have now.
It also will make what is to come, ever so slightly, more tolerable.
Apocalypse cometh™
I like my hot water showers.
I like my air conditioning.
I like my food available in a nice wrapper, ready for the grill.
I’m sure I take these things for granted often. But not most of the time. I enjoy them (what I call “Plan A,” also known as today’s normal) but I recognize that they are the product of a complex system, and complex systems are notorious for so-called Black Swan reversals.
The problem is that prepping for Plan D (WROL, Zombie Apocalypse, etc.) is mutually exclusive to dealing with Plan A, or being set in case Plan B or Plan C (change, but not as catastrophic as D) are served up. None of us knows the future, and above all, we don’t know the timing. I was sure the Poseidon Inversion was 1995; instead, the mass mind launched into the greatest delusional party, the Great Credit Mania, in recorded history.
Here we are, 20 years later….still in Plan A. Who would ‘a thought?
It’s worth noting that Neanderthal genes are highly correlated with g (the general intelligence factor) and emphasize math and spacial reasoning skills. Neanderthal was much, much smarter than Homo Sapiens — he just wasn’t as freely breeding. He was K-selected in an emerging r-selected world.
The unpleasant correlation to this is that Neanderthal genes are heavily involved in European descended people, somewhat present in Asian and native American peoples, and virtually non-existent in African, Australian aboriginal and native South American descended people.