Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007
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ORIGINAL: Termyn8or
Nope, just less safe about all the other aspects of life.
Well, glad the perspective improved, at least. 
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I did kinda jump in, but I think we also need to think abiout the big picture in another way.
I tried that. Then at about 720 degrees field of view, the lens broke, and I decided to stick to art shots... or attempting to elevate potshots to art.
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The question is - how much do we want to adapt?
It doesn't really matter all that much how much we want to adapt.
To borrow a line from a nice action movie: adapt or die.
Nice kid. Makes me want to have one.
The choice as to what we adapt, however, is interesting. Classically, we have transitioned from adapting ourselves to the environment, into adapting the environment to ourselves, and now we're back to another round of both, as another pair of entities have taken our place at the top of the food chain: nation states and (at the apex) corporations. Those eat us all, and dealing with that will be a crucial step in our adaptation (evolution, if you will).
Failing to make the step quickly enough will result in the extinction of all three species and the evolution of a new advanced species, likely either rats or squids if the biosphere remains capable of supporting mammalian life in the post-halocene era. At some point in the future, they will find the bones of strange bipeds, and eventually arrive at the conclusion that we've never done anything more substantial than building large concrete-and-steel monuments of unknown purpose, before proceeding to repeat our mistakes on their own. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Eventually, by chance, some species will get it right, if the planet supports organic life that long.
How's that space ship coming along? 
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In fiction it has been proposed that an alien race comes and just about takes over and dies off because of our germs to which they have no resistance.
Which entirely neglects that anyone able to bridge the energy gap of even the comparatively limited differential orbital velocities of Earth and Mars (some 2000km/s, which you can convert into energy under the assumption that a vessel of interest will have a mass of at least a few tonnes, disregarding the bounded density of any known energy storage) will, obviously, have little interest in taking over a planet that doesn't even care to colonize outer space, is running out of the basic building blocks of life, is wasting its least renewable resources (e.g. helium) and shows no interest in anything but reproduction, consumption and planetolysis.
From the perspective of a species advanced enough to make it to Earth from anywhere, humans are large virial lifeforms that probably need to be contained, and it is plausible that they would either be compatible with us and make contact out of curiosity, or simply collect a few samples and leave, or sterilize the planet and then colonize it. None of these would be decisions humans would have a part in at any point, nor any potential for influencing the outcomes of in any way.
If they did land, they would probably encounter new microorganisms, and their medical science would likely lag behind their physics, so it's plausbile they would have a problem. The response would probably be to assume something went to hell and sterilize the planet as a retaliatory measure, or as simple medicine of the sort we practice ourselves (ever seen the holocaust that followed the discovery of bovine spongiform encephalopathy?).
Of course, we'd be less equipped to deal with their microbes, whereas they would encounter ours before entering the solar system, as convection and the like has brought plenty of them up into high atmospheric layers where thermal diffusion has brought some high enough to be carried away by solar wind and such. Chances are that's the first sign of life in this area they would encounter, as Earth is a single blue pixel on a space telescope as seen from Voyager. There isn't much to suggest our solar system has life as seen from afar, unless one is explicitly searching for life, and then it takes getting closer to actually find anything more than a faint indication there may be something in the goldilocks zone.
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On the other hand there is evidence that by traveling the globe, people have spread diseases all over the place, as well as picked a few up.
Yeah, it's getting more homogenous, and we're pretty much violating some of the basic elements of any biosphere: the compartmentalization. Norway now has tropical fungal strains in waters that once did not need any cleaning to be just right for drinking. Tuberculosis, once extinct, is coming back, and exhibits multidrug resistance. MRSA was nothing, once, but it's becoming a real issue because of people getting cosmetic surgery done in India. Rattus norvecigus wasn't endemic to the region, but they're easily found in the morning hours of a weekend day, cleaning up the streets, and are assumed to number about the same as humans.
I've had an intensely yellow spider on my porch that prolly got there from Australia, as the final approach to FSL is over this neighbourhood, and I'm not the only one that was miffed at the prospect of two flu seasons per year, or having lots of kids in the hospital with O157 out of Germany.
Overall, globalization has some serious issues, but they're tragically far down on the list of things that should have been addressed by the "stop. assess. address. resume." approach, rather than the combination of theater and business as usual. And I'm not just talking environment here, though the non-sponsored research done by independent groups here shows that the worldwide discussions on the subject are missing the most critical warning lights, like the gulf stream flow rate (down by 50-75%, if memory serves), south pole convection columns (possibly below sustainable- or even restartable- levels) and so forth... and Sahara, of course, where the Somali and Ethiopeans will deplete all the arable land shortly, while the west wastes money on maintaining their population above the level supportable by what will soon be a desert due to this course of action, rather than reversing the desert formation.
Parliamentary democracy is actually the greatest threat, but it won't be around for long, whereas human domestication, in the #2 slot, is going to be the long term killer. It is the nail that keeps the coffin shut, and I've no shortage of distaste for a development of that sort, but you won't find a lot of people willing to leave shit behind to go do something about it all, or even just to withdraw into a rational middle ground between the crazy status quo and the freaky neoluddism. Hell, there's not even a nation state that will let you do it, nor unclaimed land in which no nation state will blast you to hell for your desire to live your own way.
Germs are a pretty distant concern if you're looking to improve anyone's lives.
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This comes down to the question whether we are fit to survive or not. And the tertiary issue of just how much do we care to adapt ? We humans have been known to adapt our environment to suit us instead. One day perhaps we may consider unadapting it.
"We humans" don't act as a homogenous group. It is always either momentum (suffrage, civil rights, infanticide), people in positions of power (9/11 NYC, 9/11 Mexico, JFK, Berlin), or one (wo)man making a critical choice at a critical time (Ghandi, Hitler, Theresa, Alexander, J d'Arc, Ivan, MLK, Vlad Tepeš, Constantine, Leonidas).
And we will not unadapt it. That would be unpleasant, even uncomfortable, and possibly even require agency, risk, balls or unicorns.
As for whether we're fit to survive or not... we're working on it... becoming less fit to survive, I mean.
Let's hope the powers that be are merciful.
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It really is coming down to where we want to draw the line. There is some sort of poison in damnear everything. It's a matter of how much and what kind I guess.
Ever consider that you may be thinking about these things to distract yourself from thinking about other things?
I don't think about them at all, and I've always got my seat in the upright position, buckled into the web on a 4-point.
Health,
al-Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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