Paul Rosolie: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. And I think that there’s a huge amount of intellectual responsibility that we can transfer off of ourselves if we go, “Yeah. The rivers are filled with trash and, yeah, extinction is happening, but we have to be an interplanetary species anyway, because at any moment this could all end from an asteroid and everything’s going to shit anyway, and so it’s like we’re fucking up this planet. ” And so we’re just being angry teenagers who are going goth for a while. And it’s like what if you just rolled up your sleeves, and said, “Holy shit. Wait a second. We can pretty much do whatever we want-“ I said, holy shit, wait a second. We can pretty much do whatever we want. We can fly all over the world. We can do heart transplants, we can watch Netflix in the Amazon if we wanted to. We could do all this amazing stuff. We can capture on video our adventures and go back and watch them again and again and again. There’s so much incredible opportunity that technology has allowed us to do, and we’re the richest in history. We could do everything. We could cross the whole planet in a second, and it’s like, that’s an amazing time to be alive. And if we just don’t fuck up the ecosystems and kill all the other animals, we got it made. It is true that we can destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons, but it also is true that that snake that I got to handle yesterday is one of the most beautiful things Earth has ever created. In that little organism is encapsulated the entire history of Earth, and it’s beautiful. Both things are true. We should worry about the existential destruction of human civilization through the weapons we create, and we should become multi-planetary species as a backup for that purpose. But also remember, this place is really, really special and probably, if not difficult, probably impossible to recreate elsewhere. And by the way, there’s something incredibly powerful about a skull.…

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