Because they are people, and people as a group are apocalyptic.
Four to five decades back, everyone grew up convinced that atomic war was inevitable. That was the zeitgeist, but wrong. Nuclear war is a great stride forward in that it's the only methodology of war yet invented that is both aggressively pursued by leaders and presents those leaders with a dire and immediate threat of death if used. (As opposed to, say, war by assassination, which only satisfies one of those criteria). So the incentives were aligned against what popular sentiment said was inevitable.
Then all of that determined, grim sentiment sloshed over into the ready and waiting environmentalist hair-shirt death cult after the collapse of the USSR.
As someone who advocates for engineered human longevity, I see a lot of this. Most people, the majority, don't have a positive view of the future. At present that is largely informed by what in a sane world would be extreme environmentalist views, but in this world are middle of the road environmentalist views - most people are convinced that the world is falling apart, that there are too many people, that no-one should be allowed to extend human life, that all resources are running out, and in short that Malthus was right.
This view of the end of the world will no more come to pass than nuclear war did. All the incentives are aligned against Malthusian limits of any sort, and always have been. Hopefully one doesn't have to explain why that's the case to the present audience.
I agree with you, but I also think that being a cynic/skeptic allows you to appear more intelligent, and that is why people (perhaps unconsciously) find flaws in an idea.
By finding flaws, you're almost saying you've outwitted the idea proposer.
I think you're right. Historically apocalyptic ideas have always been popular. Neal Stephenson had a good point when he compared the Apocalypse of John to the singularity.
"I can never get past the structural similarities between the singularity prediction and the apocalypse of St. John the Divine. This is not the place to parse it out, but the key thing they have in common is the idea of a rapture, in which some chosen humans will be taken up and made one with the infinite while others will be left behind. "
http://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-r...
If Stephenson is right, the idea of the singularity could be considered another modern apocalyptic idea.
I haven't studied it closely but I suspect similar arguments could be made about ancient sightings of gods/angels/demons vs modern encounters with aliens/UFOs.
These things are connected in that they are expressions of universal human characteristics or desires or something.
Your views on environmentalism are interesting. Do you have data about most people being convinced "that no-one should be allowed to extend human life", or "that Malthus was right"? If we're going anecdote vs. anecdote, I really don't see what you're talking about - I hear very little about longevity or exponential population growth being the problem.
What you mention that I do hear a lot about is that resources are running out. This concept seems almost a tautology to me - if resources are finite, and we are using them without replacing them, then they are running out. This says nothing of how quickly they are running out, which is why people are doing lots of research on this problem.
Your point about incentives is actually exactly why the possibility of resource shortage frightens me more than nuclear war - the people of the world and their leaders are currently incentivized to trade off long-term resource scarcity for short-term economic growth, and there are currently many economies in need of growth.
I don't see a flaw in Malthus' argument (population grows exponentially, food production does not). The green revolution mostly pushed it back a couple of decades (except for people here and there who actually did starve to death) through modernizing worldwide agriculture and massive use of petroleum as fertilizer and pesticide, but it can't be repeated--oil probably already peaked and we don't have even more advanced farming techniques held in reserve. The incentives are right but they only help if some feasible solution exists; I'm not aware of any short of inventing nanotech or invent cold fusion (scaling fission is too slow because we have to mine all our fuel) or an extremely authoritarian yet effective sterilization campaign (which would make China's look like Disneyland).
Four to five decades back, everyone grew up convinced that atomic war was inevitable. That was the zeitgeist, but wrong. Nuclear war is a great stride forward in that it's the only methodology of war yet invented that is both aggressively pursued by leaders and presents those leaders with a dire and immediate threat of death if used. (As opposed to, say, war by assassination, which only satisfies one of those criteria). So the incentives were aligned against what popular sentiment said was inevitable.
Then all of that determined, grim sentiment sloshed over into the ready and waiting environmentalist hair-shirt death cult after the collapse of the USSR.
As someone who advocates for engineered human longevity, I see a lot of this. Most people, the majority, don't have a positive view of the future. At present that is largely informed by what in a sane world would be extreme environmentalist views, but in this world are middle of the road environmentalist views - most people are convinced that the world is falling apart, that there are too many people, that no-one should be allowed to extend human life, that all resources are running out, and in short that Malthus was right.
This view of the end of the world will no more come to pass than nuclear war did. All the incentives are aligned against Malthusian limits of any sort, and always have been. Hopefully one doesn't have to explain why that's the case to the present audience.