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How Vulnerable Is the World?

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Re: How Vulnerable Is the World?

#31

Post by ip26 »

peterxpark wrote: post #19

The tragedy is the growing consensus that the world is going to shit and it's our fault. Even worse is that all this technology, social media, and so on isn't even making us more happy or fulfilled. Yet, most just sit on their hands not doing much at all. Content to eek out what comfort and pleasure we can get now and try our best to ignore the knowledge that devastation awaits us. It's amazing that in tens of thousa…

I get your critique of carbon capture tech, but it's also the only way we can clean up (that part of) our mess.

Re: How Vulnerable Is the World?

#32

Post by kiliantics »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #28
jbotz wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Civilisations have collapsed before, and will collapse again. Civilizations have collapsed before... but none of those were nuclear-armed, global civilizations that have produced more artifact matter than there is biomass on the planet[1]. Our civilization is epic... and when we collapse it will be equally epic, so I'm wouldn't bet that the whole "it has happened before and will happen again" thing really applies h…

I don't understand. You're saying that because we've made a lot of stuff, if our civilisation collapses it'll destroy everything? How does one follow from the other?

Intelligent life (at least, life which can build civilisation) has not experienced extinction events on earth before. If the current extinction event caused by climate change eventually includes the extinction of humans, which is becoming increasingly likely, it will be impossible for any future intelligent lifeforms to build civilisations. We have already extracted all of the easily-obtained resources that more primitive civilisations would require in order to develop.

Re: How Vulnerable Is the World?

#33

Post by qPM9l3XJrF »

peterxpark wrote: post #19

The tragedy is the growing consensus that the world is going to shit and it's our fault. Even worse is that all this technology, social media, and so on isn't even making us more happy or fulfilled. Yet, most just sit on their hands not doing much at all. Content to eek out what comfort and pleasure we can get now and try our best to ignore the knowledge that devastation awaits us. It's amazing that in tens of thousa…

This comment seems a little inconsistent to me. You complain about the fact that everyone doesn't have the mindset to solve problems. Makes sense so far.

Then you say carbon capture tech isn't going to work because... it's too focused on solving problems constructively? What is wrong with the mindset of carbon capture tech, exactly? What is the right mindset to have? (But also, the idea that we can figure out what solutions work based on diagnosing the "mindset" of those that propose them, as opposed to analyzing the solution itself in detail, seems pretty silly to me. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy )

Re: How Vulnerable Is the World?

#34

Post by kiliantics »

qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #30
kiliantics wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So support and join the people who are pushing for that shift. There are very powerful actors working hard to keep dissenters silent and impotent. Lots of people in this forum regularly disparage social justice efforts.

Social justice seems like a distraction from these issues to me. It is focused on the past, not the future.

Social justice includes climate justice and social issues are very much interconnected with issues of environmental sustainability. Consider the appropriation of lands from indigenous peoples and destruction of its natural ecosystems to install monocultures for profit. Consider the fact that poor people must buy cheap disposable stuff again and again because they can't afford to buy long-lasting, more sustainable goods which have become too expensive for profit-seeking industries to produce at scale. Consider that urban sprawl was largely a result of racialised segregation and that the ubiquity of environmentally destructive vehicles and road systems was encouraged in no small part by the desire of certain classes of people to distance themselves from others (or others from them).

Re: How Vulnerable Is the World?

#35

Post by qPM9l3XJrF »

kiliantics wrote: post #34
qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social justice seems like a distraction from these issues to me. It is focused on the past, not the future.

Social justice includes climate justice and social issues are very much interconnected with issues of environmental sustainability. Consider the appropriation of lands from indigenous peoples and destruction of its natural ecosystems to install monocultures for profit. Consider the fact that poor people must buy cheap disposable stuff again and again because they can't afford to buy long-lasting, more sustainable goo…

The most important climate legislation has bipartisan support: https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/15/how-to-decarbonize-america...

Framing everything in terms of past injustices turns what should be a bipartisan issue into a partisan one.

We need less infighting and more creative collaborative problem-solving.

Re: How Vulnerable Is the World?

#37

Post by cameldrv »

nugget wrote: post #2

I don't worry about easy nukes but I do worry about easy viruses, especially now that we've seen what a pandemic can do. Virus construction is only going to become easier over time, and at some point, you could imagine any run of the mill biochem lab capable of "printing" a new strain of some infectious disease.

It's already happened. There was at least one lab that, in the early part of the pandemic, created the SARS-CoV-2 live virus based solely on the sequence because the live virus was not yet available. Now, they did have to send out for the DNA synthesis, but this only costs about 50 cents a base pair.

Re: How Vulnerable Is the World?

#38

Post by davidkhess »

I developed a different take on this issue recently. It's not that technology could destroy us - it's that the amount of complexity we are continually building with technology will eventually outstrip the resources and intellect of the human species to manage it.

Another way to put it: what if the Great Filter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter) is really that biological life doesn't have the resources available or the capability to develop the intellect necessary to manage all the technology required for a species to go intergalactic?

Re: How Vulnerable Is the World?

#39

Post by retrac »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #28
jbotz wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Civilisations have collapsed before, and will collapse again. Civilizations have collapsed before... but none of those were nuclear-armed, global civilizations that have produced more artifact matter than there is biomass on the planet[1]. Our civilization is epic... and when we collapse it will be equally epic, so I'm wouldn't bet that the whole "it has happened before and will happen again" thing really applies h…

I don't understand. You're saying that because we've made a lot of stuff, if our civilisation collapses it'll destroy everything? How does one follow from the other?

The scale really is fundamentally different. What we are now, and what ware doing now, is just completely unlike anything that existed until a couple hundred years ago. This chart on land use maybe helps make the point https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-over-the-long-te...

The emerging global civilization entered some sort of exponential consumption curve a few hundred years ago and the entire planet has been swallowed up in it. The collapse will be of a scale and impact never before seen, because we've never seen anything like this. The usefulness of analogy to previous collapses seems limited to me.

Consider just in absolute terms like the amount mined. We've strip-mined all the easily accessed deposits on the whole planet at this point. If there's a serious technological regression, will our descendants even have the means to access basic resources like lithium? We've extincted all sorts of species on a scale unlike previous civilizations, as well. Unlike every other previous collapsed civilization, there's no going back to the climate-stable and resource rich world of preindustrial humanity to try over again from.

Re: How Vulnerable Is the World?

#40

Post by gnulinux »

bserge wrote: post #7

It will probably be the stuff "hidden" (it's really not, our eyes are just closed) behind many layers that will do us in on a major scale. While worrying about nuclear weapons and weaponized viruses, we're strip mining the planet dry, creating extremely resource consuming stuff just to throw it in a landfill every year, while at the same time pumping the atmosphere and soil full of shit that kills plant life and othe…

There is a great science podcast called "ologies" every episode is on a different branch of science. There is one episode on "Eschatology" which is the scientific study of apocalypse (i.e. unrelated to religious, mythical apocalypse etc, eschatologists study the probability of things that can have existential risk to our species).

In this episode eschatologist Phil Torres [1] claims that (according to some convincing estimates) humans living right now are a lot more likely to die due to a catastrophic event that can wipe out the entire species, compared to dying in a car crash. Since some of my relatives died in a car crash, I was scared of dying this way my entire life, and this put everything in such a weird perspective. As Hawking said, we're likely in the most dangerous part of the entire human history. If we don't get our shit together in the next few decades, our species will never see the next millenium.

Go listen to this episode. It's on Spotify. (I'm not in any way affiliated with that podcast, I just listen to it every once in a while)

[1]: https://twitter.com/Xriskology

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