I feel like this is impossible to mention the end of times™ without reading a bit about {100 rabbits}(https://100r.co/site/home.html) and their journey on a boat with small ecological impact in mind. A closely related read is of course {CollapseOS}(http://collapseos.org/), the OS written in Forth.
Programming in the Apocalypse
111–120 of 301 posts
Re: Programming in the Apocalypse
#112I agree that we need to plan for climate adaptation (preparing for predictable problems) and resilience (preparing for unpredictable problems), but I have a few kneejerk responses: - Although it's looking increasingly unlikely that we can avert climate disaster, we can never give up. For example, 8 degrees of warming would be much worse than 4 degrees of warming, and could mean the difference between human extinction…
I expect that people will still write software because it needed and pays well. However, the jobs that people get paid to do could become rather different. Consider what happens in a war. The people working on drones aren't just hobbyists, they're part of the war effort. Wars are not good for the environment, either. So my guess is that, if it gets really bad, these jobs will focus more on short-term needs. Are peopl…
>I expect that people will still write software because it needed and pays well.
Both "it's needed" and "pays well" are the case now - not necessarily the case at that point. So they can't be used as arguments that people "will still write software" (it would be taking for granted what must be proven).
Re: Programming in the Apocalypse
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
> human extinction and the mere collapse of our civilization How do you imagine human extinction being an outcome? It seems to me that the worst case scenario is large loss of population which would decrease greenhouse gas output. There would still be some increase in temperature even once we stop emitting, but wouldn't people in colder climates still survive?
There's some fairly absurd doomerism going on in the "climate catastrophe tomorrow" camp where climate change will (somehow) turn earth into a barren rock and we're inches away from triggering a self-reinforcing climate resonance cascade of unforeseen consequences. It's of course a very urgent issue, but I think exaggerating it until it becomes a threat to "all life on earth" levels is a) dishonest b) does nothing to…
The temperature and co2 levels have been much higher in the past. The earth has been much more tropical as well as an ice world. Humans can adapt to change quite effectively - we did invent air conditioning, as well as the land of The Netherlands which is reclaimed and existing beneath sea level.
What is the greatest tragedy is how much worry and anxiety climate change causes. The earth is not a thinking thing - “Mother Nature” is not a being. The planet will exist and doesn’t care about humans. A century after the last human lives nature will swallow up almost everything we built. Earth exists for humans because we live here and make it so. We will adapt to whatever climate exists.
Re: Programming in the Apocalypse
#114“we have to accept immense hits to the global economy and the resulting poverty, suffering and impact. The scope of the change required is staggering. We've never done something like this” This is an insanely extreme claim with very little evidence to back it up, if we watch this unfold at the hands of global leadership please know that it didn’t have to be this way and somebody is taking advantage of all of us for p…
Yeah this narrative is troubling. I’ve read stuff from IPCC contributors who compare climate change to Covid, especially in the case of people living in the first world. Things will get harder and the shape of our lives will change, but “civilizational collapse” is a term from people gleefully imagining the end of the world like they would a zombie apocalypse.
this article has bought into a lot of narratives of doomsaying and the "real" causes of it. It complains about coal consumption in India and China, conveniently linked to a reuters article.
> With China and India not even starting the process of coal draw-down yet...
It is fine to assume the Global South is trending towards further coal usage. Maybe the developed world can help them transition to something sustainable like nuclear power.
There has to be an element of truth in Michael Moore's extreme Planet of the Humans.
At least Amazon's Eating our way to Extinction [1] makes a convincing argument against deforestation and meat consumption trends. But the West is continuing to sell the global south a lifestyle (foreign to them) of extreme meat eating, among other unsustainable consumption lifestyle.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Eating-Our-Extinction-Kate-Winslet/dp...
Re: Programming in the Apocalypse
#115Raise your hand if you would be willing to lower your standard of living, voluntarily, in order to stave off global warming. Sell your car. Stop buying anything made with plastic. Stop using electricity.
I don't see many hands.
Re: Programming in the Apocalypse
#116Raise your hand if you would be willing to lower your standard of living, voluntarily, in order to stave off global warming. Sell your car. Stop buying anything made with plastic. Stop using electricity. I don't see many hands.
I think a lot of people would actually be willing to do some of this if, and only if, it came with a basic income.
Re: Programming in the Apocalypse
#117For me, the big story is going to be supply-chain breakup and de-globalization. The author touches on this a bit, but completely misses the implication. The programming languages that will best survive the apocalypse are the ones that can run on chips that best survive the apocalypse! I think that there're be a big turn toward highly-efficient compiled languages: Rust and Go are well-positioned for this, C will still…
I could not imagine running rustc on a Rust program, let alone building a 200-crate dependency graph or all of rustc, on a 2000s car entertainment system microcontroller.
Exactly. Rust is actually a loser in this due to the lack of a fleshed out stdlib.
Re: Programming in the Apocalypse
#118I agree that we need to plan for climate adaptation (preparing for predictable problems) and resilience (preparing for unpredictable problems), but I have a few kneejerk responses: - Although it's looking increasingly unlikely that we can avert climate disaster, we can never give up. For example, 8 degrees of warming would be much worse than 4 degrees of warming, and could mean the difference between human extinction…
> human extinction and the mere collapse of our civilization How do you imagine human extinction being an outcome? It seems to me that the worst case scenario is large loss of population which would decrease greenhouse gas output. There would still be some increase in temperature even once we stop emitting, but wouldn't people in colder climates still survive?
There are a large number of things that could kill everyone, but I think the top threat will always be ourselves. It's very easy to imagine some resource war degenerating into a nuclear war. A few self-induced crises like that on top of the climate crisis would be enough to finish the survivors (who might have made it if the only danger were the environment).
Think of the world population's size and global distribution as hedges against disaster: the fewer people who live, in fewer habitable places, the more likely it is that some disaster will affect everyone remaining and leave no one unaffected. We have fewer rolls of the dice, and there may come a day where they're all snake eyes.
This why many are excited about the idea of "making humanity an interplanetary species", as I once was until I realized how hard it would be to make a working biosphere anywhere else, given how bad we are at maintaining one that already works. If we don't figure out how to save this biosphere, we won't have enough time to make more.
Re: Programming in the Apocalypse
#119Raise your hand if you would be willing to lower your standard of living, voluntarily, in order to stave off global warming. Sell your car. Stop buying anything made with plastic. Stop using electricity. I don't see many hands.
I would be more than happy to give up almost everything if it would stop climate change, but unfortunately even if I make all those changes, everybody else will continue driving cars, so it seems my personal choices have nothing to do with whether global warming happens or not. The way around this is collective (government) action to guarantee everyone will participate, but for a variety of reasons we don't have the political will to make that happen. Besides, I'm not convinced individuals' actions are to blame for the majority of climate change -- I'm not an expert but I'm under the impression that corporate / industrial energy usage is the majority of the problem.
Re: Programming in the Apocalypse
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
> human extinction and the mere collapse of our civilization How do you imagine human extinction being an outcome? It seems to me that the worst case scenario is large loss of population which would decrease greenhouse gas output. There would still be some increase in temperature even once we stop emitting, but wouldn't people in colder climates still survive?
True human extinction doesn't seem plausible, but in a worst-case scenario we can imagine a > 99% drop in population, roughly to what is sustainable without technology, in a dramatically harsher world. ("Without"? Well, nobody today knows how to build a cast-iron plough.) I don't believe this scenario is likely. For one thing we're not headed for 8C of heating; for another, technological change seems to be coming jus…
We probably aren't headed for 8 degrees of heating, based on what we know today. There are a lot of "out there" scenarios that don't make it into sober, conservative scientific reports from the IPCC, because they recognize how important it is that people take their warnings seriously, and they don't want to mention anything they don't have very clear evidence for already.
One of my "favorites" is the "world without clouds" scenario, which for the record, I consider unlikely, but is horrifying to imagine: https://www.quantamagazine.org/cloud-loss-could-add-8-degree...
What we're dealing with are "unknown unknowns": what tipping points might exist that we don't know about, that might result in more warming faster than expected based on today's science? We shouldn't take those kind of existential risks.