Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future • Hacker News Board

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#211

Post by ClumsyPilot » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 3:55 PM UTC

FeepingCreature wrote: post #202

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets imagine your are right. So if you go to a person on the street, and ask them: "are you happy to live through something like the black death, but slighly better"? and the responce is gonna be "yeah, that's fine. We should not take action to prevent that" Can you imagine the devastation it left behind? Also the problem with the comparison is that the plague is finished withing a decade once everyone has immunity o…

> So if you go to a person on the street, and ask them: "are you happy to live through something like the black death, but slighly better"? and the responce is gonna be "yeah, that's fine. We should not take action to prevent that" It's not on the same scale, but 7 million people have just died to a pandemic and there is certainly no universal agreement that massive restrictions were appropriate to prevent that . So…

> I don't think it's plausible at this point to speculate that climate change will even reduce the food production capability of the world at all

You are creating the impression you have not read anything on the subject at all

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-18/climate-c...

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#212

Post by s1artibartfast » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 3:57 PM UTC

ehnto wrote: post #207

s1artibartfast wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even that is gross hyperbole. Humans as species could survive even the most disastrous predictions, rendering entire continents uninhabited. The top level post is correct. It is a matter of minimizing suffering.

Which will have to be through remediation... I never said the world was coming to an end. I said we aren't likely to stop polluting, so we should get really good at remediating what we will have wrought.

Sure, it would be a good idea to do something. I'm just calling out "if we want to survive as a species we must do something about that“ as hyperbolic. This is a point made in thread you are responding in

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#213

Post by throwaway4aday » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 3:57 PM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #145

franciscop wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion the issue with the balance here is that no matter where you fall on the "climate scale belief" (except probably the most extreme of deniers), people consider anyone that thinks a better future than you is coming will be labelled a denier, while anyone who thinks a worse future than you think is coming is given a soft pass as just having stronger convictions. That unfortunately leaves the vast majority o…

The problem is that _any_ action is criticized as sacrificing prosperity, even though it often just sacrifices the prosperity of a small number of people.

That small group of people is in fact connected to the rest of the world's population by a chain of progress that eventually leads everyone through the same level of prosperity. By turning the head and thus the direction of progress downwards you are committing the rest of the population to at the very least never achieving any level of prosperity greater than that. In the middle you're dooming them to stagnation at their current level and at the worst you're causing all of us to regress to a lower level of prosperity AND an increase in our impact on the climate due to the inefficiencies that come along with that.

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#214

Post by weatherlite » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 4:06 PM UTC

trashtester wrote: post #204

weatherlite wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have way greater fear that war or similar conflicts may cause us to exterminate each other, or even that some day, AI will take over completely. It's not like the energy/resource crunch is a totally separate problem to war. Together with climate change it is only going to increase the likelihood for war. It's kinda already happening in the the Middle East / Africa (I'm saying kinda because it's not the only reaso…

> Are all fertilizers and material used renewable or are they coming out of finite earth resources? Nitrogen is about 75% of the earth's atmosphere and potassium and phosphorus make up 2.6 and 0.1% of the Earth's crust, so we have plenty of all of them. To turn them into most of the common fertilizers, we need energy (and water, which is plentiful for this purpose). And atoms don't go away (with the exception of atom…

Nitrogen is only one ingredient, what about the others phosporus and potassium? If it was so readily available why did the war in the Ukraine affect the fertilizers market? Also what about soil degradation...? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus In the top 5 phosphorus producers are China, Russia, Morocco and Jordan. Sounds super stable.

> Way before that happens, we should be able to use Thorium or fusion.

I hope we can but it's not a given and no one knows the likelihood. Bigger VC investments are finally being poured into energy but nuclear fission and fusion are not new concepts - we haven't been able to do anything with them at scale yet.

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#215

Post by adrianN » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 4:07 PM UTC

throwaway4aday wrote: post #213

adrianN wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that _any_ action is criticized as sacrificing prosperity, even though it often just sacrifices the prosperity of a small number of people.

That small group of people is in fact connected to the rest of the world's population by a chain of progress that eventually leads everyone through the same level of prosperity. By turning the head and thus the direction of progress downwards you are committing the rest of the population to at the very least never achieving any level of prosperity greater than that. In the middle you're dooming them to stagnation at…

Suppose we were in 1890 discussing how we need to get rid of horse manure in our cities and there were a hot debate on how this "horseless carriage" thing is highly experimental and threatens the livelihood of a whole supply chain around horses. As it turns out, you can get rid of manure and it does in fact make a lot of people poorer, but in the end it enables a lot more prosperity for future generations.

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#216

Post by jxramos » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 4:11 PM UTC

fallingknife wrote: post #144

jxramos wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't fathom this singular deposit of fossil fuels in the earth, are they truly some artifact of a huge die off of living creatures from centuries ago or is there some steady generation through time that replenishes and generates the crude oil beneath our feet? I'd like to learn more about where the fossil in fossil fuels comes from and just what sort of biomass quantity we're talking about and when on earth…

There is a steady generation of fossil fuels. It is many orders of magnitude slower than consumption, so basically modeling it as a fixed quantity is accurate.

aha, that's a pretty sharp conceptualization then, if it's being generated at too slow a rate we basically drain the reservoir before it can fill up and replenish.

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#217

Post by FeepingCreature » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 4:19 PM UTC

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #211

FeepingCreature wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if you go to a person on the street, and ask them: "are you happy to live through something like the black death, but slighly better"? and the responce is gonna be "yeah, that's fine. We should not take action to prevent that" It's not on the same scale, but 7 million people have just died to a pandemic and there is certainly no universal agreement that massive restrictions were appropriate to prevent that . So…

> I don't think it's plausible at this point to speculate that climate change will even reduce the food production capability of the world at all You are creating the impression you have not read anything on the subject at all https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-18/climate-c...

I agree that it's likely for climate change to cause harvest failures in existing crop regions.

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#218

Post by aeternum » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 4:20 PM UTC

giraffe_lady wrote: post #78

aeternum wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also if we really value life, we should probably optimize for total lives lived. The universe will not last forever and entire galaxies are being lost to both the cosmic horizon and blackholes at an alarming rate. For some reason Earth seems to be the only planet with life, so every second we spend without making life interplanetary we are snuffing out an unfathomable number of future human and animal lives.

Something about this reminds me of the authority anti-abortion activists bestow upon themselves. It's easy to speak for the unborn because they cannot speak for themselves and will not contradict you. Surprising though, how neatly the interests of the far future unborn align with those of the wealthy and powerful today. Ah well, just a coincidence I'm sure.

How does anti-abortion benefit the wealthy?

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#219

Post by jxramos » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 5:12 PM UTC

Brometheus wrote: post #161

jxramos wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't fathom this singular deposit of fossil fuels in the earth, are they truly some artifact of a huge die off of living creatures from centuries ago or is there some steady generation through time that replenishes and generates the crude oil beneath our feet? I'd like to learn more about where the fossil in fossil fuels comes from and just what sort of biomass quantity we're talking about and when on earth…

If you're interested in the historical process, personally I like the videos of PBS Eons a lot: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pbs+eons+coal

This was was pretty interesting with nice animations "History's Most Powerful Plants" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pLQwa6SyZc), but it's more presenting conclusions and theories of mechanisms than how those conclusions were arrived at. I recall hearing similar things without such nice imagery or focusing on a particular plant as a kid but where's the adult explanation that has all the caveats and messy parts of the story that don't line up and all that. I've never seen or heard that part.

They mention certain bacteria not being present to breakdown the plant matter of that special tree, but what about fungus, I would think fungus has been around a pretty long time. There's something very hand-wavy and too tidy about it all. I guess one thing is known is that these are carbon based materials and where does carbon primarily come from and how did it get way down in the bottom layers of the earth is a big question. I think today we'd identify the atmosphere, but it would be surprising if it was the other way around, if carbon mostly came from the earth and got released up as CO2 somehow. But CO2 is very stable, I think we'd expect the dominant source of an element to be all bound up in its most stable forms.

I'm curious too how deep down do oil wells go. This hit has some fascinating real world depths apparently. Hydraulic fracturing reaches depths ranging from 5,000 feet to 20,000 feet. https://www.petro-online.com/news/fuel-for-thought/13/breaki....

I'm curious next how much oil can be extracted from a well and how we could back track to that being some percentage of some originating mass and if the two things match up to some realistic numbers with our experience for how much mass one finds in a forest today, etc.

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#220

Post by diputsmonro » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 5:56 PM UTC

FeepingCreature wrote: post #139

actually_a_dog wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not to be a buzz kill but things have been getting better. Past performance does not guarantee future results. In fact, what this article is saying is that mathematically, our future results are practically guaranteed to be worse than they have been in the past. I don't find your comment at all persuasive because you have not even attempted to grapple with this issue presented in the article.

No, but past performance does provide evidence, and in the outside view, "no really, this really is the time where we're growing too much and are gonna collapse" has not been true yet. Will it happen eventually? It has to. Will this be the one? Probably not. Are we close to the limits where it'll actually occur? Probably not.

Did... did you read the article you're commenting on?