I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]

> Still. Moving now to North Europe because maybe 30 years from now you'll have to move? Why not wait it out and see if you have to move?

The older you are when you move, the harder it is. New language, new culture, new laws, disconnection from your old friends who took a different path. And less time to contribute to a state pension — a skilled 30-year-old can be a welcome addition to a workforce, a 60-year-old might get their state pension before citizenship — which may make them less inclined to accept you. Especially if you're moving because there's a huge global disaster and they need more workers rather than pensioners.

That said, the economics may radically change over the next 30 years; while I think the current humanoid robot workers are a bit gimmicky at best, and that they'll only be ready for autonomous use about 5-10 years after no-steering-wheel-included self-driving cars[0], the general trend of automation they represent is significant and began long before they were able to walk on legs.

> The whole thing is one huge speculation. There's no telling if Finland will be secure since its quite weak militarily. And we we don't really know what's gonna happen - we have models with very differing scenarios.

Indeed; very little is predictable even 10 years out in geopolitics. The UK was never going to leave the EU in 2012, but gone it was a decade later. The USSR was indomitable in 1984 and gone in 1994. 30 years? That's the gap between the height of the British Empire and the WW2 home guard starting with arm bands instead of uniforms, and being armed with a mix of privately owned guns and various improvised weapons.

For the environment, what happens depends on how people react to the models that exist. We may well completely eliminate CO2 emissions on that time scale — the technology is already known and in deployment for how to do this for electricity and land transport, it's being demonstrated for iron and other metal oxide refinement, but there are plenty of things to work on before we say we can manage this without also removing CO2 from the air.

But on the other hand, we may squander the remaining time, just like we squandered the last 30 years.

[0] More specifically, when the energy cost of the computing power needed for sufficient quality real-time vision reduces to ~10W; the computers Tesla currently use are supposedly 100W, but as Tesla's autopilot is not yet rated as a full-replacement for human drivers I must assume that a sufficient AI would also be more power-hungry. As 100W is very little power, Tesla (and others) might brute force this problem by having a bigger computer that uses e.g. 1kW rather than keeping the power use to 100W and waiting for a better computer. 1kW is my guess for the maximum that anyone would be willing to use in a car-based AI.

How dead Moore's Law is or isn't depends on what you're asking, I think it's still working for Joules-per-operation which is what matters here, and every factor of 10 improvement needed is about 5 years at Moore's Law rates.

The only people that will use violence to reduce emissions will be western trust fund activist kids desperately searching for meaning.

>Hmm. I think a lot of people who were silent about their positions on this topic are much more inclined to say them out loud now, even on websites like HN.

I'm not sure, HN has always been welcoming to contrarian views unless it is something particularly nasty like racism.

If I could point to anything it would be the fact that we are getting close to an election in the US.

How were you able to board the right plane if you thought you were flying to Portland?

> Mariana Trench

I mean, you might as well quote me a list of your very personal niche hobbies and the importance of keeping them up as some kind of tradition humanity needs to uphold.

I don't think such a line of argument holds very tight in the grand scheme of things.

To others, enjoying the company of their own children and grandchildren (some of the most commonly shared joys across people, in contrast to niche interests) are far higher up there on their list of priorities of things that make our existence worthwile.

Likewise, utilitarianism won't get you far since the other person must first subscribe to it as a good idea. I don't care about "the greatest good for the majority" in some kind of vague sense whatever it means, if subjectively it means no good to me.