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536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

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Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#131

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

ci5er wrote: post #114
pmiller2 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what sense have we “recovered” from supply chain disruptions? I go to the store and still routinely see empty shelves where TP should be; have experienced meat shortages in recent days; and stores are still rationing things like hand sanitizer (when you can find it), canned goods, meat, and rice.

IDK where you live (and I won't ask! because I respect privacy and stuff), but in central Texas (Austin) and most of the urban markets I have been to (HEB, Central Market, Randall's, Trader Joe's, all the regional BBQ joints), I don't think I have seen any disruption in anything the whole time, except TP, briefly hand-sanitizer and a pop in the price of milk. I'm guessing the first two (at least) were because of peop…

The Eastern supply chains are mostly restored but liquid soap, alcohol, Lysol, and other cleaners are unobtanium. Some frozen foods are still cleared out because nobody is eating out and stores haven't compensated for the demand.

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#132

Post by aksss »

seph-reed wrote: post #113
yummypaint wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also a good reason to leave fossil fuels in the ground and not just extract them as quickly as possible wherever we find them. It seems conceivable that we could eventually find ourselves thermodynamically unable to recover after a catastrophy like a big solar flare. Unfortunately there is no way for anyone to make money by being responsible in this way. We are effectively draining our planetary rainy day fund a…

> We are effectively draining our planetary rainy day fund and spending it on cocaine Not usually a fan of us vs them mentality, but your use of "we" here feels bad. Surely, it's all of us that use these resources, nobody on HN is self sufficient (please be the exception). But at the same time, most of us aren't getting much of the "cocaine" here, at least relatively. It would almost be reasonable to say " They are e…

You kidding me? We're all getting the coke. Just because you're not Scarface doesn't avoid the fact that all of us are awash in plastics, silicone, rare earth metals, concrete, steel, precious metals, alloys, goods from far flung lands, industrial agriculture and many assumptions about available services that rely on the same and ravenous upstream fossil fuel consumption. We (as human consumers) never had it so good, and if that luxury is unevenly distributed, the fact remains that the tide continues to lift all boats globally. You certainly benefit from the aggregate bounty society as a whole has reaped (enjoy that Starbucks!) and directly are living a better life today than someone of your station would have lived 300 years ago. I don't even know you in the least, but am comfortable making that statement categorically because the difference is global capabilities is that profound.

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#133

Post by alharith »

aksss wrote: post #124
yummypaint wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also a good reason to leave fossil fuels in the ground and not just extract them as quickly as possible wherever we find them. It seems conceivable that we could eventually find ourselves thermodynamically unable to recover after a catastrophy like a big solar flare. Unfortunately there is no way for anyone to make money by being responsible in this way. We are effectively draining our planetary rainy day fund a…

> There's no way for anyone to make money by being responsible Not just that, but there's no way to sustain the level of human development (and population) we currently have without continuing to feed the energy beast. Our daily burn rate on oil/gas/coal is so profoundly high, and growing, that a) nothing can fill the gap; and b) it can't be shut down without condemning further development (esp. in Africa, India and…

Nuclear. The answer always has been nuclear.

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#134

Post by aksss »

kortilla wrote: post #128
aksss wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no way for anyone to make money by being responsible Not just that, but there's no way to sustain the level of human development (and population) we currently have without continuing to feed the energy beast. Our daily burn rate on oil/gas/coal is so profoundly high, and growing, that a) nothing can fill the gap; and b) it can't be shut down without condemning further development (esp. in Africa, India and…

Or, you know, just use nuclear.

I mentioned nuclear. It is secondary to the conversion from coal to gas though in terms of near-term realized benefit.

Nuclear requires a lot of dereg and testing that will be decades out if we start today. This assumes the barriers of popular rejection can be overcome. China might pull it off, but I don't see the US radiating enthusiasm for it. But yeah, since few places on earth can take advantage of hydro, I don't see any long-term alternative to nuclear.

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#135

Post by yesplorer »

MannishMan wrote: post #73

I know this is pedantic, but based on the order of events in the article wouldn’t 543 be the worst year to be alive? By then you would have experienced the cumulative horror of starving and freezing through two volcanic events and watching a third to half of your friends and family die of plague. 536 would have a been frightening and confusing as the volcanic fog began to roll in, but you couldn’t know the terror of…

I agree with you, but I also think 536 could be considered worst because of the initial shock. But as other events roll in with time, people may become used to expecting the worst.

I'm thinking this way because of our current situation with the corona virus. Initially people were all into doing everything to protect themselves but as time goes in, we kind of get used to living our lives around the existence of the pandemic and the videos of people dropping dead in china aren't going around anymore.

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#136

Post by Symmetry »

pureliquidhw wrote: post #17

How susceptible are we to another catastrophic volcano eruption? After COVID-19 shut down supply chains, there were some problematic delays, but seems like we quickly recovered. If the entire planet's crops were wiped out, we're all just SOL if we don't get canned goods in time? If we had 12 months notice, could we as a planet get it together? 6 months? 3 months? Is there forecasting for volcanoes? (looks like yes: h…

I'm going to plug a charity here, Allfed, working to develop technologies to let us survive the loss of conventional agriculture for a period of years by working out efficient and economical ways to convert things like, e.g., dead trees into digestible calories and the plans to deploy them in the event of a large volcanic interruption or asteroid strike or nuclear exchange.

https://allfed.info/

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#137

Post by arcade79 »

lgl wrote: post #62

The 2010 eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull [0] was a small sample of the perturbations that a volcanic event can have on day to day lives. And it was a relatively small eruption. Anything much larger than that will most likely have devastating effects on modern society on pretty much all levels and it's not really a matter of "if" but "when". Besides eruptions, many other scarier events can cause huge shifts on…

It's less than 30 years since we had a much, much larger eruption than Eyjafjallajökull. Mount Pinatubo erupted one June 12th 1991. That was a VEI-6 eruption.

Eyjafjallajökull was only VEI-4.

Now, one can argue about how Eyjafjallajökull caused ashfall in most of Europe, while Pinatubo is in the Philippines, but given the extent of ashfall from Pinatubo ..

EDIT (forgot link): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_eruption_of_Mount_Pinatub...

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#138

Post by ci5er »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #131
ci5er wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK where you live (and I won't ask! because I respect privacy and stuff), but in central Texas (Austin) and most of the urban markets I have been to (HEB, Central Market, Randall's, Trader Joe's, all the regional BBQ joints), I don't think I have seen any disruption in anything the whole time, except TP, briefly hand-sanitizer and a pop in the price of milk. I'm guessing the first two (at least) were because of peop…

The Eastern supply chains are mostly restored but liquid soap, alcohol, Lysol, and other cleaners are unobtanium. Some frozen foods are still cleared out because nobody is eating out and stores haven't compensated for the demand.

Thanks. It's hard to get nation-wide reports by chain. All I see are pictures on social media of outraged people going: "Why don't we have any sock-eye salmon? And Look! The shelves are empty!".

Surely data are the aggregate set of anecdotes, but while I see a lot of spot anecdotes, I don't see much data.

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#139

Post by cgriswald »

bilegeek wrote: post #104
ativzzz wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To me this is the main reason that going multiplanetary or space habitat based is basically the only way to escape this inevitable doom I disagree with this. Leaving the Earth doesn't remove random acts of doom from happening, and in fact, they are more lethal in unfamiliar and hostile environments. If we do not figure out how to handle such black swan events on our home planet, we have no chance of handling them i…

That's the issue. If we can't handle the black swan events in time, we'll at least have a backup. Granted, this doesn't cover bigger black swan events like gamma ray bursts, where the entire solar system is screwed, but it'll at least help with Earthside apocalypse. The fact that we couldn't handle it is indeed incriminating against our abilities as a species, but as they say, perfect is the enemy of good.

It's not possible for a gamma ray burst to 'screw' the entire solar system. It's already an incredibly unlikely event to occur near enough to do damage. Then the beam would have to be directed in our direction. And the beam would have to essentially hit the solar system edge on or face on, but not at any other angle.

Even if all that happened, underground bases would be protected, as would above-ground or in-space habitats that happened to be protected either by the mass of the body they're on by virtue of 'facing away' from the GRB; or by virtue of being behind another body (e.g. Jupiter, the sun, some body they are orbitting) relative to the GRB. With space habitats, they may also be protected by virtue of already needing some level of protection against cosmic radiation; but that's highly speculative.

A GRB also wouldn't destroy the Earth. It would do a lot of damage to its ecosystems, but the Earth would be relatively safe again not terribly long after the event, even without human intervention. If we had the technology to colonize space, we could definitely recolonize the Earth, even in a worst case scenario where the entire ecosystem collapses.

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#140

Post by Symmetry »

Avalaxy wrote: post #36

Could we use this against global warming? Artificially put something in the atmosphere that bounces part of the sunlight back?

Many people have proposed putting sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere. It looks relatively easy and could potentially be within the means of even poorer countries like Bangladesh which have a lot to loose from rising sea levels. But we can't predict exactly how it would turn out and it would certainly make ocean acidifcation worse so it's very much a desperation play.
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