Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

sciencemag.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 365 posts

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

#191

Post by seph-reed »

simonh wrote: post #180
seph-reed wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that things have gotten better over time, but how can you be so smug about it? The amount of hoarding, infighting, and extortion has been disgusting. We're advancing as slow as species seemingly could short of completely falling apart and destroying their Earth, and even that's in question right now. If we did things the way I'm speaking of, I guarantee you we'd have all of these things and more. Going slow a…

You’re largely right, we definitely need to move sharply in a more sustainable direction. Income inequality is a growing problem. However your assertion up thread that we in general don’t benefit is incredibly naive. I think you’re conflating disagreement with that position with disagreement with a whole host of utterly unrelated issues.

> we in general don’t benefit is incredibly naive

I suppose my relativity isn't from zero, but instead a sense of neutral pace. If I'm on a trek towards better lands, I don't benefit from a broken leg, but I still make progress.

To me, the concept that we're perpetually slowed down by the selfish behavior of those who generally do nothing more than seek power for themselves means we don't benefit.

I don't think there's anything that could stop humanity from moving forwards, so to say we benefit from impatient selfish jerk offs who cut the line, to build walls, and then extort resources from everyone trying to move forwards is... well, they paid a lot of money to put a nicely spinned narrative out on that.

How thankful we all should be to have been sold advancement. :)

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

#192

Post by aksss »

seph-reed wrote: post #158
aksss wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

EDIT: This post is angry. I say my words more clearly below. > living a better life today than someone of your station would have lived 300 years ago > We (as human consumers) never had it so good You couldn't possibly understand how much better community and and a sense purpose is to the life we're living. The fact that we become more and more isolated, more and more lied to, more and more defeated and yet: you thin…

I think you're mistaking my statements for a personal religious dogma. I'm just telling you the way the world is. We may or may not agree on the prescription for the world's ills, but it's irrelevant.

You're assuming consumption and community are mutually exclusive. They are not. Plenty of examples to be found to show they are not dependent (10, 01, 11, 00).

You ask why any of this is necessary to get these goods. I assume by "this" you mean the fossil fuel industry. It is necessary because as a high density energy source it has no competitive alternative. It's literally the best fuel source mankind has found in the strict terms of transportability and output relative to mass. Civilization's capabilities have grown in parallel with the improvement of its energy sources. Decreasing available energy means decreasing (or ceasing) growth/development. Do you want to be the one to tell China, India and Africa that they can't develop further?

Things we imagine are still constrained by physical reality. Technological progress for the next 100 years will still have unbreakable dependencies on high density energy. Unless a miracle happens.

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

#193

Post by pfdietz »

unFou wrote: post #187
pfdietz wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making an invalid argument there. The current generation mix in France and Germany reflects decisions made up to decades in the past, when relative prices were very different from what they are now. Back in the 20th century when France was building reactors, renewables were much more expensive. What was the low cost option then is not what it is now. Going forward, even France is having a very hard time buildi…

Sure, so that partly explains why electricity costs so much more in Germany than France. But for a lay person (ie me), I can't help but compare the carbon emissions and air quality between the two countries, and attribute the difference to fossil-fuel vs nuclear power plants? Also, I always assumed the lower renewable costs have come from economies of scale due mainly to China exploding it's energy production (which…

China certainly invested to drive down costs, but Germany provided a market for several critical years about a decade ago, to get that ball rolling.

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

#194

Post by nemosaltat »

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…

If you haven’t read “Magicians of the Gods” you might enjoy it. There’s some stuff that’s a little “out there” but the general idea of a cyclic cataclysmic event with a ~12K year periodicity seems to have some merit.

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

#195

Post by Gibbon1 »

pfdietz wrote: post #183
airstrike wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a summary of the video, posted as one of the top comments on YT: https://sundaynewsletter.com/february-video-summaries/vaclav...

Nowhere does he make the case that 100% renewables is impossible. It is, of course, a tall order, but maintaining and growing a global energy infrastructure OF ANY KIND is a tall order. Smil has argued that energy transitions happen only slowly, but I think he's being misled because the current rate of cost decline in renewables is unprecedented in its speed, as is the willingness of increasing numbers of countries t…

Second factor is historically new energy sources required rolling out different technologies to utilize it. And you often couldn't switch back and forth. Renewables are generally about electric power and electron is an electron and we already have fully built out distribution networks.

And you're right about regulatory pressure being a big motivator.

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

#196

Post by pfdietz »

sethammons wrote: post #107
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…

The idea is not to avoid black swan events entirely, it is to have pockets that are missed by a given event. Earth goes cold? Well, good thing the moon base can preserve technology and knowledge for a hundred years. Solar flare? Good thing we have the under-ice base on Europa. Europa explodes? Good thing that we are still on Earth. Now if they all happen at the same time, like the sun dying, then that is why you want…

What event would leave the Earth less habitable than the Moon already is?

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

#197

Post by twic »

indigo945 wrote: post #182
LukeEF wrote: post #166

I don't mean to be too precise, but the article is slightly undermined by the claim in the graphic that the 543 Justinian plague hurried the collapse of the eastern Roman Empire. The 'Eastern' Roman Empire fell in 1453 when the walls of Constantinople were breached by the Ottomans. Very difficult to claim that the Romans fell in the 6th Century. I mean nearly 500 years later Basil is rolling back into Syria on the ba…

The precise date of the fall of the Roman Empire -- and the point where it became Byzantium -- is a subject of debate. There is no unanimous agreement that referring to Constantinople as the Roman Empire is much more useful than, say, calling the Holy Roman Empire "Roman". Whatever your personal views may be on this matter, there indeed are some scholars that date the fall of the Roman Empire on the failure of Justin…

> There is no unanimous agreement that referring to Constantinople as the Roman Empire is much more useful than, say

Finland!

https://imgur.com/gallery/eNuUdTd

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

#198

Post by koheripbal »

chadlavi wrote: post #11

The worst year to be alive _so far_

Yep. Personally, I think the steady proliferation of nuclear weapons is going to snap at some point with some nut using them.

God help us all.

Humans are stupid. We think that because we survived the Cold War, that it won't happen. ...but if you read the history - it very nearly did happen a couple of times. ...it's only a matter of time.

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

#199

Post by pfdietz »

tastyfreeze wrote: post #102
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although it's worth asking, did the eruption affect agricultural output in Iceland? Maybe modern farming is just resilient enough against volcanic eruptions, as it is against all the other things that used to cause famines.

Modern farming is not resilient in any way. Production is centralized, mechanized and heavily reliant on outside inputs. Global trade lessens the degree to which a regional crop failure affects a population. Smaller, distributed, local farms lessen the reliance on trade but still very much rely on our gracious host to provide clean rain and sun. The only way to escape that is immense amounts of electricity for indoor…

The huge resilience is the overcapacity due to growing feed for livestock.

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

#200

Post by unFou »

kmonsen wrote: post #122
pogimabus wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Becoming multiplanetary IS handling it, just not in a necessarily "ideal" way. The problem is that we don't want to have the reset button hit and have every human in existence set back to the stone age technologically; having multiple self sustaining human societies on multiple planets mitigates that risk in a major way since the likelihood of a disaster being so large that it resets technology on both/all planets is…

The problem is that it is at least 10x easier to fix Earth than to terraform Mars, and all the problems we have on Earth are going to be there as well.

That might be the point. Few people are going to bother spending resources to fix a problem that doesn't exist. And by the time such a problem arises on Earth (inhospitable living conditions due to e.g. supervolcano), we might not have the resources to fix it. Whereas terraforming Mars creates the incentives to develop solutions while we have abundant resources, which means that we have a fix ready and waiting if something catastrophic happens on earth.
Post reply on HN