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

#261

Post by brutusborn » Tue, Sep 27, 2022, 6:25 AM UTC

svieira wrote: post #260

brutusborn wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to follow this logic but I think it is limited by the fact that using desire as a guide for meaning is a cognition that can be overruled by other congitions. E.g. a religious person may decide to forego actions related to sexual desire because their philosophy follows some theology with rules on sexuality. You could argue that the religious devotion is just a more fundamental desire, but I think this leads to…

I'm with Aristotle - "all men desire happiness". Nothing else is desired for its own sake , but always for the sake of "happiness". That said, I don't think that knowing that happiness is what we desire tells us very much. We need to go deeper or wider and learn more about the world and ourselves in order to answer the question "in what does our happiness consist". In other words, we need to examine what we have rece…

I agree on the importance of exploration and introspection to find meaning.

However, your interpretation of existence as a 'gift' is simply your own cognition, unrelated to the reality of experience. The tail is wagging the dog here. The duality of giving and receiving are just two linked concepts. If 'you' didn't create the universe, 'someone' must have! But then who made them? The buck has to stop somewhere, or maybe it doesn't exist.

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

#262

Post by ben_w » Tue, Sep 27, 2022, 10:08 PM UTC

adastra22 wrote: post #239

ben_w wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"For most crops the saturation point will be reached at about 1,000–1,300 ppm under ideal circumstances" - http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/crops/facts/00-077.htm "They found that if the outdoor CO2 concentrations do rise to 930 ppm, that would nudge the indoor concentrations to a harmful 1,400 ppm. … In fact, at 1,400 ppm, CO2 concentrations may decrease basic decision-making ability by 25%, and complex strategic…

Ok I didn't mean to imply maximally ideal. 300-400ppm CO2 would be a tremendous boon to both agriculture and most biodiverse wild ecosystems (e.g. jungles & forest tundra, not deserts). It would also warm polar regions more than it does equatorial regions, making northern Alaska, Canada, Russia, and Scandinavia more tolerable to large-scale, year-round human habitation, as well as Antarctica and Greenland (the result…

300 ppm is the normal interglacial high, we’ve been above 400 ppm since about 2015: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/

So yes, going down to that would be an improvement ;)

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

#263

Post by throwaway4aday » Thu, Sep 29, 2022, 12:54 PM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #252

throwaway4aday wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big difference here is that horses were nearly exclusively used for transportation. Fossil fuels currently provide something like 80% of all the energy used. So if you want your analogy to be accurate then you'd have to be back in 1890 saying "Ok, we're going to get rid of horses AND fossil fuels". Personally, I do think that burning oil derivatives is a waste and I would like to see it replaced where possible wi…

So we should pay now to have nuclear power in the future? Impossible , this lowers our prosperity! /s

Investment is not the same as sacrifice. Sacrifice means to destroy something for the sake of something else. When you say we should sacrifice the prosperity of a few for the good of the many (paraphrasing, this is what I interpreted your original comment to mean) then that implies we permanently reduce the prosperity of some group of people. Spending money to build more nuclear power plants is instead a productive use of that time/effort/money that will return on that investment if not with dividends from the sale of the power then with increased productivity and economic output made possible by a larger energy supply.

We know that nuclear power works, it's capable of producing massive amounts of electricity and powering whole countries anywhere we are able to build plants, output doesn't vary based on forces that are outside of our control, uranium is abundant and there are hundreds of years of estimated reserves in the ground. That is a plain and simple case for it to be a bridge to a future where we can produce excess and uninterrupted power using solar, preferably space based arrays that don't use up land, won't be affected by weather and produce power at night. Even better, it might be a bridge to fusion power, having more nuclear physicists and technicians around would surely speed up progress.

I'm averse to reducing prosperity for anyone because it has a very non-zero chance of us never recovering to a position where we can continue to increase prosperity for all. Put plainly, creating energy poverty in the West has a good chance of knocking us into a dark age where little to no progress is made and even regression may happen which, to your concern, would increase CO2 output and worsen climatic effects.

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

#264

Post by llsf » Wed, Oct 05, 2022, 8:01 PM UTC

verinus wrote: post #103

llsf wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would law of physics kick in ? If it takes thousands of years to produce oil/gas/coal, and months to extract and consume it... then what political solution do have ? My concern is that we might hit an energy crisis (Russia/Ukraine is just the tip of the iceberg). We need oil/gas/coal for everything around us (clothes, transportation, heat, cement, iron, energy). For energy we could use nuclear for baseline, and some…

and as far as I read nuclear fuel isn't endless either...

"The fission of 1 g of uranium or plutonium per day liberates about 1 MW. This is the energy equivalent of 3 tons of coal or about 600 gallons of fuel oil per day, which when burned produces approximately 1/4 tonne of carbon dioxide." https://www2.lbl.gov/abc/wallchart/chapters/14/1.html

Uranium is everywhere, enriching (separate 235 from 238) is a mechanical process (no chemistry involved).

"Uranium is a naturally occurring element with an average concentration of 2.8 parts per million in the Earth's crust. Traces of it occur almost everywhere. It is more abundant than gold, silver or mercury, about the same as tin and slightly less abundant than cobalt, lead or molybdenum." https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

And its "combustion" is carbon free. Nuclear power plants works exactly like coal or gas ones. A big boiler. Water is used to "slow" the neutrons to keep the reaction going, and also use to transport the heat.

Nuclear technology and engineering is quite impressive.

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

#265

Post by svieira » Sun, Oct 09, 2022, 1:42 AM UTC

brutusborn wrote: post #261

svieira wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with Aristotle - "all men desire happiness". Nothing else is desired for its own sake , but always for the sake of "happiness". That said, I don't think that knowing that happiness is what we desire tells us very much. We need to go deeper or wider and learn more about the world and ourselves in order to answer the question "in what does our happiness consist". In other words, we need to examine what we have rece…

I agree on the importance of exploration and introspection to find meaning. However, your interpretation of existence as a 'gift' is simply your own cognition, unrelated to the reality of experience. The tail is wagging the dog here. The duality of giving and receiving are just two linked concepts. If 'you' didn't create the universe, 'someone' must have! But then who made them? The buck has to stop somewhere, or may…

That's right, the buck _has_ to stop somewhere. What else might we discover about this uncaused cause?