The Year 2512 • Hacker News Board

Re: The Year 2512

#91

Post by guard-of-terra » Sun, Nov 18, 2012, 8:26 PM UTC

wtracy wrote: post #86

guard-of-terra wrote: post #31

Is solar shade so much hardrer to launch than retooling all the biology to live at 45C and still dealing with the world that sucks? Launching a large slightly opaque mirror to shade select aread of Earth does not seem impossible to me. It seems he bet everything on climate being out of control.

Simple answer: Tragedy of the commons. If your nation consists of 1/6th of the world's population, you bear 1/6th the burden of the global warming triggered by your fossil fuel use, but get 100% of the energy output from your fossil fuel use. Conversely, if you unilaterally decide to build a giant shade for the earth, you foot 100% of the bill yet only receive 1/6th of the overall benefits.

You can usually arrange in at least one ally (and now you're 2/6) and then tax other powers for premium features of the solar shade if they want them (that is, climate control).

Re: The Year 2512

#92

Post by jabits » Sun, Nov 18, 2012, 8:35 PM UTC

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #45

cletus wrote: post #11

It is of course hard to predict 500 years out. Hell, it's hard to predict 20 years out. Did anyone really see the world of today even 20 years ago? But I'll take my own fanciful stab. I don't foresee either an energy or a climate crisis. There is a hard limit on how expensive energy gets because at some point you can turn totally renewable energy into a fuel of some sort, ideally taking CO2 out of the atmosphere to d…

> The bigger problem (IMHO) is going to be certain elements and metals that aren't so easily replaced. I agree with the author that getting certain elements from space is going to be economically tricky (rather than technologically tricky) compared to how cheap it is to pull stuff out of the ground. I don't think this is a real issue. Expensive metals are recycled extremely efficiently even today. This is only going…

Do you really feel that going all over the planet and turning the crust to sand is a viable long-term solution? Many mining engineer types and even geologists see no problem with this approach, but consider Appalachian coal: just because they can "put that mountain back together just as before", the result is far from the original. It's like the policy of "moving" wetlands to ease development in my area; almost looks ok, but the result is a local bio-disaster.

Re: The Year 2512

#93

Post by gus_massa » Sun, Nov 18, 2012, 11:54 PM UTC

> modified ribosomes that can assemble polypeptides using non-standard aminoacids (presumably coded for using four-base codons)

This prediction is a little too much. Theoretically it is possible to use a four-base codons, but I'm almost sure that it is extremely difficult to make all the changes in every part of the process. For example, to change the number of bases in a codon, you must change the number of bases in the reciprocal part of the tRNA. But the shape of the tRNA depends on the length, and it seems to be very difficult to change this without breaking the other functions.

It's much easier just to change the meaning of some codons (there are 64, and only 20 codified aminoacid + a termination mark), and even the mitochondrias and some estrange living organism have small changes in the genetic code.

Re: The Year 2512

#94

Post by lmm » Mon, Nov 19, 2012, 4:47 PM UTC

pourush wrote: post #49

I'll write this before I read the article: Assumptions: I think a lot of what we "know" is going to be wrong. It's just a thing which seems likely to me. Not in a "things fall up now" sort of way, though a little of that, since the laws of physics have been revised quite a bit, and I don't see that trend stopping. But more in a "We were pretty much crazy to think these things" way. You know about alchemy's position p…

>History: We'll be better at this. Assuming historians haven't mysteriously vanished as a profession, I think we're going to know more about history in the future, and knowing more about the present in the future. As a collective, I mean, not every individual.

Pretty much a given.

>Screwing the world up: Will happen a lot less. We gained raw power in the last 500 years, we're going to learn wisdom now. Or die. That's a possibility, its been discussed. But I'm assuming we survive.

Not entirely convinced. Keeping the world a place humans can live in, sure, but maybe people will just get more comfortable with accelerating change. My perception is it's the older generation that cares more about preserving the environment, both natural and artificial. When you can synthesize any kind of organism you like, who cares if a bunch of existing species go extinct?

>Culture: Will have finally recovered from British expansionism. There will be lots of strong local cultures again.

Unlikely in this age of instant communication. I think we might see lots of subcultures, but globally distributed, in a way that's already happening to some extent with the likes of, well, HN.

Re: The Year 2512

#95

Post by Gravityloss » Mon, Nov 19, 2012, 8:45 PM UTC

JVIDEL wrote: post #82

OP makes a number of mistakes about the past. For starters it wasn't Portuguese conquistadores who descended on South America 500 years ago but the Spanish. The Portuguese had more important operations in Asia at the time. It wasn't until the 17th that the Portuguese really started to exploit part of what today is known as Brazil, part because a chunk of Brazil used to be part of the Spanish Empire, not the Portugues…

One problem with geoengineering is that it doesn't neatly negate effects of increased CO2 - it's hard to predict exactly what will happen. If we triple CO2 and install space glasses that refract sunlight so that it misses the earth, what will happen? Maybe the refraction and CO2's radiative forcing will cancel itself at some latitudes on some days. But in many other places and climate conditions, they won't.

For relative climate stability, by far the technically simplest and most straightforward way would be just to stop burning coal and stop projects like tar sands and oil shale.