7 ms·

This is what keeps me up at night. If we don't find an efficient way to extract CO2 and methane from the atmosphere, I fear that mankind might go extinct.

erikpukinskis 10y ago
Mankind is absurdly resilient. We are like rats or cockroaches but a hundred times more adaptable. Billions of people could die. We might lose 99% of species. But human extinction is out of the question. We could live in bubbles of air under the ocean huddled around nuclear reactors if we needed to. Roaches couldn't do that (without our help).
- pier25 10y ago
  > Billions of people could die. We might lose 99% of species. You make it sound like this wasn't a huge deal.
- Red_Tarsius 10y ago
  But our scientific knowledge could be lost, maybe forever. The survivors may also forget the concepts of free speech, human rights, the separation of faith and state. What are the chances that we rediscover all of this? Such thoughts require a minimum threshold of resources. But climate change might disrupt our sources of food production.
  - erikpukinskis 10y ago
    A hundred million people with smartphones will be able to preserve that. Try to come up with a realistic scenario that kills the last 100m humans. I've never seen one. You'd become at least internet famous if you could do it.
    - vacri 10y ago
      The humans that survive such an event will not be the smartphone engineers, but the subsistence farmers.
      - erikpukinskis 10y ago
        You don't need smartphone engineers just repair techs. We already have billions of smartphones, millions of which will last a century with proper care. There are palm pilots that still work today. But also as the world collapses a thousand motivated people could and would relocate a basic computer fab to a safe location. Guaranteed.
        TeMPOraL 10y ago
        > millions of which will last a century with proper care I strongly doubt that. Electronics are not designed to last that long; components age. Also, planned obsolescence is king these days.
        enraged_camel 10y ago
        How are you going to charge those devices reliably and consistently? What knowledge-bases will you be able to connect to with no Internet? Our technology stack is like a house of cards. Smartphones are at the top. There's no way they will be of any use in the event that the foundation and the walls collapse.
        ajmurmann 10y ago
        There is a great short story with the unfortunate name "The man who came early". It's about a American GI who is stationed at Keflavik during the cold war and somehow gets thrown back in time to the Icelandic saga age. He wants to give people there so kind of technology that's much simpler than a smart phone and it all fails. Even something simple as gun powder doesn't get off the ground. They don't know how to get Salpeter. Even if the had the powder they would be missing so much technology to make the guns. As the main character says "you haven't the tools to make the tools to make the tools". Also resources.
        10y ago
    - rleigh 10y ago
      How long would smartphones be able to preserve knowledge? When you can no longer get clean power to charge them, they will cease to function. When they break, there will be no means to repair them. And most critical knowledge isn't even contained on the phone, it's on other machines which are likely inaccessible given the number of failure points in our global networks. If a catastrophe occurs, this high technology will be the first class to break. And no one person or group can recreate them; they depend upon global supply chains and expertise and manufacturing techniques siloed in hundreds of companies. And if a collapse did occur, we might have more pressing needs than recreating such technological marvels, like feeding and clothing ourselves. The value of such technology would vanish overnight if the supporting infrastructure collapsed. To preserve knowledge you need it to be usable and accessible as the high edifice of our technological society crumbles. That would mean quality paper, vellum or some other durable material. We know it can last for hundreds to thousands of years if properly cared for. And I suspect that with the essentials of our knowledge base preserved and disseminated in such a way, we could quickly re-master the missing advanced stuff in a handful of decades. But if we relied on smartphones to save us, we'd quickly become savage and starving cavemen! One of the more dangerous tendencies of modern times is that precision manufacturing techniques are often undocumented and are learned skills which require passing on from masters to trainees. There's plenty of technology from WW2 and earlier which we already can't recreate even though we know exactly what they look like. The people who knew retired and died. The drawings and documentation are useless without full training--we'd have to rediscover and refine the processes from scratch. Just last week I was reading about the restoration of a German WW2 fighter plane. They had to replace the entire engine because they couldn't manufacture a replacement part for the (repairable) original, because the machines to make the parts no longer exist and the expertise was lost. We'd have to make the machines to make the machines that make the part. Our technology base is built upon a house of cards. It's not a new phenomenon, but what is new is our utter reliance upon technology we have little control over to feed us and run our lives, making its loss quite disastrous.
- mistermann 10y ago
  Without a massive population of worker bees, can we maintain the level of technological sophistication we've reached? I suppose governments probably have that fairly well doomsday planned.
  - Arizhel 10y ago
    That's exactly right about maintaining this level of technology. Looking around at most people I know and am surrounded by, there's just no way we could keep the technology level we have now without such a large population: most people are just too inept. Kill off 99% and there won't be enough people to even keep the stuff we have working, let alone come up with anything new. Don't bet on governments having anything planned. That sounds like fantasy; just look at how governments actually behave in the real world: they're inept too.
    - erikpukinskis 10y ago
      You don't need to keep all of it working. Most of it can fall apart. During the decline, important things will retract, move around, be protected. Look at what happened in the Holocaust. European Jewish culture wasn't wiped out. It was dealt a massive blow. Many important things were lost. But the community closed ranks and certain assets were protected too. This apocalyptic thinking is something you only do if you're so removed from violence that you have to imagine the whole world ending to conceive of it getting to you. People who actually deal with violence know they never get all of us. People are lost. It sucks. But we are resilient too. In a million people, there are always a few who are both smart and lucky and are able to reorganize reality ahead of the wave. That's why there are 6 billion of us. We survive.
      - SamUK96 10y ago
        Little bit off-topic here, but there's almost 8 billion of us now. 7 billion was past a while ago and exponential growth continues.
      - Arizhel 10y ago
        "European Jewish culture" is not a technology. It doesn't take a huge population base for a group of people to remember their roots and culture and save a lot of it. But most people are not technologists. Sure, there's a few smart people in a million, but that's not enough to maintain things: medical technology, transportation technology, computer technology, etc. Want a historical example? Look at the fall of the Roman Empire (and also older empires before them). They knew how to make concrete, huge buildings, aquaducts, plumbing, etc. It was all lost when the society collapsed, and that didn't involve killing off most of them, only having them give up on it and move away, and give up on the idea of specialization of labor. It took 1000 years or more to regain the level of technology they had, and really they never did figure out how to make concrete that good until modern times.
- intrasight 10y ago
  The topic of "Seveneves" by Neal Stephenson - which I did enjoy. https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Seveneves https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Seveneves
  - jfoutz 10y ago
    Lucifer's hammer falls into the same category.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  I believe the adaptability of humans is greatly exaggerated, mostly thanks to our hubris. We believe we will be able to use our intelligence to figure a way out of pretty much any problem. However, the fact of the matter is that our species has never been through any extinction-level events that would truly test our adaptability. Sure, we can adapt to localized or short-term problems extremely well, but how would we fare in an event the level of, say, the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event?
  - erikpukinskis 10y ago
    What about such an event would cause extinction? 5 billion people die, the rest of us live in warehouses eating indoor-grown food until the sun comes out again.
- flukus 10y ago
  > Mankind is absurdly resilient. We are like rats or cockroaches but a hundred times more adaptable. Are we? We've been around for a fraction of the time and nearly gone extinct at least once (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory). We also have a tendency to build absurdly interconnected systems so a single failure has ripple effects, we see this in things like the late bronze age collapse where most civilizations in the Mediterranean disapeared (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse).
  - ckastner 10y ago
    You just listed two incidents which, on the face of it, support the grandparent's argument.
    - flukus 10y ago
      Being on the right side of a knifes edge event (Toba example) doesn't prove we're resilient, it shows how susceptible we are to forces beyond our control, just as retrospectively guessing a coin toss doesn't mean we can predict the future, that's the anthropic principal at work. The second example shows how susceptible Civilization is. For more examples look at our closest relatives which survived on earth longer than we did but ultimately went extinct.
      - ckastner 10y ago
        Can you please provide a credible example for such an event. Regarding your first example, Toba: we have no record of what may or may not have happened to a small population of Neanderthals 75.000 years ago, and your source itself states "Both the link and global winter theories are highly controversial". Your second example marks the decline of a civilization, but does not even come close to what could be described as an "extinction".
        flukus 10y ago
        For Toba, I wouldn't expect it to be definitively settled one way or another for a long time, if ever. Volcanology, geology and genetics are very young fields of study, particularly in developing nations that are home to much of the evidence. The theory is that it caused a population bottleneck in humans though, not Neanderthals (who probably had a pretty hard time as well) and that humans nearly fell below the genetic diversity needed to survive. It's the only example that I know of because humans have only been around for the blink of an eye, Toba maybe be the worst that nature has thrown at us, which is a fraction of what it's capable of. There are some other more documented examples the merely bought down civilizations (or helped anyway), like the Justinian Famine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535%E2%80%93536 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535%...) thought to be caused by a volcanic eruption. > Your second example marks the decline of a civilization, but does not even come close to what could be described as an "extinction". I didn't mean to imply otherwise, though I would say they are one and the same thing in the long term. For humanity to survive and spread beyond our planet we need civilization and we've used up so many natural resources that I'm not sure we could rebuild one to match what we have today without them.
- KnightOfWords 10y ago
  We'd be very difficult to wipe out, but our technology falls a long short of being able to construct self-sustaining environments. We rely on having a global supply train at our disposal, not something we'd have access to in the event of a major catastrophe.
taberiand 10y ago
It's the collapse of modern civilization that I worry about.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

erikpukinskis 10y ago

Mankind is absurdly resilient. We are like rats or cockroaches but a hundred times more adaptable. Billions of people could die. We might lose 99% of species. But human extinction is out of the question. We could live in bubbles of air under the ocean huddled around nuclear reactors if we needed to. Roaches couldn't do that (without our help).

pier25 10y ago
> Billions of people could die. We might lose 99% of species. You make it sound like this wasn't a huge deal.
Red_Tarsius 10y ago
But our scientific knowledge could be lost, maybe forever. The survivors may also forget the concepts of free speech, human rights, the separation of faith and state. What are the chances that we rediscover all of this? Such thoughts require a minimum threshold of resources. But climate change might disrupt our sources of food production.
- erikpukinskis 10y ago
  A hundred million people with smartphones will be able to preserve that. Try to come up with a realistic scenario that kills the last 100m humans. I've never seen one. You'd become at least internet famous if you could do it.
  - vacri 10y ago
    The humans that survive such an event will not be the smartphone engineers, but the subsistence farmers.
    - erikpukinskis 10y ago
      You don't need smartphone engineers just repair techs. We already have billions of smartphones, millions of which will last a century with proper care. There are palm pilots that still work today. But also as the world collapses a thousand motivated people could and would relocate a basic computer fab to a safe location. Guaranteed.
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        > millions of which will last a century with proper care I strongly doubt that. Electronics are not designed to last that long; components age. Also, planned obsolescence is king these days.
      - enraged_camel 10y ago
        How are you going to charge those devices reliably and consistently? What knowledge-bases will you be able to connect to with no Internet? Our technology stack is like a house of cards. Smartphones are at the top. There's no way they will be of any use in the event that the foundation and the walls collapse.
      - ajmurmann 10y ago
        There is a great short story with the unfortunate name "The man who came early". It's about a American GI who is stationed at Keflavik during the cold war and somehow gets thrown back in time to the Icelandic saga age. He wants to give people there so kind of technology that's much simpler than a smart phone and it all fails. Even something simple as gun powder doesn't get off the ground. They don't know how to get Salpeter. Even if the had the powder they would be missing so much technology to make the guns. As the main character says "you haven't the tools to make the tools to make the tools". Also resources.
        10y ago
  - rleigh 10y ago
    How long would smartphones be able to preserve knowledge? When you can no longer get clean power to charge them, they will cease to function. When they break, there will be no means to repair them. And most critical knowledge isn't even contained on the phone, it's on other machines which are likely inaccessible given the number of failure points in our global networks. If a catastrophe occurs, this high technology will be the first class to break. And no one person or group can recreate them; they depend upon global supply chains and expertise and manufacturing techniques siloed in hundreds of companies. And if a collapse did occur, we might have more pressing needs than recreating such technological marvels, like feeding and clothing ourselves. The value of such technology would vanish overnight if the supporting infrastructure collapsed. To preserve knowledge you need it to be usable and accessible as the high edifice of our technological society crumbles. That would mean quality paper, vellum or some other durable material. We know it can last for hundreds to thousands of years if properly cared for. And I suspect that with the essentials of our knowledge base preserved and disseminated in such a way, we could quickly re-master the missing advanced stuff in a handful of decades. But if we relied on smartphones to save us, we'd quickly become savage and starving cavemen! One of the more dangerous tendencies of modern times is that precision manufacturing techniques are often undocumented and are learned skills which require passing on from masters to trainees. There's plenty of technology from WW2 and earlier which we already can't recreate even though we know exactly what they look like. The people who knew retired and died. The drawings and documentation are useless without full training--we'd have to rediscover and refine the processes from scratch. Just last week I was reading about the restoration of a German WW2 fighter plane. They had to replace the entire engine because they couldn't manufacture a replacement part for the (repairable) original, because the machines to make the parts no longer exist and the expertise was lost. We'd have to make the machines to make the machines that make the part. Our technology base is built upon a house of cards. It's not a new phenomenon, but what is new is our utter reliance upon technology we have little control over to feed us and run our lives, making its loss quite disastrous.
mistermann 10y ago
Without a massive population of worker bees, can we maintain the level of technological sophistication we've reached? I suppose governments probably have that fairly well doomsday planned.
- Arizhel 10y ago
  That's exactly right about maintaining this level of technology. Looking around at most people I know and am surrounded by, there's just no way we could keep the technology level we have now without such a large population: most people are just too inept. Kill off 99% and there won't be enough people to even keep the stuff we have working, let alone come up with anything new. Don't bet on governments having anything planned. That sounds like fantasy; just look at how governments actually behave in the real world: they're inept too.
  - erikpukinskis 10y ago
    You don't need to keep all of it working. Most of it can fall apart. During the decline, important things will retract, move around, be protected. Look at what happened in the Holocaust. European Jewish culture wasn't wiped out. It was dealt a massive blow. Many important things were lost. But the community closed ranks and certain assets were protected too. This apocalyptic thinking is something you only do if you're so removed from violence that you have to imagine the whole world ending to conceive of it getting to you. People who actually deal with violence know they never get all of us. People are lost. It sucks. But we are resilient too. In a million people, there are always a few who are both smart and lucky and are able to reorganize reality ahead of the wave. That's why there are 6 billion of us. We survive.
    - SamUK96 10y ago
      Little bit off-topic here, but there's almost 8 billion of us now. 7 billion was past a while ago and exponential growth continues.
    - Arizhel 10y ago
      "European Jewish culture" is not a technology. It doesn't take a huge population base for a group of people to remember their roots and culture and save a lot of it. But most people are not technologists. Sure, there's a few smart people in a million, but that's not enough to maintain things: medical technology, transportation technology, computer technology, etc. Want a historical example? Look at the fall of the Roman Empire (and also older empires before them). They knew how to make concrete, huge buildings, aquaducts, plumbing, etc. It was all lost when the society collapsed, and that didn't involve killing off most of them, only having them give up on it and move away, and give up on the idea of specialization of labor. It took 1000 years or more to regain the level of technology they had, and really they never did figure out how to make concrete that good until modern times.
intrasight 10y ago
The topic of "Seveneves" by Neal Stephenson - which I did enjoy. https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Seveneves https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Seveneves
- jfoutz 10y ago
  Lucifer's hammer falls into the same category.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
enraged_camel 10y ago
I believe the adaptability of humans is greatly exaggerated, mostly thanks to our hubris. We believe we will be able to use our intelligence to figure a way out of pretty much any problem. However, the fact of the matter is that our species has never been through any extinction-level events that would truly test our adaptability. Sure, we can adapt to localized or short-term problems extremely well, but how would we fare in an event the level of, say, the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event?
- erikpukinskis 10y ago
  What about such an event would cause extinction? 5 billion people die, the rest of us live in warehouses eating indoor-grown food until the sun comes out again.
flukus 10y ago
> Mankind is absurdly resilient. We are like rats or cockroaches but a hundred times more adaptable. Are we? We've been around for a fraction of the time and nearly gone extinct at least once (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory). We also have a tendency to build absurdly interconnected systems so a single failure has ripple effects, we see this in things like the late bronze age collapse where most civilizations in the Mediterranean disapeared (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse).
- ckastner 10y ago
  You just listed two incidents which, on the face of it, support the grandparent's argument.
  - flukus 10y ago
    Being on the right side of a knifes edge event (Toba example) doesn't prove we're resilient, it shows how susceptible we are to forces beyond our control, just as retrospectively guessing a coin toss doesn't mean we can predict the future, that's the anthropic principal at work. The second example shows how susceptible Civilization is. For more examples look at our closest relatives which survived on earth longer than we did but ultimately went extinct.
    - ckastner 10y ago
      Can you please provide a credible example for such an event. Regarding your first example, Toba: we have no record of what may or may not have happened to a small population of Neanderthals 75.000 years ago, and your source itself states "Both the link and global winter theories are highly controversial". Your second example marks the decline of a civilization, but does not even come close to what could be described as an "extinction".
      - flukus 10y ago
        For Toba, I wouldn't expect it to be definitively settled one way or another for a long time, if ever. Volcanology, geology and genetics are very young fields of study, particularly in developing nations that are home to much of the evidence. The theory is that it caused a population bottleneck in humans though, not Neanderthals (who probably had a pretty hard time as well) and that humans nearly fell below the genetic diversity needed to survive. It's the only example that I know of because humans have only been around for the blink of an eye, Toba maybe be the worst that nature has thrown at us, which is a fraction of what it's capable of. There are some other more documented examples the merely bought down civilizations (or helped anyway), like the Justinian Famine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535%E2%80%93536 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535%...) thought to be caused by a volcanic eruption. > Your second example marks the decline of a civilization, but does not even come close to what could be described as an "extinction". I didn't mean to imply otherwise, though I would say they are one and the same thing in the long term. For humanity to survive and spread beyond our planet we need civilization and we've used up so many natural resources that I'm not sure we could rebuild one to match what we have today without them.
KnightOfWords 10y ago
We'd be very difficult to wipe out, but our technology falls a long short of being able to construct self-sustaining environments. We rely on having a global supply train at our disposal, not something we'd have access to in the event of a major catastrophe.

taberiand 10y ago

It's the collapse of modern civilization that I worry about.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]