> We're not going to wake up one day and be instantly vaporized. Nice strawman. No one ever said we're going to "wake up and be instantly vaporized". What's ac

> We're not going to wake up one day and be instantly vaporized. Nice strawman. No one ever said we're going to "wake up and be instantly vaporized". What's actually going to happen is this: - Food is going to continuously get more expensive as droughts shorten growing seasons, desertification and flooding eliminate arable land, the ocean depopulates, and increased atmospheric CO2 "de-nutrients" the crops that do grow. - We're going to rack up unbelievable debt trying to either migrate people out of flood zones or try to delay their immersion. I've said before that once Miami starts flooding enough that people can no longer stick their heads in the sand and pretend nothing is wrong, Florida real estate owners will probably demand some ultra-expensive engineering megaproject to try and save the city on the taxpayers' dime. The same will happen in every other low-lying coastal region. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12342617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12342617 quotes a figure of $180 million just to migrate 600 people in Alaska; now multiply that by the size of the population in coastal areas and get a glimpse of the hole we're driving into. - Building on that last point, human migration is going to increase dramatically as people try to escape more affected regions for better-off ones. The current level of migration, relatively tiny all things considered, is already causing fatal autoimmune reactions in Europe and North America, and it's going to increase by orders of magnitude. Not to mention the additional unrest when the wealthy inevitably retreat to (literal or metaphorical) walled cities to escape the problem. - The above factors of resource scarcity, political unrest, and finger-pointing are going to cause global wars. So yes, this will affect all of us on the personal level of having a lower standard of living in a world of permanent social turmoil. It is not going to be fine. > Maybe this will push us to go to space sooner than we would have? Maybe we'll create underground cities? This is an opportunity to advance human technology and society, Even disregarding that your own use of the word "maybe" already indicates a certain amount of hopelessness about the situation, this is a fallacy of "just because circumstances forced us to develop this technology, that technology is a Good Thing and represents societal progress". I don't want to live underground or in space, I want to live on a healthy planet with lots of open space and diverse environments. At the very best, either of these options would be like spending your entire life in a climate-controlled office building. I'd prefer death.