15 ms·

This planet will not support 7 billion humans. Certainly not 7 billion stupid-ass humans who swing massive sledgehammers into the pillars of the biosphere that

by titzer 8y ago

This planet will not support 7 billion humans. Certainly not 7 billion stupid-ass humans who swing massive sledgehammers into the pillars of the biosphere that support them in their hedonistic blunder in search of more "wealth". When I hear the words "economic growth", and then weigh it against the destruction of this magnitude, I often want to vomit. And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in computers somewhere that represent some fiction of our collective imagination, all the while burning more energy and fuel and contributing to the massive side show that distracts us from our self-destruction? Not well.

amelius 8y ago
> And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in computers somewhere that represent some fiction of our collective imagination, all the while burning more energy and fuel and contributing to the massive side show that distracts us from our self-destruction? Not well. Well at least the mass consumption of virtual goods (software) seems to produce less waste than the mass consumption of physical goods. Your mission is to write software that's so good that people do not need to upgrade their hardware.
- xg15 8y ago
  I'm not sure about that. Sure, the software itself won't, but the hardware needed to run the software absolutely has environmental impact: It drives habitat destruction due to mining the raw materials, pollution from waste by the mining and production processes and than more pollution when the hardware is decommissioned and ends up on landfills. Then there is the enormous energy demand of IT systems, which in turn requires more fuel to drive them. The industry itself is not helping either. Not just is writing resource efficient software often not a priority, it's sometimes even seen as an anti-pattern (due to a misunderstanding of "premature optimization"). In the latest iteration, we have technologies like blockchains that make wasting energy into a feature. > Your mission is to write software that's so good that people do not need to upgrade their hardware. Meanwhile, the mission of your superiors is to make sure people upgrade their hardware as often as possible so the revenue keeps coming in. Before there is a large-scale change of that culture, I don't think software development will be innocent in this.
  - open-source-ux 8y ago
    ...the hardware needed to run the software absolutely has environmental impact I agree. When I look at other industries I see efforts to reduce energy consumption. Most programmers, in contrast, couldn't care less. The most popular languages are the least energy efficient. But they make life easier for developers, or as devs love to say 'more productive'. Who cares if you need to add more and more server boxes to your setup, after all 'hardware is cheap' - the default response of countless programmers everywhere. This industry is absolutely rife with hypocrisy.
    - nopriorarrests 8y ago
      >The most popular languages are the least energy efficient. What does it mean?
      - rollo 8y ago
        JS is the most popular language. Thus most software is wasting orders of magnitude more energy than it should. The same functionality would require less than a tenth of processing power (and thus energy and physical hardware) if it were implemented properly.
        nopriorarrests 8y ago
        Properly is like what, assembler? So lets spend 100x power on developers notebooks and 100x of their paid time and rewrite eveything in asm so it will work faster? Or what "implemented properly" means?
        Zoh0eich 8y ago
        Properly in this context would mean achieving the same effect at the lowest possible overall expense of energy (including those of developer laptops) given specific hardware. Google spends a lot of effort optimizing their software because they bear the energy cost of running it in their own data centers. Websites do not bear the energy cost of running their code on enduser devices. The lack of incentives turns energy waste into an externalty which means it is not factored into development.
- gaius 8y ago
  mass consumption of virtual goods (software) seems to produce less waste than the mass consumption of physical goods. I read that bitcoin produces more CO2 than the global aviation industry... https://jalopnik.com/bitcoins-annual-carbon-footprint-is-equal-to-one-millio-1828460235 https://jalopnik.com/bitcoins-annual-carbon-footprint-is-equ... Your mission is to write software that's so good that people do not need to upgrade their hardware. Email, word processing, the vast majority of commercial workloads, would work fine on machines with a tiny fraction of the typical PCs power today. But developers insist on using godawful “frameworks” to do the most trivial things. Like JS based text editors that take gigs of RAM to do less useful stuff than Emacs could do in megs. The PC of the future is something like an RPi with an eInk display with a solar panel on the other side.
  - titzer 8y ago
    > I read that bitcoin produces more CO2 than the global aviation industry... It's big (~23Mt), but not as big as aviation (~860Mt). https://www.atag.org/facts-figures.html https://www.atag.org/facts-figures.html https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
- eecc 8y ago
  Unfortunately datacenters don't run on pixie dust! I'd love to know the carbon billow produced in a 5 social media session.
killjoywashere 8y ago
I'll just leave this here https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
11235813213455 8y ago
Agreed, but I believe we can act about it. My environmental fingerprint is probably <5% of average first-world countries people, I don't consume much, food mostly obviously, and local one, mostly vegs/fruits according to the season. no car, no pets, not a smoker, working remotely, avoiding trips as much as possible. I try to save wild life as much as possible, on every possible occasion, even if it's just moving a dead one off the road, in a better place. At a single person level, these actions looks insignificant, but if everyone does it, it won't be since the major source of pollution is residential pollution, i.e. people, and the other sources of pollution (industry, large-scale transports...) are also driven by consumption. So if people stop over-consuming, this saves dramatically our planet, and our sibling animals. Of course governments need to foster this change
- pfisch 8y ago
  If everyone did that it would cause an economic collapse. Do you know what happens when there is an economic collapse? Fascists take over. Trump is just a small taste of that, and he is president because white middle class people are facing economic hardships. If it gets worse the leaders we have will become more extreme. I don't understand how none of you environmentalists can realize that if you had your way with your extreme proposals like reducing everyone's environmental footprint by 95% it would backfire incredibly hard and would result in a strong man taking power and possibly a genocide. Do you not realize how delicate our government is? When there is extreme economic hardship it pushes the government to the brink of collapse and people always turn to awful leaders. It has happened throughout history at least dozens of times.
  - yardie 8y ago
    So your solution is to simply do nothing. It might offend some voters’ sense of entitlement. That things aren’t the same as they were 30 years ago. We could do it the hard way. When ocean levels rise the coastal house market will collapse. Water will become scarce as aquifers get spoiled by salt. And climate patterns are certainly changing. Places that used to get an abundance of rain are already facing a drought. But some douchebag in a bro-dozer is certainly sticking it to the rich.
lawlessone 8y ago
We're essentially gobbling up all possible biomass at this stage...
- bufferoverflow 8y ago
  The insects are dying off not because we're eating them or taking their habitats. It's because of the insecticides. We need better ways, and technology is the only way to save us and the biosphere at the moment. No way we will choose to starve 7 billion people to death.
  - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
    Choose, no, but it's not unfathomable we'll see a huge crisis in our time, famines caused by climate change, wars over resources, and I wouldn't be surprised if one of the highly tense parties (mostly the US) hits the launch button. I mean if Trump wants to leave NATO there's nobody stopping him / them from going for that, plus a big objection to its enemies nuking the US goes away.
  - chakalakasp 8y ago
    Most data right now does not suggest its the insecticides (outside of agricultural areas). It’s because the entire planet is warming up and this is changing the entire biome faster than speices and interconnected biological systems can adapt.
xupybd 8y ago
The only way we’re going to get better at managing our environmental impact is going to be through technological improvement. As you say we are too many now. The only way that technology will improve is under good economic conditions. We have to weigh economic growth against its impact else we will only speed up the destruction. When people become poor environmental concerns come second place to the basics of life.
- jyounker 8y ago
  We have the technologies now. We're just failing at the political and societal organization.
  - crispinb 8y ago
    The "just" is unmerited. That was always the difficult part, necessitating the most gargantuan act of exaptation in the history of life on our planet. It was never very likely to work.
  - xupybd 8y ago
    We don't have technologies now that bring things under control. When it's cheaper to use renewable energies, when it's cheaper to use recycled materials then we have the technologies.
- latch 8y ago
  This is silly. The economy has been booming for a while now and technology is more advanced that it's ever been. The situation is accelerating the wrong way. More of the same won't help. Plant trees and revive massive amount of land loss that most countries have caused due to poor stewardship (overgrazing). Better capture negative externalities. Or at the very least, stop subsidizing them. (aka, tax beef production, water consumption and plastic use). This is a social, not technology problem.
  - gerbilly 8y ago
    > Plant trees and revive massive amount of land loss that most countries have caused due to poor stewardship In some places you can't even plant the trees back. For example if you clearcut trees on a karst landscape, the rain washes away the thin soil completely, leaving only bare rock. >The lesson goes back to the ancient Romans, who harvested the great pine trees on the Dalmatian karst on the southern tip of Croatia. “As soon as new trees got started, the sheep or the goats ate them,” Ford says. “The word karst means stony ground—stony because they wrecked it.” In the Middle East, the mythic Cedars of Lebanon—believed by some Christians to be the place where the resurrected Jesus revealed himself—grew on pure limestone karst very much like that of Vancouver Island. They were mowed down to build the temples of ancient Egypt and Jerusalem. The soil disappeared and never came back. Around one percent of the original cedars remain, in scattered, protected groves. Slovenia banned clearcutting on karst in 1949—but by then it was too late. There are photos, circa 1900, of babushka-wrapped Austro-Hungarian peasants hauling topsoil back onto the bald karst after it was clearcut. (https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/the-cavernous-world-under-the-woods/ https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/the-cavernous-world-u...)
std_throwawayay 8y ago
I've come to believe that we'll adjust our numbers in time. That time has not come yet but it will come.
Regardsyjc 8y ago
I used to feel this way and I found that it wasn't productive. What can you do? If you can do something, do it. If you think you can't change the future possible destruction of our ecosystem or millions of people, then you also need to make peace with it. I think you can either do or not do things without the negativity. I found that the negativity made me think emotionally and not rationally or productively, and also sometimes came off in my conversations with people which was also not helpful-because I was clearly very emotional about the issue. My thought process is whatever happens, happens. I can't do much to prevent whatever systemic collapse that might happen or not happen. But whatever I can do, I will. When I first learned about this, I thought it meant the future that I took for granted could be nonexistent - the dying happily carefree of systemic collapse part after having a family and growing old. It made me bitter and resentful. What's the point of doing anything if the world's going to go to shit by 2030? I decided to be more optimistic or maybe stoic. Make sure I can do what I can or all I can and not let some potential apocalyptic future darken my life. Sorry if this is a trash comment.
- honestoHeminway 8y ago
  You can sabotage, initiate preemptive collapse
- makerofspoons 8y ago
  This isn't a trash comment- this is exactly what I needed to read after reading this article. Thank you!
- radiorental 8y ago
  I view our success as a product of evolution. It is the driving factor that got us down out of the trees, cultivating our food and to where we are today. Would we be putting a little less pressure on the environment without people like Edward Bernays, possibly. However, I think our collective consciousness can put itself a little at ease. As we enter the 6 mass extinction event, it's a natural cycle and if it wasn't us, some other species would dominate the planet. It's never a bad time to listen to George Carlin's "saving the planet" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c
ryanmercer 8y ago
I've come to accept the fact that we've already lost the game. I have a friend that is extremely optimistic and thinks we will figure things out, like fusion, 'because we need to' but I'm far more pessimistic. This year, based on previous years, we will probably hit 35 gigatons of carbon emissions and it won't be long before we hit 40 gigatons. Even if a fleet of alien ships appeared in orbit today and was like "we're going to give you 20,000 fusion reactors and we should have them all operational by the end of March, this will replace all of your power needs with much room for growth" we'd need to find some miraculous way to begin sequestering tens of gigatons of carbon a year on top of what the earth can naturally do to begin to retard the damage we've done and it would take us 15-20 years to make a significant reduction in carbon that we've added since the industrial revolution. Then we'd still have a planet lousy with microplastics that are now in the air and water. A recent study found microplastics in all participants fecal matter, on multiple continents. Then to borrow from Loyd Blankenship in his The Conscience of a Hacker " You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, you cheat, and lie" so even if we solve our power issue, solve our carbon generation issue, summon a miracle to deal with the microplastics, make rapid advances in land management and sustainable food production, then we still have the fact that by nature humans are full of hate, full of prejudice, we are flawed with greed and the desire to wage war. Add to that the middle class is shrinking, the lower class is growing, even a measly billionaire worth exactly 1 billion dollars has a net worth equal to 16,937 years of the MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME of the United States with Forbes estimated in 2017 that there were 2,208 billionaires in the world and we are quickly on our way to seeing a trillionaire in the next couple of decades most likely... Then student loan debt. A friend expressed to me yesterday that she "is better off dead" as she's been trying to refinance her student loans (2 bachelors degrees, different fields, decided teaching wasn't for her and pivoted to nursing) because after a year of trying to refinance the MINIMUM monthly payment is more than double what she's paying now if she consolidates and that she fully believes she will be servicing her student loans for the rest of her natural life because she's looking at 6 figures of debt that only continues to grow from interest. I suspect this comment will be severely downvoted but my opinion stands. The world is truly and duly fucked. Barring miracle-aliens or an unprecedented number of miraculous inventions by dozens or hundreds of individuals in a very short time period, the ship is sinking. Gentlemen, it has been a privilege playing with you tonight.
LukeB42 8y ago
When? Yesterday? Enough energy enters Earth's atmosphere on days like this one to sustain 7 billion people plus the six-legged majority with room for human technological innovation. We're just not capturing each day's energy with even greater than 50% efficiency yet. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43619013?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/43619013?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...
dharma1 8y ago
It feels like humans lack the capacity to optimise for success beyond reproduction and acquiring power, especially at large scales and timelines. Maybe there is a non-technological solution to this - new ways of organising that enforces better choices for the planet and our long term survival - but it's hard to see that. Perhaps the bit flipping will be the way out of this mess - using machine intelligence to understand and help us optimise for things that we can't. I think that will take a while though - we need more legislation around polluting and overuse of resources as the immediate step.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  I think nothing has that capacity from incomplete information alone. One would think primitive lifestyles would produce less pollution. They would surprisingly be wrong - biomass cooking fires scale worse than petroleum ironically. Similarly the reason hunter gathers were nomadic was because they were like a plague of locusts stripping food capacity - it is no wonder humans caused so many mass extinctions with spear and arrows alone. Given the sheer difficulty of predicting technology I don't think it is very possible beyond "Don't put lead in gasoline you morons!".
- harshreality 8y ago
  What's best for the individual is not always best for society or the world. As long as people have a mindset that prioritizes individual well-being, the only roadblock to environmental irresponsibility is to generate enough political awareness so that laws get passed that curtail some of the more harmful individual behaviors (in ways that are enforceable).
AllMen 8y ago
Valar Morghulis
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
snikeris 8y ago
For most of those "7 billion stupid-ass humans", "their hedonistic blunder in search of more wealth" means acquiring things like food, water, and shelter for themselves and their families. Seems like you want them to halt their economic growth? I'm concerned about the biosphere too, but people gotta live. Check out ecomodernism: http://www.ecomodernism.org/ http://www.ecomodernism.org/ It's a more productive way to frame your concern for the environment.
mempko 8y ago
The vast, vast majority of people use so little resources and energy, it's not even worth talking about. Even if there was 1 billion people , but those people were only Americans and Europeans, you would still see such a large collapse of our habitat. Billions of poor people are not the problem.
magduf 8y ago
While I mostly agree, I would like to make one little point about "economic growth" not necessarily being worse for the planet: digital goods. People making money selling digital goods (e.g., downloadable songs/videos, subscriptions to internet content, etc.) doesn't have nearly the effect on the planet that making and shipping physical goods (VHS tapes, DVDs, CDs, magazines, etc.) does, especially as computing devices become more energy-efficient. So I think it is possible for the economy to grow in some ways without a negative ecological impact. But yeah, people buying bigger cars (SUVs) and houses generally isn't good for the planet at all.
- zoobab 8y ago
  Not when you consider that the total ecological footprint of the internet and computers. Not to mention the impact of online shopping, which is fed by the internet as an advertising/profiling/consuming state machine.
  - magduf 8y ago
    The ecological footprint of the internet and computers isn't nearly as much as all the carbon we pump into the atmosphere so we can drive around alone in 2-ton steel cages just so we can go buy little trinkets at various stores, frequently some distance from where we live.
standerman 8y ago
It's dangerous to be so confident about something that hasn't happened yet. Something about counting chickens...

by titzer 8y ago

amelius 8y ago

> And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in computers somewhere that represent some fiction of our collective imagination, all the while burning more energy and fuel and contributing to the massive side show that distracts us from our self-destruction? Not well. Well at least the mass consumption of virtual goods (software) seems to produce less waste than the mass consumption of physical goods. Your mission is to write software that's so good that people do not need to upgrade their hardware.

xg15 8y ago
I'm not sure about that. Sure, the software itself won't, but the hardware needed to run the software absolutely has environmental impact: It drives habitat destruction due to mining the raw materials, pollution from waste by the mining and production processes and than more pollution when the hardware is decommissioned and ends up on landfills. Then there is the enormous energy demand of IT systems, which in turn requires more fuel to drive them. The industry itself is not helping either. Not just is writing resource efficient software often not a priority, it's sometimes even seen as an anti-pattern (due to a misunderstanding of "premature optimization"). In the latest iteration, we have technologies like blockchains that make wasting energy into a feature. > Your mission is to write software that's so good that people do not need to upgrade their hardware. Meanwhile, the mission of your superiors is to make sure people upgrade their hardware as often as possible so the revenue keeps coming in. Before there is a large-scale change of that culture, I don't think software development will be innocent in this.
- open-source-ux 8y ago
  ...the hardware needed to run the software absolutely has environmental impact I agree. When I look at other industries I see efforts to reduce energy consumption. Most programmers, in contrast, couldn't care less. The most popular languages are the least energy efficient. But they make life easier for developers, or as devs love to say 'more productive'. Who cares if you need to add more and more server boxes to your setup, after all 'hardware is cheap' - the default response of countless programmers everywhere. This industry is absolutely rife with hypocrisy.
  - nopriorarrests 8y ago
    >The most popular languages are the least energy efficient. What does it mean?
    - rollo 8y ago
      JS is the most popular language. Thus most software is wasting orders of magnitude more energy than it should. The same functionality would require less than a tenth of processing power (and thus energy and physical hardware) if it were implemented properly.
      - nopriorarrests 8y ago
        Properly is like what, assembler? So lets spend 100x power on developers notebooks and 100x of their paid time and rewrite eveything in asm so it will work faster? Or what "implemented properly" means?
        Zoh0eich 8y ago
        Properly in this context would mean achieving the same effect at the lowest possible overall expense of energy (including those of developer laptops) given specific hardware. Google spends a lot of effort optimizing their software because they bear the energy cost of running it in their own data centers. Websites do not bear the energy cost of running their code on enduser devices. The lack of incentives turns energy waste into an externalty which means it is not factored into development.
gaius 8y ago
mass consumption of virtual goods (software) seems to produce less waste than the mass consumption of physical goods. I read that bitcoin produces more CO2 than the global aviation industry... https://jalopnik.com/bitcoins-annual-carbon-footprint-is-equal-to-one-millio-1828460235 https://jalopnik.com/bitcoins-annual-carbon-footprint-is-equ... Your mission is to write software that's so good that people do not need to upgrade their hardware. Email, word processing, the vast majority of commercial workloads, would work fine on machines with a tiny fraction of the typical PCs power today. But developers insist on using godawful “frameworks” to do the most trivial things. Like JS based text editors that take gigs of RAM to do less useful stuff than Emacs could do in megs. The PC of the future is something like an RPi with an eInk display with a solar panel on the other side.
- titzer 8y ago
  > I read that bitcoin produces more CO2 than the global aviation industry... It's big (~23Mt), but not as big as aviation (~860Mt). https://www.atag.org/facts-figures.html https://www.atag.org/facts-figures.html https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
eecc 8y ago
Unfortunately datacenters don't run on pixie dust! I'd love to know the carbon billow produced in a 5 social media session.

killjoywashere 8y ago

I'll just leave this here https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

11235813213455 8y ago

Agreed, but I believe we can act about it. My environmental fingerprint is probably <5% of average first-world countries people, I don't consume much, food mostly obviously, and local one, mostly vegs/fruits according to the season. no car, no pets, not a smoker, working remotely, avoiding trips as much as possible. I try to save wild life as much as possible, on every possible occasion, even if it's just moving a dead one off the road, in a better place. At a single person level, these actions looks insignificant, but if everyone does it, it won't be since the major source of pollution is residential pollution, i.e. people, and the other sources of pollution (industry, large-scale transports...) are also driven by consumption. So if people stop over-consuming, this saves dramatically our planet, and our sibling animals. Of course governments need to foster this change

pfisch 8y ago
If everyone did that it would cause an economic collapse. Do you know what happens when there is an economic collapse? Fascists take over. Trump is just a small taste of that, and he is president because white middle class people are facing economic hardships. If it gets worse the leaders we have will become more extreme. I don't understand how none of you environmentalists can realize that if you had your way with your extreme proposals like reducing everyone's environmental footprint by 95% it would backfire incredibly hard and would result in a strong man taking power and possibly a genocide. Do you not realize how delicate our government is? When there is extreme economic hardship it pushes the government to the brink of collapse and people always turn to awful leaders. It has happened throughout history at least dozens of times.
- yardie 8y ago
  So your solution is to simply do nothing. It might offend some voters’ sense of entitlement. That things aren’t the same as they were 30 years ago. We could do it the hard way. When ocean levels rise the coastal house market will collapse. Water will become scarce as aquifers get spoiled by salt. And climate patterns are certainly changing. Places that used to get an abundance of rain are already facing a drought. But some douchebag in a bro-dozer is certainly sticking it to the rich.

lawlessone 8y ago

We're essentially gobbling up all possible biomass at this stage...

bufferoverflow 8y ago
The insects are dying off not because we're eating them or taking their habitats. It's because of the insecticides. We need better ways, and technology is the only way to save us and the biosphere at the moment. No way we will choose to starve 7 billion people to death.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  Choose, no, but it's not unfathomable we'll see a huge crisis in our time, famines caused by climate change, wars over resources, and I wouldn't be surprised if one of the highly tense parties (mostly the US) hits the launch button. I mean if Trump wants to leave NATO there's nobody stopping him / them from going for that, plus a big objection to its enemies nuking the US goes away.
- chakalakasp 8y ago
  Most data right now does not suggest its the insecticides (outside of agricultural areas). It’s because the entire planet is warming up and this is changing the entire biome faster than speices and interconnected biological systems can adapt.

xupybd 8y ago

The only way we’re going to get better at managing our environmental impact is going to be through technological improvement. As you say we are too many now. The only way that technology will improve is under good economic conditions. We have to weigh economic growth against its impact else we will only speed up the destruction. When people become poor environmental concerns come second place to the basics of life.

jyounker 8y ago
We have the technologies now. We're just failing at the political and societal organization.
- crispinb 8y ago
  The "just" is unmerited. That was always the difficult part, necessitating the most gargantuan act of exaptation in the history of life on our planet. It was never very likely to work.
- xupybd 8y ago
  We don't have technologies now that bring things under control. When it's cheaper to use renewable energies, when it's cheaper to use recycled materials then we have the technologies.
latch 8y ago
This is silly. The economy has been booming for a while now and technology is more advanced that it's ever been. The situation is accelerating the wrong way. More of the same won't help. Plant trees and revive massive amount of land loss that most countries have caused due to poor stewardship (overgrazing). Better capture negative externalities. Or at the very least, stop subsidizing them. (aka, tax beef production, water consumption and plastic use). This is a social, not technology problem.
- gerbilly 8y ago
  > Plant trees and revive massive amount of land loss that most countries have caused due to poor stewardship In some places you can't even plant the trees back. For example if you clearcut trees on a karst landscape, the rain washes away the thin soil completely, leaving only bare rock. >The lesson goes back to the ancient Romans, who harvested the great pine trees on the Dalmatian karst on the southern tip of Croatia. “As soon as new trees got started, the sheep or the goats ate them,” Ford says. “The word karst means stony ground—stony because they wrecked it.” In the Middle East, the mythic Cedars of Lebanon—believed by some Christians to be the place where the resurrected Jesus revealed himself—grew on pure limestone karst very much like that of Vancouver Island. They were mowed down to build the temples of ancient Egypt and Jerusalem. The soil disappeared and never came back. Around one percent of the original cedars remain, in scattered, protected groves. Slovenia banned clearcutting on karst in 1949—but by then it was too late. There are photos, circa 1900, of babushka-wrapped Austro-Hungarian peasants hauling topsoil back onto the bald karst after it was clearcut. (https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/the-cavernous-world-under-the-woods/ https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/the-cavernous-world-u...)

std_throwawayay 8y ago

I've come to believe that we'll adjust our numbers in time. That time has not come yet but it will come.

Regardsyjc 8y ago

I used to feel this way and I found that it wasn't productive. What can you do? If you can do something, do it. If you think you can't change the future possible destruction of our ecosystem or millions of people, then you also need to make peace with it. I think you can either do or not do things without the negativity. I found that the negativity made me think emotionally and not rationally or productively, and also sometimes came off in my conversations with people which was also not helpful-because I was clearly very emotional about the issue. My thought process is whatever happens, happens. I can't do much to prevent whatever systemic collapse that might happen or not happen. But whatever I can do, I will. When I first learned about this, I thought it meant the future that I took for granted could be nonexistent - the dying happily carefree of systemic collapse part after having a family and growing old. It made me bitter and resentful. What's the point of doing anything if the world's going to go to shit by 2030? I decided to be more optimistic or maybe stoic. Make sure I can do what I can or all I can and not let some potential apocalyptic future darken my life. Sorry if this is a trash comment.

honestoHeminway 8y ago
You can sabotage, initiate preemptive collapse
makerofspoons 8y ago
This isn't a trash comment- this is exactly what I needed to read after reading this article. Thank you!
radiorental 8y ago
I view our success as a product of evolution. It is the driving factor that got us down out of the trees, cultivating our food and to where we are today. Would we be putting a little less pressure on the environment without people like Edward Bernays, possibly. However, I think our collective consciousness can put itself a little at ease. As we enter the 6 mass extinction event, it's a natural cycle and if it wasn't us, some other species would dominate the planet. It's never a bad time to listen to George Carlin's "saving the planet" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c

ryanmercer 8y ago

I've come to accept the fact that we've already lost the game. I have a friend that is extremely optimistic and thinks we will figure things out, like fusion, 'because we need to' but I'm far more pessimistic. This year, based on previous years, we will probably hit 35 gigatons of carbon emissions and it won't be long before we hit 40 gigatons. Even if a fleet of alien ships appeared in orbit today and was like "we're going to give you 20,000 fusion reactors and we should have them all operational by the end of March, this will replace all of your power needs with much room for growth" we'd need to find some miraculous way to begin sequestering tens of gigatons of carbon a year on top of what the earth can naturally do to begin to retard the damage we've done and it would take us 15-20 years to make a significant reduction in carbon that we've added since the industrial revolution. Then we'd still have a planet lousy with microplastics that are now in the air and water. A recent study found microplastics in all participants fecal matter, on multiple continents. Then to borrow from Loyd Blankenship in his The Conscience of a Hacker " You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, you cheat, and lie" so even if we solve our power issue, solve our carbon generation issue, summon a miracle to deal with the microplastics, make rapid advances in land management and sustainable food production, then we still have the fact that by nature humans are full of hate, full of prejudice, we are flawed with greed and the desire to wage war. Add to that the middle class is shrinking, the lower class is growing, even a measly billionaire worth exactly 1 billion dollars has a net worth equal to 16,937 years of the MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME of the United States with Forbes estimated in 2017 that there were 2,208 billionaires in the world and we are quickly on our way to seeing a trillionaire in the next couple of decades most likely... Then student loan debt. A friend expressed to me yesterday that she "is better off dead" as she's been trying to refinance her student loans (2 bachelors degrees, different fields, decided teaching wasn't for her and pivoted to nursing) because after a year of trying to refinance the MINIMUM monthly payment is more than double what she's paying now if she consolidates and that she fully believes she will be servicing her student loans for the rest of her natural life because she's looking at 6 figures of debt that only continues to grow from interest. I suspect this comment will be severely downvoted but my opinion stands. The world is truly and duly fucked. Barring miracle-aliens or an unprecedented number of miraculous inventions by dozens or hundreds of individuals in a very short time period, the ship is sinking. Gentlemen, it has been a privilege playing with you tonight.

LukeB42 8y ago

When? Yesterday? Enough energy enters Earth's atmosphere on days like this one to sustain 7 billion people plus the six-legged majority with room for human technological innovation. We're just not capturing each day's energy with even greater than 50% efficiency yet. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43619013?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/43619013?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...

dharma1 8y ago

It feels like humans lack the capacity to optimise for success beyond reproduction and acquiring power, especially at large scales and timelines. Maybe there is a non-technological solution to this - new ways of organising that enforces better choices for the planet and our long term survival - but it's hard to see that. Perhaps the bit flipping will be the way out of this mess - using machine intelligence to understand and help us optimise for things that we can't. I think that will take a while though - we need more legislation around polluting and overuse of resources as the immediate step.

Nasrudith 8y ago
I think nothing has that capacity from incomplete information alone. One would think primitive lifestyles would produce less pollution. They would surprisingly be wrong - biomass cooking fires scale worse than petroleum ironically. Similarly the reason hunter gathers were nomadic was because they were like a plague of locusts stripping food capacity - it is no wonder humans caused so many mass extinctions with spear and arrows alone. Given the sheer difficulty of predicting technology I don't think it is very possible beyond "Don't put lead in gasoline you morons!".
harshreality 8y ago
What's best for the individual is not always best for society or the world. As long as people have a mindset that prioritizes individual well-being, the only roadblock to environmental irresponsibility is to generate enough political awareness so that laws get passed that curtail some of the more harmful individual behaviors (in ways that are enforceable).

AllMen 8y ago

Valar Morghulis

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

snikeris 8y ago

For most of those "7 billion stupid-ass humans", "their hedonistic blunder in search of more wealth" means acquiring things like food, water, and shelter for themselves and their families. Seems like you want them to halt their economic growth? I'm concerned about the biosphere too, but people gotta live. Check out ecomodernism: http://www.ecomodernism.org/ http://www.ecomodernism.org/ It's a more productive way to frame your concern for the environment.

mempko 8y ago

The vast, vast majority of people use so little resources and energy, it's not even worth talking about. Even if there was 1 billion people , but those people were only Americans and Europeans, you would still see such a large collapse of our habitat. Billions of poor people are not the problem.

magduf 8y ago

While I mostly agree, I would like to make one little point about "economic growth" not necessarily being worse for the planet: digital goods. People making money selling digital goods (e.g., downloadable songs/videos, subscriptions to internet content, etc.) doesn't have nearly the effect on the planet that making and shipping physical goods (VHS tapes, DVDs, CDs, magazines, etc.) does, especially as computing devices become more energy-efficient. So I think it is possible for the economy to grow in some ways without a negative ecological impact. But yeah, people buying bigger cars (SUVs) and houses generally isn't good for the planet at all.

zoobab 8y ago
Not when you consider that the total ecological footprint of the internet and computers. Not to mention the impact of online shopping, which is fed by the internet as an advertising/profiling/consuming state machine.
- magduf 8y ago
  The ecological footprint of the internet and computers isn't nearly as much as all the carbon we pump into the atmosphere so we can drive around alone in 2-ton steel cages just so we can go buy little trinkets at various stores, frequently some distance from where we live.

standerman 8y ago

It's dangerous to be so confident about something that hasn't happened yet. Something about counting chickens...