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Mass starvation, mass dehydration, yes those are big concerns. But they can be overcome. For water, for instance, desalination exists, as do pipes, as do pumps.
by Jach 8y ago
Mass starvation, mass dehydration, yes those are big concerns. But they can be overcome. For water, for instance, desalination exists, as do pipes, as do pumps. It would be expensive, someone's gotta pay for it -- what are millions of lives worth? But it's a reasonably well-defined engineering solution that doesn't require new technology or better understanding of the sciences to create e.g. atmosphere scrubbers or whatever. I'm biased as an engineer, big engineering projects seem a lot more feasible than international political ones. If those political ones are backed by threat of war, that's also a lot more worrying to me on the prospect of ways the planet can be rendered uninhabitable.
- baxtr 8y agoHave you looked into the environmental effects of desalination? https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/01/desalination-plants-produce-twice-as-much-waste-brine-as-thought/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/01/desal...
- ThomPete 8y ago"here’s why that’s a potential problem." The important word there is potential.
- saagarjha 8y agoThere's a potential chance of you dying if you play Russian roulette. Does that mean you'd like to ignore the concerns because of them not being certainties?
- ThomPete 8y agoThere is an even bigger chance of you dying when driving in a car. Does that mean you don't drive the car? This kind of argumentation is so lazy and misguided.
- saagarjha 8y ago> There is an even bigger chance of you dying when driving in a car. Does that mean you don't drive the car? No, but I am not actively going around saying that self-driving technology is useless because the fatality rate is going down already.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y agoRussian Roulette is often depicted as being played with a six-shooter. The only reason driving a car is more dangerous is because people don't routinely play Russian Roulette. Which surely isn't an argument you actually want to make?
- ThomPete 8y agoSorry you lost me. What are you trying to say?
- Jach 8y agoNot really. I don't see why it'd be any harder to overcome them though, especially for known classes of effects like "what about waste?" I'll defer to the engineer quoted at the end of that article that at least for the issue of brine it's probably not a problem.