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It's not as simple as you'd like, but the little known Bosch-Haber process, which produces ammonia for farming, staved off mass famines and may be why many read
by leoh 7y ago
It's not as simple as you'd like, but the little known Bosch-Haber process, which produces ammonia for farming, staved off mass famines and may be why many readers of HN are alive today.
- ghaff 7y agoAfter which, Haber went on to play a key role in helping Germany develop chemical weapons for World War I.
- new2628 7y agoWould the world be better or worse off without the population boom that resulted from the invention?
- robbrown451 7y agoBetter to whom? How do you define "better" if not relative to some entity able to appreciate the difference between good and bad?
- dredmorbius 7y agoLooking at the long-term consequences might be illuminating, though that presupposes agreement on what that long-term consequence is. If it is a high, stable, prosperous, and happy population, sustainable over the long term, arguably good. If you start deviating from these criteria, things don't look so good. H-B has given us "large. Is that population stable? Is it prosperous (and if so or if not, where and why)? Is it happy? And is it sustainable over the long term? If not, what does the end-stage look like, and how does it compare to the status quo ante*, prior to H-B? As with tackling complex projects, addressing difficult questions sometimes becomes more tractable when decomposed into sub-problems and components. As with mathematical proofs, sometimes presuming one result, then walking that to its inevitable conclusions, leads to a proof by contradiction.