6 ms·

While it's difficult to imagine a scenario in which humanity extinguishes itself, it's easy to imagine scenarios which make civilized society difficult, and cou

by lumost 6y ago

While it's difficult to imagine a scenario in which humanity extinguishes itself, it's easy to imagine scenarios which make civilized society difficult, and could preclude future advanced civilizations from ever emerging on Earth, these may constitute a variety of "hidden filters" which make exiting ones own solar system or mustering the energy to make oneself known impractical. The article makes reference to a million year time horizon, however even earthly nuclear energy reserves may become strained on a thousand year time horizon. As we're all acutely aware, the great biochemical battery of fossil fuels is already operating on diminished capacity. Planet's such as mars lack the hydro-cycle to drive renewables, the organic legacy to support fossil fuels, and potentially the tectonics to enable surface extraction of nuclear fuels. While a theoretical expansion outside of the confines of earths gravity to acquire resources from asteroids, or produce high concentrations of solar energy is currently achievable on a 20-100 year time horizon, supporting the energy demands of the aerospace supply chain or considering regular space launches may be difficult in 2 centuries. On a thousand year time horizon it's entirely plausible that maintaining a purely renewable economy makes the production of certain materials impractically expensive when considering the concentrated energy demands of blast furnaces or industrial mining. Similar collapse events have occurred historically due in part to the exhaustion of limited resources such as forests have occurred in the past in both Europe and polynesia. If a similar event occurred in the future it's entirely plausible that a future civilization would be unable to muster the resources to ever "unlock" the next set of energy production capabilities.

UweSchmidt 6y ago
Scenarios where humanity extinguishes itself are easy to come by: We are still living under the threat of accidental or intentional launch of a great number of nuclear weapons. The remaining civilizations might be unable to survive or thrive with what's left. On the other hand speculating about the technological limits of humanity a million years in the future is difficult when we've only come up with nuclear energy a few decades ago, and while progress in some areas has been overdue, generally there seem to be quite a few "research trees" with potential for scifi-tech.
- Retric 6y ago
  Industrialization would be slower without fossil fuels, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. Small scale wood smelting can eventually make way to hydro powered electric based smelting. We are used to a very energy extensive economy, but most of the world would be habitual without any home heating or cooling for example. Similarly, a network of street cars need something like 1% of the energy as individual cars for everyone in a city. Historically, rivers, streams, and canals where similarly quite efficient long distance transportation networks we have largely forgotten about.
  - henrikschroder 6y ago
    > We are used to a very energy extensive economy Like you say, there are enormous amounts of low-hanging fruit when it comes to energy efficiency across all of society. Take building insulation, for example. Where I'm from, triple glaze windows were made mandatory 30 years ago, every single existing apartment building was forced to retro-fit. Yet when I moved to the US less than ten years ago, apartment ads would regularly highlight "DOUBLE GLAZING" as if that was some incredibly expensive and luxurious feature. Also where I'm from, I used to own an apartment in a building from the 1940s. But a bit more than ten years ago, new strict energy efficiency requirements went into effect, so my building - and every building like it in the country - had to fix it, often by adding a thick layer of insulation on the outside. I still own an apartment there, it's newer, but the outside walls are 30cm thick and made of concrete for insulation purposes. And yet, here in the US, I regularly see new housing construction that's essentially just plywood for every single wall, inside and outside. The US is incredibly behind when it comes to insulation and energy efficiency, because the economics of it doesn't make sense. If energy were to become much more expensive, this would change pretty damn fast.
    - count 6y ago
      There's also a US approach to 'grandfathering' in existing structures as building codes are updated. The only time I will ever 'have' to bring something in my house up to date is if I voluntarily do something like open a wall or install a new HVAC unit. And then the only thing impacted is that item, nothing else even gets inspected for safety/compliance. I understand it to some extent: TONS of people can't afford to just...replace all of their windows, for example.
tachyonbeam 6y ago
You can very much use solar panels on Mars. There's also a clear advantage that right now, there's nothing on Mars, lots of land to place said solar panels, but IMO, that's not going to be an issue. We will probably master nuclear fission within the next few decades. Lots of progress has been made, and it will solve our energy needs. What if we run out of deuterium or tritium? Not a problem, by that time, in a few centuries, we'll likely be able to build bigger, better reactors that can fuse "normal" hydrogen and maybe even helium. As for the great filter, I've always thought that the real danger is something that would cause say, one person, to have an outsized destructive power. Imagine if we successfully invent nanobots that can self-replicate, for example, and anyone with the right set of skills could program them. In that scenario, it's within the capability of any individual to create a deadly disease. You just need one unhinged person to trigger a horrible disaster. Nanotech could be much more dangerous than nukes, and if you combine strong AI and nanotech, I could see that being an immense survival risk.
- lumost 6y ago
  Martian solar energy production has a few "unique" challenges. Including - Dust - Supply chain - ~40% less watts/square meter Of these the most unproven is the supply chain problem. The link below summarizes why solar doesn't work in the short-term for mars habitation missions - it's an open question as to whether there are economically extractable deposits of silicon, cadmium, and other materials to build out a solar farm. Bear in mind, terrestrial resource extraction makes extensive use of water. https://medium.com/swlh/solar-power-is-never-going-to-work-on-mars-and-everybody-knows-it-b2fb221722b1 https://medium.com/swlh/solar-power-is-never-going-to-work-o...
  - Balgair 6y ago
    The comparison would be for locally produced solar. We know that making solar panels on Earth is a net positive energy expenditure, from raw materials to recycle/disposal, and just barely so. But the cost of creation of solar panels on Mars is unknown relative to net energy expenditure. I'm fairly certain that it would be many decades, if not centuries, before it became net positive. Sending solar panels to Mars is obviously not a good use of Watts.
throwaway189262 6y ago
> While it's difficult to imagine a scenario in which humanity extinguishes itself I used to believe this, until the pandemic. Now I think bio weapons are infinitely more dangerous than nukes. Imagine if COVID was a few times more contagious and as deadly as it's close relatives SARS and MERS. Not a big stretch really. We would be pondering extinction right now. If the power was still working.
- jononor 6y ago
  While the COVID-19 pandemic has struck hard in some countries, it has not been on a scale which threatens humanity in any form? Excess deaths for 2020 are in the ranges 10-300 per 100k, meaning under 0.3% in the worst case. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking-covid-19-excess-deaths-across-countries https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking... Not that pandemics cannot be properly devastating. During the bubonic plague up to 50% of the population died in many areas across the world. It was still no threat to humanity though.
  - sgt101 6y ago
    A pathogen as deadly as the plague and as mysterious or intractable to medicine as the plague was in the 1200's released into a connected world such as ours would have an astonishing impact.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    The threshold that matters isn't extincting humanity, but collapsing modern technological civilization. That's much easier to do. The current pandemic revealed how fragile our supply chains are, and I still consider it a small miracle that the impact so far was so small. Lots of people are in dire straits, yes, but the world structurally didn't change much.
- robocat 6y ago
  Very very hard to cause human extinction with a pathogen. A pathogen could kill fast, in which case some islands would be warned in time to close borders and survive. Or a pathogen could have a long incubation, in which case it is surely going to be somewhat survivable by some percentage of the population Making it spread through the atmosphere worldwide, while remaining virulent in sunshine for weeks, would be a hard problem to solve.
pdonis 6y ago
> even earthly nuclear energy reserves may become strained on a thousand year time horizon No, they won't. Even if we restrict to just fission power, on a thousand year time horizon we can expect thorium reactors and extraction of uranium from seawater, which multiplies the available energy by a factor of at least a thousand. Furthermore, on that time horizon we can expect fusion to be available, and deuterium from seawater multiplies the available energy by a factor of about a billion. Not to mention that on a thousand year time horizon, we should be making full use of the available solar energy in Earth's vicinity by means of orbital power stations, in which case we won't even need any other energy source on that time horizon except for specialized uses like fast spacecraft. > On a thousand year time horizon it's entirely plausible that maintaining a purely renewable economy makes the production of certain materials impractically expensive And it also makes it practically certain that any material that's that expensive to produce won't be needed anyway, since cheaper substitutes will be found. "Limited resources" by itself simply doesn't strike me as a plausible Great Filter.

by lumost 6y ago

UweSchmidt 6y ago

Scenarios where humanity extinguishes itself are easy to come by: We are still living under the threat of accidental or intentional launch of a great number of nuclear weapons. The remaining civilizations might be unable to survive or thrive with what's left. On the other hand speculating about the technological limits of humanity a million years in the future is difficult when we've only come up with nuclear energy a few decades ago, and while progress in some areas has been overdue, generally there seem to be quite a few "research trees" with potential for scifi-tech.

Retric 6y ago
Industrialization would be slower without fossil fuels, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. Small scale wood smelting can eventually make way to hydro powered electric based smelting. We are used to a very energy extensive economy, but most of the world would be habitual without any home heating or cooling for example. Similarly, a network of street cars need something like 1% of the energy as individual cars for everyone in a city. Historically, rivers, streams, and canals where similarly quite efficient long distance transportation networks we have largely forgotten about.
- henrikschroder 6y ago
  > We are used to a very energy extensive economy Like you say, there are enormous amounts of low-hanging fruit when it comes to energy efficiency across all of society. Take building insulation, for example. Where I'm from, triple glaze windows were made mandatory 30 years ago, every single existing apartment building was forced to retro-fit. Yet when I moved to the US less than ten years ago, apartment ads would regularly highlight "DOUBLE GLAZING" as if that was some incredibly expensive and luxurious feature. Also where I'm from, I used to own an apartment in a building from the 1940s. But a bit more than ten years ago, new strict energy efficiency requirements went into effect, so my building - and every building like it in the country - had to fix it, often by adding a thick layer of insulation on the outside. I still own an apartment there, it's newer, but the outside walls are 30cm thick and made of concrete for insulation purposes. And yet, here in the US, I regularly see new housing construction that's essentially just plywood for every single wall, inside and outside. The US is incredibly behind when it comes to insulation and energy efficiency, because the economics of it doesn't make sense. If energy were to become much more expensive, this would change pretty damn fast.
  - count 6y ago
    There's also a US approach to 'grandfathering' in existing structures as building codes are updated. The only time I will ever 'have' to bring something in my house up to date is if I voluntarily do something like open a wall or install a new HVAC unit. And then the only thing impacted is that item, nothing else even gets inspected for safety/compliance. I understand it to some extent: TONS of people can't afford to just...replace all of their windows, for example.

tachyonbeam 6y ago

You can very much use solar panels on Mars. There's also a clear advantage that right now, there's nothing on Mars, lots of land to place said solar panels, but IMO, that's not going to be an issue. We will probably master nuclear fission within the next few decades. Lots of progress has been made, and it will solve our energy needs. What if we run out of deuterium or tritium? Not a problem, by that time, in a few centuries, we'll likely be able to build bigger, better reactors that can fuse "normal" hydrogen and maybe even helium. As for the great filter, I've always thought that the real danger is something that would cause say, one person, to have an outsized destructive power. Imagine if we successfully invent nanobots that can self-replicate, for example, and anyone with the right set of skills could program them. In that scenario, it's within the capability of any individual to create a deadly disease. You just need one unhinged person to trigger a horrible disaster. Nanotech could be much more dangerous than nukes, and if you combine strong AI and nanotech, I could see that being an immense survival risk.

lumost 6y ago
Martian solar energy production has a few "unique" challenges. Including - Dust - Supply chain - ~40% less watts/square meter Of these the most unproven is the supply chain problem. The link below summarizes why solar doesn't work in the short-term for mars habitation missions - it's an open question as to whether there are economically extractable deposits of silicon, cadmium, and other materials to build out a solar farm. Bear in mind, terrestrial resource extraction makes extensive use of water. https://medium.com/swlh/solar-power-is-never-going-to-work-on-mars-and-everybody-knows-it-b2fb221722b1 https://medium.com/swlh/solar-power-is-never-going-to-work-o...
- Balgair 6y ago
  The comparison would be for locally produced solar. We know that making solar panels on Earth is a net positive energy expenditure, from raw materials to recycle/disposal, and just barely so. But the cost of creation of solar panels on Mars is unknown relative to net energy expenditure. I'm fairly certain that it would be many decades, if not centuries, before it became net positive. Sending solar panels to Mars is obviously not a good use of Watts.

throwaway189262 6y ago

> While it's difficult to imagine a scenario in which humanity extinguishes itself I used to believe this, until the pandemic. Now I think bio weapons are infinitely more dangerous than nukes. Imagine if COVID was a few times more contagious and as deadly as it's close relatives SARS and MERS. Not a big stretch really. We would be pondering extinction right now. If the power was still working.

jononor 6y ago
While the COVID-19 pandemic has struck hard in some countries, it has not been on a scale which threatens humanity in any form? Excess deaths for 2020 are in the ranges 10-300 per 100k, meaning under 0.3% in the worst case. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking-covid-19-excess-deaths-across-countries https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking... Not that pandemics cannot be properly devastating. During the bubonic plague up to 50% of the population died in many areas across the world. It was still no threat to humanity though.
- sgt101 6y ago
  A pathogen as deadly as the plague and as mysterious or intractable to medicine as the plague was in the 1200's released into a connected world such as ours would have an astonishing impact.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  The threshold that matters isn't extincting humanity, but collapsing modern technological civilization. That's much easier to do. The current pandemic revealed how fragile our supply chains are, and I still consider it a small miracle that the impact so far was so small. Lots of people are in dire straits, yes, but the world structurally didn't change much.
robocat 6y ago
Very very hard to cause human extinction with a pathogen. A pathogen could kill fast, in which case some islands would be warned in time to close borders and survive. Or a pathogen could have a long incubation, in which case it is surely going to be somewhat survivable by some percentage of the population Making it spread through the atmosphere worldwide, while remaining virulent in sunshine for weeks, would be a hard problem to solve.

pdonis 6y ago

> even earthly nuclear energy reserves may become strained on a thousand year time horizon No, they won't. Even if we restrict to just fission power, on a thousand year time horizon we can expect thorium reactors and extraction of uranium from seawater, which multiplies the available energy by a factor of at least a thousand. Furthermore, on that time horizon we can expect fusion to be available, and deuterium from seawater multiplies the available energy by a factor of about a billion. Not to mention that on a thousand year time horizon, we should be making full use of the available solar energy in Earth's vicinity by means of orbital power stations, in which case we won't even need any other energy source on that time horizon except for specialized uses like fast spacecraft. > On a thousand year time horizon it's entirely plausible that maintaining a purely renewable economy makes the production of certain materials impractically expensive And it also makes it practically certain that any material that's that expensive to produce won't be needed anyway, since cheaper substitutes will be found. "Limited resources" by itself simply doesn't strike me as a plausible Great Filter.