7 ms·

At first I thought there was a typo and the article meant 1812. But no. They really mean 812. As someone in their late 20s, I don’t see how the future of Earth

by ecf 6y ago

At first I thought there was a typo and the article meant 1812. But no. They really mean 812. As someone in their late 20s, I don’t see how the future of Earth in another half-century is anything but bleak.

the-dude 6y ago
Please, I remember we would all die a horrible death due to a nuclear armageddon. When that didn't happen, we would all suffocate because all the forests would die due to acidrain. Then we would all die of skin cancer due to the ozone-hole. I actually remember the nuclear effects from Tjernobyl, glad I didn't die then.
- haltingproblem 6y ago
  Good points. Don't forget the prediction of mass starvation made in the 1970s for the 80s, updated to the 90s then the 2000s and so on and so forth. Galactic gloom and doom is probably written into our genes which is why it makes its way into almost every western religion. Armageddon. We need to balance our natural proclivity for gloom and doom with plausible scenarios like pandemics, asteroid strikes, obesity epidemic, population declines instead of fantasy one that never come to pass or ones we have no control over.
  - the-dude 6y ago
    In the 70s we would all freeze to death due to a new ice age. Thanks for the heads-up.
    - titzer 6y ago
      No scientist ever seriously suggested this. At most they pointed out that a new ice age was coming...on schedule. In a couple thousand years.
      - haltingproblem 6y ago
        "the prognosis is for a long-lasting global cooling more severe than any experiened hitherto by civilized mankind." [1] [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0033589472900671 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/003358...
        titzer 6y ago
        ....8000 years from now, as part of the normal interglacial cycle, which is exactly what I said. And given that civilization is less than 10000 years old, just returning to the previous ice age would technically fulfill the quote you tried so hard to pull out of context. Did you actually even read the entire abstract?
  - ska 6y ago
    > Don't forget the prediction of mass starvation made in the 1970s for the 80 This didn't happen at any significant scale; I mean there were (correct) concerns about geopolitical forces leading to things like the mid 80s ethiopian faminei impact but no concern about wide spread starvation. There was concern about mass starvation in the earlier part of the century, and it was pretty well founded. This changed due the "green revolution" and massive increase in food production. What this shows is that predictive models can be made obsolete by new technology. Unfortunately, a lot of people take the wrong lesson from that. The assumption that new technology will arrive in time to address a well predicted problem is dangerously irrational.
    - haltingproblem 6y ago
      "Dangerously stupid"? Please review the HN site usage guidelines.
      - ska 6y ago
        I’ll have a look bit suspect it’s on the right side of them, it’s an assumption not a person; updated anyway.
- FiReaNG3L 6y ago
  Wow, 1 generation survived all kinds of terrible events, so it surely means this was all made up and that there's no problems that could eventually lead to catastrophy over a 'long' period of time that is more than the lifespan of one human being.
  - hnuser123456 6y ago
    strawman
    - fsflover 6y ago
      I don't see a strawman here. Care to elaborate?
      - musingsole 6y ago
        > 1 generation survived all kinds of terrible events That isn't even close to the GP's argument. The steelman is every generation encounters existential problems that get exaggerated to apocalyptic proportions but that history is also a very long story of those existential problems being dealt with in one way or another. (And in the voice of GP "I lived through one such cycle") The black-pilled people would counter that civilization today has an unprecedented number of ways in which to destroy itself and so that destruction is inevitable. The counter to the black pill is that it's missing historical information which shows humanity has been successfully walking this tightrope for far longer than anyone thinks.
- yongjik 6y ago
  > Please, I remember we would all die a horrible death due to a nuclear armageddon. And then leaders of superpowers talked to each other, signed treaties, and decided not to start a nuclear war, because nobody likes dying. > When that didn't happen, we would all suffocate because all the forests would die due to acidrain. So nations signed treaties and laws to limit sulfur and NOx emission, which worked. > Then we would all die of skin cancer due to the ozone-hole. Yep, treaties and laws. No more CFC, no more ozone hole. > I actually remember the nuclear effects from Tjernobyl, glad I didn't die then. OK I'll grant you that this was overblown a bit.
  - ed25519FUUU 6y ago
    What about global cooling scare[1], which obviously turned out to be nothing but I'm sure was used to scaremonger people? OP wasn't saying that they weren't real issues. In fact they were all serious! I think he was saying there's nothing good about falling into a nihilist hole. Living together on Earth is hard and takes cooperation. There's plenty of room for the innovators but no room for the defeatist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
    - yongjik 6y ago
      From your link: > Academic analysis of the peer-reviewed studies published at that time shows that most papers examining aspects of climate during the 1970s were either neutral or showed a warming trend. I'm too young to have read anything about Global Cooling during the 1970s, but I can confidently say that, by 2021, I've seen way more "Ha ha scientists warned about Global Cooling in 1970s which makes the theory of Global Warming invalid!" than actual "Scientist So-and-so warned that the Earth is Cooling." It's basically historical revisionism for selling an agenda.
      - kbelder 6y ago
        I still think cooling is a larger long-term threat than warming. Warming is a temporary disruption for humans, but the biosphere will, overall, flourish. Cooling is more of a general threat to Earth life, and it's pretty sure to happen. We are subject to periodic ice ages. The difference, I guess, is that the warming is upon us NOW, while the ice age is potentially 50,000 years off.
- cgriswald 6y ago
  I remember a New Agey book talking about California becoming an island, the Mississippi River flooding the Great Plains essentially splitting the US in two, and Florida being completely underwater... by like 1990. That said, just because some people take hysteria to the extreme doesn’t mean the threats aren’t real. The nuclear annihilation one in particular came down to a handful of people steering the ship blind and somehow not running into the rocks while their first mates were screaming at them to turn the other way.
  - kbelder 6y ago
    True, but it means that you maybe shouldn't partake in extreme hysteria. I vividly remember my teacher in High School asking the students to raise their hands if they thought there would be a nuclear war with the USSR in their lifetime, and I was the only kid in my class who didn't think there would be. I imagine that there would be a similar response now, if you asked a bunch of kids if civilization was going to collapse due to global warming in their lifetime. Doesn't mean that global warming isn't a problem, just like nuclear war wasn't a problem; it just means that people have a hard time evaluating risk and likelihood.
- bosswipe 6y ago
  Your argument is a pretty obvious fallacy: some things didn't happen in the past so this other unrelated thing won't happen in the future.
- WhompingWindows 6y ago
  Do you believe in climate science? I can't abide climate denialism, it's already led to hundreds of thousands of deaths via air pollution having been worsened by fossil fuel's deleterious smear campaigns against climate science. Parent comment is not talking about cataclysmic death, he's talking about the destruction of our ecosystems. It will indeed be bleak when rampant forest fires destroy our forests, when the sea levels rise and take out whole swaths of valuable real estate. You may think this is fear-mongering, but whatever your opinion, molecules have inherent properties that your opinion doesn't affect. This is simply physics, CO2 and methane and other gasses will trap heat, rendering all of the biosphere changed, ice melting, forest fires worsened. It's already happening and it will get worse.
- airhead969 6y ago
  It will take 100-200 years to get really bad, but the inertia of the energy in the water cycle is the concerning point.
- titzer 6y ago
  They only have to be right once....
  - bosswipe 6y ago
    Who is "they"?
    - titzer 6y ago
      The same amorphous "they" that denialists are always talking about being wrong.
  - musingsole 6y ago
    Go read Wheel of Time and pay particular attention to Ishamael/Moridin's character arc. They only have to be right once, sure, but the entire fabric of existence is working against 'them' to make sure it will never happen.
- eloff 6y ago
  > Please, I remember we would all die a horrible death due to a nuclear armageddon. That's not off the table at all, it's just not talked about much anymore. To take your argument seriously, past performance does not predict future results. The fact that we've avoided disaster in the last 80 years does not mean we will be so lucky with climate change. It's certainly not a reason to ignore the risks - the ozone hole situation improved because the nations of Earth took united and conclusive action to halt it by banning CFCs.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  > Please, I remember we would all die a horrible death due to a nuclear armageddon. That was a significant risk at one point. > When that didn't happen, we would all suffocate because all the forests would die due to acidrain. Eh? Who told you that? > Then we would all die of skin cancer due to the ozone-hole. That was a serious, but ultimately very tractable problem, with an expensive but feasible solution, which was taken. > I actually remember the nuclear effects from Tjernobyl, glad I didn't die then. See answer two. Global warming is most similar to number three, but the solutions are far, far more expensive, and may have been left too late. Ultimately "something bad nearly happened, but it was averted" doesn't form a great basis to assume that the next very bad thing will also be averted.
  - musingsole 6y ago
    "something bad nearly happened, but it was averted" is literally the story of life on Earth.
- throwaway5752 6y ago
  Please, I remember we would all die a horrible death due to a nuclear armageddon. When that didn't happen, we would all suffocate because all the forests would die due to acidrain. Then we would all die of skin cancer due to the ozone-hole. I actually remember the nuclear effects from Tjernobyl, glad I didn't die then. In all of those cases they were massive problems that took massive efforts to fix. Have you heard of SO2 scrubbers? The Clean Air Act? The Montreal Protocol? The bunch of dead liquidators in Chernobyl? For that matter you missed tetraethyl lead gasoline additives, dioxins, asbestos, and cigarettes. There are too many massive problems and too frequently there are greedy (evil?) people fighting to keep the status quo. What's different is that global warming has been blunted by icecap melting, ocean warming, and ocean thermal expansion. We've used up our budget, and it will get abruptly worse. The sheer quantity of energy is beyond any prior problem humanity has ever created and you can't bargain with thermodynamics. Now it's our turn to deal with a problem, like previous generations did in the examples you mentioned.
yosito 6y ago
What do you think the future of earth was like in 812?
- tasogare 6y ago
  Before 1000 AD there was movements in Europe speaking about the imminent destruction of mankind.
TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
The future will be different, and we will have to adapt. But to see it as bleak is to embrace the pessimistic interpretation, which while sometimes accurate isn't always the best way to view things. Humans are the most adaptable species on the planet. We can purposefully manipulate our environment for our purposes. Our adaptability will help us going forward.
- TLightful 6y ago
  Yay, technology and adaptability will allows us all, eventually, to exist drinking dust and looking after termites as pets.
wunderflix 6y ago
30 years ago my mum said the same about the coming next 30 years. I am not saying that your hunch is wrong. I just want to caution that people were thinking similarly a while back. Don't underestimate the will and resourcefulness of men.
- titzer 6y ago
  People can. not. understand. exponential growth. Things are really speeding up! Half of all CO2 emissions by humans have been since...1990. https://ieep.eu/news/more-than-half-of-all-co2-emissions-since-1751-emitted-in-the-last-30-years https://ieep.eu/news/more-than-half-of-all-co2-emissions-sin... Global emissions are higher than they were in 1990, and higher than the average over these last 30 years. And still increasing.
  - wunderflix 6y ago
    If you acknowledge the negative effects of potential growth, do you also see the upsides of it? Exponential growth in smart people working on solutions for example. 1 year ago no one assumed that we would have 4 working vaccines already deployed to millions of people.
    - titzer 6y ago
      I am told day-in and day-out about how awesome this exponential growth thing is. Month after month, year after year, they just keep stuffing this exponential growth right up my in face without me even asking for it. Exponential growth has got the entirety of the world's mindshare behind it. It's not enough to just constantly scramble everything and revolutionize everything, and eat everything up. Ya can't even utter a word against it; everyone must bend a knee to it. It's the only model that anyone seems to be able to think of. "Circle the wagons, someone criticized it!" The reality is that we get nothing but exponential growth, and promises of more exponential growth. It's the only future we see now. It's the only answer have to any kind of problem. What are we going to do about all this debt? Exponential growth. What are we going to do about retirement? Exponential growth. What are we going to do about the climate? Exponential growth. How are we going to feed our exponential growth? More exponential growth. We're addicted to exponential growth mindset and we are now incapable of imagining anything else. No, I don't need to constantly mouth platitudes about the upsides of it, not anymore. Not after the rivers and fields I frequented as a kid are choked with garbage and plowed under for subdivisions. But oh yeah, exponential growth. Everybody loves it. Can't say a word against it. Like a watermelon growing in a lightbulb. This exponential growth thing isn't gonna work out in the end, people. But hey, your computer is fast, you little ingrate.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
eloff 6y ago
More like half-millennia that we'll be dealing with the fallout from climate change. The next 50 years won't even be the fastest paced period of change. It's pretty bleak. If there's a silver lining it's that on time scales of tens of millennia we might have avoided descending into another glacial period - which would be disaster for the northern hemisphere, erase Russia and Canada, and wipe out a sizable or even majority share of current crop production. It's tough to say if that would even matter to humans so far into the future, but maybe it's a small consolation. The next ten generations or so are going to have some incredible challenges to overcome.
gus_massa 6y ago
Try to read the best models for the next 50 years by serious scientific groups like the IPCC. Try to ignore the denialist and alarmist reports that get to the front page of newspapers.

by ecf 6y ago

the-dude 6y ago

Please, I remember we would all die a horrible death due to a nuclear armageddon. When that didn't happen, we would all suffocate because all the forests would die due to acidrain. Then we would all die of skin cancer due to the ozone-hole. I actually remember the nuclear effects from Tjernobyl, glad I didn't die then.

haltingproblem 6y ago
Good points. Don't forget the prediction of mass starvation made in the 1970s for the 80s, updated to the 90s then the 2000s and so on and so forth. Galactic gloom and doom is probably written into our genes which is why it makes its way into almost every western religion. Armageddon. We need to balance our natural proclivity for gloom and doom with plausible scenarios like pandemics, asteroid strikes, obesity epidemic, population declines instead of fantasy one that never come to pass or ones we have no control over.
- the-dude 6y ago
  In the 70s we would all freeze to death due to a new ice age. Thanks for the heads-up.
  - titzer 6y ago
    No scientist ever seriously suggested this. At most they pointed out that a new ice age was coming...on schedule. In a couple thousand years.
    - haltingproblem 6y ago
      "the prognosis is for a long-lasting global cooling more severe than any experiened hitherto by civilized mankind." [1] [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0033589472900671 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/003358...
      - titzer 6y ago
        ....8000 years from now, as part of the normal interglacial cycle, which is exactly what I said. And given that civilization is less than 10000 years old, just returning to the previous ice age would technically fulfill the quote you tried so hard to pull out of context. Did you actually even read the entire abstract?
- ska 6y ago
  > Don't forget the prediction of mass starvation made in the 1970s for the 80 This didn't happen at any significant scale; I mean there were (correct) concerns about geopolitical forces leading to things like the mid 80s ethiopian faminei impact but no concern about wide spread starvation. There was concern about mass starvation in the earlier part of the century, and it was pretty well founded. This changed due the "green revolution" and massive increase in food production. What this shows is that predictive models can be made obsolete by new technology. Unfortunately, a lot of people take the wrong lesson from that. The assumption that new technology will arrive in time to address a well predicted problem is dangerously irrational.
  - haltingproblem 6y ago
    "Dangerously stupid"? Please review the HN site usage guidelines.
    - ska 6y ago
      I’ll have a look bit suspect it’s on the right side of them, it’s an assumption not a person; updated anyway.
FiReaNG3L 6y ago
Wow, 1 generation survived all kinds of terrible events, so it surely means this was all made up and that there's no problems that could eventually lead to catastrophy over a 'long' period of time that is more than the lifespan of one human being.
- hnuser123456 6y ago
  strawman
  - fsflover 6y ago
    I don't see a strawman here. Care to elaborate?
    - musingsole 6y ago
      > 1 generation survived all kinds of terrible events That isn't even close to the GP's argument. The steelman is every generation encounters existential problems that get exaggerated to apocalyptic proportions but that history is also a very long story of those existential problems being dealt with in one way or another. (And in the voice of GP "I lived through one such cycle") The black-pilled people would counter that civilization today has an unprecedented number of ways in which to destroy itself and so that destruction is inevitable. The counter to the black pill is that it's missing historical information which shows humanity has been successfully walking this tightrope for far longer than anyone thinks.
yongjik 6y ago
> Please, I remember we would all die a horrible death due to a nuclear armageddon. And then leaders of superpowers talked to each other, signed treaties, and decided not to start a nuclear war, because nobody likes dying. > When that didn't happen, we would all suffocate because all the forests would die due to acidrain. So nations signed treaties and laws to limit sulfur and NOx emission, which worked. > Then we would all die of skin cancer due to the ozone-hole. Yep, treaties and laws. No more CFC, no more ozone hole. > I actually remember the nuclear effects from Tjernobyl, glad I didn't die then. OK I'll grant you that this was overblown a bit.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  What about global cooling scare[1], which obviously turned out to be nothing but I'm sure was used to scaremonger people? OP wasn't saying that they weren't real issues. In fact they were all serious! I think he was saying there's nothing good about falling into a nihilist hole. Living together on Earth is hard and takes cooperation. There's plenty of room for the innovators but no room for the defeatist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
  - yongjik 6y ago
    From your link: > Academic analysis of the peer-reviewed studies published at that time shows that most papers examining aspects of climate during the 1970s were either neutral or showed a warming trend. I'm too young to have read anything about Global Cooling during the 1970s, but I can confidently say that, by 2021, I've seen way more "Ha ha scientists warned about Global Cooling in 1970s which makes the theory of Global Warming invalid!" than actual "Scientist So-and-so warned that the Earth is Cooling." It's basically historical revisionism for selling an agenda.
    - kbelder 6y ago
      I still think cooling is a larger long-term threat than warming. Warming is a temporary disruption for humans, but the biosphere will, overall, flourish. Cooling is more of a general threat to Earth life, and it's pretty sure to happen. We are subject to periodic ice ages. The difference, I guess, is that the warming is upon us NOW, while the ice age is potentially 50,000 years off.
cgriswald 6y ago
I remember a New Agey book talking about California becoming an island, the Mississippi River flooding the Great Plains essentially splitting the US in two, and Florida being completely underwater... by like 1990. That said, just because some people take hysteria to the extreme doesn’t mean the threats aren’t real. The nuclear annihilation one in particular came down to a handful of people steering the ship blind and somehow not running into the rocks while their first mates were screaming at them to turn the other way.
- kbelder 6y ago
  True, but it means that you maybe shouldn't partake in extreme hysteria. I vividly remember my teacher in High School asking the students to raise their hands if they thought there would be a nuclear war with the USSR in their lifetime, and I was the only kid in my class who didn't think there would be. I imagine that there would be a similar response now, if you asked a bunch of kids if civilization was going to collapse due to global warming in their lifetime. Doesn't mean that global warming isn't a problem, just like nuclear war wasn't a problem; it just means that people have a hard time evaluating risk and likelihood.
bosswipe 6y ago
Your argument is a pretty obvious fallacy: some things didn't happen in the past so this other unrelated thing won't happen in the future.
WhompingWindows 6y ago
Do you believe in climate science? I can't abide climate denialism, it's already led to hundreds of thousands of deaths via air pollution having been worsened by fossil fuel's deleterious smear campaigns against climate science. Parent comment is not talking about cataclysmic death, he's talking about the destruction of our ecosystems. It will indeed be bleak when rampant forest fires destroy our forests, when the sea levels rise and take out whole swaths of valuable real estate. You may think this is fear-mongering, but whatever your opinion, molecules have inherent properties that your opinion doesn't affect. This is simply physics, CO2 and methane and other gasses will trap heat, rendering all of the biosphere changed, ice melting, forest fires worsened. It's already happening and it will get worse.
airhead969 6y ago
It will take 100-200 years to get really bad, but the inertia of the energy in the water cycle is the concerning point.
titzer 6y ago
They only have to be right once....
- bosswipe 6y ago
  Who is "they"?
  - titzer 6y ago
    The same amorphous "they" that denialists are always talking about being wrong.
- musingsole 6y ago
  Go read Wheel of Time and pay particular attention to Ishamael/Moridin's character arc. They only have to be right once, sure, but the entire fabric of existence is working against 'them' to make sure it will never happen.
eloff 6y ago
> Please, I remember we would all die a horrible death due to a nuclear armageddon. That's not off the table at all, it's just not talked about much anymore. To take your argument seriously, past performance does not predict future results. The fact that we've avoided disaster in the last 80 years does not mean we will be so lucky with climate change. It's certainly not a reason to ignore the risks - the ozone hole situation improved because the nations of Earth took united and conclusive action to halt it by banning CFCs.
rsynnott 6y ago
> Please, I remember we would all die a horrible death due to a nuclear armageddon. That was a significant risk at one point. > When that didn't happen, we would all suffocate because all the forests would die due to acidrain. Eh? Who told you that? > Then we would all die of skin cancer due to the ozone-hole. That was a serious, but ultimately very tractable problem, with an expensive but feasible solution, which was taken. > I actually remember the nuclear effects from Tjernobyl, glad I didn't die then. See answer two. Global warming is most similar to number three, but the solutions are far, far more expensive, and may have been left too late. Ultimately "something bad nearly happened, but it was averted" doesn't form a great basis to assume that the next very bad thing will also be averted.
- musingsole 6y ago
  "something bad nearly happened, but it was averted" is literally the story of life on Earth.
throwaway5752 6y ago
Please, I remember we would all die a horrible death due to a nuclear armageddon. When that didn't happen, we would all suffocate because all the forests would die due to acidrain. Then we would all die of skin cancer due to the ozone-hole. I actually remember the nuclear effects from Tjernobyl, glad I didn't die then. In all of those cases they were massive problems that took massive efforts to fix. Have you heard of SO2 scrubbers? The Clean Air Act? The Montreal Protocol? The bunch of dead liquidators in Chernobyl? For that matter you missed tetraethyl lead gasoline additives, dioxins, asbestos, and cigarettes. There are too many massive problems and too frequently there are greedy (evil?) people fighting to keep the status quo. What's different is that global warming has been blunted by icecap melting, ocean warming, and ocean thermal expansion. We've used up our budget, and it will get abruptly worse. The sheer quantity of energy is beyond any prior problem humanity has ever created and you can't bargain with thermodynamics. Now it's our turn to deal with a problem, like previous generations did in the examples you mentioned.

yosito 6y ago

What do you think the future of earth was like in 812?

tasogare 6y ago
Before 1000 AD there was movements in Europe speaking about the imminent destruction of mankind.

TheAdamAndChe 6y ago

The future will be different, and we will have to adapt. But to see it as bleak is to embrace the pessimistic interpretation, which while sometimes accurate isn't always the best way to view things. Humans are the most adaptable species on the planet. We can purposefully manipulate our environment for our purposes. Our adaptability will help us going forward.

TLightful 6y ago
Yay, technology and adaptability will allows us all, eventually, to exist drinking dust and looking after termites as pets.

wunderflix 6y ago

30 years ago my mum said the same about the coming next 30 years. I am not saying that your hunch is wrong. I just want to caution that people were thinking similarly a while back. Don't underestimate the will and resourcefulness of men.

titzer 6y ago
People can. not. understand. exponential growth. Things are really speeding up! Half of all CO2 emissions by humans have been since...1990. https://ieep.eu/news/more-than-half-of-all-co2-emissions-since-1751-emitted-in-the-last-30-years https://ieep.eu/news/more-than-half-of-all-co2-emissions-sin... Global emissions are higher than they were in 1990, and higher than the average over these last 30 years. And still increasing.
- wunderflix 6y ago
  If you acknowledge the negative effects of potential growth, do you also see the upsides of it? Exponential growth in smart people working on solutions for example. 1 year ago no one assumed that we would have 4 working vaccines already deployed to millions of people.
  - titzer 6y ago
    I am told day-in and day-out about how awesome this exponential growth thing is. Month after month, year after year, they just keep stuffing this exponential growth right up my in face without me even asking for it. Exponential growth has got the entirety of the world's mindshare behind it. It's not enough to just constantly scramble everything and revolutionize everything, and eat everything up. Ya can't even utter a word against it; everyone must bend a knee to it. It's the only model that anyone seems to be able to think of. "Circle the wagons, someone criticized it!" The reality is that we get nothing but exponential growth, and promises of more exponential growth. It's the only future we see now. It's the only answer have to any kind of problem. What are we going to do about all this debt? Exponential growth. What are we going to do about retirement? Exponential growth. What are we going to do about the climate? Exponential growth. How are we going to feed our exponential growth? More exponential growth. We're addicted to exponential growth mindset and we are now incapable of imagining anything else. No, I don't need to constantly mouth platitudes about the upsides of it, not anymore. Not after the rivers and fields I frequented as a kid are choked with garbage and plowed under for subdivisions. But oh yeah, exponential growth. Everybody loves it. Can't say a word against it. Like a watermelon growing in a lightbulb. This exponential growth thing isn't gonna work out in the end, people. But hey, your computer is fast, you little ingrate.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

eloff 6y ago

More like half-millennia that we'll be dealing with the fallout from climate change. The next 50 years won't even be the fastest paced period of change. It's pretty bleak. If there's a silver lining it's that on time scales of tens of millennia we might have avoided descending into another glacial period - which would be disaster for the northern hemisphere, erase Russia and Canada, and wipe out a sizable or even majority share of current crop production. It's tough to say if that would even matter to humans so far into the future, but maybe it's a small consolation. The next ten generations or so are going to have some incredible challenges to overcome.

gus_massa 6y ago

Try to read the best models for the next 50 years by serious scientific groups like the IPCC. Try to ignore the denialist and alarmist reports that get to the front page of newspapers.