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Something tells me that if solar continues this decline (which is obviously much more difficult now) and achieves another 80% drop in price, it is possibly the
by newyankee 5y ago
Something tells me that if solar continues this decline (which is obviously much more difficult now) and achieves another 80% drop in price, it is possibly the biggest solution to most of the world's major problems impacting most of the world population (which lives in tropics).
The oligopoly of energy industry by OPEC, Russia and few other countries has possibly impacted geopolitics more than anything else. The fights of today and future might all be about intellectual property on everything new and shiny that is discovered.
- kragen 5y agoI think you're being unrealistically optimistic, despite your extremely dystopian last sentence. People will continue to create suffering through ignorance, delusion, greed, and hatred even in the face of abundant energy—OPEC was founded in 01960, at which point the previous 50 years included the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Great Leap Forward and the greatest famine in history, the Rape of Nanking, the worldwide rise of Fascism, two World Wars, the Bengal Famine of 01943, de-kulakization, the establishment of GULAG, the Great Depression, the first nuclear war, the destruction of Königsberg, the 01918 flu pandemic, the First Indochina War, the Chinese civil war, the Armenian genocide, the last 18 years of the American Indian boarding schools, the death marches of the Palestinians, the Partition of India, and some other incidents. Energy became immensely cheaper after Watt, and all of the above events happened in the world thus created. Making energy cheaper still won't solve most of the world's major problems impacting most of the world population.
- frosted-flakes 5y agoWhy are you writing years with five digits and a leading zero when the global convention is four digits, or informally, two digits?
- vages 5y agoIt’s a Long Now Foundation thing: in order for us to have a longer perspective on time, we should prefix years with 0
- rabidrat 5y agoIt's a meme for Long Now members showing that they intend/expect civilization to continue past the year 9999. It's an effective signal to other members and a great "Ask me" button.
- vlovich123 5y agoIt’s a movement that thinks that adding the extra 0 gets people to think on a longer time scale. I don’t happen to think it’s a useful trick because we’re not even thinking on thousand-year timescales and a lot of us experienced the turn of the millennia.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]