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Is the planet crowded? Whenever I go on a road trip I certainly don't get that impression. There's 20 minutes of cities, an hour of outskirts, then 4 hours of

Is the planet crowded? Whenever I go on a road trip I certainly don't get that impression. There's 20 minutes of cities, an hour of outskirts, then 4 hours of nothing. People don't want to live that far away from everyone else, in general, but wind turbines and solar panels don't get as lonely. All you really have to worry about are resistive losses when bringing the electricity to the people, and that seems very manageable. It's also a problem with nuclear because nobody really wants to live next door to a nuclear power plant. One "hold my beer!" away from being the next "Damn Interesting" article in the lost cities category.

elevaet 4y ago
I mean "crowded" is relative, but yeah I'd say we're crowding the planet. There's precious little wilderness left [1]. Livestock outweighs wild mammals by a factor of 10:1 [2]. The chicken is the most common bird, 15x the runner up [3]. Flying insects are down 75% or more since ~1990 [4]. The reefs are dying, we're dumping CO2 into the atmosphere and cooking the planet, there's plastic getting everywhere in the ocean. Maybe "crowded" is a loaded term and I can see why someone might object when they drive through the countryside and all they can see is miles of roads and fields, but we're stripping the planet of biodiversity, and gobbling all the resources we can. We're shifting the planet is shifting from a biological system to an industrial one. It's not all bad, and at heart I really do believe humans are the most precious creature here, but we're shitting the bed and spoiling our own cradle. Lately, nuclear has started looking like a necessary tool if we're going to have any chance at tackling climate change. 1. https://www.science.org/content/article/just-19-earth-s-land-still-wild-analysis-suggests https://www.science.org/content/article/just-19-earth-s-land... 2. https://ourworldindata.org/life-on-earth https://ourworldindata.org/life-on-earth 3. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/most-populous-bird-species-in-the-world.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/most-populous-bird-speci... 4. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185809 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

elevaet 4y ago

I mean "crowded" is relative, but yeah I'd say we're crowding the planet. There's precious little wilderness left [1]. Livestock outweighs wild mammals by a factor of 10:1 [2]. The chicken is the most common bird, 15x the runner up [3]. Flying insects are down 75% or more since ~1990 [4]. The reefs are dying, we're dumping CO2 into the atmosphere and cooking the planet, there's plastic getting everywhere in the ocean. Maybe "crowded" is a loaded term and I can see why someone might object when they drive through the countryside and all they can see is miles of roads and fields, but we're stripping the planet of biodiversity, and gobbling all the resources we can. We're shifting the planet is shifting from a biological system to an industrial one. It's not all bad, and at heart I really do believe humans are the most precious creature here, but we're shitting the bed and spoiling our own cradle. Lately, nuclear has started looking like a necessary tool if we're going to have any chance at tackling climate change. 1. https://www.science.org/content/article/just-19-earth-s-land-still-wild-analysis-suggests https://www.science.org/content/article/just-19-earth-s-land... 2. https://ourworldindata.org/life-on-earth https://ourworldindata.org/life-on-earth 3. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/most-populous-bird-species-in-the-world.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/most-populous-bird-speci... 4. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185809 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...