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I had a chemistry teacher (retired analytic chemist for what's now DOW chemical) in highschool who pointed out something that stuck with me: We tend to act wit

I had a chemistry teacher (retired analytic chemist for what's now DOW chemical) in highschool who pointed out something that stuck with me: We tend to act without consideration and have confidence we can just engineer ourselves out of our mistakes. I think she was right. While I never try to underestimate humanity's enginuity, there's some arrogance there that we may create problems we can't simply engineer around.

guywithahat 3y ago
To be fair though, in the context of humanity we've never encountered a problem we couldn't later engineer ourselves out of. And it seems reasonable to think if we can engineer ourselves into the problem, we can engineer ourselves out of it as well (especially considering the alternative is to say we must stop innovating)
- rhaway84773 3y ago
  > we've never encountered a problem we couldn't later engineer ourselves out of I think this is survivorship bias. There have been several civilizations which have basically completely died out in human history, who weren’t able to engineer themselves out of whatever killed them.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    True but with technology that had not advanced beyond stone, simple metallurgy, and hand tools. Ultimately limited by whatever power could be extracted from human and animal effort. Once steam power and then electricity were discovered, civilization never looked back.
    - fwip 3y ago
      We've only had 200 or so years of widespread steam power (and closer to 100 for electricity). On an anthropological timescale, that's quite short. Egypt was ruled by pharaohs for 3,000 years. The technology we have is bigger now, and so we're also making bigger problems.
- djbusby 3y ago
  Stopping innovation not the alternative, you're creating a false dichotomy.
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    Right. The alternative is to engineer in the solution at the same time you engineer the innovation, so that there's no problem in the first place. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Do we gain much by requiring innovators of the future to spend their innovation power on solutions to the side-effects of past innovations, instead of brand new innovations?
- jmknoll 3y ago
  Sure we have. Climate change, radioactivity, and micro plastics are three major challenges that we have very much engineered ourselves into, and do not appear to be able to engineer ourselves out of.
- htag 3y ago
  We have tons of oopsies that we haven't fixed, and there is no reasonable path towards resolution. It is all a matter of the size of the problem we've created. I agree that we should continue with technological progress, but it's naive to dismiss the risks. Here are some humanity scale problems we've created for ourselves. * Chernobyl is still unsafe to visit. The amount of radiation we've leaked into the atmosphere and oceans has a measurable negative impact on global health, and often a horrendous impact on local environments. * Air quality/light pollution/noise pollution is significantly worse than pre-industrial revolution levels. These have measurable negative health impacts. * We've directly and indirectly caused an uncountable number of extinctions. * Glaciers are melting at an incredible rate.
  - Vecr 3y ago
    For Chernobyl, what do you mean by "unsafe to visit"? Because it's a war zone? I remember a lot of people went in 2019 after the show came out and it was fine. They had a guide or took a dosimeter and weren't crawling over the melted core or anything like that. I don't think the radiation from a nuclear reactor meltdown had global impacts, can you cite something? Even the fallout from a full nuclear exchange at the peak of warhead counts would stay in the northern hemisphere.
    - htag 3y ago
      Chernobyl safety -> "During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian forces subsequently captured Chernobyl. While there is an increase in radiation in the area, this is due to Russian forces disturbing the soil in the Red Forest and releasing radioactive dust and not from the reactor 4 itself. The New Safe Confinement is reportedly unharmed." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_New_Safe_Confinement#Project_timeline_and_status https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_New_Safe_Confinement... Atmospheric fallout -> "Because all people in the United States who were alive since 1951 received some radiation exposure from fallout, some people may have an increased risk of cancer from this exposure, in particular, thyroid cancer. " https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/fallout/RF-GWT_home.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/fallout/RF-GWT_home.htm
    - specialist 3y ago
- crazygringo 3y ago
  1) You're ignoring everyone killed in the interim, from pollution, poisoning, etc. 2) It's entirely unclear whether we can engineer ourselves out of climate change. We've never experienced anything at this scale before, or from something (fossil fuels) we rely on so much. The solution to climate change may have to be political rather than engineering, and it may be impossible politically.
  - guywithahat 3y ago
    Climate change has been the most important issue for the upcoming election for at least the past four decades. As real problems manifest themselves, we solve them. And again, as I said earlier, this is in the context of humanity. Although I don’t want to undermine the death of someone, their death won’t stop the progress of humanity unless so many people die it resets our species. Even if we’ve never faced a particular problem as big as anything we experienced today, we’ve also never been so advanced and rich as a civilization.
- bwestergard 3y ago
  There are thousands of species that went extinct due to engineered habitat destruction, pollution, and/or hunting. We face an ongoing "vulture crisis" in India due to the tremendous use of antibiotics on livestock. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_vulture_crisis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_vulture_crisis See the book "Their Fate is Our Fate" for more examples of ecological problems affecting humans, for which birds provide early warnings. Speaking of anti-biotics, we've been so successful in our development and manufacture of these medicines that anti-biotic resistance is a significant and growing problem. Stepping away from medicine, consider the ongoing water crisis in the Colorado River basin. We engineered our way into vast cities and agricultural projects in the desert (e.g. California's central valley) and there is now no clear path to sustaining all of these projects.
edmundsauto 3y ago
> We tend to act without consideration and have confidence we can just engineer ourselves out of our mistakes. Or the people acting without consideration are not impacted by the mistakes and will not be held responsible for engineering their way around them.
markoman 3y ago
Having confidence about engineering ourselves out of our mistakes is, after all, the conservative rationale for ignoring Climate Change. They're certain that out of the sky will fall the technology for combating the runaway warming of the earth and it all happen just in time (mind you) before any major harm is visited on the earth's populations. The actions from the Right that are more directly disingenuous are where they try to deny scientific conclusions and the damage already done. They'll post on twitter (implicit denials of sea level rise by) showing 150 year old pictures of seaside landmarks beside today's version with similar sea levels. Yet where are are counter-arguments for why the arctic sea ice/ice shelf is in such worse shape than it was just 30 years ago?
- gigatexal 3y ago
  holy crap -- my pithy comment blew up a bit. I'm really digging the discussion. Why haven't we seen all the amazing properties of graphene commercialized yet? like super capacitors made from graphene that replace batteries and can insta-charge?

guywithahat 3y ago

To be fair though, in the context of humanity we've never encountered a problem we couldn't later engineer ourselves out of. And it seems reasonable to think if we can engineer ourselves into the problem, we can engineer ourselves out of it as well (especially considering the alternative is to say we must stop innovating)

rhaway84773 3y ago
> we've never encountered a problem we couldn't later engineer ourselves out of I think this is survivorship bias. There have been several civilizations which have basically completely died out in human history, who weren’t able to engineer themselves out of whatever killed them.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  True but with technology that had not advanced beyond stone, simple metallurgy, and hand tools. Ultimately limited by whatever power could be extracted from human and animal effort. Once steam power and then electricity were discovered, civilization never looked back.
  - fwip 3y ago
    We've only had 200 or so years of widespread steam power (and closer to 100 for electricity). On an anthropological timescale, that's quite short. Egypt was ruled by pharaohs for 3,000 years. The technology we have is bigger now, and so we're also making bigger problems.
djbusby 3y ago
Stopping innovation not the alternative, you're creating a false dichotomy.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  Right. The alternative is to engineer in the solution at the same time you engineer the innovation, so that there's no problem in the first place. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Do we gain much by requiring innovators of the future to spend their innovation power on solutions to the side-effects of past innovations, instead of brand new innovations?
jmknoll 3y ago
Sure we have. Climate change, radioactivity, and micro plastics are three major challenges that we have very much engineered ourselves into, and do not appear to be able to engineer ourselves out of.
htag 3y ago
We have tons of oopsies that we haven't fixed, and there is no reasonable path towards resolution. It is all a matter of the size of the problem we've created. I agree that we should continue with technological progress, but it's naive to dismiss the risks. Here are some humanity scale problems we've created for ourselves. * Chernobyl is still unsafe to visit. The amount of radiation we've leaked into the atmosphere and oceans has a measurable negative impact on global health, and often a horrendous impact on local environments. * Air quality/light pollution/noise pollution is significantly worse than pre-industrial revolution levels. These have measurable negative health impacts. * We've directly and indirectly caused an uncountable number of extinctions. * Glaciers are melting at an incredible rate.
- Vecr 3y ago
  For Chernobyl, what do you mean by "unsafe to visit"? Because it's a war zone? I remember a lot of people went in 2019 after the show came out and it was fine. They had a guide or took a dosimeter and weren't crawling over the melted core or anything like that. I don't think the radiation from a nuclear reactor meltdown had global impacts, can you cite something? Even the fallout from a full nuclear exchange at the peak of warhead counts would stay in the northern hemisphere.
  - htag 3y ago
    Chernobyl safety -> "During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian forces subsequently captured Chernobyl. While there is an increase in radiation in the area, this is due to Russian forces disturbing the soil in the Red Forest and releasing radioactive dust and not from the reactor 4 itself. The New Safe Confinement is reportedly unharmed." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_New_Safe_Confinement#Project_timeline_and_status https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_New_Safe_Confinement... Atmospheric fallout -> "Because all people in the United States who were alive since 1951 received some radiation exposure from fallout, some people may have an increased risk of cancer from this exposure, in particular, thyroid cancer. " https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/fallout/RF-GWT_home.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/fallout/RF-GWT_home.htm
  - specialist 3y ago
crazygringo 3y ago
1) You're ignoring everyone killed in the interim, from pollution, poisoning, etc. 2) It's entirely unclear whether we can engineer ourselves out of climate change. We've never experienced anything at this scale before, or from something (fossil fuels) we rely on so much. The solution to climate change may have to be political rather than engineering, and it may be impossible politically.
- guywithahat 3y ago
  Climate change has been the most important issue for the upcoming election for at least the past four decades. As real problems manifest themselves, we solve them. And again, as I said earlier, this is in the context of humanity. Although I don’t want to undermine the death of someone, their death won’t stop the progress of humanity unless so many people die it resets our species. Even if we’ve never faced a particular problem as big as anything we experienced today, we’ve also never been so advanced and rich as a civilization.
bwestergard 3y ago
There are thousands of species that went extinct due to engineered habitat destruction, pollution, and/or hunting. We face an ongoing "vulture crisis" in India due to the tremendous use of antibiotics on livestock. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_vulture_crisis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_vulture_crisis See the book "Their Fate is Our Fate" for more examples of ecological problems affecting humans, for which birds provide early warnings. Speaking of anti-biotics, we've been so successful in our development and manufacture of these medicines that anti-biotic resistance is a significant and growing problem. Stepping away from medicine, consider the ongoing water crisis in the Colorado River basin. We engineered our way into vast cities and agricultural projects in the desert (e.g. California's central valley) and there is now no clear path to sustaining all of these projects.

edmundsauto 3y ago

> We tend to act without consideration and have confidence we can just engineer ourselves out of our mistakes. Or the people acting without consideration are not impacted by the mistakes and will not be held responsible for engineering their way around them.

markoman 3y ago

Having confidence about engineering ourselves out of our mistakes is, after all, the conservative rationale for ignoring Climate Change. They're certain that out of the sky will fall the technology for combating the runaway warming of the earth and it all happen just in time (mind you) before any major harm is visited on the earth's populations. The actions from the Right that are more directly disingenuous are where they try to deny scientific conclusions and the damage already done. They'll post on twitter (implicit denials of sea level rise by) showing 150 year old pictures of seaside landmarks beside today's version with similar sea levels. Yet where are are counter-arguments for why the arctic sea ice/ice shelf is in such worse shape than it was just 30 years ago?

gigatexal 3y ago
holy crap -- my pithy comment blew up a bit. I'm really digging the discussion. Why haven't we seen all the amazing properties of graphene commercialized yet? like super capacitors made from graphene that replace batteries and can insta-charge?