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Everyone is wringing their hands about climate change steadily boiling the earth when a comet could wipe us out like it supposedly wiped out dinosaurs. I actua

Everyone is wringing their hands about climate change steadily boiling the earth when a comet could wipe us out like it supposedly wiped out dinosaurs. I actually sort of find this amusing, fwiw.

simmerup 3y ago
It’s probably worth worrying more about climate change which is a feedback loop we’re directly causing, versus an major asteroid impact which is a once every 300~ million year occurrence
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  It's probably worth trying to do something constructive about it. Bellyaching is generally not constructive and the emotional baggage the world has on the topic seems distinctly counterproductive, actively making it nigh impossible to have meaty discussion about real solutions. People are quick to dismiss any effort to solve it as "hopeless" and "pointless" and "not enough."
  - uoaei 3y ago
    I think you're projecting a lot.
  - midnitewarrior 3y ago
    The only real solution to climate change is mass genocide of the human race. 8 billion people is not sustainable for the planet. Every human has wants and needs that they prioritize over the health of the planet. We can "green" some of those things up, but it simply delays the inevitable by a few years if we are lucky. Of course, if some genius gets the population of the Earth to somehow stop wanting the things that emit carbon (transportation, hot water, hot food, modern infrastructure), while maintaining / growing the population, then humanity will have a front-row seat for collapse of society due to resource depletion, rapid species collapse of animals, microplastics-infused water pollution poisoning all that remains. The only thing, aside from mass genocide, to slow all of that down is for every human to use less. Every CEO has to pledge to sell less each year. Every consumer must pledge to use less every year. The societal controls put in place to enforce this will eventually result in the overthrow of governments that attempt to impose this on their citizens. We are humans, and what you see happening to the world is simply what humans do. If you want to see less climate change, less resource depletion, less toxic waste, then we need fewer people if we want to make this planet survivable for longer. It's good to make our activities more green, use renewable resources, recycle, etc., but the reality is that most of those things will only delay the inevitable. Delay is good, pushing the timeline out for the consequences of our actions is something humans are good at.
    - jvm___ 3y ago
      I've thought about this too. Even with some miracle 'spread this powder in your backyard to remove your years-worth of carbon footprint' magic material that keeps the CO2 levels steady... humanity is poisoning almost everything else - just not at a 'kill our selves in 100 years' rate.
      - DoreenMichele 3y ago
        That magic material that keeps CO2 levels steady may well be called peat moss. Wetlands are much more effective at carbon sequestration than forests and, worldwide, we've lost 85 percent of our wetlands since the 1700s. Though I agree that we are also poisoning our planet and should stop it. <-- expect another histrionic pile on by people who think climate change will definitely kill us all but want to dismiss concerns about how toxic our world is.
  - Andrex 3y ago
    Whether people feel pointless or hopeless ultimately doesn't matter, it all comes back to money. And green energy is becoming a major economic force.
    - DoreenMichele 3y ago
      Green energy. And electric cars. Sigh. I wish we would do more passive solar design and walkable development.
trickstra 3y ago
Ok, but at least we didn't manufacture that comet.
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  Right. It's so much less deadly when it wasn't the product of suicidally stupid choices by humans. What's really funny is this flies in the face of typical human patterns of behavior where we obsess about longshot disasters we can't control, like catastrophic plane wrecks, and go "meh" about things that are much more likely that we can control, like the much higher risk of dying or being maimed in a car wreck.
  - namaria 3y ago
    > and go "meh" about things that are much more likely that we can control, like the much higher risk of dying or being maimed in a car wreck. I don't known about you but I look both ways when crossing streets. I have never bothered to try and protect myself from crashes during flights.
    - WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
      Like, never checked the safety brochures, or looked if the safety vests are where they are supposed to be, or never listened to preflight safety instructions? I always do that, and also try to book seats close to exits.
      - mrexroad 3y ago
        I mean out of boredom, or being a captive audience, yes I’ve watched… but I’ve never selected an airplane seat based on reducing risk in event of an emergency or crash. Or checked for the vest. I do however verify my safety situation when I’m in automobiles. Same escalation of risk/control applies to me when on a bicycle as well.
  - AlecSchueler 3y ago
    > Right. It's so much less deadly I think the point was more that it makes sense to worry about something of our own creation which we have, at least in theory, some control over and power to change, than about something that comes from outside with more force than we can handle.
namaria 3y ago
> Everyone is wringing their hands about climate change I find it deeply concerning that your issue with climate change is what you address as "hand wringing".
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  deeply concerning? I'm some random internet stranger. Why would you have deep feelings about anything I say here at all without knowing anything about me?
  - uoaei 3y ago
    I've noticed this "I care less than you" attitude and style of """debate""" since I shared a flat in college. Except it was about doing the dishes and vacuuming the carpet then. And most of them grew out of that mindset by now. It's not a more rational stance to deflect things like concerns, and especially not to act so flippant in the face of such grand risks.
    - DoreenMichele 3y ago
      Given that I'm an environmental studies major and an American who has lived without a car for well over a decade, I doubt that I care less than you. I'm pretty seriously invested in literally walking the walk here. So odds are high there's a misunderstanding here somewhere.
      - uoaei 3y ago
        The rhetoric you use is indistinguishable to me from the "we have so many other things to worry about, and anyway we'll be fine because techno-utopianism blah blah blah" crowd. I don't think being concerned and doing stuff to help are mutually exclusive, but your reaction seems to frame them as such.
        DoreenMichele 3y ago
        I haven't said anything like that, so I don't know why you are having a problem.
Gravityloss 3y ago
I think we should watch out for asteroids and also climate. I think it's the responsible thing to do.
razemio 3y ago
Strange what you find amusing. Not sure why you downplay climate change. It is one of the biggest challenges for many generations, that's a fact.
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  A. I'm not downplaying climate change. B. Perhaps you've heard of World War II? Or the Cold War? Both were threats to the survival of mankind at least as much as climate change, perhaps more so.
  - razemio 3y ago
    A. you sure did B. Can you stay on topic please? That is the second topic you bring up without anyone asking. Funny enough, you downplayed climate change again.
    - DoreenMichele 3y ago
      Nope. What's extremely "funny" in some sense of that word is that elsewhere on HN I am discussing climate change and environmental issues in earnest and it hasn't gotten one tenth the attention this has gotten, which is proof positive of my point: people have big feels about the topic and vent a lot about it but don't want to really engage constructively with it anywhere near as much. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37443229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37443229
    - jskrablin 3y ago
      I'd say that the Cold War had a far bigger potential to end the humanity than climate change currently has. It's a well known fact that we were on a brink of nuclear confrontation more than once during that period.
    - darkerside 3y ago
      Buddy, you are upset that poster isn't engaging with you on climate change in a thread about a comet. What gives you the right to dictate the narrative? How about you both talk about what you want to talk about?
edoloughlin 3y ago
The universe could also spontaneously stop existing[1] but I still put my seatbelt on when I get into my car. It’s about probability. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum_decay https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum_decay
- Xaiph_Rahci 3y ago
  People who get existential crisis out of this can find relief in the fact that the Universe can expand faster than the decay. So, it is possible that decay never reaches your region of Space.
  - delecti 3y ago
    They should also get relief in the fact that there doesn't appear to be any reason to think our universe is even subject to that "risk".
- roenxi 3y ago
  Yes please lets focus on probability. And cost-benefit analysis. We'd be a lot closer to solving all sorts of problems, including the asteroid one and any climate-related ones, if people had thought about probabilities when dealing with nuclear power in the 80s and 90s. Humans don't seem to be very good at symbolic reasoning though.
- appplication 3y ago
  > The effects could range from complete cessation of existing fundamental forces, elementary particles and structures comprising them, to subtle change in some cosmological parameters, mostly depending on the potential difference between true and false vacuum. Some false vacuum decay scenarios are compatible with survival of structures like galaxies and stars or even biological life while others involve the full destruction of baryonic matter or even immediate gravitational collapse of the universe What an interesting wiki article. It’s incredible this is proposed as a sliding scale effect, where the tunable parameters on that scale are the fundamental physical constants of the universe itself.
heavenlyblue 3y ago
a) We can do something about climate change b) climate change is primary self-imposed c) stacking your bets makes it exponentially less likely to survive
rpastuszak 3y ago
Fair enough, why worry when a friendly comet could solve the problem by killing us all.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bad_alloc 3y ago
There is a long list of potential civilization killers. Many are anthropogenic, some are natural. They all have varying probabilities of killing us. Probably the highest now are climate change, nuclear war and a worse pandemic.
denton-scratch 3y ago
> when a comet could wipe us out like it supposedly wiped out dinosaurs Not this comet, though. The reason it's in The Guardian is because it's on its closest approach to Earth; it's 0.85AU distant. https://theskylive.com/c2023p1-info https://theskylive.com/c2023p1-info
joshuanapoli 3y ago
There are a lot of people here on earth. We can tackle climate change and comet impact risks at the same time. It would be pretty sweet if by learning to deflect asteroids, we also find a way to collect valuable resources from them: move small amounts of material into orbits that come close to earth.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  I would like to solve the threat of nuclear disaster and asteroid impact, by putting all the nukes under UN control directed at the sky, or already placed in orbit, all the time ready to deflect an undedected planet killer.. So we just have to achieve world peace, to make that work.
carapace 3y ago
Sometimes I cheer myself up with the thought that, hey, there hasn't been an x-ray radiant supernova nearby today. ("nearby today" relatively, of course.) - - - - edit to add: wow you sure touched a nerve, eh? I dunno what nerve exactly, but I agree with your sib comment about how it would be great if your meatier comments got such engagement. FWIW in my personal estimation doing something (or not) about asteroid detection and mitigation (if possible) is one of the measures of the maturity of a civilization (that lives on the congealed scum on the surface of a blob of magma orbiting a puddle of hydrogen in a region of space filled with rocks!) It's wild that just a couple of centuries ago (less!) the very idea of rocks falling out of the sky was unthinkable (like UFOs or bigfoot.)

Everyone is wringing their hands about climate change steadily boiling the earth when a comet could wipe us out like it supposedly wiped out dinosaurs. I actually sort of find this amusing, fwiw.

simmerup 3y ago

It’s probably worth worrying more about climate change which is a feedback loop we’re directly causing, versus an major asteroid impact which is a once every 300~ million year occurrence

DoreenMichele 3y ago
It's probably worth trying to do something constructive about it. Bellyaching is generally not constructive and the emotional baggage the world has on the topic seems distinctly counterproductive, actively making it nigh impossible to have meaty discussion about real solutions. People are quick to dismiss any effort to solve it as "hopeless" and "pointless" and "not enough."
- uoaei 3y ago
  I think you're projecting a lot.
- midnitewarrior 3y ago
  The only real solution to climate change is mass genocide of the human race. 8 billion people is not sustainable for the planet. Every human has wants and needs that they prioritize over the health of the planet. We can "green" some of those things up, but it simply delays the inevitable by a few years if we are lucky. Of course, if some genius gets the population of the Earth to somehow stop wanting the things that emit carbon (transportation, hot water, hot food, modern infrastructure), while maintaining / growing the population, then humanity will have a front-row seat for collapse of society due to resource depletion, rapid species collapse of animals, microplastics-infused water pollution poisoning all that remains. The only thing, aside from mass genocide, to slow all of that down is for every human to use less. Every CEO has to pledge to sell less each year. Every consumer must pledge to use less every year. The societal controls put in place to enforce this will eventually result in the overthrow of governments that attempt to impose this on their citizens. We are humans, and what you see happening to the world is simply what humans do. If you want to see less climate change, less resource depletion, less toxic waste, then we need fewer people if we want to make this planet survivable for longer. It's good to make our activities more green, use renewable resources, recycle, etc., but the reality is that most of those things will only delay the inevitable. Delay is good, pushing the timeline out for the consequences of our actions is something humans are good at.
  - jvm___ 3y ago
    I've thought about this too. Even with some miracle 'spread this powder in your backyard to remove your years-worth of carbon footprint' magic material that keeps the CO2 levels steady... humanity is poisoning almost everything else - just not at a 'kill our selves in 100 years' rate.
    - DoreenMichele 3y ago
      That magic material that keeps CO2 levels steady may well be called peat moss. Wetlands are much more effective at carbon sequestration than forests and, worldwide, we've lost 85 percent of our wetlands since the 1700s. Though I agree that we are also poisoning our planet and should stop it. <-- expect another histrionic pile on by people who think climate change will definitely kill us all but want to dismiss concerns about how toxic our world is.
- Andrex 3y ago
  Whether people feel pointless or hopeless ultimately doesn't matter, it all comes back to money. And green energy is becoming a major economic force.
  - DoreenMichele 3y ago
    Green energy. And electric cars. Sigh. I wish we would do more passive solar design and walkable development.

trickstra 3y ago

Ok, but at least we didn't manufacture that comet.

DoreenMichele 3y ago
Right. It's so much less deadly when it wasn't the product of suicidally stupid choices by humans. What's really funny is this flies in the face of typical human patterns of behavior where we obsess about longshot disasters we can't control, like catastrophic plane wrecks, and go "meh" about things that are much more likely that we can control, like the much higher risk of dying or being maimed in a car wreck.
- namaria 3y ago
  > and go "meh" about things that are much more likely that we can control, like the much higher risk of dying or being maimed in a car wreck. I don't known about you but I look both ways when crossing streets. I have never bothered to try and protect myself from crashes during flights.
  - WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
    Like, never checked the safety brochures, or looked if the safety vests are where they are supposed to be, or never listened to preflight safety instructions? I always do that, and also try to book seats close to exits.
    - mrexroad 3y ago
      I mean out of boredom, or being a captive audience, yes I’ve watched… but I’ve never selected an airplane seat based on reducing risk in event of an emergency or crash. Or checked for the vest. I do however verify my safety situation when I’m in automobiles. Same escalation of risk/control applies to me when on a bicycle as well.
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  > Right. It's so much less deadly I think the point was more that it makes sense to worry about something of our own creation which we have, at least in theory, some control over and power to change, than about something that comes from outside with more force than we can handle.

namaria 3y ago

> Everyone is wringing their hands about climate change I find it deeply concerning that your issue with climate change is what you address as "hand wringing".

DoreenMichele 3y ago
deeply concerning? I'm some random internet stranger. Why would you have deep feelings about anything I say here at all without knowing anything about me?
- uoaei 3y ago
  I've noticed this "I care less than you" attitude and style of """debate""" since I shared a flat in college. Except it was about doing the dishes and vacuuming the carpet then. And most of them grew out of that mindset by now. It's not a more rational stance to deflect things like concerns, and especially not to act so flippant in the face of such grand risks.
  - DoreenMichele 3y ago
    Given that I'm an environmental studies major and an American who has lived without a car for well over a decade, I doubt that I care less than you. I'm pretty seriously invested in literally walking the walk here. So odds are high there's a misunderstanding here somewhere.
    - uoaei 3y ago
      The rhetoric you use is indistinguishable to me from the "we have so many other things to worry about, and anyway we'll be fine because techno-utopianism blah blah blah" crowd. I don't think being concerned and doing stuff to help are mutually exclusive, but your reaction seems to frame them as such.
      - DoreenMichele 3y ago
        I haven't said anything like that, so I don't know why you are having a problem.

Gravityloss 3y ago

I think we should watch out for asteroids and also climate. I think it's the responsible thing to do.

razemio 3y ago

Strange what you find amusing. Not sure why you downplay climate change. It is one of the biggest challenges for many generations, that's a fact.

DoreenMichele 3y ago
A. I'm not downplaying climate change. B. Perhaps you've heard of World War II? Or the Cold War? Both were threats to the survival of mankind at least as much as climate change, perhaps more so.
- razemio 3y ago
  A. you sure did B. Can you stay on topic please? That is the second topic you bring up without anyone asking. Funny enough, you downplayed climate change again.
  - DoreenMichele 3y ago
    Nope. What's extremely "funny" in some sense of that word is that elsewhere on HN I am discussing climate change and environmental issues in earnest and it hasn't gotten one tenth the attention this has gotten, which is proof positive of my point: people have big feels about the topic and vent a lot about it but don't want to really engage constructively with it anywhere near as much. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37443229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37443229
  - jskrablin 3y ago
    I'd say that the Cold War had a far bigger potential to end the humanity than climate change currently has. It's a well known fact that we were on a brink of nuclear confrontation more than once during that period.
  - darkerside 3y ago
    Buddy, you are upset that poster isn't engaging with you on climate change in a thread about a comet. What gives you the right to dictate the narrative? How about you both talk about what you want to talk about?

edoloughlin 3y ago

The universe could also spontaneously stop existing[1] but I still put my seatbelt on when I get into my car. It’s about probability. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum_decay https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum_decay

Xaiph_Rahci 3y ago
People who get existential crisis out of this can find relief in the fact that the Universe can expand faster than the decay. So, it is possible that decay never reaches your region of Space.
- delecti 3y ago
  They should also get relief in the fact that there doesn't appear to be any reason to think our universe is even subject to that "risk".
roenxi 3y ago
Yes please lets focus on probability. And cost-benefit analysis. We'd be a lot closer to solving all sorts of problems, including the asteroid one and any climate-related ones, if people had thought about probabilities when dealing with nuclear power in the 80s and 90s. Humans don't seem to be very good at symbolic reasoning though.
appplication 3y ago
> The effects could range from complete cessation of existing fundamental forces, elementary particles and structures comprising them, to subtle change in some cosmological parameters, mostly depending on the potential difference between true and false vacuum. Some false vacuum decay scenarios are compatible with survival of structures like galaxies and stars or even biological life while others involve the full destruction of baryonic matter or even immediate gravitational collapse of the universe What an interesting wiki article. It’s incredible this is proposed as a sliding scale effect, where the tunable parameters on that scale are the fundamental physical constants of the universe itself.

heavenlyblue 3y ago

a) We can do something about climate change b) climate change is primary self-imposed c) stacking your bets makes it exponentially less likely to survive

rpastuszak 3y ago

Fair enough, why worry when a friendly comet could solve the problem by killing us all.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bad_alloc 3y ago

There is a long list of potential civilization killers. Many are anthropogenic, some are natural. They all have varying probabilities of killing us. Probably the highest now are climate change, nuclear war and a worse pandemic.

denton-scratch 3y ago

> when a comet could wipe us out like it supposedly wiped out dinosaurs Not this comet, though. The reason it's in The Guardian is because it's on its closest approach to Earth; it's 0.85AU distant. https://theskylive.com/c2023p1-info https://theskylive.com/c2023p1-info

joshuanapoli 3y ago

There are a lot of people here on earth. We can tackle climate change and comet impact risks at the same time. It would be pretty sweet if by learning to deflect asteroids, we also find a way to collect valuable resources from them: move small amounts of material into orbits that come close to earth.

hutzlibu 3y ago
I would like to solve the threat of nuclear disaster and asteroid impact, by putting all the nukes under UN control directed at the sky, or already placed in orbit, all the time ready to deflect an undedected planet killer.. So we just have to achieve world peace, to make that work.

carapace 3y ago

Sometimes I cheer myself up with the thought that, hey, there hasn't been an x-ray radiant supernova nearby today. ("nearby today" relatively, of course.) - - - - edit to add: wow you sure touched a nerve, eh? I dunno what nerve exactly, but I agree with your sib comment about how it would be great if your meatier comments got such engagement. FWIW in my personal estimation doing something (or not) about asteroid detection and mitigation (if possible) is one of the measures of the maturity of a civilization (that lives on the congealed scum on the surface of a blob of magma orbiting a puddle of hydrogen in a region of space filled with rocks!) It's wild that just a couple of centuries ago (less!) the very idea of rocks falling out of the sky was unthinkable (like UFOs or bigfoot.)