3 ms·

I've been thinking about the next 50 years a lot. Climate change, the state of our oceans, the lack of corporate & human morality to reverse or even slow down t

I've been thinking about the next 50 years a lot. Climate change, the state of our oceans, the lack of corporate & human morality to reverse or even slow down the rape and pillaging of our planet. I don't see any indication that we're not on a path to surefire destruction. Climate change is happening. The sea level is rising. And as this article (and many more) points out- it's a snowball effect. Faster and faster. When will it stop? When will governments actually take notice and do something about it? I don't think that the earth in 50 years will be able to support nearly as many people as it has now. We're going to see massive migration, famine, and starvation. We'll have to learn to live on our new planet, one that isn't quite as nutritious as this one, has a worse climate, and even less habitable surface area. I actually have my fingers crossed for something drastic to happen before that. We need a silver bullet. This could be something good like a new energy technology- or it could be something bad like a disease that wipes out 50% of the earth's population. In any case, staying the course is not something I want to do. We're headed right for disaster.

abraham_s 13y ago
Is cheap energy, solar or fusion, one candidate for "silver bullet"?
- socialist_coder 13y ago
  If it displaces fossil fuels, definitely. It still wouldn't change the tons and tons of nitrogen fertilizer runoff that is going into our oceans and creating the oxygen poor "dead zones". Nor would it stop every seafaring nation on the planet from overfishing (they all do). And don't forget all that radiation from Fukashima that's already in the Pacific. But at least it would help the CO2 problem. It might be too late for that however. The current CO2 is already in our atmosphere, so unless we have a really good method (and the resources and want to implement that plan) to fix it back into the ground we're still going to see it's accumulated effects. Combine that with the already smaller polar ice caps which aren't reflecting as much sun and we might already be past the point of no return. I dunno, I think we're fucked and there's really no solution other than a drastic decrease in the human population.

abraham_s 13y ago

Is cheap energy, solar or fusion, one candidate for "silver bullet"?

socialist_coder 13y ago
If it displaces fossil fuels, definitely. It still wouldn't change the tons and tons of nitrogen fertilizer runoff that is going into our oceans and creating the oxygen poor "dead zones". Nor would it stop every seafaring nation on the planet from overfishing (they all do). And don't forget all that radiation from Fukashima that's already in the Pacific. But at least it would help the CO2 problem. It might be too late for that however. The current CO2 is already in our atmosphere, so unless we have a really good method (and the resources and want to implement that plan) to fix it back into the ground we're still going to see it's accumulated effects. Combine that with the already smaller polar ice caps which aren't reflecting as much sun and we might already be past the point of no return. I dunno, I think we're fucked and there's really no solution other than a drastic decrease in the human population.