
We Are the Threat: Reflections on Near-Term Human Extinction - Red_Tarsius
https://criticaltheoryresearchnetwork.com/2018/02/14/threat-reflections-near-term-human-extinction/
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yesenadam
Gee..I got maybe 1/3 through. Half of that was breathless warnings of how
revolutionary what was to come was, how I needed to be ready etc etc.. Then
every sentence was a reference to some book or other, mostly dragged in with
no good reason, except that the cloth of this writing is woven from other
peoples' thoughts, as you're reminded once or twice every sentence, with
exactly who that is and where they said it—so very tiresome. Too much reading,
no thinking. And mainly some 1980 book on fossil fuels? I was once deeply into
the critical theory guys, and many of the others mentioned, and this seems
like someone from that place trying to peer far out to a position..that's
virtually mainstream these days, but he's so covered in books it's hard for
him to see anything. And he thinks it's all so sophisticated and advanced
because every sentence refers to another book. Nuh-uh.

~~~
alexey_denisov
Well, I have Ph.D. in Physics, and what he says makes a lot of sense to me.
And I did experiements and know that managing reality is much harder than
thinking about it.

~~~
yesenadam
Yes, I'm not saying it didn't make sense—it made a lot of sense, common sense
even—just dressed up painfully in erudition. Every commonplace thought (every
sentence) was dragged in as a quote from a different writer. Edit out all the
name-dropping and not much would be left.[0] When I was 15 I would have been
fooled, impressed, but the Emperor's nakedness is now painfully obvious to me.

'A mountain had gone into labour and was groaning terribly. Such rumours
excited great expectations all over the country. In the end, however, the
mountain gave birth to a mouse.'

[0] I haven't seen anything nearly so bad in critical theory-type philosophy,
but in, say, post-modern writing and the art world, it's not uncommon. That's
why the Sokal hoax worked.

~~~
alexey_denisov
I agree that this thought could be presented better. On the other hand it is
the first time that I see an important long-term idea came to the top of
Hacker News. (Not staying long though.)

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njarboe
Nuclear power can (technically) easily replace all fossil fuel power. It is a
political problem, not a resource issue. It would take a decade of serious
dedication and leaving behind a "safety first" culture, but no major technical
advances are needed. On the political front, I hope one of the many groups
working on small nuclear can come up with a different name for their nuclear
fission reactors and make it stick. That would be more than half the battle to
get the world off of fossil fuels.

~~~
tehsauce
Nuclear power is actually safer (joules generated per deaths caused) than
fossil fuel power generation. That's with old fashioned reactors, and if you
include deaths caused by fossil fuel pollution the issue of safety is far from
arguable.

~~~
yesenadam
I guess you don't have very accurate figures on the deaths caused by existing
nuclear waste in the future either.

~~~
astrodust
Nuclear waste gets safer over time, so the risk diminishes.

Coal is a problem _today_.

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lnanek2
It's pretty amazing to read someone still fear mongering about peak oil,
something that was predicted to happen in 1970. Maybe the author is very old?
What's actually occurred in practice is that, as the oil price rises other
sources become economically feasible like horizontal drilling and extracting
tar from oil, but at the same time make competing resources like gas and solar
more attractive. So it isn't even a big deal. Rising price naturally increases
supply right up to the point where it funds competition. That mechanism is
also only even needed in boom times, often as not the economy slows down and
energy demands drop through the floor anyway.

~~~
crpatino
If you are going to criticize, at least get your facts straight.

Peak oil _did_ happen in the 1970s. _American_ peak oil, that's it. The reason
we have had the last couple of decades of Middle East adventurism is because
the US stopped being the largest oil producer back then. OPEC would not even
exist if that was not the case.

Conventional Oil has supposedly peaked sometime in the 2005-2010 timeframe,
though you are correct that more innovative extraction techniques have
compensated the lost of conventional sources so far. However, you grossly
overestimate the capacity of price signals to conjure up solutions out of thin
air. Instead, what has allowed a more or less sustained living standard on the
face of steady _per capita_ oil consumption are countless hours of engineering
devoted to efficiency.

At the end of day, the tragedy of the Peak Oil movement of the past decade is
something that happens to a lot of geeks. They were able to calculate a fairly
accurate mathematic model of the raise and fall of production, but their
predictions of doom failed to grasp the fact that society adapts to changing
conditions. Their economic models turned out to be too simple, and both
private and public sector reacted by taking measures that would have been
imposible to predict on a quarterly profits only analysis.

~~~
alexey_denisov
The tragedy of Peak Oil movement is its inability to capture collective
imagination. Engineering devoted to efficiency faces reduced returns on
effort. Let us look at aviation, past certain limit you are restricted by
physics and cannot make more efficient airplanes. These enineering efforts can
buy civilisation some time for a search of an alternative. And it comes with a
cost of putting productive engineering workforce away from searching long-term
alternative.

All-in-all problem is far from being solved.

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fallingfrog
Blah. I don't know if he's necessarily wrong, but the writing is both insipid
and pretentious. Very philosophy-undergrad. I mean look; given enough time any
species of life goes extinct, we're not going to be any exception. I think
most people massively underestimate the threat of nuclear war, the threat of
war in general, and the amount of damage we're doing to the planet's life
support systems.

However- if we're able to at least accept that we can't keep growing the
economy exponentially forever- we do have access to a fusion power generator
outputting 384.6 yottawatts of power. I'm not saying we're safe from near term
human extinction but it's by no means certain. Far term, of course, as I said,
every species goes extinct.

Basically I've done enough research that I know this fear is well founded but
not for the reasons presented in this paper. A much better and more specific
argument could be made.

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philipkglass
_Cargoism, then, covers everything from the seemingly reasonable belief that
solar panels and other forms of renewable energy can replace fossil fuels
(they can’t – as Moriarty & Honnery point out, “an energy source can be
renewable without being ecologically sustainable”)_...

Searching for that phrase led me to
[http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02604027.2017.135...](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02604027.2017.1357930)

which rationalizes the claim with

"Solar energy may be unlimited, but this does not guarantee system
sustainability for RE. Instead, we run the risk of replacing non-renewable
fossil fuels with another set of non-renewable metals and minerals (Vidal,
Goffé, & Arndt, 2013). Greatly increased use of RE, especially wind and solar,
will require similar increases in many rare minerals (Bardi, 2014)."

This is a reference to Ugo Bardi's book "Extracted: How the Quest for Mineral
Wealth Is Plundering the Planet." I don't doubt that Bardi has made such
statements in his book. He'd be far from the first to propagate this nonsense.
Wind turbines and solar cells _can_ be made with rare minerals, but they do
not _require_ rare minerals. The vast majority of solar cells _do not_ require
gallium, indium, or tellurium (the usual rare elements cited for solar), and
the majority of wind turbines do not require rare earth elements. Some wind
generators use rare-earth-containing permanent magnet generators, but most use
electromagnets made with common copper.

EDIT: I was able to peek inside Bardi's book via Google Books, and he actually
makes the same point I just did. It's actually the _opposite_ of what Moriarty
& Honnery claim in citing him. Page 239: "We have also seen that technologies
such as modern wind power, solar concentration, and photovoltaics have
reasonably high EROEIs and can be manufactured without a critical need of raw
materials."

------
alexey_denisov
It is interesting that idea of overshot and resource-limitations managed to
get to the top og Hacker News. Though from reading comments another problem is
clearly seen, it is difficult for believers in religion of Progress to
objectively evaluate something that goes against their core beliefs. Main
objection being - people will surely think of something working. Though they
cannot point out a single human, who managed to propose a working plan of
dealing with resource limitations. I do not even mention implementing it.

At the moment there is no technology, that would allow human civilisation move
past current overshot predicament. Accept this fact. Before such technology is
invented we are on the path to death.

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Jedi72
It's unfortunate this topic is usually dominated by crackpots[1]. There is
some serious research out there that is quite troubling though - this research
paper is an academic review of limits to growth done in 2014, published by a
researcher at the University of Melbourne, Australia

[http://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/M...](http://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/MSSI-
ResearchPaper-4_Turner_2014.pdf)

"Based simply on the comparison of observed data and the LTG (limits to
growth) scenarios presented above, and given the significantly better
alignment with the BAU (business as-usual) scenario than the other two
scenarios, it would appear that the global economy and population is on the
cusp of collapse. This contrasts with other forecasts for the global future
(eg. Raskin et al., 2010, Randers, 2012), which indicate a longer or
indeterminate period before global collapse; Randers for example forecasts
collapse after 2050, largely based around climate change impacts, with
features akin to the LTG comprehensive technol- ogy scenario."

Now, there probably arent a lot of collapse sceptics who would do this
research in the first place, so in all likelyhood it contains some bias. Then
again society seems to have a way of ignoring scientists who report back with
too much bad news.

I have 2 further pieces of trivial data to add to this post, 1) I have a
general interest in end-of-the-world type literature, probably because my
parents were millenium bug preppers (I spent all my high school years eating
stored rice hahaha) - and my opinion is that collapse isn't that likely
overall. Why/why not is a long debate but I think we're overall probably safe.
I think we have some very serious problems that should not be ignored, but
they can all be dealt with if push comes to shove, and many are being handled
though probably not fast enough. I'm an engineer though so my internal bias
probably leans towards coming up with solutions. 2) I recently caught up with
an old colleague, another software engineer, and this topic came up. It made
me wonder if there might be some internal bias in the way we think that we
both maintained these ideas even though objectively we are both doing pretty
well at life. We really need more quality research conducted, unfortunately
its hard to find.

[1] Shoutout to whoever else from here is on /r/collapse - it's not me cross-
posting all the "AI will kill us all but also take all the grocery bagging
jobs" articles from HN. If you're not a reader I'll summarise, its 80%
paranoid crazies with 20% interesting doomsday porn. Not a place of serioua
discussion. The author of this piece posted there and is basically doing an
AMA.

~~~
alexey_denisov
Seems that you don't understand the problem. I try to simplify it for you.
Point out a single energy extraction working technology, that pays its cost.
Aka: "constructing wind electricity generator using only energy outputs from
this generator". (You can replace electricity generator with solar cell,
algae, anything.)

~~~
fallingfrog
Over the lifetime of solar panels they will produce dozens of times the energy
required to make them.

~~~
alexey_denisov
Let us imagine a world, that is powered by solar panels. The only source of
energy that we have is electricity from solar panels. So it would be a world
poered by electricity. How would you make vehicles? I mean you need to melt
metal, produce concrete (for buildings) etc. You would need to power the whole
infrastructure by electricity. It might be possible, but it is not easy, and
its technological feasibility is not demonstrated.

As soon as you start to think about the whole cycle, it becomes clear that
having electricity form solar panels is not enough.

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s_m_t
What does trump have to do with any of this

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vixen99
Sophomoric.

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nordsieck
If you're confused about why the article is weird, look at the source.

    
    
      “Critical Theory” in the narrow sense designates several
      generations of German philosophers and social theorists
      in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the
      Frankfurt School. According to these theorists, a
      “critical” theory may be distinguished from a “traditional”
      theory according to a specific practical purpose: a theory
      is critical to the extent that it seeks human “emancipation
      from slavery” [0]
    

In contrast, the fitness of a "traditional" theory is only related to its
correct modeling of reality or it's usefulness in making accurate predictions
(depending on your opinion of instrumentalism/scientific realism [1]).

[0] [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-
theory/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/)

[1] [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-
realism/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/)

~~~
yesenadam
Well, that's not fair, in many ways. Using dictionary definitions to attempt
to settle anything is well-known to be silly.

This piece—which reads like a really bad student essay—is so awful for the
reasons I stated in my other comment, nothing to do with it being critical
theory or not. There are good writings within that, and awful writings
without.

Critical theory is philosophy, not science, so your dismissing it for not
being science is just confused. (Scientific realism is an attitude towards
science/scientific theories, not philosophy. Yes, philosophers write about it,
but as philosophers of science.)

Critical theory is generally political philosophy, so no wonder it's concerned
with human freedom, 'emancipation from slavery', whatever whoever wrote that
meant precisely, and such things. Marcuse, the philosopher/guru of the USA's
60s hippie cultural revolution, was Critical Theory. Read a potted version of
what he stood for and it all sounds pretty sensible. A lot of it has just
become totally mainstream.

Erich Fromm is my favourite of these guys, my favourite psychologist still,
writer of wonderful and inspiring books. In him the critical theorists' mix of
Freud and Marx doesn't seem strange or weird. It just means they're very
interested in both psychology _and_ politics - life in the mind and in the
world, everywhere. Critical theorists write about anything, whatever interests
them. And usually they don't quote other writers constantly like this guy! But
they're informed by a lot of the thinkers of the past.

I was into Adorno for a while, but gave up. Too often deliberately obscure,
although sometimes not, wrote some illuminating stuff. e.g. his essay on jazz,
although ignorant and unfair, is pretty classic. Horkheimer I like more.

They're all from the original Frankfurt School of critical theory; there are
many later people who might be called critical theorists - e.g. Raymond
Williams, of whom I've loved everything I've read.

