I agree that we need to plan for climate adaptation (preparing for predictable problems) and resilience (preparing for unpredictable problems), but I have a few kneejerk responses:
- Although it's looking increasingly unlikely that we can avert climate disaster, we can never give up. For example, 8 degrees of warming would be much worse than 4 degrees of warming, and could mean the difference between human extinction and the mere collapse of our civilization. The lives of billions hang in the balance, and even if some will inevitably suffer and die, we can't just throw up our hands and let everyone die. Climate change mitigation, cutting emissions as quickly and thoroughly as we can, must remain a priority for the rest of our lives, even if we can no longer reach the best/safest scenarios. Every little bit of avoided global heating matters.
- This post, as dire as its predictions are, may underestimate the difficulty of computing in 2050, given current trends. If you are/were living in Ukraine recently, programming is not most people's top priority, they have other problems. Famines, extreme weather events, and resource wars will affect programmers who live in comfortable locations today. It's not just your users/audience who might be computing from a shitty mobile phone in a refugee camp, it could be you. Don't forget that we're not only dealing with climate change, but with the reaction of other people to climate change: they might want to kill you for your water. And heatwaves are predictable in India/Pakistan, but look at the freak heatwaves in Canada recently, nowhere on Earth is safe, the climate crisis is a global problem.
- Why are we programming what we're programming? Shouldn't our activities and their purposes change given the dramatic change in circumstances? Isn't there something wrong with the system that produced this result, the impending destruction of the biosphere that supports us? Fighting valiantly to preserve the functionality that is killing the world may not be a wise or ethical use of your time. (And if you're programming something for a fossil fuel company, now is a good time to reconsider.)
>"- This post, as dire as its predictions are, may underestimate the difficulty of computing in 2050, given current trends. If you are/were living in Ukraine recently, programming is not most people's top priority, they have other problems. Famines, extreme weather events, and resource wars will affect programmers who live in comfortable locations today."
It's true that programming was not a top priority outside of survival, though to many programmers in Ukraine, it was still a major one.
This report (source: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/04/ukrainians-are-built-differe...) from CNBC in March documents this: "Those developers, along with other Ukrainian civilians in the country, are now being forced to defend their homes and cities while sheltering from Russian bombs. But many are still continuing to remotely work for their employers, supporting the local defense effort by day while sending in their deliverables by night.
“Yes our teams are sending deliverables from a f—ing parking garage in Kharkiv under heavy shelling and gunfire in the area. Amazing humans,” Logan Bender, chief financial officer at a San Francisco-based software licensing company, said in a story posted to Instagram on Tuesday by venture capital meme account PrayingforExits. "
I would personally prioritize survival over work at that point, and avoid praising sending deliverables in a warzone as a moral good (over ensuring the safety of your family), but it's evidence that even in extreme conditions, people still want to program as part of their work. As for why there would be a want to program in extreme conditions, some discussions on Reddit and Slashdot in response to the article suggested that programming was a way for these workers to get their minds off their current situation.
I recall being stuck in a closet for hours during tornado warnings multiple times throughout my life. It gets boring. Programming is a good way to pass the time.
I don't know, maybe a war is a bit different. For the first two weeks of it I could not really focus on anything work-related. Worrying whether your city gets captured by the enemy or heavily shelled, being constantly interrupted by air raid sirens, worrying how to replenish supplies, worrying about safety of your family, etc.
Even after I evacuated my family further from the action, we still had missile strikes and air raid warnings. Being away from home, learning about horrible things happening in your country, those things do not help with being productive.
> human extinction and the mere collapse of our civilization
How do you imagine human extinction being an outcome? It seems to me that the worst case scenario is large loss of population which would decrease greenhouse gas output. There would still be some increase in temperature even once we stop emitting, but wouldn't people in colder climates still survive?
There's some fairly absurd doomerism going on in the "climate catastrophe tomorrow" camp where climate change will (somehow) turn earth into a barren rock and we're inches away from triggering a self-reinforcing climate resonance cascade of unforeseen consequences.
It's of course a very urgent issue, but I think exaggerating it until it becomes a threat to "all life on earth" levels is a) dishonest b) does nothing to convince sceptics that it's a real issue, quite the opposite c) is not really all that actionable (at least not in a good way).
> where climate change will (somehow) turn earth into a barren rock and we're inches away from triggering a self-reinforcing climate resonance cascade of unforeseen consequences.
The "barren rock" is a bit of a strawman. Very few if any people believe that the elimination of all life on Earth is in the cards. Human life, on the other hand, is certainly possible.
For the vast majority of major extinction events in history it looks like rapid climate change was the major trigger, and at some point small changes lead to a "self-reinforcing climate resonance cascade of unforeseen consequences", and we currently don't know exactly what the limits are.
This is the focus of a huge amount of the work of Peter Ward and he has written plenty both for scientific and a popular audiences.
Now he may, of course, be wrong. But his work is credible enough that you have to at least take into account that the real risk of extinction is possible.
It's hard to imagine how climate change would lead to human extinction, since humans have inhabited such a wide range of environments across the globe for thousands of years, have technology to help cope with extreme climates, and are vary adaptable. What would make every single environment unlivable for humans? I don't believe there is a single climate model that does that.
And how many climate scientists actually believe extinction is on the table? I've seen some say collapse of global civilization and mass death is a possibility under the worst case scenarios, but not really anyone claiming all humans would die. Anyway, the latest IPCC report puts the upper range of warming at 3.7°C. Which is bad, but not the apocalyptic hot house Earth scenario. But even with that, some environments will still be livable. People live on mountains, near likes, far inland, way up north and all over the place. Earth isn't going to turn into Venus, and it was a lot hotter when the dinosaurs evolved. Plants and animals still survived after the Permian die off.
> It's hard to imagine how climate change would lead to human extinction, since humans have inhabited such a wide range of environments across the globe for thousands of years, have technology to help cope with extreme climates, and are vary adaptable. What would make every single environment unlivable for humans? I don't believe there is a single climate model that does that.
Human life today is mostly maintain with infrastructure (water, food, security, health, etc). A cascade of failure due to climate change can destroy all but very local and small infrastructures. With society eventually returning to a pre-industrial conditions. It is not the end of humanity but the pre-industrial world economy can't support food, water safety and health care for 9 billion people. In pre-industrial era world population were less than 1 billion, we might return to these numbers. That means death of the large majority of human. Not extinction but the biggest threat in human history.
Well, hundreds of millios displaced and/or dead would be enough. Doesn't have to "turn earth into a barren rock".
And as for "suddenly", many systems tend to have a breaking point, especially systems, like the environment, which have feedback loops that can easily feed into each other and make things worse fast. Collapse is seldom linear or a nice gradual curve.
> Well, hundreds of millios displaced and/or dead would be enough. Doesn't have to "turn earth into a barren rock".
Actually, yes it does. The OP specified "human extinction". We're arguing that single point. The fact that thousands/millions/billions might displaced isn't being contended.
40% of insect species are declining and 1/3 are endangered. In terms of biomass, we're losing 2.5% of all insects every year at the current rate. Insects are essential contributors to the biosphere, both as pollinators and as food sources.
If that's not a "threat to all life on earth," I don't know what is. And that's just what I could find with 5 seconds of googling.
The point the OP is making is that wiping out all life on earth is an impossible and silly benchmark. No-one sane thinks 'oh, but we don't have to do anything about climate change because some worms will survive around the thermal vents on the ocean floor'
To 'wipe out' life on earth, you have to crash the moon into it or do something similarly ridiculous - remember that a giant asteroid wasn't enough.
Wiping out all human life is possible, but again I don't think that anyone is comforted by the idea that 0.1% of the population might survive in an arctic cave.
Where we seem to fail is in communicating to folks that don't want to spend money to fix the problem today how their life will become miserable tomorrow.
If we lost all the insects in a ~100 year period, the result would be close enough to losing "all life on earth" for anyone who doesn't have a microscope (or, more likely, a telescope). This is not an exaggeration in any sense of the word.
We won't lose all insects. They didn't all die off when a massive rock took out the non-avian dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and that was far more catastrophic (worse than any human nuclear winter scenario).
You are not wrong, but isn't the insect-apocalypse distrinct from climate change? Insects aren't dying from CO2 emissions, different policies are needed to address them.
The temperature and co2 levels have been much higher in the past. The earth has been much more tropical as well as an ice world. Humans can adapt to change quite effectively - we did invent air conditioning, as well as the land of The Netherlands which is reclaimed and existing beneath sea level.
What is the greatest tragedy is how much worry and anxiety climate change causes. The earth is not a thinking thing - “Mother Nature” is not a being. The planet will exist and doesn’t care about humans. A century after the last human lives nature will swallow up almost everything we built. Earth exists for humans because we live here and make it so. We will adapt to whatever climate exists.
> The temperature and co2 levels have been much higher in the past. The earth has been much more tropical as well as an ice world. Humans can adapt to change quite effectively
It doesn't matter what Earth was like at some point in the distant past. There weren't 8 billion humans living on it. It's not easy or cheap to move cities with populations in the millions because sea level rise puts them below water.
Humans can adapt to climate change but it's very likely to be very painful and very expensive.
Yes but acting like 99% of humanity is going to die is irrational, illogical, not true in any reality, and scares the shit out of people. It’s tragic that doomers have made people think that has any chance of happening.
It definately could happen if major nations compete for ever-shinking habitable land or water and trigger a nuclear war.
Do you expect that several hundred million people who's previous land of habitation is now unable to support human life will just lie down and die peacefully?
There are a large number of things that could kill everyone, but I think the top threat will always be ourselves. It's very easy to imagine some resource war degenerating into a nuclear war. A few self-induced crises like that on top of the climate crisis would be enough to finish the survivors (who might have made it if the only danger were the environment).
Think of the world population's size and global distribution as hedges against disaster: the fewer people who live, in fewer habitable places, the more likely it is that some disaster will affect everyone remaining and leave no one unaffected. We have fewer rolls of the dice, and there may come a day where they're all snake eyes.
This why many are excited about the idea of "making humanity an interplanetary species", as I once was until I realized how hard it would be to make a working biosphere anywhere else, given how bad we are at maintaining one that already works. If we don't figure out how to save this biosphere, we won't have enough time to make more.
True human extinction doesn't seem plausible, but in a worst-case scenario we can imagine a > 99% drop in population, roughly to what is sustainable without technology, in a dramatically harsher world.
("Without"? Well, nobody today knows how to build a cast-iron plough.)
I don't believe this scenario is likely. For one thing we're not headed for 8C of heating; for another, technological change seems to be coming just in time to head off the very worst outcomes, assuming we struggle hard enough.
We probably aren't headed for 8 degrees of heating, based on what we know today. There are a lot of "out there" scenarios that don't make it into sober, conservative scientific reports from the IPCC, because they recognize how important it is that people take their warnings seriously, and they don't want to mention anything they don't have very clear evidence for already.
What we're dealing with are "unknown unknowns": what tipping points might exist that we don't know about, that might result in more warming faster than expected based on today's science? We shouldn't take those kind of existential risks.
We aren't struggling at all, though. We just eased off the accelerator a little. (Assuming that our accounting is correct, and that methane leakage isn't worse than we think. [1])
I need to retain some optimism, or I get too depressed to keep on. In this case, my optimism is that solar/wind and batteries will drop enough in price that fossil fuels become economically unfeasible.
It seems possible! I just hope it isn't too little, too late.
Reduce human population by enough and extinction goes back on the agenda long term. There was at least one [1] population bottleneck in the last 70,000 years.
Of course I would've thought "aren't you worried your grandchildren will live miserable, dangerous lives struggling to survive" would be a decent argument but I've encountered no Boomer who seems to worry about it as they excitedly tell me about the coming collapse of something or imminent major war in wherever.
"the difference between human extinction and the mere collapse of our civilization"
Literally nobody is predicting any of those things, except propagandists and doomers. I would urge you to broaden your media intake to more mainstream sources, because it is not mentally healthy to be living a life under such falsehoods.
The comment section is full of clueless numpties that do not understand what 4 degrees REALLY means, and think it won't lead to collapse.
When the world was 4 degrees COLDER Chicago was under 900 meters of ice. Toronto was under two Kilometers of ice.
Do you think that would cause collapse of civilisation? How are you going to adapt to a glacier covering all the farmland? No technolgy, not even nuclear bombs, can remove the billions of tons of ice that would be covering all the farmland. We could not even protect cities, the moving wall of ice would buldoze every structure we've build and then whoever didn't freese to death would die of famine.
We are headed for a 4 degree change in the OTHER direction. That's what we are headed for by the end of the century
The biggest mistake climate scientists have done is communicated their change in terms of degrees, so people think about their everyday experience with weather, which obviouslty changes much more than that, and think they will just sweat a bit more in the summer.
To be very specific: people who think increase isn't dangerous need to look up web-bulb temperature [1].
There are regions of this planet where an average 4 degrees increase will mean that for periods longer then 24 hours, multiple times a year, the wet-bulb temperature will exceed 35 degrees C. That is unsurvivable by human life. Your only options in that environment are to not be in that environment by either escape or technological means.
There are cities built in areas where this is a risk, and if it happens they will just be depopulated: it is not possible for millions of people to escape an urban area under a heat wave. If they're somewhat built up, then they might survive it provided the electrical grid holds out - which, as recent experience globally should show - is questionable. Remember: under these conditions, no repairs to external infrastructure are going to be possible - you would need active refrigeration to move around outside and survive. We are not remotely adapted to that sort of hostile environment.
Most likely we are a decade or two out from a climate-forced mass casualty event, probably in the Indian subcontinent, with more minor (slightly less mass death) occurring in parts of Asia earlier.
We have missed every single target that we'd need to hit to limit the warming to 2C.
We have 28 years left and emissins are still increasing. We have to reduce emissions by like 40% per decade, which is not happenning at present.
We have to replace every car on the road, which takes 20 years. That means in 8 years every new car has to be electric, and that's not happening either.
You misread their statement. They said "8 degrees". With 8 C increase in temperature, what they described could very much happen. We expect 4 C worst case, which is why we do not need to worry about extinction. I think they are saying that we do not need to worry about more than 4 C increase exactly because people in the past fought for the cause, and if they stopped fighting the same way today some people feel resignation and want to stop fighting, even 4 C would have been too optimistic. The fact that people in the past did not resign themselves to the status quo is why we do not need to worry about an 8 C increase.
That's... one man's opinion and at the absolute extreme end of accepted science. You will find a person willing to have a view on anything if you look hard enough.
If you read mainstream publications, then you will gradually form an opinion, which is that there is a climate emergency, but not that humanity will be destroyed.
Climate doomerism has been a catasrophe, because it means many people have "given up", when things can actually be done. The doomer propaganda jumped off the deep end, and the mainstream media should have called them our on their absurd nonsense years ago.
Humanity probably will not be wiped out, but the current global civilization will collapse like it happened to many other civilizations before because they reached the ecological overshoot. I also thought that something "could be done" on a large scale, but after studying the problem in depth (starting with the IPCC report), I began to prepare on the community level for the impact in the next 10-20 years. That's the only area where something can be done.
By the way, BBC is not a reliable source, like other neoliberal propaganda they bet on continuing "business as usual" while coming up with some innovative solutions (so-called "techno-hopium").
Your reaction surprises me. What is so strange about "preparing on the community level", which would mean things like making sure your township is not expanding into areas that would be destroyed by newly severe forest fires or hurricanes or floods. Or that your city forbids certain types of lawns or agriculture because droughts are getting more severe. Or just having a more independent electricity/water/sewage in your house because the municipal systems do not have the backups they will start needing.
All the things you describe are good and beneficial for society. The problem was that you are preparing for an "impact" in 10 years that is not being predicted by anyone, except doomers and propagandists. You believe that the BBC is "neoliberal propaganda". That is your right, but you will alienate the vast majority of people with such extremist rhetoric.
Slow down for a second, I am not the person to whom you originally responded, I am just a passerby that is surprised by the intensity of your reaction given there are fairly reasonable interpretations of the passage you quoted as a reason to not bother having conversation with OP. We do know that droughts and fires and hurricanes will be more severe over the next decade or two, so it seems reasonable to call it "impact", their severe dislike of BBC notwithstanding.
> For example, 8 degrees of warming would be much worse than 4 degrees of warming, and could mean the difference between human extinction and the mere collapse of our civilization.
I'm assuming celsius, not farenheit.
I'm curious why a mere 8 degrees increase leads to human extinction.
Is that "8 degrees evenly over the globe"? If so, that most certainly would leave the majority of land arable and comfortably livable.
Is that "8 degrees average with such a high deviation that no land is left with a year-round range of 0 degrees to 30 degrees"? If that is the case, where can I read/view/see the model that produces such an extreme outcome?
This guy Mark Lynas studied the models and wrote a book about it, but then he wrote it again based on newer models, so make sure to find the latest one called "Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency" for a grizzly drilldown into the centigrades towards extinction. Few models deal with warming beyond three degress, in itself a point of some consideration, but the references are all there and here's the synopsis for the book.
> At one degree - the world we are already living in - vast wildfires scorch California and Australia, while monster hurricanes devastate coastal cities. At two degrees the Arctic ice cap melts away and coral reefs disappear from the tropics. At three, the world begins to run out of food, threatening millions with starvation. At four, large areas of the globe are too hot for human habitation, erasing entire nations and turning billions into climate refugees. At five, the planet is warmer than for 55 million years, while at six degrees a mass extinction of unparalleled proportions sweeps the planet, even raising the threat of the end of all life on Earth.
Actually I was kinda hoping for just a model or some peer reviewed conclusions.
I'm just not in the mood to devote a lot of time to what sounds (to me) like hyperbole: If the earth stabilised at +8 degrees celcius I find it hard to understand why the entire earth becomes literally uninhabitable.
Here is a well-written article (shared by another HNer here) on one plausible run-away event. But the same way as upon exerting more and more force to a branch it will first have linear changes going on, there will come a point where it will break.
Some possible runaway events include the aforementioned loss of clouds which in turn won’t reflect back that much sunlight (which currently can account for 30-70% of sun light not hitting the ocean water), melting ice will free lots of trapped CO2, changing climates may alter currents and winds causing very large-scale changes to certain areas (and might also affect cloud formation), etc. We are in a big, closed jar and that 8C change may not be a problem locally, it is that much more heat trapped globally.
But one should add that life is unlikely to die out in even the worst predictions (life, finds a way), but you still don’t want to find yourself in the situation where you will have to literally hunt down other humans because they may have food, or try to migrate with 100s of millions of other agitated, hungry people to nations which won’t be friendly to you because they themselves have enough problems to begin with.
It doesn’t. It’s an extrapolation based on the limited insights of a PhD who by any reasonable definition spends too much time with simulations.
If you want to think of a way it could be possible, though, think of those areas that would be habitable, realize that they would be highly contested, are mostly presently permafrost, and consider your own ability to both protect and survive on melted tundra and reproduce there, given you will starve in a single season without food.
> If you want to think of a way it could be possible, though, think of those areas that would be habitable, realize that they would be highly contested, are mostly presently permafrost, and consider your own ability to both protect and survive on melted tundra and reproduce there, given you will starve in a single season without food.
I actually did consider that first - that maybe at +8c humans will kill each other, but that's just pure speculation.
And, sure, food is necessary daily and constantly, but the situation you outline isn't an overnight thing. Hell, it isn't even a 100-year change, +8c is a lot longer.
That gives you plenty of time to move, and at +8c, as long as it is stable at +8c, you'd still have enough arable and livable land to ensure that humanity is nowhere close to extinction.
So if it isn't lack of land, and it isn't the temperature range that causes human extinction, what does?
I think it is incredibly unlikely personally. We have evolved nearly beyond environmental dependence, certainly beyond local environmental problems, and it is difficult to imagine our extinction as long as there are some plants and insects that survive. Possibly we could even persist on algae farming.
But if you add the fact that antibiotics will be in short supply, novel zoonotic diseases will ramp up, and most knowledge of how to survive in the wild has been lost and probably can’t be reconstituted in a couple of violent generations, I can see how it could come about.
There is also the social and psychological impacts of that scale of loss, and there are some other sort of scary indicators you could lean on (Calhoun rat experiments) to indicate that there are limits to what animal populations will reproduce through.
I’m not worried about it — we seem like a pretty robust system from my perspective. But it is interesting to think about abstractly.
> For example, 8 degrees of warming would be much worse than 4 degrees of warming
You should review where you got those figures and whether they are representative enough of current scientific consensus regarding the most likely scenarios.
As fas as I know and assuming that current pledges are fulfilled, most plausible estimations tend to be around 2 or at most 3 degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels (we are already well over 1°C).
While it is clear that this increase in temperatures will have severe consequences, I fail to see how it would lead anywhere near the civilization collapse that you seem so confident in predicting.
That's a pretty big assumption, to assume that current pledges will be fulfilled. Last I heard, it was just, like, Gambia that was on track to meet Paris Agreement pledges. https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/15/world/climate-pledges-insuffi... None of the G20 countries are on track.
The point of the Paris Agreement pledges is to prevent catastrophic global heating, so it would be great, although in my opinion inadequate, if the world community met them. Sadly, we're not heading in that direction right now.
I expect that people will still write software because it needed and pays well. However, the jobs that people get paid to do could become rather different.
Consider what happens in a war. The people working on drones aren't just hobbyists, they're part of the war effort. Wars are not good for the environment, either.
So my guess is that, if it gets really bad, these jobs will focus more on short-term needs. Are people who are really focused on preparing for heat waves and drought and flooding going to give a hoot about being carbon neutral? An overloaded hospital is going to focus on the patients, not global environmental issues.
>I expect that people will still write software because it needed and pays well.
Both "it's needed" and "pays well" are the case now - not necessarily the case at that point. So they can't be used as arguments that people "will still write software" (it would be taking for granted what must be proven).
Then again, demand for fossil fuels is also part of the equation. You get a remote programming job, demand to travel by car potentially goes down. So there's potentially a net reduction in emissions.
The pandemic taught me a lot about apocalypse. While people are a lot slower to buy into collective action and changing their way of life than I thought, society is far more robust than I expected. Covid looked nothing like a pandemic film, thank god.
With that in mind, I have some ideas on what programming will look like in 30 years:
1. New frameworks and abstractions for making apps even more disposable while maintaining privacy will come along. New languages will happen. Corporations that just finished moving to the cloud will now be moving to even greater abstractions like Airtable or whatever comes next.
2. Programmer pay will decrease compared to other industries. This is a hunch and I’m only 60% confident of it happening.
3. Satellite internet will be more of a norm for no better reason than it’s the most efficient way to manage infrastructure. More rural communities will need it, and remote trends will continue. The cost of launches are going down and there’s a lot of land.
4. Everything will get more energy efficient, and most intense activity will be pushed to compute farms.
5. VR will once again come around as the next big revolution in computing, but will be ultimately disappointing and won’t see mass adoption.
Beyond these ideas, I think too much plays into our personal optimism or pessimism. I think things will change, but we’re a scrappy species that will fight to preserve its way of life. It will look a lot like our global pandemic response…warts and all. There’s a lot there to be disappointed about, but it’s actually incredible it wasn’t worse.
When these predictions hit I’ll be 70. I hope I’ll live to see it.
>Covid looked nothing like a pandemic film, thank god.
That's probably because it was not that great impact wise. If it was more like the Spanish Flu, with a huge death toll across all ages (as opposed to 1/10th the death toll, and mostly focused on older people and co-morbidities) it would have absolutely have looked like "a pandemic film".
I think there's a fallacy here in that "because covid's impact wasn't great, covid wasn't that bad." Any time we have to mobilize a lot of effort to head off the worst outcome, there's a tendency to say "well nothing really bad happened, so why did we go through all that effort?" Let's not trivialize the global effort necessary to bring us to 1/10th the death toll. It absolutely could've been worse.
It's our response to covid, not covid itself, that taught me a lot of what we're capable of in global crisis. We've come a long way since Spanish Flu.
It would seem to be a kind of variant on the “post hoc ergo propter hoc” (after this, therefore because of this) fallacy — if one thing follows another the second must have been caused by the first.
Only in this case you are looking at denials where “propter hoc” actually holds — the second thing really was caused by the first.
There really should be a catchy name for this, since it permeates a lot of political reasoning on topics such as remediation for ozone hole depletion, FDC regulations, environmental regulations, etc. People see that timely action averted a problem, but somehow take that as evidence that there wasn’t a problem in the first place.
>People see that timely action averted a problem, but somehow take that as evidence that there wasn’t a problem in the first place.
Depending on the situation, 2 cases are possible (and have happened):
(a) A thing was indeed about to become a grave problem and timely action prevented it.
(b) A thing was never to become a big issue, and all the action spent preventing it didn't have any significance.
In both cases the outcome is "thing didn't become a big problem".
But in (a) action is what helped with this, and in (b) action was irrelevant and wasted.
Now some people see the outcome (no issue) and think that action was wasted. That's accurate in (a) and wrong in (b).
My point is that whether "timely action averted a problem" or "the problem was oversold to begin with" is something to be argued and proved, not taken for granted.
We know it could have been a big problem by the small things that got omitted and became problems.
You can argue that we didn’t need to pump hundreds of millions into it; but it is a fact that there would have been a crisis had it not been actively averted.
The same issue exists now with 2048 and we’re already seeing problems (on things that date far into the future) and we will likely need to expend effort and energy in avoiding this issue: especially on embedded devices.
If you’re denying that there would have been a problem then I’m afraid you’re simply mistaken.
I could give you many citations if I wasn’t on my phone. There was even a documentary about it.
> there's a tendency to say "well nothing really bad happened, so why did we go through all that effort?
Basically a third of our country didn't go through that effort and the country is mostly still chugging along. Were it much deadlier, things would not have turned out okay.
The more deadlier a virus, the rest likely it is to spread. Let’s take ebola as an example which was very feared due to it being quite deadly, yet a flu-like virus managed to infect many orders of magnitude more people.
A counterexample: HIV is pretty deadly, but slow to progress, so it infected a lot of people. In countries with insufficient healthcare infrastructure (Subsaharan Africa), it actually killed a significant percentage of the population, precisely because it was so successful in spreading. Without modern medicine, it could have wiped out entire cultures, especially those that were more sex-positive.
(An interesting question to chew on is: what was the impact of religious sex taboos in pre-modern and early modern era? If monogamous couples were more likely to have healthy offspring and nurse their kids into adulthood, it might explain some of the societal swings towards puritanism in the 16th-19th century, which was a period of endemic syphilis.)
Indeed as you and another commenter pointed out correctly, it is not the whole picture, and given an intelligent, evil design one could possibly create a disease that spreads fast and kills only much later (by let’s say, causing cancer). But fortunately we are not inside Plague Inc.
But if I am not mistaken, from a strictly evolutionary perspective there is no pressure towards such a disease — a genetic variation that is more deadly won’t dominate over its less deadly variant and thus deadliness could be a variable that only changes randomly from the initial level (and decreasing if it is actively detrimental to spreading, where I would say that in case of a human population deadliness does correspond with fear).
> The more deadlier a virus, the rest likely it is to spread.
Not really. The two primary factors controlling how fast a disease spreads is the infectiousness (R0 or other similar measures), and how long victims are infectious before they display symptoms.
The deadliness, the victim living or dying, happens significantly after they've finished their role as spreader of disease and thus does not significantly affect the spread.
Ebola fails to spread, not because it's deadly, but because the symptoms are almost immediate and dramatic.
(I took graduate level course in the mathematics of epidemiology and got an A, which makes me no expert at all, but this is fairly fundamental.)
I gave the OP another example of a deadly and yet widespread virus, HIV.
He is not completely off the ball, though. Our immune systems are rather good, so (with significant exceptions like HIV) if some virus doesn't kill us quickly, we tend to clear it out of the organism or at least get it under control, so it won't kill us at all.
Viruses that are very deadly but take a long time to kill you (thus enhancing the risk of transmission), like HIV, aren't very typical.
This is a weird argument to make. The rational thing is to make different decisions in different scenarios. The choices I would make for how/whether to participate in society, whether to take a vaccine, etc., would vary greatly depending on whether a given disease has a 1 in 50,000 chance of killing me vs if it's like something out of the movie Contagion that would have a 1 in 10 chance of killing me.
If covid had a 1 in 10 chance of killing me I would have made very different decisions over the course of the pandemic. You're saying that people would still behave the same as they did during covid no matter how deadly a given disease is, which seems pretty ridiculous.
My state took it just seriously enough to get us to vaccines (and even before that, buy some time until they realized they shouldn't just put everyone on a respirator). For all I know it may have saved my life and the life of several other people I know with comorbidities. Possibly my parents as well.
Yes, a third of the country didn't go through the effort and a lot of people died in those states also. The country might still be functioning, but not necessarily well, with significant labor shortages, supply chain issues, high inflation, a looming recession, record high gas prices, etc. (not all of that is directly because of the pandemic, granted, but it sure didn't help).
>Let's not trivialize the global effort necessary to bring us to 1/10th the death toll. It absolutely could've been worse.
I'm not so sure, given places that did nothing or not much (either out of policy or lack of resources) and still didn't have a toll anywhere comparable to the Spanish Flu (and more or less comparable to places that took "great effort", if not better).
> I think if the vaccines hadn't come out at all, it could well have been as bad as the Spanish Flu.
I'm very much for vaccines, but this is just not true at all. Covid was never going to be near as bad as the Spanish flu, even if no measures were taken at all.
I don't think it has taught you much. All things considered, despite all the suffering by unlucky individuals, when you consider humanity as a whole, covid is an insignificant blip. If it's significant at all, it's only because of our response to it.
> Covid looked nothing like a pandemic film, thank god.
Covid was not 1% as bad as any pandemic featured in a film. Humanity has seen way worse, and we could still see way worse in the future.
What COVID taught me is that the human ability to not give a fuck is apparently infinite. I have trouble processing the fact that a million people died (in the USA) and there is no mourning, no shared sense of tragedy or loss, no looking more kindly on other people, just a madder, faster dash on cash and even more finger-pointing.
> Covid was not 1% as bad as any pandemic featured in a film.
I'll be generous and not dwell on this stunning example of this age's inability to get bothered by anything unless it hits harder than film. Look on the bright side I guess, despite how soulless, empty, and glib we have to be do so!
> Something like 5 million people die every year, should we be in permanent mourning?
That gives truth to Benjamin Disraeli's (attributed) "Lies, damn lies, and statistics". Very misleading.
It was the concentrated effects.
When bottled oxygen ran out in India.
When you could not get into a hospital in many American cities (my American geography is hazy - South Los Angeles hospital, I think, was crippled for weeks)
Running out of morgue space in New York city - mass graves in central park.
It was really very scary, and I am glad I was not in any of those places badly hit.
I know you're trolling, but I'll respond. Part of growing up and moving from just a mere legally-licensed adult is being able to hold heavy things. They never stop getting heavier. They just keep unfolding, and if you are willing to grow just a little deeper--not bigger, but deeper, like the roots of you being able to feel things, then maybe all that learning to deal with loss, tragedies, loved ones dying, aging, your parents and uncles and cousins and friends dying--and yet not letting it destroy you, might be worth something. Though, for a moment, you can be devastated on the inside and hold yourself up without breaking. You don't need to cry your eyes out every day, but man, what the hell if we can't reflect on such a grievous time that has befallen us--all of us--over the past two years, without clawing someone else's face off or storming off in a huff. But if you need to feel not bothered at all, go ahead, you aren't the subject of this one.
> what the hell if we can't reflect on such a grievous time
You made the assumption the rest of us aren't. You've written a number of emotionally-laden statements about the lack of virtue amongst the rest of us, but I'm "trolling" when I point out you ignore greater loss of life happening yearly.
Unfortunately you are still trolling, and I hope you are aware enough to see it.
I'm not going to do all the work for you, because I'm tired and certainly tired of teaching critical thinking to adults, but take a look at _excess_ deaths since the COVID-era started[1].
That is key, just like all the fears of a devastating food shortage on the horizon because Putin needed to get his gun off.
Outside of math class, you can't play "Direct cause of death from COVID" vs. "people starved to death by their own government" or <insert issue you have feel the need to play "well, actually..." tonight>.
Lately, I've been thinking about the role of nihilism as a natural force in society and its use as a tool of renewal. At its best, it's a power to take only that which strengthens so that we don't take on the collective emotional debt of past generations. It's why we're finding new ways to do old things all the time and why we aren't living in guilt over the deeds of past generations.
At its worst, nihilism throws the baby out with the bath water and you get holocaust deniers. This has been the hardest part of aging for me, because seeing this evolve in real time has left me in despair for our world at times. I have to remind myself that this force has been at work for centuries, and when I was young I didn't think it was all that bad. We'll probably be ok.
Why have we spent $2 trillion so far on Iraq (even if you believed it was linked to 9/11 and 3000 deaths) when Alzheimer's disease costs $200B annually and costing about 5 million a few decades of life? (I'm approximating lost QALY as ~5 million/year, or about 20x 9/11s every year)
We should be investing in high ROI life-saving actions, not emotional impulses. Let's put serious money behind defeating aging, which currently has a 100% fatality rate and was highly comorbid with COVID-19.
The world is nowhere near overpopulated, most countries are going to see population crashes if anything.
“Overpopulation” is a meme from the 60s coming from a book (Population Bomb) that was disproved the instant it was published. It is, however, a big reason for single family zoning in California - they literally thought it would encourage people to stop moving there and having kids.
Overpopulation - a number - is the wrong metric. Instead, we should be looking at the mix of factors (which include overpopulation) that cause the destruction of ecosystems, all the way up to climate change. So that would include: mono-agriculture ('monoculture'), technology powered by fossil fuels (such as logging machines, strip mining machines, etc.), and global transport networks (which hugely enable demand to outstrip supply).
More complicated, but more accurate - and humanity is way past that threshold, even with population crashes.
Long lived organisms tend to procreate less. If you look at fertility of humanity right now, it is obvious that countries with the lowest life expectancy are experiencing the biggest population booms. Long lived nations aren't even sustaining themselves.
That's not what the likes of the poster you reply to want. They want you to be in permanent acceptance of whatever agenda they support with their virtue signalling.
Still, historically people have died from diseases at a much higher rate than even during the worst of COVID pandemics. I think if anything people should be more accepting towards death, recognizing it as a part of life that is eventually unavoidable to us all.
I guess one problem is that nowadays in Western world people often spend their last times in a hospital, rather than at home and their local communities. This doesn't give space for healthy mourning.
I'd argue the opposite. If it's insignificant at all, it's only because of our response to it. Lots of people worked very, very hard for us to sit here typing "it wasn't that bad" unless you believe that our global covid response did very little to change the outcome. If you do believe that, though, there's probably little point in continuing this thread.
Yes, lots of people worked very hard to make the outcome better. I'm grateful to them for helping protect my aged relations. They did make a difference.
With that out, the Covid-19 pandemic, even without any measures at all, was still incredibly mild. Wikipedia says 0.1-0.3% global population lost [0]. It would have been I don't know, perhaps 0.5% without measures? Compare to the other pandemics on that list, you routinely see ones that wipe out 20-50% of the regional population - now that is significantly bad.
Wikipedia says 0.1-0.3% global population lost [0]. It would have been perhaps 0.5% without any response whatsoever. That's still insignificant compared to all the other pandemics, which seem to often kill 20-50% of the regional population.
Well I think that's using an assumption that if we had greater exposure (ie less public health measures/vaccines) for the virus it wouldn't mutate and cause more damage than it did in its current form and causing a step change in in impact.
Also wikipedia in and of itself is not a high quality source.
I'd argue that we are through it in the public health, government mandate, change how you live day-to-day sense of things. Everyone who is willing to get vaccinated is probably vaccinated at this point. There is very little support for more government intervention even as cases rise in various areas, regardless of political persuasion (at least in the US, maybe it's different in the UK and EU?)
The fact that COVID is still out there, infecting and mutating, is irrelevant to most people.
COVID will live with us forever now, a pandemic has a few characteristics which make it so, one of which is capacity to overwhelm healthcare.
As soon as covid couldn’t overwhelm our healthcare systems it was over.
Now people will die every year with it, just like the flu.
Sad reality, but reality nonetheless, the fact we couldn’t handle a lock-down cemented that we would be living with it for the rest of human existence.
We still haven't really grappled with the aftereffects of long COVID. What we've done instead is say it's over because the acute phase is done with, and buried the reports of longer term issues. In other words, the health care system now simply returns wrong answers to triage its own capacity.
But that doesn't make it no longer a pandemic. We know quite well that we can normalize our way into wrong answers as a society. It'll only become clear where we stand after another year or two - either more and more people become disabled after their "mild" case, or it gradually trails off.
T cell immunity lasts longer than that. The antibody counts are kind of like a “watched pot never boils” thing - we’ve just never bothered to look before so now everyone is stressing about it.
Also, everything will require a network connection (which is where ubiquitous Internet via cable or satellite comes in). No Internet? Pfft, what, do you live without electricity, too?
2. Pay for these kinds of professions (ever increasing complexity, whether necessary or self-made + decently mentally taxing) will only go up. Not everyone can be a programmer, or a lawyer, doctor, video/audio editor, electrician, etc. Barring some catastrophic event or the creation of good enough AI/robots.
4+5. in 30 years, if current development rates continue, VR will be the next revolution. Super compact and efficient devices + a world where you can do almost anything you want will be very popular with the masses facing ever increasing costs, climate problems, joblessness, lack of housing, etc.
Why even put up with all the bs when you can do the bare minimum and use technological opium the rest of your time? I wonder if VR could be banned in the same manner as drugs, actually.
The reason I'm low confidence on pay is because I think there will be even more disparity among programmer salaries and the median will be far lower. Will it be possible to make a million a year as an engineer in 30 years (forget inflation for a moment)? Sure. However, I think there will be a lot more engineers making five figures. We're lowering the bar to do simple work all the time. Much like the other professions you mentioned, some make millions...others are far more middle-class.
As for the rest...they were in direct response to this article's predictions. My VR prediction is tongue-in-cheek because it's been "just around the corner" for the last thirty years. It's not far-fetched to think it'll still be "just around the corner" in another 30.
If society has to rebuild/replace infrastructure destroyed by more hurricanes, raise ports above new sea levels or build new ports, upgrade the power grid, food takes more resources to grow, etc, all using materials that are being desperately sought by every other nation on earth that's going to take every penny we can find anywhere and that means most salaries will be squeezed.
I'm torn about the high end, but my guess is even they will suffer because money is going to basic needs and even if you can help produce them for efficiently there isn't the kind of surplus we see today to reward you.
Software is going to be needed to control many many more automated systems especially as we age and don’t have replacement birthrates. So the demand, and therefore the pay, for highly skilled technical professions will only increase.
Climate change will mainly not affect the rich countries with computer programmers, except for secondary effects like California wildfires. It’ll mostly affect poor countries at the equator.
The median scientific projection is that every year will still be “better” economically than the one before it, including climate change costs, but that it’ll be about as bad as WW2 happening very slowly in the background.
> Programmer pay will decrease compared to other industries.
It is supply and demand for smart people. So far, demand for smart people increased throughout times. If earth will make more smart people or if they will be replaced/augmented with A(G)I, then pay will subside.
Agreed, a vote would hardly bring much extra information here.
I'd love to see data behind this question, but yes I believe that there is significant variation in the required intelligence to perform the highly various professions that the human race engages in. And I would claim – in all the humility I can muster speaking as a programmer myself – that the average programming job does inherently have a higher bar for intelligence than the average other profession.
It would be very wrong indeed to extrapolate from this information that one should TREAT individuals differently based on their choice of profession! Even if we knew for certain that the Brick Laying profession only consisted of the 1% most intelligent individuals and Data Entry Specialists the lowest 1%, treating individuals with these professions differently from a policy or cultural perspective would, in my opinion, be a great injustice.
The individuals may or may not be smarter, meaning they are a lot of smart people in professions that don't require it, but the computer related professions have a higher floor for intelligence to be successful, mainly abstract thinking.
I don’t think the constraint is smart people existing, it’s smart people choosing this career path. If we culturally produced more engineers (like some other countries do) then that could depress pay.
Probably in the same way that VR does...it comes in waves. 3D has been around for a while, and every now and then it resurges. It has more to do with marketing forces to excite people about going to the theater than anything.
And yes, I suspect theaters will still be a thing unless teenagers find a new excuse to be unsupervised in the dark for a few hours.
IMAX is much bigger (brand + technologies) than what you probably think it is. As far as I know, IMAX and Dolby and maybe a few others are today's cutting edge.
it looks like you're right, the median salary for programmers in Finland (4,830 EUR) is just a bit more than the median salary for everyone (4,320 EUR)
Calling it a "woman's salary" is a bit of an exaggeration, when mainly-women fields such as nursing requiring higher education pay about 2900-3500 EUR including extras from night shifts and sundays (or about 2500 without any extras).
But yes, programmers definitely are not overpaid in Finland. It's not unheard for fresh CS grads to be paid just 2500 EUR a month, though at least they have career progression unlike nurses forever stuck with such bad salaries...
I have fear that the cathartic pessimism we sometimes enjoy ironically is turning into a chronic fatalism. It's like a habit that has become an addiction. I think the author was in a discussion that started as a fun catharsis for all involved and then devolved into an addictive argument that the author felt they needed to win.
There is a cliché which goes: "Expect the best. Prepare for the worst". Articles like this only seem to get the second half of that while clearly violating the first half. A well balanced response to crisis is benefited by both.
I think the author is not actively aware of the importance of expecting the best, both of the world and of their colleagues. I feel their arguments are weak due to this imbalance.
You want to provide a reason based in reality for that level of optimism at the present time? It seems like pessimism is currently warranted absent major upheavals that would change the political situation worldwide, which would bring their own issues.
2.5%[0] of the world GDP just doesn't sound very apocalyptic to most people. Especially when you factor in GDP growth projections over the next century.
Life on Earth has survived much, much worse than the burning of fossil fuels. For example, the K-Pg extinction event.
It's all a matter of perspective. But humans are irrationally social creatures susceptible to memetics, so no amount of empirical evidence will alter socially beneficial memeplexes.
“we have to accept immense hits to the global economy and the resulting poverty, suffering and impact. The scope of the change required is staggering. We've never done something like this”
This is an insanely extreme claim with very little evidence to back it up, if we watch this unfold at the hands of global leadership please know that it didn’t have to be this way and somebody is taking advantage of all of us for power and control.
Yeah this narrative is troubling. I’ve read stuff from IPCC contributors who compare climate change to Covid, especially in the case of people living in the first world. Things will get harder and the shape of our lives will change, but “civilizational collapse” is a term from people gleefully imagining the end of the world like they would a zombie apocalypse.
this article has bought into a lot of narratives of doomsaying and the "real" causes of it. It complains about coal consumption in India and China, conveniently linked to a reuters article.
> With China and India not even starting the process of coal draw-down yet...
It is fine to assume the Global South is trending towards further coal usage. Maybe the developed world can help them transition to something sustainable like nuclear power.
There has to be an element of truth in Michael Moore's extreme Planet of the Humans.
At least Amazon's Eating our way to Extinction [1] makes a convincing argument against deforestation and meat consumption trends. But the West is continuing to sell the global south a lifestyle (foreign to them) of extreme meat eating, among other unsustainable consumption lifestyle.
I don't think they're gleeful, they just deeply believe that we need to reject capitalism and/or embrace some sort of global technocratic governance, and see the threat of climate catastrophe as the most-plausible mechanism that such a change would come about.
That's an interesting take I hadn't thought of. At first I read it dismissively, but it's surprisingly plausible given the role software engineers have taken over the last 15 years.
I'm deeply suspicious of any environmental cause that starts with having to reject capitalism. Particularly when it advocates for totalitarian government as a solution. I tend to think the environmental cause is being used to justify belief in some other system.
How is it insanely extreme ? Except if we are lucky and there is a Deus ex machina that saves us (which by definition is unpredictable), this is the current trajectory
The newest IPCC report (Aug 2021) is rather apocalyptic even in the best-case scenarios that are not happening currently. And their worst-case scenarios do not include possible feedback loops.
Slowing down the global economy wouldn’t benefit the elites. Still though they might have their liferafts planned that none of us are going to be welcome onto.
Yeah, I'm not accepting any such thing. Cure is worse than the disease, and the implication is the developing world will have to stop developing, while the developed world lives with economic depression. I'm sure that will be politically viable /s.
If I had half the money I think Obama has, buying a vacation home somewhere that might disappear into a hurricane randomly in the next 10 years would not be a problem.
For me, the big story is going to be supply-chain breakup and de-globalization. The author touches on this a bit, but completely misses the implication.
The programming languages that will best survive the apocalypse are the ones that can run on chips that best survive the apocalypse! I think that there're be a big turn toward highly-efficient compiled languages: Rust and Go are well-positioned for this, C will still be around, but languages like PHP and Ruby are very poorly suited for this. Anything that can be adapted to run on a microcontroller that you can scavenge from old cars that no longer can get gas will be in high demand.
I also think we'll see a turn toward more local production of semiconductors, which may require moving back in process nodes toward older technology where the supply chain and manufacturing process isn't as complex.
I don't think backwards-compatibility is as important as the author thinks it is. Enough other things are going to break in the economy that people will be willing to make due with software that gives them basic communication & computation abilities even if it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of modern software, particularly if modern software becomes completely unavailable due to infrastructure failures like cable lines coming down and there not being enough power to run datacenters.
Final thoughts: I think distributed technologies like mesh networks, data synchronization algorithms, networking, (proof-of-stake/storage) blockchains, etc. will become significantly more important. I wouldn't count on the cloud surviving: it has a lot of physical infrastructure dependencies, and physical infrastructure is already crumbling. Software that you can run locally on a device and communicate over unreliable networks will become very important.
One should first ask what is the actually useful task for computers. Right now it is often things like powering ad networks, tracking engagements, running tax code for millions, calculating sha 256 hashes. Would any of this be useful in apocalypse? If not what would be?
There's tons of stuff that would be useful in an apocalypse. Things like:
1.) Communications. Being able to send over plans for a useful tool, or instructions for repair, or a meeting place for the defense of a village becomes critical.
2.) Entertainment/education. Threads shows the post-apocalyptic children watching a VHS video of animals & grammar. If you can preserve even just the PBS Kids catalog on local disk and have a working computer, you'll be in huge demand as the town's babysitter, and it's far easier to do this at scale with video than individually keep dozens of kids occupied.
3.) Local records. It's critical to catch freeriders for any communal endeavors, because if you don't, community breaks down and everybody just worries about their own family. Same goes for financial records: if you can restore some semblance of banking & credit you can operate much more efficient trade than if everything is spot barter.
4.) Knowledge repository. The community where everybody knows how to garden is going to be way better off than the one where two people know how to garden and everybody steals their food. Same with a variety of other skills - repairs, local resources, weapon manufacture, etc.
5.) Industrial control. If communities can get an electricity source back online, it opens up a wide variety of options for local manufacturing and automation. Labor is likely to be in very short supply after an apocalypse, so anything you can do to automate control will be a big help.
Modelling environmental phenomenon certainly if you want to viably farm and feed appreciable amounts of people. you'd also use these rigs for biological analysis to identify targets for genetic modification that would improve yields in a rapidly changing environment with limited nutrient availability. i imagine one day crops are genetically modified to be most optimal for specific hillsides or valleys or individual farm parcels, essentially going back to the benefits of land races but with the flexibility to introduce known changes in a single season.
I could not imagine running rustc on a Rust program, let alone building a 200-crate dependency graph or all of rustc, on a 2000s car entertainment system microcontroller.
What you are programming would change, just like what you're programming with would change. The projects who use 200-something crates are building desktop applications or something like that.
What we'd program if we only have microcontrollers available, would be much smaller in scope, maybe a lot of focus on controlling physical infrastructure for agriculture and such.
There are two better explanations than the Great Filter:
- Dark Forest theory is popular in China, that civilizations should conceal their existence to prevent being destroyed by a more advanced civilization
- Our own high power TV and Radio transmitters will be shutdown soon in favor of fiber optics. Even better communication mechanisms should be no surprise
The glossed over Great Filter is space is fucking huge and physics is mean.
It takes a great effort to get a coherent radio signal to hit a system many light years away. Leaked radio emissions just don't reach very far. Even high powered radar is extremely narrow beams coming from a spinning planet orbiting a star that itself is flying through space. The odds that beam crosses some system specifically listening for it is extremely low and the odds of a reoccurrence is ridiculously low.
The dark forest just doesn't make sense. A sufficiently large telescope can get spectra from terrestrial planets. If you have some killer space fleet you'll send it off to any planet where you find short-lived industrial emissions (CFCs etc). There's no need to wait for radio emissions from a planet with biomarkers. It also presumes its practical to send a space fleet to go destroy anyone.
It's far more likely the odds of any two technological civilizations existing at the same "time" at detectable ranges is extremely low. Species also don't tend to take over galaxies because it requires unattainable amounts of power and resources much better used to live happily in their own little corner.
I've always had an intuitive feeling that theories like The Great Filter theory was a pretty arrogant simplification of "actual reality" beyond our narrow biological lenses and even narrower western definition of "life" or even spatial dimensions and time.
Just because some western scientist with only 350+ years of somewhat advanced tools, math and imagination can't see "something" doesn't mean something isn't there - we don't even know what "there" is, or who "we" are.
Math and science is an awesome "thing", but the ridiculous existential pop-science extrapolations from simple equations is laughable if not sinister, especially in light of the paradigmatic shifts in science and worldview over just the last couple of centuries.
I tend to agree, I don't think we have a good grasp on what life will be like in 50 years let alone 1000 or 10,000. My personal guesses are that we will continue to make improvements in efficiency and so will produce very little leakage of communications or even heat making us nearly invisible over vast distances. Sociologically, I think we'll be very different; population growth may approach 0 while lifespan increases dramatically so we'll continue to explore the universe but will do so remotely since we just won't have the numbers to physically colonize other star systems. Even the timescale on which we live may change drastically, perception of time isn't even fixed when it comes to biology there are other species that have much faster or slower perception of time and once we being to modify our biology and augment it by integrating with digital systems we'll be able to control that sense. Who can predict what other technological advances are on the horizon, for all we know alien probes or other technology could be as small as bacteria and might just be distributed through space as vast networks of dust clouds that harvest ambient chemical and solar energy and have transmission ranges measured in micrometers. How would we even detect such technology without physically going there and examining it up close?
Agreed. The Great Filter theory has weak assumptions that a) all ”living” systems evolve in a similar way as the biological systems on earth, and b) that this evolution ”advances” somehow towards space expansion.
Our biological lenses make it seem like the complex system we call ”life” is the only similarly complex system that is possible in the entire universe.
Right; the parameter that would be of interest is rather L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space.
Quoting Wikipedia: "Inserting the above minimum numbers into the equation gives a minimum N of 20. Inserting the maximum numbers gives a maximum of 50,000,000. Drake states that given the uncertainties, the original meeting concluded that N ≈ L, and there were probably between 1000 and 100,000,000 planets with civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy."
As I understand it, at the time it was estimated that a civilization would broadcast during its existence, from the time radio communications started until the fall of civilization (thus the Great Filter).
Now, from our sample size of one, it looks like L would rather be on the order of 100 years (in our case, not because we are trying to hide in the Dark Forest, but because we don't want to waste energy beaming Dallas reruns into space for no good reason).
When dealing with unknown unknowns any theory can be logical.
Maybe extra-terrestrials are more like lumberjacks chopping down trees. Except these lumber jacks avoid *any tree with a bird's nest in it*. Then, we should be as visible as possible.
So should we be quiet (ala Dark Forest), or loud? Depends on how you model extra-terrestrials.
Isn't some sort of game theory going to suggest we be quiet then? Because if they exterminate birds nests, we want to be quiet, and if they intentionally avoid bird's nests, they probably will look for them closer before chopping us down.
Hmm, so I am not sure I see why that would be more likely. It sounds like you're saying that exterminators are less effective at detection than lumberjacks--whether by effort or some other reason.
I think you could just as logically conclude the opposite: maybe lumberjacks don't need to exterminate to survive, so they do not put as much effort in, since they are just avoiding us altruistically.
But more generally, this is the sort of problem I have with speculation on unknown unknowns: It's fun to do, but I dont recommend changing any of our decisions based on it because we simply do not know.
I don't think any explanation is "better" or "worse" than the great filter, as we only have our example. There's nothing suggesting that we are alone in the universe, but also nothing suggesting that we aren't alone. We can formulate whatever hypothesis we want but it won't change reality. Either there's something out there or there isn't. Lots of people thinking the great filter or Drake's equation is real won't affect what is or isn't out there. We just don't know, and it's mostly a waste of time to think about it.
I feel like the second is the most likely. Combine that with challenging the proposition that intelligent life would ever choose to colonize the galaxy to the extent that it would be blatantly obvious and I think you have a pretty solid position from which to argue that it won't be easy to detect other civilizations.
> Just wanted to follow up on my note from a few days ago in case it got buried under all of those e-mails about the flood. I’m concerned about how the Eastern Seaboard being swallowed by the Atlantic Ocean is going to affect our Q4 numbers, so I’d like to get your eyes on the latest earnings figures ASAP. On the bright side, the Asheville branch is just a five-minute drive from the beach now, so the all-hands meeting should be a lot more fun this year. Silver linings!
I... I don't think I'm psychologically prepared for tolerating the fauxptimism of corpospeak under the Slow Motion Apocalypse.
>>> “On the bright side, the Asheville branch is just a five-minute drive from the beach now, so the all-hands meeting should be a lot more fun this year.” <<<
As an aside, seeing things like this in climate change articles always bothers me. FYI Asheville being minutes from the beach would imply a 650m+ (2000+ft) sea rise in the next 25 years.
This kind of hyperbole makes it easy for people who deny climate change in totality to say it is based on absurd scenarios which will never happen. The real projections implications are significant enough. Why do people feel the need to resort to pure fiction?
Fiction is a tool used by humans to elicit, experience and process feelings under (mostly) safe circumstances. The details (such as how much the sea level would have to rise for this to be accurate) are not quite relevant; the point is to make the reader think about how they would feel if this sort of concern was just a commonplace consideration in their daily life. Is it not shocking? Uncomfortable? Sorta nihilism-inducing?
In summary: doesn't it make you want to act towards preventing this from ever being close to happening?
It only makes you want to act in the short term. In the long term, it either promotes denial (from those who think that its all hyperbole) or doomerism (from those who think that none of it is hyperbole). Hyperbole does not promote hope, which is the primary motivating factor to solving problems like this.
I agree with the person above, too much hyperbole makes it easy to dismiss an argument.
We're already struggling against a mountain of industry funded FUD, the last thing we need is people stretching the truth in well meaning yet counterproductive ways.
It makes me want to question climate activism. I'd want to act to prevent or mitigate realistic scenarios (depending on the tradeoffs), not apocalyptic fictions.
It’s nice to submit to call of civilizational collapse every once in a while, but it’s not a realistic view. Yes, climate change is going to affect billions of people, but from what I can tell, things are moving in the right direction and we’re on track to avoid the worst even with barely any political action.
If it was suddenly 2050 and none of our technology had improved, we’d be fucked. But it’s not a useful perspective to assume that technological progression will stop. Solar panels have dropped in price by literal orders of magnitude. It seems like nuclear is coming back into vogue. Space-based power seems like it might be economically viable in a few decades, even.
> "Based on this I felt like some of the big winners in 2050 will be Rust, Clojure and Go."
I mean the guy may be delusional, but he's right on the climate part.
Even if our tech improves and we cut carbon to zero in a fairytaleish fashion we're still up for a 3 deg temp increase till 2100 which will be rather catastrophic. Of course the developed world will be hit the least due to its location, so we'll likely be fine for the most part but it will be troubling time regardless. It all depends on cascading issues that we can't really predict, like warming causing some fish to go extinct that ate eggs of some insect that will now breed uncontrollably and push out useful pollinators from the ecosystem, leading to crop failure and such.
I mean that's in the ballpark, few people agree on the exact numbers given that it depends on so many unknown factors. There's the oceans outgassing the CO2 they've absorbed so far, ice melting resulting in permanent greater sunlight absorption, clathrate gun, etc.
The rule of thumb (iirc) is that 1C would be business as usual, 4C a Mad Max hell scape, and we'll likely end up somewhere in between. The closer to which side we'll be depends on how well we implement countermeasures... and how much luck we have.
Yep, this is the comment. We've been on and are continuing along a path to disruptive new tech in a whole cluster of key societal sectors, and this will change the whole game to the point where by 2030, we'll wonder why we were worried in 2022(see: any Tony Seba lecture). It's not just energy production but the paradigms of land use, transport, communications, materials engineering, all shifting at once, with orders-of-magnitude consequences in each. It'll make solving the climate issue be a slam dunk - we still have to make it a reality but there will be plenty of capacity to do so.
The ONLY techs we should be caring about over the 50-year horizon are the disruptive ones.
I doubt global warming will negatively affect amount of time spent on open source/programming language design.
Currently we're wasting a lot of time on social media, Netflix, games, etc. There's lots of fat to cut. Also historically bad conditions were when people wrote books and focused on studies. If OS is important - it will develop.
On the other hand x as a service and cloud based stuff will likely die off. Good riddance.
Economical collapse will affect how much free time people can donate to open source. Paying open source (like Linux kernel) will not be more impacted that closed source but the rest yes
Economic collapse can just as easily mean more free time. The relationship isn't linear nor straightforward. For example substinence farming leaves you A LOT of free time, just provides very little surplus and you risk starvation.
'Bit sad innit, but what can I do about it except globally irrelevant feel-goods that we're conditioned into doing on the individual basis?
Cheap, clean energy solves a lot of the problems described, and until we get people to understand that the only energy that can be produced on a low budget, with little impact to the environment is either hydro or atomic, we are going to be a long way from a long-term solution or even remediation. Wind and solar are also extremely promising, but the load put on network balancing, storage and conversion makes me sceptical of their performance under unreliable conditions.
"Based on this I felt like some of the big winners in 2050 will be Rust, Clojure and Go. They mostly nail these criteria and are well-designed for not relying on containers or other similar technology for basic testing and feature implementation. They are also (reasonably) tolerant of spotty internet presuming the environment has been set up ahead of time."
Why is Clojure better then Java when it's a JVM language as well? It uses Java artefacts (Maven) so how is it more tolerant than Java of a spotty internet? Scala, Clojure, Java, Groovy should all rate pretty much the same or am I missing something?
I feel like this is impossible to mention the end of times™ without reading a bit about {100 rabbits}(https://100r.co/site/home.html) and their journey on a boat with small ecological impact in mind. A closely related read is of course {CollapseOS}(http://collapseos.org/), the OS written in Forth.
Based on this I felt like some of the big winners in 2050 will be Rust, Clojure and Go.
These will be less than we think of Cobol today. The paradigms will be completely different by then. Declarative languages have the best shot at surviving since they are the least tied to today's paradigms. We have to figure a may to program for fine and coarse grain parallel machines -- and not von Neumann fetch-decode-execute style machines.
Probably not a complete break. But there needs to be paradigms that can allow for exacale computing. Instead of 20000 independent threads (e.g., SIMD / CUDA style) we will have trillions of threads that work in interleaved harmony. The von Neumann model break downs at that level.
We've made a ton of progress. They didn't have decentralized computing at all in 1978. Now most things run on remote machines. Also, there has been a move away from the imperative style that makes parallelism so difficult.
This isn’t nearly so clear-cut as you make it out to be—compilers today often treat “imperative” languages as declarative, and CPUs are a lot more sophisticated than “fetch-decode-execute” implies. (Yesterday I was looking at some code where GCC took a fairly complicated for-loop and turned it into about four assembly instructions, all with incomprehensible acronyms.)
COBOL’s fall from grace was due in no small part to the syntax rather than the semantics, and I expect that trend to continue: I wouldn’t be surprised if the languages of 2050 are similar to the languages of today, just with more expressivity, better communication between compiler and programmer, and an even larger range of optimizations under the hood.
So... anyone else having doubts that with all the apocalyptic things going on around the world people will keep their appetite for mindless distraction and will still be able/willing to one-click buy random stuff on a whim? When they might have to expect waiting weeks for the delivery, and/or pay humongous transport fees?
Asking because that seems to be what much of modern IT is angling for and why there's so much money in it.
> else having doubts that with all the apocalyptic things going on around the world people will keep their appetite for mindless distraction and will still be able/willing to one-click buy random stuff on a whim
Wouldn't people in the described apocalyptic scenario want mindless distraction? Anything to keep their minds off the, well, apocalyptic things going on.
Exactly, mindless distraction is only an option when you are comfortable. Try not eating for a day + turning off your heating/cooling and see how interesting Twitter is then.
Mindless distraction is exactly what you turn to when your efforts to better your life become too monumental to bear: lifespans shorten because destitution drives people to apathy or an open desire for suicide.
> Due to heat and power issues, it is likely that disruptions to home and office internet will be a much more common occurrence. As flooding and sea level rise disrupts commuting, working asynchronously is going to be the new norm.
Nah. I expect simple UI fashion transitions (e.g. round corners to square corners back to round corners) are likely to claim more of our time and attention over the next 30 years than the "serious" predictions in the article.
Consider also the support systems in place for agrarian production that enable programmers to do what we do.
We’re in the midst of a mass extinction event. If we lose the eco systems that support us we’ll go into decline as surely as every other species as high on the food chain as we are.
I’m not sure if civilization will collapse but it does seem like something that is probable. Do we have enough people with the expertise to maintain or build computing devices with limited access to fabrication? Can we still cobble together useful stuff from the piles of e-waste?
One easy thing we can do is push for policies that make it easier to access public infrastructure. Low-cost access to the poles, towers, etc.
Raise your hand if you would be willing to lower your standard of living, voluntarily, in order to stave off global warming. Sell your car. Stop buying anything made with plastic. Stop using electricity.
I would be more than happy to give up almost everything if it would stop climate change, but unfortunately even if I make all those changes, everybody else will continue driving cars, so it seems my personal choices have nothing to do with whether global warming happens or not. The way around this is collective (government) action to guarantee everyone will participate, but for a variety of reasons we don't have the political will to make that happen. Besides, I'm not convinced individuals' actions are to blame for the majority of climate change -- I'm not an expert but I'm under the impression that corporate / industrial energy usage is the majority of the problem.
consumer's demand is indeed part of the problem, but the corporate/industrial's perpetual quest for growth is also part of it IMHO. if corporations are okay with not growing, planned obsolescence won't be a thing and we will also probably get less ads shoved on our face to trigger our impulse to buy.
Never. I'm not changing any part of my lifestyle to prevent any climate disaster. I'm all for technological solution to climate change. In case that's not enough, I'm happy to face the consequences. But I'm still not changing my lifestyle.
Lots of people have tried to promote biking, urban zoning reform, denser cities, mixed living and working areas, reduction of urban cars and the overall need for cars, increased availability of public transport, remote working, less work to more time off ratio, reduction in use of plastic, companies have switched from oil based plastics to alternative plastics, people have switched to solar or wind generated electricity, triple-glazed their houses to save on heating bills, paid for a more efficient washing machine or lower power TV or fridge.
I see tons of hands and lots of companies lobbying against them because it wouldn't be as profitable if things changed and people bought less.
100% willing to never use a car again if the place I live is designed properly. Happy to dramatically reduce plastic use to only what must be plastic. Electricity use reduction is definitely the hardest sell to me since electricity is by far the most impactful modern convenience and I actually can't think of a use I have for it that doesn't come down to some kind of necessity (food preservation, cooling, and powering the tools I use to literally earn my entire income).
I already have given up my car and transitioned to using a bicycle for my commute to work, longer distances i cover with the train. We (my family and i) are on a vegetarian diet and moving to vegan.
At some point, we'll have to put a fine dust in the upper atmosphere.
We seem to have most of the building blocks already for renewable energy. Just need to focus on it and assemble them together... and decide it's worth giving up fossil fuel related things that are still functional.
Dust in the upper atmosphere? That is a solved problem; we can just burn more coal. Of course the world will be dirty and it will get cold everywhere, but hey at least we will be back to where we were in the early 20th century. I have a better idea how about we consume less and not spew crap into our environment.
What about technological singularity, alternate power sources, starlink like projects, energy efficient appliances, etc?
Also, China/India are in survival/growth mode, so "sustainability" is least of their concerns right now :( and btw resource consumption per person is higher in first-world countries, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/american-consumpt... . This is a mindset issue and needs to addressed as well.
If there is an apocalypse, it looks entirely contrived to me.
Spending untold billions to shut down the economy for most of 2 years is something I saw with my own eyes.
Sea level rises, and whatever else, not at all. The dire predictions have been coming for decades (remember Al Gore)? And nothing.. I suspect its just a trick that means we hand over greater control and money to the worst of us (government). And if it were real, I have zero trust in any governance structure to do the right thing as opposed to serving itself and its 'stakeholders' (aka corporations).
So because of the way temperatures seem to you subjectively, you're going to say there is a worldwide conspiracy of everyone who works on historical climate research to fudge the numbers?
With climategate, we saw scientists falsifying the data. But you can't read about what happened on wikipedia - the entry there is an exercise in obfuscation.
What this tells me is that the science is highly politicised, and cannot be trusted. Too many people stand to make money and gain control from the purported threat. Al Gore is one of those. You should watch 'An Inconvenient Truth' from 2006 - it hasn't aged well. Should there be a punishment for people who shout fire in a crowded theatre?
So, I have listened (and once believed) all the alarms over the years - they have not materialised. People talk about wildfires and flooding, but these are better explained by mismanagement, despite the media hype.
So no, I don't trust the politicised science, nor the foghorn media. OTOH, I do see how an excuse of 'climate change' is valuable in handing even greater control to the governance structure, where they can micro-manage your usage of electricity, water, and even have the ability to turn it off. Do you think if they have that power they won't do it?
And yes, despite all the talk of rising water levels, I have not seen it. I have been to beaches from my youth - the water levels are the same. Certainly there have been changes - and climate is not some consistent, clockwork thing - there are probable cycles and mega-cycles in there.
The whole thing about climate changes, seems designed to be play on both our sense of importance (that we can really change the world, as if we were gods) and a self-indulgent saviour complex - we need to save the world from us. Its religious thinking to me, you feel sinful and are seeking atonement. I didn't think science was meant to work like that!
I've been thinking about this recently and have a few tentative conclusions.
- My government (.au) runs almost entirely on the MS cloud/productivity stack, as do most large businesses. This is the stuff that's going to get resources when there are outages, conflicts, or difficult decisions have to be made. Assuming a degradation over the next decade or two, you could do worse than align your business or personal computing with PCs and MS tech/services - by the time you're facing major outages there are probably bigger problems outside your window. Even in extended collapse downturns there will be some work available to keep this stuff ticking along for many years.
- Intermittent connectivity is to be expected, but also the risk of suddenly losing access to some resource permanently, be that dependencies, documentation, software downloads, or your cloud data. At a minimum all cloud data you care about should have a full offline copy on local disk in a format that is usable. (This seems generally true of both Apple and MS cloud services, if you have a fully synced Mac or Windows PC with the right settings.)
- Development environments with batteries-included standard libraries will offer the most bang-for-buck, which can be installed from offline installers. Being able to build custom GUI apps on demand for whatever hardware your customer has is very helpful. I think .NET MAUI is very interesting here, especially if they end up gaining Linux GUI support. Linux is a great way to bring old laptops into service.
- When advanced technology manufacturing becomes too resource intensive and expensive for many people to buy, larger computers etc. will give way to phones, often crummy ones. Expect lots of Androids and hand-me-downs.
- There will be good trade in second-hand hard drives and batteries that are not too worn. If you can bodge together USB powerpacks from scavenged batteries then certain kinds of USB-powered devices should be able to run for decades. Ultimately I expect old Android devices to be dominant platform because they are numerous, relatively inexpensive, hackable and portable.
- If your value derives from what you have (hardware, stashes of offline data etc.) then expect it to be taken from you. Skills are more helpful - so long as they are actually useful in the computing environment of the time.
I don't understand. In this article we are imaging widespread and frequent failure of critical infrastructure and we are supposed to further imagine that we're still interested in working on our relatively unimportant software? I suppose there are critical software systems out there, but they're already written so we don't really need to think about what languages they'll be work on with.
The word Apocalypse only appears once on that page, in the title. The page is pointless either way since the Apocolypse isn't here yet. People will know when it's here and there will still be a subset of people who will deny it. Like that cartoon of the dog casually sitting at the table while the house burns down around him, saying "This is fine.".
2050 local first development will be the only way to go. No more servers but devices communicating via local networks with maybe some online backup at the most. It will be only offline mobile apps and web apps that will thrive.
Struck me as strange the discussion jumped straight to how things will be done, but not what things will be done. Surely the tools and workflows will depend on the tasks we are trying to accomplish at that time?
I don't really agree with 'collapse of human civilization; apocalyptic predictions due to fossil-fueled global warming, more like a rapid degradation in living standards for the vast majority of people on the planet, do to the known list of climate-related issues: decreases in agricultural production largely related to heat waves and drought, and infrastructure damage due to flooding and fires and extreme weather.
This is likely to reduce the amount of arable land, and the intersection of that and continued human population growth is likely going to put pressure on populations to migrate to more livable zones, and that will create the kinds of tensions like to lead to widespread warfare and possibly even genocidal actions.
Now, can some of this be technologically mitigated? Absolutely. It's entirely possible to run the global economy without fossil fuels. The major sources of replacement energy would be wind/solar/storage, and nuclear in some regions (massive expansion of nuclear is just not feasible, sorry enthusiasts, but that's the reality - there's not that much high-grade uranium ore around, breeder concepts are implausible, fusion is nowhere in sight, and the cost equation favors solar and wind in the vast majority of regions, from the equator descending polewards).
However, that would upend the economic status quo in a remarkable way. All the petrostates that live off oil exports and oil production would have serious readjustments (and this is non-ideological, it's true for the USA, for Saudi Arabia, for Venezuela, for Russia, for Iran, etc.).
Imagine if we got serious about eliminating fossil fuel use globally. Well, one obvious first step would be a ban on the international trade in fossil fuels, right? Who would agree to that? All the fossil fuel corporations I know of are planning on maintaining current levels of output for the next 30 years, as well.
Regardless, we could very plausibly reduce fossil fuel production in the USA by 3% per year if we also increased solar/wind/storage by 3% per year, while maintaining most of the current nuclear fleet. Then, in 30 years, the USA would produce zero fossil fuels. It's entirely doable with existing technlogy, but would require as much investment as say, the military-industrial complex currently gets.
As far as computer tech and programming, I really don't see that being fundamentally impacted; if there's an energy / material crunch then it will just become more expensive to buy a computer or run a datacenter, and it'll be more restricted to key uses (managing energy grids, running factories, etc.). However, running a chip production line off solar power is entirely feasible.
By now one question should remain: why was the very idea of geoengineering silenced for decades behind sneers and activism and bad press, when we could implement it half a century ago and avert much of the climate change?
I think the general consensus is that we've proven to be complete and absolute rubbish when it comes to predicting how vast complex real-world systems that we can't read worth a damn behave when we put them under major stresses, and the vast majority of attempts to hack ecosystems have been disasters, meaning that we're just as likely to make things even worse if we try to apply our crude means and models to make planet-scale modifications to climate and biosphere.
Nearly all of the disastrous things we've done to the planet were understood to have negative environmental consequences and yet we did them anyhow. Meanwhile, a great deal of our environmental interventions have been incredibly successful.
So I'm totally unconvinced by this often recited and rarely supported mantra.
Some people may have understood, or rather suspected. They weren't in the majority though, or lots of misguided geoengineering wouldn't have been done the way it was.
Clearing forests has been progress thing until relatively recently, draining swamps was a totally great thing until even more recently, straightening rivers into concrete beds has been considered progress up into my lifetime. All of these things have had lots of bad downstream consequences to the point that lots of places now spend huge sums to undo at least some of these developments. And come to think of it, wildfire management is another geoengineering effort that lots of very dry places totally screwed up (e.g. California, as discussed frequently on this very site) out of the very best intentions, but working with broken models.
Plenty of times species have been introduced overseas to control other species, and it's always been a disaster, to the great surprise of everyone involved, time and again. Dams for hydro power are still considered ultra low ecological footprint power generation by lots of people, even though they form barriers that can completely disrupt river ecosystems to the point of leaving desolate wastelands in the riverbed downstream, disrupt riverside ecosystems downstream that depend on regular floods, allow for excessive water extraction and so on. Hunting predators to extinction is still widely popular, even though ecosystems without predators can't and don't function. I've had conversations with local people who're hellbent on exterminating the few remaining local beavers because they damage trees; but beavers are a keystone species, tons of species depend on beaver-created clearings.
The list doesn't end: Dumping toxic waste into rivers has been considered harmless until toxins accumulated to levels extreme enough to severely hurt people, by which point some of the worst-polluted rivers had been pretty m much sterilized (e.g. the lower Rhine). It's hard do believe this today, but people did honestly think nature would take care of the gunk, filter it out or dilute it or whatever. We pumped lead into the environment by means of leaded gasoline, one of the craziest "accidental" geoengineering adventures to date, until whole forests started dying, and of course some people saw that one coming, but then some people saw the world end when the LHC went online, and good thing we didn't listen to those people. When I grew up, climate change was widely considered a crazy myth; some saw it coming early on, the majority had a good chuckle; yet that's the biggest geohacking fuck-up in all our history, and it took us that long to realize the fact that climate change is real.
Generally speaking, with experiments like this, the true consequences tend to not become visible until way down the line, at which point cleanup may be impossible (e.g. climate change, the current mass extinction) so we need to anticipate such things and get it right the first try. Yet we've historically both failed to build non-rubbish models and then to heed those few warnings we did get. Convenience and progress and growth seem to always trump the naysayers, and often that's just fine – the world didn't end when the LHC went online and we learned a lot about the fundamentals of physics. Good thing we didn't listen to them.
But all this history leaves me personally highly pessimistic when it comes to more planet-scale climate hacking, given that we don't even understand the downstream consequences of our past and current climate hacking and given that our track record of getting this sort of thing right on the first (or any) try is so grotesquely bad.
We're great at problem-solving short-term, everyday issues with near-immediate feedback loops, like by mass-producing crazy good tools; we're bad when things get big, abstract, long-term, with long-ish feedback cycles e.g. when building nuclear reactors that don't malfunction in major ways, because we start making bad compromises and take shortcuts even though we should and do know better, because we socially can't help doing this; and we're sad failures at anything extremely large-scale, extremely long-term, extremely long feedback cycle-ish, like climate change or – planet-scale climate engineering.
Since we are bound to get pretty desperate and since climate hacking does offer an enticingly quick way out, I'm confident we'll try it at some point. When we do, I very much hope I'll find my pessimism proven wrong.
We are already putting major stress to the environment, so we might need to experiment a bit with different methods to better understand and control climate. The problem is that changing the earth’s climate can only be done at a global scale, so this is a project where every country needs to cooperate and requires incredible amounts of trust on each other… (which I don’t think will happen soon enough)
The most convincing argument to me is that we're already facing a vast problem that would require a great deal of geoengineering to counter. If polluters realized they could geoengineer the problem away, they would stop trying to reduce emissions, and the geoengineering problem would become even larger and more unmanageable.
Due to how entropy works, it's always more efficient to simply not spill milk on the floor than to mop it up. Deciding that you should just have a milk bottle fight because you have a mop in the house is... strange? It will never be more efficient to scrub greenhouse gases from the air than to avoid emitting them in the first place.
Agreed. It also makes me feel like some people want there to be no 'easy' solutions to problems, because they despise how society is going and wish it would be forced to change. I suspect they'd still be unhappy even if there was a magic wand you could wave that would instantly fix climate change (or make it impossible to occur).
I agree that geoengineering is a bad idea but they use the "white men" bogeyman, that's really stupid. And also they don't really talk about to price to pay for degrowth
Well… IMHO trying to solve our climate change issues with geoengineering seems similar to the USA trying solve their gun issues by putting even more guns in circulation.
Does not fix the root causes and I don’t see how it can work long-term.
And that's an entirely reasonable stance that as far as I can tell is the consensus among climate researchers. But it logically implies that the narrative of climate apocalypse is not true - that nature is capable of self-balancing within the parameters industrial civilization throws at it, and that our current climate trajectory is mild enough that it's not worth pursuing some potential solutions if their side effects look too serious.
Climate change has turned into a sort of quasi-religious moral issue that blends with other issues of our day.
The thinking goes that, if only we could become pure and stop partaking in the evils of consumer capitalism, we might appease a hidden power and be saved from a myriad of bogeyman such as climate change.
This mindset fails to reasonably consider the certainty and enormity of the threat. Organized civilization is likely to end. Billions will die and we might very well become extinct.
The problem must be attacked with the full force of human intellect. It's so damn obvious that "wait for everyone to become super duper conscientious" is a fool's plan.
This person is assuming the problem will occur, and thinking about what their type of work will look like under those conditions. So, it is less interesting of an article if you want to hear about attempts to innovate around the whole problem.
By geoengineering, you mean blocking out the light of the sun?
Won't that significantly reduce the photosynthetic potential of Earth, and significantly reduce the carrying capacity of the Earth for life?
There are plenty of planets and moons that are cooler because they receive less sunlight. None of them host any life that we can detect.
Isn't there a real risk that geoengineering would just end up turning the Earth into something resembling Mars, irreversibly?
The Earth has supported abundant life with an atmosphere with a higher concentration of C02 than it has now. Has it ever supported abundant life with the solar energy being reduced to the extent required to reduce climate change?
It's not an exact measurement of incoming solar energy, but the Earth has supported abundant life through a much wider range of climate variation than anything we're facing today. I don't know of any evidence that we're in a climate "sweet spot" where we'd need to worry about something like that. (https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte...)
Why wait all the time until global warming destabilizes every ecosystem on Earth? You can have it today, just by spraying the upper atmosphere!
People do take geoengineering quite seriously. People do talk seriously about carbon capture, about ecosystem husbandry, about forced forestation, even about ocean seeding (there have been enough research about this one to conclude we are not desperate enough yet). It's only global shading that isn't serious.
There's no profit incentive to geoengineer or clean up anything so nothing will get fixed - at least not if the future will be a continuation of how capitalism, industry and geopolitics have worked literally forever - probably also biological and even physical systems if we extrapolate.
It's always boom then bust, everywhere in space and time.
That said i still hope we'll manage in some obscure way because we have no other choice!
This is probably true at the level of corporations, but not clearly the case at the level of countries. An interesting paper on the economics of geoengineering, if you’re curious: https://www.nber.org/papers/w18622
Anthropic global warming is by definition geoengineering. We are not controlling it, what makes you think that we can control other geoengineerings techniques ?
COMPILERS - just use LLVM.
Why do we need 900 different compilers ? We can have every architecture, programming language covered. Less human resource wasted. Experiments and new approaches can be tried inside LLVM too.
Have you done any research about the impacts of climate change? Complaining about the urgency of warnings only works if you're certain the urgency is unwarranted.
Personally, I'm not against the planet or humanity, I'm against disingenously poor quality arguments designed as a chaff countermeasure to befog public discourse and facilitate a worlwide distration theft via technocratic policies and economic centralization.
Ah the good old genetic fallacy. As it so happens, he was a lead designer on the original PowerPC and received several awards for it. So a real engineer and scientist. After retiring he started investigating the fallacy of climate change.
It's quite irrelevant who he is, it's what he has to say that's important and whether his facts are correct (which they are).
I don’t know about you but I’m not qualified to evaluate the enormous amount of evidence required to ascertain whether the globe is warming and so I’m inclined to believe almost all scientists rather than some kook on YouTube who basically doesn’t google. That’s the nature of considering the opinions of experts on subjects in which you’re not an expert.
Virtually all of this is laughably stupid, but there's one thing buried in there that's true today:
> Mobile will be the only computing people have access to and they'll need to be more aware of data pricing.
For the vast majority of the planet, mobile is already the only computing they ever use.
> There's no reason to think telecoms won't take advantage of their position to increase data prices under the guise of maintenance for the towers.
This, though, is straight up wrong, since in any competitive market data prices becomes a commodity. In India you can get a 1 GB data plan for 15 rupees (~US$0.20) per month. Emphasis on the "competitive" bit there though: as usual, Canadians will be screwed.
- Although it's looking increasingly unlikely that we can avert climate disaster, we can never give up. For example, 8 degrees of warming would be much worse than 4 degrees of warming, and could mean the difference between human extinction and the mere collapse of our civilization. The lives of billions hang in the balance, and even if some will inevitably suffer and die, we can't just throw up our hands and let everyone die. Climate change mitigation, cutting emissions as quickly and thoroughly as we can, must remain a priority for the rest of our lives, even if we can no longer reach the best/safest scenarios. Every little bit of avoided global heating matters.
- This post, as dire as its predictions are, may underestimate the difficulty of computing in 2050, given current trends. If you are/were living in Ukraine recently, programming is not most people's top priority, they have other problems. Famines, extreme weather events, and resource wars will affect programmers who live in comfortable locations today. It's not just your users/audience who might be computing from a shitty mobile phone in a refugee camp, it could be you. Don't forget that we're not only dealing with climate change, but with the reaction of other people to climate change: they might want to kill you for your water. And heatwaves are predictable in India/Pakistan, but look at the freak heatwaves in Canada recently, nowhere on Earth is safe, the climate crisis is a global problem.
- Why are we programming what we're programming? Shouldn't our activities and their purposes change given the dramatic change in circumstances? Isn't there something wrong with the system that produced this result, the impending destruction of the biosphere that supports us? Fighting valiantly to preserve the functionality that is killing the world may not be a wise or ethical use of your time. (And if you're programming something for a fossil fuel company, now is a good time to reconsider.)