We do not know who invented zero. Or who identified earth to be a sphere. Or who wrote the sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 ... . We just pick a name and associate them to our liking.
So when another colonizer comes up, we will have newer people associated with these. Hope it does not happen. But history does say so.
Sure, but the reasons offsets are dodgy is because they actually aren't fungible in the way you're hoping for.
Say a paper maker is about to cut down a forest in the US. It buys up the rights to do so for $1M. Then, instead, it sells $1M worth of carbon credits to Amazon (maybe for a premium) for its data center greenwashing and doesn't end up cutting the US forest.
But then, secretly, or through some shell company machinery, it buys a plot of land in the Amazon and cuts trees down anyway to match its demand. Even though US law makers evaluate the counterfactual of the paper maker cutting trees down in the US, the net amount of trees in the world goes down.
Doesn't have to be that complicated to be dodgy. A bunch of carbon offset works on optimistic to downright stupid metrics for carbon capture.
For example they buy a plot of land and then raze it, then they will plant 10k saplings and take that figure at face value even if most of those won't take and actually become trees.
Then they will estimate the CO2 captured by averaging it over the entire life of the tree (say 30 years) and count year 1 as if it captured 1/30 of the CO2 even though the carbon capture potential of tree is not constant throughout its life.
Beyond that they will double count the carbon credits of the plot of land by selling them twice.
Finally after all the above, they will sell the plots after ~5 years to buy some other plots and it will be razed anyway. No one actually checks that the carbon capture forest will be there in 10 years, let alone 30.
I know that you are just trying to make a point, but just to be clear: no paper maker in US is importing Amazon trees to make paper out of them. That would be exceedingly idiotic from profit-making perspective.
Yeah, Brave New World is a really interesting work of dystopian fiction IMO, because many people disagree that it's "dystopian", unlike 1984 which it's often compared with. No one thinks living in the world of 1984 sounds appealing, but BNW sounds like a pretty nice place actually, but the anti-BNW crowd tries to tell us it's horrible because it's "unnatural" or "against family values" or something like that. Meanwhile, in the real world today, many families are completely broken (and many were in Huxley's time too, except they didn't get divorced, they just suffered), the marriage rate has gone down, the birthrate is unsustainably low, and young people frequently aren't even having sex any more, leading many to be isolated and depressed. Personally, I fail to see how adopting a BNW-style society could possibly be any worse than what we have now; indeed, it seems like a huge improvement in most ways.
Well the "we have the ability to alter humans so we're all strong, healthy, and intelligent but we not only choose not to do that but choose to stunt development of some humans to produce a docile compliant workforce for menial labor" is pretty darn dystopian no matter how you swing it.
And if you say "oh that wouldn't be so bad" you can even put your money where you mouth is -- would you be fine with being deprived of oxygen long enough to cause minor brain damage but otherwise not harm you? Done right you wouldn't feel a thing too. You can volunteer to be permanently dumber.
Huxley describes very eloquently how one end by two means are not the same. Human variation that arises naturally but at all times people are trying their best is a fact of life. But humans taking the reins and making that same variation by choice for their own desires is dystopian.
>Well the "we have the ability to alter humans so we're all strong, healthy, and intelligent but we not only choose not to do that but choose to stunt development of some humans to produce a docile compliant workforce for menial labor" is pretty darn dystopian no matter how you swing it.
That's not the thing the anti-BNW crowd complains about at all. It's not really even relevant: BNW was written a century ago before computers, automation, and robotics were invented. In a real BNW-type future scenario, you wouldn't need to artificially stunt peoples' intelligence to make menial workers: you'd just make robots to do that stuff, like we're already doing today.
The relevant part of BNW that would actually apply in the future is the idea of eliminating families, and having the state control reproduction and child-rearing. That's the part people find dystopian. No one seriously considering the issue thinks about the stuff you're talking about, because they realize that robots and automation have made that whole point moot.
Huxley was satirising fetal alcohol syndrome as a problem of his age; one might hope that in this more enlightened day and age parents would know not to drink during pregnancy and to keep their kids vaccinations up to date after pregnancy (and keep trace amounts of iodine in their diets) ... but your mileage may vary.
The US has its Alphas and Betas and Gammas and Deltas, all of whom are targeted by advertising that convinces them that their caste is the best (and the other castes are living incorrectly). It's probably not as bad as the old UK system the book was satirising, but exists clearly enough once you look for it.
it is really odd to only discuss long term plans in a meeting.
Meetings help individuals present their idea/code and reviewer to critically/loudly think about the solutions. If that does not happen, thinking happening offline is not likely.
Definitely elated at the offers, but the offers are for climbing the tallest peaks there exists.