Re:Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters
by eseehausen on Monday January 21, 2019 @01:47PM
(#18962482)
If the only thing stopping the structural changes necessary to prevent ecological collapse was a fear of aliens, then I think we'd be doing better.
Also, the kind of technological delay you're talking about there would be a couple of decades at most, when it looks like you're talking about thinking in terms of centuries. If anything, we're slowing down necessary technological advances to maintain the status quo long past the point where it's tenable.
Re:Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters
by makerofspoons on Monday January 21, 2019 @09:03AM
(#18960406)
There is reason to believe we may have already hit peak farmland or may in the near future: http://freakonomics.com/2012/12/21/why-peak-farmland-is-good... https://www.forbes.com/sites/billconerly/2015/05/26/peak-far...
Re:Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters
by ForHackernews on Monday January 21, 2019 @11:07AM
(#18961236)
Lots of current farmland is due to become unproductive with climate change, so we'd better hope we don't need as much.
That's probably the way we'll have it, but there will be artificial-natural habitat, eg. "reservations", that could grow to even be country-sized or half-continent-sized if we manage resources right. (Though probably they'll be smaller since we're going to have to some pretty large scale heavily-engineered-and-very-unnatural-agriculture to prevent famine in the face of climate degradation.)
The second option sounds somewhat enticing... but it would likely severely diminish speed of technological progress, hence diminish our even-longer-term changes of survival (think encounter and warfare with alien civs etc. - the universe is huge and if we/our-mostly-artificial-descendants survive long enough we'll have to compete with strains of life much more virulent than ourselves today).