Re:What If We Haven’t Met Aliens yet Because They’ve Messed ...
by pygy_ on Saturday August 03, 2019 @08:38PM
(#20603719)
The issue with fossil fuels isn't how much there is left, it is how much more CO2 we can release into the atmosphere while keeping the place livable. More generally, the larger the economy the more energy we degrade, and the more entropy we generate (in the form of pollution and environment destruction).
Our economy today is possibly already too large for our long term survival, and event if it isn't I'd rather we avoid crossing the threshold unknowingly.
But off course no one ever died in a fire they themselves had started. Let's keep on fanning the flames.
Re:What If We Haven’t Met Aliens yet Because They’ve Messed ...
by dmead on Saturday August 03, 2019 @08:07PM
(#20603571)
isn't most of the breathable oxygen produced by phytoplankton in the oceans?
Re:What If We Haven’t Met Aliens yet Because They’ve Messed ...
by smegger001 on Saturday August 03, 2019 @08:13PM
(#20603612)
and the taiga/boreal forest of the far north.
Re:What If We Haven’t Met Aliens yet Because They’ve Messed ...
by empath75 on Saturday August 03, 2019 @08:21PM
(#20603655)
We’ve probably got another 100 years of fossil fuels left at best. We’re still _increasing_ how much we’re burning every year.
Re:What If We Haven’t Met Aliens yet Because They’ve Messed ...
by mrdarknezz1 on Sunday August 04, 2019 @06:39PM
(#20609699)
That's why we need to shift to hydro and nuclear
Maybe.
> We are consuming nonrenewable (or very slowly renewable) resources at an unsustainable pace. Coal, oil, and gas are finite resources...
It's hard to overstate just how much fossil fuel there is out there compared to demand. Beyond that, we're becoming more efficient at an even faster pace than we are using it.
> Even if there is a lot left, there is not an infinite amount left.
Plenty of nuclear, solar, wind, hydroelectric, etc.
> We are converting rainforests, which produce the majority of our breathable oxygen and consume the majority of the carbon dioxide, into land for farming or housing.
This is happening in the 3rd world, and will be arrested by minor effort on the part of the 1st world if it is ever made to care enough. The idea that we are going to run out of breathable oxygen is something that only a journalist could believe.
> Our population is growing so fast that our ability to provide food for each person will be in serious doubt within a generation, despite all of our scorched-earth efforts to extract more and more sustenance from the planet.
Whoa, has somebody been reading population projections from the 1970s?
> Meanwhile, climate change is threatening major coastline developments, some ocean ecosystems are in all-out collapse, and biodiversity throughout the globe is plummeting.
3 separate, though major issues, but none of which threaten civilization.
> We are in the midst of a mass extinction caused almost exclusively by our own actions. Who knows how bad things will get before we bottom out?
In my youth these sorts of people just joined doomsday cults. (The Jehovah's Witnesses are still in operation if anyone is looking. I'm sure that there are others.)
Real threats to civilization exist. The Earth's biosphere has been wiped out several times by large rocks from outer space. It seems likely enough however, that if we can survive the next 1000 years (order of magnitude), we'll have enough technology to create cross-planet ecosystems that are not so threatened from a large rock wiping out any single planet.