Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
by aianus on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @12:18PM
(#21336127)
What is the point of the human race surviving if it turns into some 1984-like dystopia with cameras in my house making sure I pledge allegiance to Emperor Xi's portrait every morning or my social credit score plummets?
Give me the climate (or nuclear) apocalypse, instead, please.
Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
by ncmncm on Friday October 25, 2019 @01:00AM
(#21352036)
Humanity never had a point. It just is. Humans will survive everything imaginable, in much reduced numbers.
There were once 100M people in the Amazon basin, wiped out by plagues brought by Europeans 5 centuries ago. A few survived. The trees growing in unchecked in the depopulated Americas reduced CO2 enough to cause a mini ice age.
That won't be enough to bring down temperatures in the next collapse because the CFCs and HFCs won't go away. But at least the oceans will get less acid.
I’m not intending to downplay the impact on minorities within China, or their growing global influence. It’s just that what China is doing is fundamentally the same category of human and national behavior we have seen for 100 years. Relatively speaking, it is less destructive than what came before. We must address it but the tools to do so are available and obvious.
It pales before the threat of climate change because that is a new category of threat to global society.
Why? Because water, food, and real property are fundamental to the health and economies of all nations, and climate change will create massive unfunded changes to those. It’s one thing to have an aggressive nation on the world stage a la China. It’s quite another if hundreds of millions of people need to migrate and have no money to do so. The latter is well within the realm of possibility given what we know about climate change.