To me the funny thing is that he spoke about climate scientists in their ivory towers, yet dreams up genetic engineering plans that have no basis in current reality. It's even unclear he understands realities of DNA-based terrestrial life as we know it, if you look at his writings on seeding the solar system with life. In my day we called such people "bullshit artists."

Someone 100 years ago: "You can stop reading right there. We do not have the ability to breed corn with the ears the size of a man's forearm."

Yet here we are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpKlvxnspXs

We don't have a 100 years anymore.

I think one of the best things the alarmists do is say we only have ten years left. When those predictions are proven wrong again and again eventually people will notice the pattern.

It's 12 years apparently

https://conservativehardliner.com/sites/default/files/styles...

People have been predicting the end of the world based on inference from their faith in a priori positions for a long time...

People don't pay attention long enough. We have 20 solid years of non-stop doomsday predictions, all of which were wrong. Nobody pays any attention to this, they just go right on believing all the new baseless doomsday predictions. Meanwhile actual looming disasters are ignored.

The return on energy investment for oil dropped from 20:1 to 12:1 in 15 years.

What you're arguing for is normalization of deviance.

> ten years

Your words not mine.

Problem is you guys thinks real technology moves as fast as you guys reinvent web frameworks.

It doesn't. Developing real technology and rolling it out takes decades.

It cuts both ways. Problem is you guys think that technology is not going to move at all. It will.

None of us individually do, but I'm pretty sure there will still be 7+ billion people on this planet in year 2120. Irrespective of 2 degree rise in temperature or lack thereof.

I'm not an expert, but I think the sea level rise is going to be quite crappy in another 30 years or so. Sounds plausible that it could lead to people being displaced and pricey waterfront properties and adjacent losing a lot of value.

A hundred years might enough to bring the population back up after civilization collapses. Collapse will put a damper on CO2 release, and the pulse of reforestation of formerly occupied areas would absorb a lot of the CO2 overburden.

Anyway that's the optimistic view.

Your point about genetic engineering capability is true (source: spent two years working in an advanced plant science lab).

The latter one I'm not sure about, it's complicated.

The downvoting of this comment seems a little strange to me.

Edit: Thanks for explaining, I get it now, I shouldn't have mentioned it anyway, I was just interested in the scientific substance of parent comment and wondered why others seemed not to be (I get it now, it wasn't the scientific aspect of the comment which was against HN guidelines).

I imagine it was downvoted because of "You can just stop reading right there", which is an internet trope (-> repetitive -> bad for HN) and also needlessly aggressive. The comment would be just fine without that bit—well, plus the snarky "magical". Snark is deprecated on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Can you add sarcasm next to snark in the guidelines? I’ve never seen sarcasm improve a conversation and it inflames passions unnecessarily. Thanks for considering this, whatever you decide.

How would you define the difference?

Sarcasm is writing the opposite of what you mean. It doesn't work in short form text (similar to Poe's Law) but people do it anyway because it works in their internal monologue that has vocal intonation. Even when it works, it's an obnoxious outburst and intellectually devoid of value.

Snark is general obnoxiousness that adds no intellectual value.

It’s not to signify a difference, but to expand coverage. I wouldn’t want to argue with someone saying “I was sarcastic, but not snarky”.

There are many comments ending with /s to signify sarcasm or even /sarcasm or such. It’s easier to point out a transgression when the user has agreed in his mind or his words that he was in fact being sarcastic.

I think we'd just reply that they're close enough to count as the same thing for HN purposes. "Don't be snarky" is nice and short.

It’s not so much for you as it is for me. I often quote the rules, this would make it easier for me.

Ah I see. If it comes up, you can point to this subthread, or you can always ping us at [email protected]. Thanks for quoting the rules and helping to preserve this place!

It's hero worship. Dyson was an innovator and very much an outside the box thinker. He was also fond of what rationalists call "magical thinking".

"What the secular faith of Dysonism offers is, first, a hypertrophied version of the technological fix, and second, the fantasy that, should the fix fail, we have someplace else to go."

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/12/the-dan...