Effectively the time when it is useful is "when we don't have cheaper alternatives yet". We still should strive to make renewables and storage the cheaper option though.
To get really pedantic our 20th century understanding of power and energy are exactly backwards colloquially from what is really provided. Power is energy over time. The "power" infastructure was actually largely an energy infastructure with the exception of say hydro electric dams - you can only burn fuel once no matter how clever your ability to extract it. Meanwhile "renewable energy" provides power over its period of existence.
Coal is a different thing. That said, I think that it's not necessary to have very cheap coal and oil energy to have technological advances.
https://www.factcheck.org/2017/04/facts-fracking-chemical-di...
Where I live is a perfect microcosm of this - in the summer, we get ample power from our solar array, but in the winter, when it can be dark and raining for weeks on end, it doesn’t come close - so I’m building out hydro and wind, as when it rains, a stream appears that we can harness, and the wind blows.
The same applies to renewables at grid scale - overdependence on a single source is absolutely risky, which is why most renewable energy efforts involve quite a bit of diversification.
“It can't work if you do it that way" is a pretty bad argument if nobody actually does it that way. Maybe you are accidentally misrepresenting reality in order to support your world view here, but if not please go somewhere else, where facts don't matter.
As others mentioned: every nation that does renewables is looking into robust energy mixes and this (at least in industrial nations) includes catastrophic scenarios as well).
If there was no sun at all, do you think the temperatures would only drop 1-3° as mentioned in the article?
There will plenty of metals on the surface. Use the wood to melt iron. Use iron to make saws. Use saws to cut trees into beams and planks. Use beams and planks to build windmills. Use windmills to generate power and electricity. Etc.
Using coal and oil we went through the part from using mills for power to where we are now in about 250 years. On the one hand, if knowledge is retained, that can be sped up. On the other hand, it will be a lot harder to go through that process without coal and oil.
I would guess the net effect will be that it will take longer, as one of the effects of not having coal and oil will be lower yields in agriculture and, hence, a much smaller world population that also has to make a bigger effort to produce food.
we've even brought a lot of them closer to the surface, refined them, and alloyed them!
Not just that, but there's no way to sustain the level of human development (and population) we currently have without continuing to feed the energy beast. Our daily burn rate on oil/gas/coal is so profoundly high, and growing, that a) nothing can fill the gap; and b) it can't be shut down without condemning further development (esp. in Africa, India and China). Two disconnected factoids to illustrate the level of dependency and consumption we have today: without ammonia synthesis from fossil fuel, worldwide organic fertilizer stock could sustain only about 4bln people - globally; China in-serviced more cement (which requires fossil fuels) in like five years than the US did in the last 100 years.
To reduce carbon output, you need to switch coal use to natural gas where possible. That's the best near term solution right now - isolate coal and oil consumption to the industries that really need them - e.g. transportation, manufacturing - and work on alternative sources of electric generation, i.e. hydro where available, nuclear where not, unless some miracle net-positive and reliable electric generation method becomes available in the meantime.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkj_91IJVBk&list=WL&index=5&...
EDIT: I mean, you guys are downvoting these comments, and I'm sorry to tell you things you don't want to hear, but would prefer that you respond with contrary information rather than downvoting. Happy to alter my views and engage in information sharing.
Replacing fossil fuels with renewables is altogether more practical and economical than doing so with a combination of new nuclear and renewables. This wasn't true even ten years ago, but the costs of renewables have fallen so fast that it's now the case. At the same time, the supposed "Nuclear Renaissance" was revealed to be an illusion. Nuclear is now a dead technology walking. And renewables (and associated technologies like batteries and electrolyzers) continue to show cost declines at a rate nuclear could only dream of.
BTW, summarize the argument in the video. I don't waste my time watching video links.
If I've misunderstood this somewhere, I would love to learn more.
Going forward, even France is having a very hard time building reactors, and is finding renewables are cheaper. This is one reason why France's nuclear industry is in such trouble.
Germany deliberately pushed renewables in order to send them down their experience curves. This was spectacularly successful, but it has come at a high price to their consumers, who are still paying that down. The rest of us have reaped the benefit of far lower renewable costs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Japan#/media/File:Ja...
Japan, one of the most technologically developed place in the world, cannot use renewables when they shut down nuclear. Instead they turn back to coal.
I'm not saying renewables are always inferior - e.g., California would be a perfect place for solar. But in every story I've heard of, when nuclear power is turned off fossil fuels pick up the slack.
First, 2011 is nine years ago. Utility scale solar has declined in cost by a factor of about 5 in the last decade. Decisions made even then do not say anything about how solar would compete today. Wind has also declined considerably in cost in that decade, although not as steeply.
Second, the argument I was making was that renewables beat new nuclear. I wasn't arguing that renewables beat fossil fuels unencumbered by CO2 charges, or even necessarily existing nuclear plants in which the construction and financing costs are sunk. So your observation is irrelevant to the claim I made.
I have to wonder why you guys never notice that the anti-renewables arguments you make are such non sequiturs. Myself, if I found defending my position required I resort to bogus logic, would reevaluate whether what I believed was actually true.
Now that nuclear power is fallen out of favor, they went back to fossil fuels, instead of renewables, because it's cheaper for them.
So apparently the advances in renewables didn't just make renewables cheaper: it also made nuclear more expensive than fossil fuels!
Or, maybe, nuclear is now considered "more expensive" largely thanks to the huge negative PR.
Also, I always assumed the lower renewable costs have come from economies of scale due mainly to China exploding it's energy production (which renewables makes a decent chunk of)
Also underrepresented are his comments on just how unrealistic the assumptions are in the models calling for temperature reduction, specifically about the implications for reducing our dependency on fossil fuels. Reducing energy consumption (whether through bans or price hikes) has a known humanitarian impact in present terms. The idea that you can convince your poor neighbor that he doesn't really need to eat better or have access to more resources is a tricky problem.
pfdietz, I think the case is made quite plainly in his presentation that renewables cannot catch up to much less displace ("100%") fossil fuels anytime in the near future. If you don't see that in the sum of what he presents in the notes, I'd encourage you to watch the source material to hear him say it, sector by sector. It's full of real data from a guy that's been studying energy use in human civilization for many decades.
This link has some of the same info in PDF form: http://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/JPM.2019.pd...
Smil has argued that energy transitions happen only slowly, but I think he's being misled because the current rate of cost decline in renewables is unprecedented in its speed, as is the willingness of increasing numbers of countries to impose CO2 taxes or the equivalent.
And you're right about regulatory pressure being a big motivator.
"There is zero chance of 100% replacement of fossil fuels with renewables. Zero. Without a Thanos solution."
is utter nonsense. I mean, it's as if you're asking me what's wrong with a statement that the Earth is flat.
Developing societies such as Africa, India and China are increasing their consumption for the next few decades at least, radically accelerating the demand for hydrocarbons. India expects a quintupling of coal use in the next 4 decades. Airline miles will quintuple in much shorter period of time (like ten-twenty years). There is no shortage of hydrocarbons to naturally limit these demands. Politically there is no way to restrain newly developing nations. Technologically there is no net-positive energy generation source that competes on a density basis with fossil fuels. Again, the numbers tell the story.
I sincerely appreciate your frustration and hope for something different/better, but you need to come up with contrary data to argue these points. A hope in technical improvements year-over-year is all you've pointed to, and the trendline of capacity and efficiency improvements doesn't back that up. Further cost paid for a solar panel is not a benchmark. Energy intensity of its emplacement to bring it online is what its output needs to be balanced against. Its output, limited by useful life and useful operating hours really hamstrings its total lifecycle cost after the fossil fuel intense journey it takes.
That renewables are still a fairly small percentage of global energy demand is a good thing. It means that these experience effects still have room to kick in. Extrapolating the demonstrated experience curve gives that resistive heat from PV will be cheaper than heat from burning any form of fossil fuel, by the time PV has expanded fully.
The investment required to go 100% renewable will be many trillions of dollars. But the world GDP is $87 trillion, and the world spends about 10% of that on energy each year. There is enormous capacity to invest in energy infrastructure -- which is good, because enormous investment will be needed, regardless of what that infrastructure is.
Certainly they must be competitive in terms of energy density otherwise how can they substantially displace another energy source? Today renewable tech is not energy dense enough.
> Once renewables are sufficiently cheap
..cheap in total lifecycle cost (not end user cost of panel), carbon negative and sufficiently energy dense (transportable at light weight/low volume relative to stored energy)
> it's just building more of them.
For all of this, please remember we're talking global scale for electricity generation (<30% of fossil fuel use today), plus transportation, and manufacturing, not just electric use at my house or even a small country.
Straight cost - you mention taxes and regulation. This implies regulatory disincentives to produce and consume fossil fuels. It's relevant to note that at no time in recorded human history have humans backed off the consumption of an energy source unless a better replacement (more dense) was found. We nearly deforested the US east coast and almost killed off a whale species until coal came along and saved both (true story). Now we couldn't go back if we wanted to because civilization assumes a certain amount of energy input. Reducing it would have huge humanitarian impacts. Stabilizing it would be good, but this unfairly puts a huge burden on developing regions who would likely not tolerate it anyway.
Technology improvement - Look in the graph below at where diesel is relative to a Li-Ion battery. That's the gap it needs to make up at 5% efficiency gain per year (many orders of magnitude). It's beyond optimistic to say that would be covered any time soon barring a miracle (the track record shows that Moore's law doesn't apply to solar cells and batteries).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#/media/File:Ene...
Even if you doubled the rate of efficiency improvements to 10% annualized, it's still an unrealistically wide gap to make up in my lifetime at least.
Fundamentally, for your position to be true you have to assume a miraculous leap forward in technology. And/or you have to assume some global-scale rational decision making (or force) to reduce consumption voluntarily (or involuntarily :/), in contrast with the whole of historic human behavior regarding energy consumption. Seems like there's a lot of hope involved there.
We have plenty of examples of humans forgoing technologies that turned out to have downsides. And it's a near universal truth that dire warnings were given about these restrictions, warnings that turned out to be vastly overblown. Technology does step up to the plate when market incentives are in place.
> Look in the graph below at where diesel is relative to a Li-Ion battery.
Li-ion batteries do not have to become as energy dense as diesel for fossil fuels to be displaced. Some applications don't require that energy density. We are already seeing battery electric buses, for example. In other cases something other than batteries can be used, for example hydrogen. In the worst case, net zero CO2 diesel can be made synthetically, using energy from renewables (and carbon from either CO2 capture or biomass; use of biomass would be limited to these edge cases.)
We are already at the point technically where a great deal of fossil fuel for transportation would be displaced if transport paid the true cost of CO2 emission.
> Fundamentally, for your position to be true you have to assume a miraculous leap forward in technology.
No, the roadblock is not technology, it's proper carbon pricing. That is the biggest obstacle.
I didn't say technologies, I said energy sources.
> batteries do not have to become as energy dense as diesel
We need a storage mechanism that allows the energy gained from renewable sources to power things without interruption.
Two examples illustrate the problem today - for renewables to power a cargo ship the battery load-out required to move that loaded container ship would materially reduce its cargo capacity because it's wasting so much space and mass on literally tons of batteries. Compare the capacity, speed, and installed power of MV Yara Birkeland (electric container ship) to the OOCL Hong Kong (diesel powered cargo ship) for an idea. Another example is Tokyo suffering a predictable 3-day cyclone every year, where 27 million people need 22 gigawatts of electricity. Imagine the battery array needed for that (with its inherent cost, maintenance, limited lifespan and acres of space in a space-constrained land). So these are two easy examples of why storage density needs to increase by orders of magnitude to meet the bar you set of 100% replacement.
It won't be Li-Ion, it has to be something else, but that "something else" doesn't exist yet and the track record of an annualized 5% efficiency improvement for storage tech (which is generous but imagine even doubling it to 10%) per year won't catch up in our lifetimes. The math speaks for itself.
> roadblock is not technology, it's proper carbon pricing
If it were just pricing, it presumes that I have equivalent systems to implement and I just need to pay a premium for one vs the other. But that's not the case as illustrated in the examples above (and there are many, many more - airplanes, continuous smelting) where the existing energy storage tech doesn't work. So technology is an enormous roadblock.
As to carbon pricing - carbon pricing regimes require world-wide cooperation. IF you can get that, it effectively means limiting fossil fuel usage, right? Otherwise why are we doing it?
So limiting fossil fuel usage in a situation where there is no suitable replacement as described above, ultimately means you need to tell some guy in India that he can't have an air conditioner and some family in Africa that their agriculture development programs need to take a hit for lack of synthesized ammonia. This is a very unequal proposition. Alternatively, you can preserve that growth rate in the developing world and tell people in the developed world that they need to rewind their lifestyles in all ways (housing, vehicle mass, etc) to the early 1960's, which is when the US last had a consumption rate at the level needed to impact global warming. This is probably the preferable solution, but how tenable do you think either of these propositions really are?
There are undeniable humanitarian costs - not just monetary costs - to reducing fossil fuel use today when there are no (at scale) suitable replacements.
There have only been a handful of energy sources, so this argument is lame. I'll also note that it's an example of "nothing can happen for the first time".
> It won't be Li-Ion, it has to be something else, but that "something else" doesn't exist yet
Hydrogen. Ammonia. Synthetic hydrocarbons (which I explicitly listed). These are demonstrated technologies.
It's a common canard that anti-renewable polemics make to represent batteries as the only storage option. And you've continued to make this argument even after I listed alternatives earlier.
When you make an argument that no solution is possible, it puts the responsibility ON YOU to rule out not just batteries, but every conceivable solution and combination of solutions. You can't just adopt a lazy attitude of lousy engineering to make your case.
> As to carbon pricing - carbon pricing regimes require world-wide cooperation. IF you can get that, it effectively means limiting fossil fuel usage, right? Otherwise why are we doing it?
It will likely involve carbon tariffs. If some country refuses to control CO2 emission, trade with that country will be blocked. This will coerce the holdouts.
Your attitude there also smacks of fatal defeatism. What is your alternative, burning fossil fuels until we have a replay of the end-Triassic greenhouse mass extinction?
A matter of fact isn't an argument, it just is. It's usefulness here is that IF your solution depends on humans doing something for the first time ever in not just recorded history but also in the entire archeological record, it's a big assumption to be weaving into a proposal and weakens (but granted does not make impossible) the idea that you may be on the right track in assuming it will happen now. It's like the famous "How to draw an owl" meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-to-draw-an-owl
Are miracles possible? Sure. Should you bet on it in your planning? No.
> Hydrogen, ammonia
Both of these require fossil fuels to synthesize in quantities to meet today's needs, let alone new at-scale quantities. Hydrogen certainly may be better than burning coal or even natural gas, but it still would require fossil fuels. The amount of organically sourced ammonia we have on the planet _in total_ is only sufficient to support crops for ~4 bln people globally. There is no solution right now to synthesize enough ammonia at scale without hydrocarbons.
> [embargoes] will coerce the holdouts
We'll not get a chance to test this, but as a thought exercise let's consider how well embargoes work today. Then consider who the embargoes will be placed on from a justice perspective or from an effectiveness perspective. You are either advocating a form of colonialism in the developing world or telling your French neighbor to pay way more for heating, cooking, driving, etc. Both these things have taken place in isolation, and both had bad outcomes. Scaling it up doesn't make a good outcome any more likely.
> What's your alternative?
Rational thinking isn't defeatism - it's application _is_ the solution.
I would gently ask - very gently and politely as I would a friend - that you to re-read your initial response to my statement. You said it was "utter nonsense" and equated it to saying the earth was flat. I'm sure you can appreciate now with more data how the critique is actually the reverse. Your response to my points assumes a miraculous technological development at an indeterminant future date whose likelihood is not supported by existing efficiency improvement data. It disregards the voraciousness with which the planet is consuming fossil fuels today, the future burden forecasted by developing economies, and the insufficiency of current technologies to scale.
I empathize with your sense of hope and am similarly shocked at the risk we face as a species, but people typically do two things in the face of this shock that are equally irrational: deny global warming or believe the solution for energy transition is easy.
Bill Gates said in a talk at Stanford a few months ago that the "easy" people are a bigger barrier to decarb progress than the deniers. I don't know if I would agree in the ranking (or care), but agree that neither are helpful. The problem is enormously difficult (as befitting a planetary emergency). My view of solutions is informed the same way as my assessment of current energy use is. Seek knowledge, be rational, be very skeptical, watch out for the hucksters, support what's left over.
Proposed new offshore wind farms cost £40/MWh, operational from 2023/2024
Nuclear was the answer 15 years ago. It's not now.
Battery storage is possibly going to fit in there, but it doesn't do it yet.
Tidal, ground source, gravity/momentum/compression/latent-heat storage solutions, some of these might do.
I think we need at least one more cycle of Nuclear power plants.
Perhaps then we'll have workable fission.
Sods law will say if you don't invest in nuclear, you'll be using a lot more CCGT because storage or large-geography interconnects won't be there
But if you do invest, you'll end up being stuck with something costing far more than commodity renewables+storage
We have "workable fission" now, it's just very expensive. Workable fusion is always a generation away.
It does feel like Tokamak will never arrive. An acquaintance did their doctorate last year on modelling some aspect of the containment; they didn't seem hopeful.
If you go to https://model.energy/ and optimize such systems in various places, using real weather data, you find nuclear (called "Dispatchable 2" in the advanced options) get optimized to 0%. It's just too expensive. That site uses plausible cost numbers, except electrolysers are already cheaper than their target cost for 2030.
Nuclear requires a lot of dereg and testing that will be decades out if we start today. This assumes the barriers of popular rejection can be overcome. China might pull it off, but I don't see the US radiating enthusiasm for it. But yeah, since few places on earth can take advantage of hydro, I don't see any long-term alternative to nuclear.
The key parameters in a nuclear build are:
1) the construction time (impacted by regulatory regimes)
2) the cost of capital (interest rate of tying up money)
3) an uncertainty factor about getting shut down (impacted by regulatory regimes)
In China, 1&2 are 3-4 years and 2% respectively. In the US they are 8-9 years, 15% and maybe 50% chance you'll be shut down before you can finish. [0]
The nuclear plant has a strike price twice as high as the offshore wind.
Not usually a fan of us vs them mentality, but your use of "we" here feels bad. Surely, it's all of us that use these resources, nobody on HN is self sufficient (please be the exception). But at the same time, most of us aren't getting much of the "cocaine" here, at least relatively.
It would almost be reasonable to say "They are effectively draining our planetary rainy day fund and spending it on cocaine".. whoever they are. The ones with cocaine mustaches presumably.
EDIT: Someone paid a lot of money to make this not an "our" choice but instead a "their" choice. If you feel like this is something you have any real control over, I urge you to change things.
If the average citizen of the U.S is scarface what is a koch brother then? A monster made up of a thousand scarfaces all shouting say hello to my little friend in unison?
If the average citizen of the U.S is scarface what about someone who works at Greenpeace, doesn't have a car and lives frugally? Probably scarface in comparison to the average untouchable in India but I don't know enough to make that comparison.
Warren Buffet has roughly 100,000X the wealth of the average american (~700k), but Warren buffet does not produce 10^5 as much co2 or consume 10^5 as much iron.
Seph-reed posted: >Not usually a fan of us vs them mentality, but your use of "we" here feels bad. Surely, it's all of us that use these resources, nobody on HN is self sufficient (please be the exception). But at the same time, most of us aren't getting much of the "cocaine" here, at least relatively.
This begs the question of what the threshold is for when it stops being a collective "us" problem, and becomes a "them" problem because of "their" disproportionate contribution to the problem. This [1] suggests that the richest 20% of americans account for 30% of US carbon emissions, or about 1.5x the average. If the bottom 80% are still emitting 70% of the emissions, than I would say it is still a collective "us" problem. If you somehow reduced the emissions from the top 20% richest americans to 0, the average american would still emit 300% more than the global average.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041201...
The fact is though we are all in the developed world swimming in material wealth and comfort unimaginable to most humans from even a few generations ago. Only an incredible abundance of cheap energy and raw materials make this possible.
Yes the very wealthy have yachts and helicopters, but if you have a reasonably up to date smartphone and laptop, a can of Coke or a Starbucks, maybe a PlayStation and a microwave oven, etc, there isn’t really much a billionaire can spend that will get them anything significantly better. The main advantage of wealth is getting other people to do things for you, but in terms of material life were in an incredibly democratic and egalitarian era.
The amount of hoarding, infighting, and extortion has been disgusting. We're advancing as slow as species seemingly could short of completely falling apart and destroying their Earth, and even that's in question right now.
If we did things the way I'm speaking of, I guarantee you we'd have all of these things and more. Going slow and doing things right is worth it. Having value for creativity, community and labor is worth it. Not justifying oppressive decisions we couldn't have changed on the basis that we got some cheap consumer crap from it... it's worth it to me at least.
This line of thought is unpopular now, but if history is any indicator, the sentience of the future will look back on these logs and question how the fuck you could read these words and not fucking get it. We would be more advanced if we didn't do these things. Not the other way around.
I suppose my relativity isn't from zero, but instead a sense of neutral pace. If I'm on a trek towards better lands, I don't benefit from a broken leg, but I still make progress.
To me, the concept that we're perpetually slowed down by the selfish behavior of those who generally do nothing more than seek power for themselves means we don't benefit.
I don't think there's anything that could stop humanity from moving forwards, so to say we benefit from impatient selfish jerk offs who cut the line, to build walls, and then extort resources from everyone trying to move forwards is... well, they paid a lot of money to put a nicely spinned narrative out on that.
How thankful we all should be to have been sold advancement. :)
You're assuming consumption and community are mutually exclusive. They are not. Plenty of examples to be found to show they are not dependent (10, 01, 11, 00).
You ask why any of this is necessary to get these goods. I assume by "this" you mean the fossil fuel industry. It is necessary because as a high density energy source it has no competitive alternative. It's literally the best fuel source mankind has found in the strict terms of transportability and output relative to mass. Civilization's capabilities have grown in parallel with the improvement of its energy sources. Decreasing available energy means decreasing (or ceasing) growth/development. Do you want to be the one to tell China, India and Africa that they can't develop further?
Things we imagine are still constrained by physical reality. Technological progress for the next 100 years will still have unbreakable dependencies on high density energy. Unless a miracle happens.
Why seek the good feelings by relying on a community that you have no control over than pick your favorite things to consume? Why have people that lived within the community model for thousands of years defected the first chance they could?
Meanwhile, have you tried both ways? My personal experience suggests that acting benevolently to others is much less stressful, makes one much happier, and that leads to better physical health even. Compared with being a bitter curmudgeon on the other extreme, you will likely be happier and live longer. It's a much better way to release the chemicals.
Pick amy product on a supermarket shelf or on Amazon, and you wil find that raw materials account for maybe 20% of its final price tops. They are called commodities for a reason, and its production of those raw materials that does the lions share of pollution. You could replace all manufacturing with a combonation of nuclear power and reneables, and youd hardly change the price of the final product.
So that seems to imply to me that ordinary people (in the rich countries) shouldn't be underestimated from an environmental perspective, and because our morality is pro-consumer it reinforces waste. I don't think that's brainwashing by the rich, I think that's just how people are, in Western society at least.
A more equal society would probably have a greater chance of enacting Pigouvian taxes anyway because political power and economic power would be less intertwined.
Eyjafjallajökull was only VEI-4.
Now, one can argue about how Eyjafjallajökull caused ashfall in most of Europe, while Pinatubo is in the Philippines, but given the extent of ashfall from Pinatubo ..
EDIT (forgot link): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_eruption_of_Mount_Pinatub...
I disagree with this. Leaving the Earth doesn't remove random acts of doom from happening, and in fact, they are more lethal in unfamiliar and hostile environments.
If we do not figure out how to handle such black swan events on our home planet, we have no chance of handling them in space or on other planets.
Supervolcanos, nuclear war and meteor impacts are probably the most likely of all and could be survived by offworld colonies. And while these could still leave a lot of humans on Earth, the biggest issue is that there is a big possibility for them to evolve into full blown ice ages that could potentially last for millennia which would pretty much guarantee extinction since the initial phase would most likely also destroy a large portion of infrastructure and human knowledge.
> And supernovas and rogue AIs can wipe out both.
I'm not a scientist but I think that supernovas and solar flares could maybe be detected with enough advance to possibly make sophisticated enough space colonies time their orbital movement to get in cover behind large bodies and any non-earth planetary colonies would already have to be mostly prepared for life under radiation shielding and zero atmosphere so the damage would probably be less than for everything on Earth's surface.
Rogue AIs, assuming we're the ones building them, I feel are the least of our problems although I may be wrong of course. Viruses are also a possibility but could also be largely mitigated with multiple pockets of humanity spread by enough distance.
> But in terms of of overcoming catastrophies you're better of donating to groups like Allfed or AI safety or arms control groups.
I don't agree since it shouldn't be an either-or situation. We should strive to keep our marble safe and blue for as long as possible but preemptively prepare for any of these well known existential risks.
Looking for an advance blast wave of neutrinos gives us about 3 hours of lead time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperNova_Early_Warning_System
If I understand correctly, SARS-CoV-2 hit some "sweet spot" being rather sneaky and rather dangerous at the same time, but is nowhere near top sneakiness across all viruses.
We're gonna want a multi-week airlock to be allowed into the Moon & Mars habitats.
The technology developed to live on the moon may allow it to be rapidly deployed on Earth, saving a large number of people, but if that technology doesn't exist then you're stuck
Yelowstone blows up unexpectedly - orbital rescue forces do a quick drop, help rescue survivors in the immediate area. Later on food supplies from orbital/Lunar farms help cover food shortages and teraforming techniques can be used to fixup the biosphere.
Granted, this doesn't cover bigger black swan events like gamma ray bursts, where the entire solar system is screwed, but it'll at least help with Earthside apocalypse.
The fact that we couldn't handle it is indeed incriminating against our abilities as a species, but as they say, perfect is the enemy of good.
Even if all that happened, underground bases would be protected, as would above-ground or in-space habitats that happened to be protected either by the mass of the body they're on by virtue of 'facing away' from the GRB; or by virtue of being behind another body (e.g. Jupiter, the sun, some body they are orbitting) relative to the GRB. With space habitats, they may also be protected by virtue of already needing some level of protection against cosmic radiation; but that's highly speculative.
A GRB also wouldn't destroy the Earth. It would do a lot of damage to its ecosystems, but the Earth would be relatively safe again not terribly long after the event, even without human intervention. If we had the technology to colonize space, we could definitely recolonize the Earth, even in a worst case scenario where the entire ecosystem collapses.
It would probably also require a change of culture, away from treating information as property and/or trade secrets in favour of open-hardware with shared designs. Designs would be shared and manufacturing decentralised, to improve robustness.
Putting people on Mars, and then other solar systems: Backups
A massive global famine could kill a billion humans or more. But if the 1 in 10 of us (likely the poorest, most vulnerable people) died, would civilization end? I don't think so.
However, if that leads to all out nuclear war, then we have two enormous correlated shocks to the system. Maybe even that wouldn't be enough, but some number of such shocks could push us over the brink.
Just like an economic meltdown or a plane crash, it's never one thing that goes wrong, it's a sequence of failures.
In EU/EEA there are are bank regulations specifying that banks may operate on a common market under supervision of regulating body where the bank is registered. As Landsbanki UK was branch office and not subsidiary company, it falled under Iceland regulation.
These regulations also require that there is a deposit guarantee scheme for protection of depositors up to 100k EUR, based on country where bank is registered.
So when Landsbanki crashed, all its depositors were entitled to deposit guarantee from Iceland deposit guarantee scheme. But this system cannot handle crash of such size. After that, Iceland government decided to reimburse icelandic depositors, but not offshore depositors (although both have the same claims after icelanding deposit guarantee system, the local ones have political power).
To avoid political windfall, UK (and AFAIK also Dutch) government decides to reimburse their local depositors and get reparation from Iceland based on Iceland government's failure of setup proper deposit guarantee scheme / sufficient regulation, which was condition for allowing its banks access to UK/EU banking market.
a. Icelandic government failed in allowing a bank registered in the country to venture in a scheme that scales to such high amounts, given they need to guarantee their failure.
b. The EU/EEA failed in not taking in account the size of the host country economy.
c. The UK failed in not challenging this private venture at the EU/EEA level while it was happening. As they should have known Iceland was not equipped to dealing with a potential failure. The UK should have warned it's citizens as well.
d. The EU/EEA fail in not holding the people responsible for the damage caused by owners of private banks. Both Iceland and the UK share this failure since they can seek reparations on a national level.
Note that none of these failures are the fault of the UK nor the Icelandic taxpayers. Focusing the following court cases on those was a mistake. Sheltering the obvious villain of this disaster was another mistake. Allowing that villain to carry on and not pay any damage is ludicrous.
I was always told if something is too good to be true, it usually is.
Not only did lots of regular people put their money in this bank, a lot of public authorities did too, and the desposit protection doesn't really help Kent council (which lost £50m), or TFL (£40m), or whatever.
UK governments gambled, with big promises, and lost.
My understanding is that the current leading theory is a drastic shift in outflow of Lake Agassiz (an expanded version of Lake Manitoba in Canada).
[0] https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/108/1/40/F1.large.jpg
[1] https://capeia-usercontent.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2019/07/...
Besides eruptions, many other scarier events can cause huge shifts on the planet's thermal equilibrium including our current state of global warming or many other unknown events (like whatever happened to cause the Younger Dryas [1] "only" ~13k years ago which is theorized to have been either a mega eruption, impact event or stellar supernova).
It's pretty scary and definitely not something that we're at all prepared even with all our technology so we're basically in a permanent state of risk of complete reset which is guaranteed to happen eventually. Sadly it's not something most of us spend too much time thinking or preparing for. I guess this is largely because we live very short lives and that make these kind of events appear much "larger than life" so they go mostly ignored except for some underfunded science departments or the occasional billionaire. To me this is the main reason that going multiplanetary or space habitat based is basically the only way to escape this inevitable doom even though that is also a huge barrier to overcome on so many levels.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_eruptions_of_Eyjafjallaj%...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas