Re:First Ever Image of a Multi-Planet System Around a Sun-Li...
by bosswipe on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @06:59PM
(#23922484)
Separate from the details of the consequences of global warming itself, more generally my hypothesis is that in order for a civilization to become aware that it is consuming too many natural resources requires a level of advanced development that can only be achieved by consuming too many resources. In other words, it might be more likely than not that when a planet produces a civilization that enters an industrial revolution it ends up burning through its natural resources in an unsustainable way and ends up collapsing. The easy access to resource surpluses that ignites the industrial revolution is also what causes them to overshoot their planet's capacity.
For us it's not just CO2 pollution that is a problem, there are many other resources that we are over-utilizing in an unsustainable way. And it seems that we are completely incapable of coordinating as a planet when the sacrifices are large. The hope of the techno-optimists is that technology will save us. It's a high-stakes bet that technology will figure it out before it's too late. Maybe the Great Filter is that when this bet is made across the universe the odds are generally in favor of losing.
My point is that we won't go extinct, we'll bounce back and get another try.
>especially if we've extracted all the easy to extract natural resources making
Would you rather hollow out a mountain to mine minerals or dredge through what used to be a major city? We've concentrated all sorts of useful things on earth's surface. If anything the next civilization will have it easy.
>harder for our ancestors to rev back up, or if large parts of the planet become uninhabitable.
Large parts of the planet were more or less uninhabitable. The few people who lived in the arctic and the deserts mostly just followed food/water sources. They contributed little to civilization's progress (mostly in the field of astronomy because desert nights and polar winters give you plenty of time to look at the starts) because they didn't have the spare resources to engage in those pursuits because they were too busy surviving. Progress has always come from the places that are easy to live in and therefore have resource surpluses.