"Let's just stop doing anything regarding climate change because in 50 years we'll have the tech to solve it, we don't know it yet because we can't imagine it."
At some point, as a specie, we certainly can't afford to gamble our survival and culture like that.
If I launch a rocket now, it’s will take 50 years to get to Pluto. If I wait 10 years, we’ll have faster rockets, so it will actually get there sooner. The progress of my original rocket cannot be improved.
For global warming, progress we make now can be built on and improved over time. This is not the case with a rocket that’s already launched.
That's because my argument is not about rockets or climate change but about underlying assumptions.
> If I launch a rocket now, it’s will take 50 years to get to Pluto. If I wait 10 years, we’ll have faster rockets, so it will actually get there sooner. The progress of my original rocket cannot be improved.
Faster, maybe. Sooner ? Where is the proof ?
And what if you can build a faster rocket only because you learned from mistakes from the slower first rocket ? If you never launch and experiment with that one in real conditions then you may very well never have a faster rocket.
Let's put it another way:
- before, we didn't know how much was feasible and we doubted we could do better (LEO, moon landing, etc.).
- Now we know we could and did.
- So we think in the future we'll be able to do things we can't do now.
- But what if we are wrong again (like we were before) and that very belief is wrong.
- You can still think/believe things like “Assuming constant progress in technology we might be able to get there faster by waiting decades than by leaving now. Even the absolute limit of light speed, while impossible to imagine today, might turn out to be less of on obstacle in some future understanding of physics.” but that belief may very well be our mistake, just like people 100 years ago didn't believe we could land on the moon.
Now we just believe anything is possible.
Mind-blowing universe, amazing planet, very little time sadly.
The main reason that farmers outcompete hunter-gatherers is that agriculture allows building larger societies than hunter-gathering can, and this extra population gives a decisive advantage in being able to prosecute wars for as long as is necessary to exterminate hunter-gatherers.
Thinking about this a bit deeper, this is only true if you have a small population with relatively plentiful resources. Hunter gatherers quickly bump into the limits of their environment if their population increases. The idealization of their lifestyle is misguided because it would necessitate drastic reduction of population levels to reach that balance. The goal should be to increase the abundance of resources in our modern environment so that we reach the same ratio of resources to population, which hopefully would mean a consequent reduction in the amount of effort we have to expend to obtain those resources.