Those are worthwhile problems to solve, but they seem well on their way to getting solved, though it's not guaranteed. Your civilization is collapsing because you're fighting each other, not because of climate change. Fighting each other is also why it's not guaranteed.

Other problems are also worthwhile to solve. I agree that zero-sum HFT and negative-sum adtech and arms races are not the most prominent ones.

> Your civilization is collapsing because you're fighting each other, not because of climate change

10% of all deaths each year are due to air pollution. There's pretty much no place on earth where unfiltered rainwater is still safe to drink. Ocean acidification is accelerating and killing off the organisms that are both the biggest producers of oxygen and the biggest sequesterers of carbon.

Air pollution is not due to climate change, unless you count CO₂ as air pollution, but that's eargrayish misreasoning — that's not the kind of air pollution that causes 10% of all deaths. The sort of local air pollution we're talking about amounts to factories strip-mining local children's lungs for profit; it's a form of fighting each other.

Rainwater harvesting risks seem to be primarily due to birds pooping on your roof and other fecal contamination, and they can be adequately mitigated by boiling or chemical sterilization: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41545-019-0030-5.

Climate change very likely would collapse your civilization, given enough time, but that isn't what is happening now.

If we spent on those what we spend instead on adtech etc., it really would be guaranteed. Even with fighting invaders. Albeit probably not invaders using nukes.

I think 228 GWp of solar power generation capacity is being installed in 02022, which is about US$50 billion for the solar modules and another US$50 billion for balance of plant, not counting things like battery storage, pumped storage, transmission, and Fischer-Tropsch. Wind energy generation capacity is getting installed at a similar pace, in terms of peak gigawatts per year, but I have the impression that it is significantly cheaper. Tesla's revenues are US$53.8 billion per year, of which about US$0.07 billion is solar panels and therefore getting double counted. I don't know how to measure other automakers' EV production, housing switching to heat pumps, housing adding insulation, and R&D, so I'm just not counting them.

Alphabet's yearly revenue is US$258 billion, some of which is earned from things like Google Play, Google Cloud, and Google Workspace, and some of which has been spent on things like Makani, Verily Life Sciences, DeepMind, and Google Fiber. Meta's revenue is US$118 billion.

https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/internet-services-t... says, "Google earned nearly 81% of its total revenues in 2021 from advertisements," and it's talking about that US$258B number, not some smaller number that excludes other Alphabet companies.

We can maybe estimate the whole adtech spend, generously, at US$400 billion per year [edited: was US$300 billion]: most of Alphabet, all of Meta, plus a handful of smaller fish. (I say this is "generous" because it's counting all the effort that goes into running Google Search, YouTube, Instagram, and Android development as "adtech", because it's monetized through ads, even though most of the people working on those projects are not directly concerned with ads; if you omit that, you might size adtech at only US$50 billion.) And maybe US$200 billion per year goes into the renewables transition. I'm not convinced that doubling that to US$400 billion per year would guarantee a win, particularly when the humans are going around bombing each other's power plants, snarling up power plant construction and energy-efficient housing in red tape, and publishing disinformation that "debunks" global warming.

These are of course very rough estimates, but how would you estimate these numbers?

As far as I know, there aren't any invaders the humans are fighting; they're only fighting other humans, plus the occasional rogue elephant.

Maybe boosting $200B to $500B would provide a win, but ok, maybe not.

Invasion is an activity, not an identity. Those so engaged could stop anytime. Many will.

Nobody is, as far as I know, invading the humans' territory from someplace else, such as Delta Centauri. Humans invading other humans' territory is just a sort of humans fighting among themselves, but not, currently, the sort that is the biggest obstacle to the renewable transition.

Agree. And maybe it will encourage Europe to build out renewables and heat pumps faster.

Apparently it has not had that effect in Romania, yet. But they are by report still happy with their Canadian CANDU reactors.

And fission

Well, there's education - that's net good. And I think entertainment is pretty neutral (even slightly positive) if it doesn't involve gambling or rely on player addiction. Fintech and adtech are where people bright enough to contribute positively to society go to make money instead, kind like the oil industry. All IMHO, YMMV, etc.

Who would they be stealing from?

The body politic.

People program computers to exchange messages furiously, to no external effect besides power consumed. Then they go buy yachts. It's all perfectly legal, of course.

I'm not sure how this 'stealing' is supposed to work.

The stock market is a zero-sum game. Every single penny taken out was a penny put in. Money going in is people's pensions, largely.

As a society, we like to reward people who do things that are useful: feed, house, clothe, warm, transport, educate, protect, medicate, lately amuse people, and get money that may be exchanged for those services, or yachts.

HFT traders provide none of those, nor anything comparable, but get yachts anyway.

>The stock market is a zero-sum game. Every single penny taken out was a penny put in. Money going in is people's pensions, largely.

Ah, so you lack a basic understanding of how the stock market works, but think you're qualified to make very strong statements about it.

Trades batched by second would provide as much liquidity as anybody could use, without the yachts.

You can start a new exchange that does this batching.

Btw, you need to be careful, because people might still race to be the last (or first) to contribute to a batch.

They'd race to be the first, if tied prices within a batch are resolved in favour of the earlier bird. Otherwise, they would race to be the last, so they have the most information available when deciding on their price (and so that they can change their mind until the last nano-second.)

And if ties within that second were resolved randomly, what perverse optimizing would you predict?

Well traders do provide liquidity which saves pensioners enormous sums compared to selling retirement assets at will into illiquid markets

Granted traders can play other games, but their primary benefit to others is significant

I think we have more than just environmental issues in this world...but sure.

Not for long, unless...