“Climate drift” sounds like the name of an AI bot, made specifically to create a narrative that underplays the seriousness and gravity of the extremely dangerous and deadly feedback loops that are appearing now in the global climate system.
Drift carry the idea that we cannot change it back.
I don't think it underplay anything. I understand that we must act. But with this name your arguments won't be heard.
The climate denialists of today are those believing that if it gets too much, we will have to do some efforts for a decade and boom, back to 1970 climate. I want to engage that belief, hence 'climate drift'
The implication of “great extinction” is that we’re seeing a mass extinction event which we aren’t. At least not on the level of the major ones usually discussed.
I am considering this exact point in a business decision.
It comes down to the use of the token. If the token is being used to capitalise the business activity then it is better to be a mature and compliant financial instrument, rather than a roll your own token.
I can think of endless scenarios of how this plays out, and that is not one of them.
Corporations rule us today and will only continue to grow larger and more powerful. There's not a thing any individual or even a group of people can do about it because the vast majority of people either don't care or embrace it with open arms. See the futile fight for privacy some of us still care about as an example.
We, the technologists, are complicit or directly benefit financially from this change. Governments are slowly catching up, pretending to control the monster they've let loose on their citizens, but are really in symbiosis with corporations, so nothing will change there.
This Metaverse thing is not something to laugh about or dismiss. It will happen one way or the other. And all of it makes me want to pick up gardening and go live in a mountain shed away from it all.
We've all read the sci-fi books or seen the movies to know how this plays out, yet are actively working towards that future. I have no words to describe it but mass insanity.
I'm trying really hard to think about the positive aspects of this, but I'm coming up short. Will the future be more convenient? Sure. Will this help some people live out a better life in the real world? Probably. But the vast majority will be mindlessly plugged into this thing, isolated from meatspace, at the direct benefit of the corporations that produced the experience.
There won't be a big war between man and machine. The Matrix will be built by humans, machines will help us do it, and we'll all want a taste of that juicy steak we saw in that ad.
> There's not a thing any individual or even a group of people can do about it because the vast majority of people either don't care or embrace it with open arms.
I don't think history supports this prediction. We've been through several cycles of of this over the past few hundred years already -- the rise of powerful corporatocracy, followed by the people ultimately getting sick of that and knocking corporate power back.
I see no reason to expect that pattern won't continue to repeat as we move into the future.
Yes, the ideas are not new. but they are not bullshit. as someone who also has kids that spend money on virtual goods like it’s going out of fashion, i can attest that the impact on my bank account is very real.
The NFT craze (and cryptocurrencies in general) is largely fuelled by an inflationary global currency ($) and dare i say it, a lot of money laundering too. But that does not make the sector illegitimate.
in fact some of the platforms that have risen out of web3 already (ssb/patchwork) for example are indeed just better versions of dystopian counterculture that have gone before.
i’d say the author here is just keen to shout at the TV as the big corporate news breaks.
Billionaires will be the ones who may end up benefiting least from a true move to a dystopian, decentralised internet as Web3 is hinting at.
Physics is a rule set that never changes, hence engineering standards can be built around it.
Qualitative systems like programming languages have an immeasurable amount of variation and complexity and are extremely difficult to monitor and enforce standards around.
What’s required is a better stack that is less error prone. If programmers can’t make the mistakes in the first place, they won’t happen.
The basic rules of logic which CPUs use and much easier than physics, and have been fixed liner (see quantum mechanics and relativity). I am ignoring CPU bugs here, but then again I wouldn't expect a law to blame programmers for those, same way a builder wouldn't be blamed for defect concrete they couldn't have known about.
Also, new building materials are created all the time, tested, then allowed if they meet fixed safety standards.
I was watching the ISS live feed going over North West Africa and up to Italy. The landscape was red and arid and it struck me just how ‘Mars like’ it looked.
It got me thinking that Earth could be facing the same destiny many aeons from now. It’s hard to imagine with the amount of H2O on the planet right now, but if it can happen to Mars (the atmosphere is stripped away), it could happen here I suppose.
But I wonder if a Venus situation is more likely first, because of our proximity to the Sun?
This discovery certainly makes me feel that lifecycle of planets is an awesome thing.
It's not even a question: the Earth is absolutely facing the same fate. The Sun is getting hotter and in ~1 billion years the Earth will be uninhabitable by us in its current form.
Eventually (~4-5B years) the Sun will expand while in its dying stages and probably swallow the Earth.
What can we do? That's actually quite "easy". I mean "easy" in the essence that no weird new physics is required, it's just an engineering problem, albeit a massive one. Then again, we have a lot of time. So there are essentially three things we can do:
1. Reduce the amount of light and heat hitting the Earth. Example: large arrays of solar power collectors at the L1 Lagrange point. If the Sun is 10% hotter in 1B years and you reduce the light hitting the Earth by ~10% it about evens out. The captured energy can be put to use and I expect it wouldn't even be noticeable from Earth. The Sun will just be slightly dimmer;
2. You can move the Earth. Many people are familiar with gravity assists for spacecraft. Obviously gravity affects both bodies but the spacecraft is so low-mass it has no discernable effect on the larger body. Imagine taking large rocks and flying them past the Earth. The net interaction can be that the Earth moves slightly faster. Do this over a long enough time frame and you can move the Earth's orbit outwards.
3. The Sun itself can be manipulated to remove mass from it, particularly Helium.
Indeed, to the point that talking about it in terms of what "we" could do about it in ordinary engineering terms becomes pointless.
A billion years ago, the first multicellular plants were beginning to move onto land; animals were still water-bound single cells who would have to wait another couple hundred million years to discover sex. Whatever life still exists on Earth a billion years from now will presumably be as far removed from us as we are from those ancient ancestors.
Very interesting - couldn't we also just evolve to live with a hotter sun in a billion years or will it affect other systems so much that life for humanoids will be more difficult?
A lot of problems ultimately turn into energy problems.
Lack of recycling comes down to it mostly being uneconomic to do so. There can be a labor component to this too but the energy cost matters. A lot of labor can be automated, which then also becomes an energy problem.
It's highly likely that in 1B years, we'll have access to energy many orders of magnitude higher than we do now and it'll probably be much cheaper. My personal prediction is the space-based solar power collection is likely to be dominant. The big unknown is fusion. Personally I'm not yet convinced fusion will ever be economical, but that's a whole other topic.
We live in hot, dry climates now (eg the Middle East). What makes that possible is simply energy for food and water production, climate control and so on.
It'll likely be worse for other life on Earth but that too is an energy problem. Also, we have no real idea of what life will look like in 1B years since we'll likely have gone through several mass extinction events between now and then.
And of course, in the last 1B years we've largely gone from single-celled and early multi-cellular organisms to what we have now.
So this opinion is a fairly popular one but I'm not sure there's any factual basis for it.
The idea is simple: there's little evolutionary pressure to adapt because technology and society can deal with issues that once would've been fatal.
There are a bunch of issues that still affect survivability though: recklessness, propensity for violence, inability to survive in modern society, addiction issues, mental health issues, etc. We can expect all of these to improve but go away entirely? That's less certain.
Even if you ignore mortality issues, the other side of natural selection is how many offspring you have and how many of them survive to have their own offspring. If a group with trait A has an average of 2 children each but trait B have an average of 3, it's not too many generations before B becomes dominant.
Evolution is also relatively slow and not smooth. We only identified DNA ~50 years ago and mapped the human genome in the last 10-15. It's a bit early to refute observational evidence.
Remember too that certain traits that were once advantageous can become a disadvantage or they only become a disadvantage in certain circumstances. Take the modern abundance of food. Some people have genes that predispose them to storing excess, others less so. 1000 years ago, that was probably an advantage. Now? Less so, both in terms of health effects related to, say, obesity, but also in terms of finding a mate and having offspring given changing societal standards for beauty (not universal of course).
But in such a society we'll figure out how to adapt ourselves using DNA modification, doing evolution's job for it. We're getting pretty close already and a billion years is more than enough.
But we'll have other challenges first like finite resources and our self-destructive tendencies. We'll have made bigger fish to fry before we can even make it a billion years
The combination of two processes -- tectonic activity and the increased luminosity of the sun -- will mean that surface water no longer exists at that time.
> in ~1 billion years the Earth will be uninhabitable by us in its current form
In ~1 billion years, "we" won't be inhabiting anything in our current form. If humanity/primates haven't gone extinct by then, they will have evolved completely beyond our current form.
About North Africa: archeological findings seems to imply that what is now the Sahara desert was much more lush and wet relatively recently. We have human made cave paintings of river animals in areas which are very dry nowadays. It is thought that the area dried out relatively suddenly about 5k years ago. That is basically yesterday as far as geological timescales go.
When I learned about this I got kinda scarred. If the climate of an area can change this drastically all of a sudden that means to me that the climate system is a lot less stable than I previously have thougt.
Something similar happened on a smaller scale in North America with Lake Lahontan[0], which covered much of Nevada after the last ice age. If you walk the old shoreline up on the mountainsides, it is not uncommon to find evidence of the neolithic people that lived on its shores before it disappeared.
The much larger mass, gravity, and magnetic field of Earth prevents large scale atmospheric losses. Whether we have the resources to ignite another Venus remains to be seen.
Remains to be seen or is already known to be impossible? All the carbon in fossil fuels originally came from the atmospheric CO2, didn't it? And it was never as hot as Venus. What are the steps we would need to take to make it as hot as Venus in any kind of physically possible scenario?
"The contribution of each gas to the greenhouse effect is determined by the characteristics of that gas, its abundance, and any indirect effects it may cause. For example, the direct radiative effect of a mass of methane is about 84 times stronger than the same mass of carbon dioxide over a 20-year time frame[27] but it is present in much smaller concentrations so that its total direct radiative effect has so far been smaller, in part due to its shorter atmospheric lifetime in the absence of additional carbon sequestration. On the other hand, in addition to its direct radiative impact, methane has a large, indirect radiative effect because it contributes to ozone formation. Shindell et al. (2005)[28] argues that the contribution to climate change from methane is at least double previous estimates as a result of this effect.[29]"
Didn't mean to imply we could get "as hot as" Venus, which is unlikely due to our distance from the Sun. But hot enough to boil water? Possibly, given a runaway chain reaction. Not sure.
> It’s hard to imagine with the amount of H2O on the planet right now, but if it can happen to Mars (the atmosphere is stripped away), it could happen here I suppose.
Mars' atmosphere isn't protected by a strong magnetic field because the planet isn't geologically active, unlike the Earth. Gasses escape from the Earth into space constantly, but not at a rate that will leave the Earth like Mars before the sun becomes a red giant.
In billions of years, the sun will expand and probably blast away the Earth's atmosphere before possibly engulfing it later.
(the summary there is inaccurate; CO2 will be increasingly absorbed by weathering of rocks as the Earth heats, until photosynthesis fails and oxygen levels collapse.)
I'm no astrophysicist, but I'm under the impression that the effect of the magnetosphere is popularly overstated. Rather, the reason that Earth still has its atmosphere and Mars doesn't is that Earth has the gravity to hold onto it more tightly, and Mars is just too small. Hence why Venus, which also (curiously) has no dynamic magnetosphere, still has an atmosphere: it's 80% the mass of Earth (compare Mars, which is 10% the mass of Earth).
The death of Mars' magnetosphere allowed solar wind plasma to strip away its atmosphere in the past[1]. Mars once had a much denser atmosphere when its dynamo was active, and the stripping of its atmosphere happened when the dynamo died.
And here's we are at a paradox, where one side is attempting to escape imminent danger by traveling outside Earth, and in doing so potentially accelerating its instability.
A true and fair democracy would ensure that all candidates had the same economic means to broadcast their policies. Yes, that means giving unsavoury parties a platform. Yes, that means state sponsored political party advertising and messaging. And yes, it means the regulation of social media.
That’s why it will never happen. That’s why democracy is a flawed system.
Democracy is a product of the last century and is now fragile in the face of technology and capital markets.
As has always happened, money will ultimately decide the next political era. This is not new for humanity.
Although, I’m hopeful that we have faced these challenges before and nearly always come up with better ways.
