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Comment by blondie9x | Hacker News Reader

When I see all these catastrophic events related to the the changes we cause to the climate, I sometimes question the point of living the way most of us do. The values and things we chase, our day-to-day endeavors. None of it matters if we don't drive towards sustenance, because nothing would last, all the pursuits would be forgotten, the light of mankind would fade if sustainability isn't the top priority. There would be no way for humans to become an interplanetary species, for generations to continue through all the ages of the universe. Nothing would matter if we live a life now that destroys the potential life of our successors.

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You shouldn't sometimes question it, you should persistently question and change it. It isn't just possible that we destroy civilization, it's actually quite likely. We know that dominate life forms have exhausted the resources which allowed them to thrive before, leading to their extinction. We can see it in the fossil record. The difference is we are smart enough to see it coming, yet we spend our time worrying about stuff that really won't matter when it comes crashing down.

I wish we could find a way to get an economy that strives at equilibrium rather than mandating growth for prosperity as we do now.

Unfortunate that academics have reasonable solutions (or at least something reasonable to try) to many of the troubles we are encountering but we are unable to hear and internalize them. This poor guy has been singing this song for a long time. http://timjackson.org.uk/ecological-economics/pwg/

I didn't know about Jackson, thanks for the tip :-)

Living systems are in dynamic equilibrium. They bound from one extreme to another. A large adult gives way to a small child and back again. If they reach static equilibriums we call them dead.

The beautify of life is that it is perpetually moving towards new equilibria. We can't really settle it down without killing it. Instead we need to be sure it keeps going through boom and bust.

It's almost poetical, but we're talking here about a species whose activity keeps on growing while the rest of the ecosystem dies. We're in the middle of a human-driven mass extinction, a third of arable land has been destroyed in the past 40 years. The CO2 crisis (warming and ocean acidification) is a cataclysm that unfolds in slow motion before our very eyes.

So I'll phrase it differently. I wish we could manage to turn what is currently a predatory/parasitic situation into a symbiotic one before the earth can't sustain us anymore. There's a dearth of terraformed planets to move to once we're done with this one.

I want my kids to be able to have kids with a conscience cleaner than mine right now.

Humanity is pretty awesome. We're an incredibly tiny, fragile, and short-lived piece of the universe that has become self aware. I believe that comes with a responsibility.

Unfortunately though most individuals are good, _organized_ people produce undesirable outcomes. It's emergent behavior, a structural issue, not user error. CGPgrey explores how this affects governments in rules for rulers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs)

> Unfortunately though most individuals are good, _organized_ people produce undesirable outcomes.

I would say the opposite. Humans, individually, are fundamentally the same as we were 1000 years ago. Our base survival instincts and drives produce behavior that is typically not "good", as you put it, and they haven't changed. But yet our behavior in many areas has advanced (human rights, tolerance, civil society). This is the result of culture, of "organized" people as you put it. Remember, the Prisoners Dilemma is a dilemma precisely because the prisoners aren't allowed to organize.

Almost all of society's ills that are self-inflicted are the aggregate result of individuals making self-serving and cynical decisions. For example, sexism in the workplace would have long disappeared if every man who knew it was wrong took a stand against it every time it occurred. But most such men stay silent, or even play along, because it is better for their career (and their family's financial well-being). Doing the right thing will likely only get them ostracized. It will also have little impact on sexism, they rightly believe, because every other guy will have the same calculus. So instead of everyone speaking out, we have everyone staying silent. A self-fulfilling prophesy. This is a flaw of individuals, not groups. All advances we've made regarding women's rights are entirely the result of organized humanity.

There are studies that show that people are more ethical in groups than as individuals. (Unfortunately I can't find the links to those that I had thought I saved.)

Awesome. I'd be interested in those studies. The argument is that society manages behavior. That's reasonable. Not all organization is bad.

Would you agree that the organizations that run our countries and companies tend to behave rather poorly? I'm curious what you'd think of the linked video above.

Yep. And it's very hard to change without everyone else changing as well. And it's very hard for everyone else to change unless that change is mandated at a government level. And it's very hard for change to happen at a government level unless every country is doing it. And that's VERY hard.

No-one wants to give everything up while everyone else gets to keep living how they want and ruining the environment for you anyway. I wish we could get more worldwide consensus on real change.

It's not hard to change. If everyone changed what they do day to day (stop flying, stop eating beef, stop driving everywhere), we would not be talking about the future in such a bleak way. But everyone thinks they are the exception, it's OK if they do it. That's why governments introduce taxes to discourage bad behaviour, because people are ultimately stupid.

> If everyone changed what they do day to day (stop flying, stop eating beef, stop driving everywhere), we would not be talking about the future in such a bleak way.

And what would replace these things? Would they not create another catastrophic problem in another area?

What is the magic bullet that fixes all the world's problems??

Stop pumping carbon into the sky?

Have you seen a volcano erupt in real-time via satellite? I have and I've tracked the plume for days and sometimes weeks. Sometimes, there are 5 or 6 of these events a day. A very rare day to not have at least one of earth's visible volcanoes erupt.

Now lets talk about all the volcanoes that are underwater... then we can talk about solar weather and more...

Nobody is impressed by your stupid stories of having been a weatherman in the air-army. Annual average volcano emissions are three orders of magnitude smaller (that's 1/1000, for the innumerate in the audience) than human CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion. And you can't fucking _see_ CO2 anyway. It's fucking invisible. Whatever you saw from that volcano was water or dust or ash or whatever, the things that volcanoes spew into the upper atmosphere that counteract the warming effect of their CO2 emissions.

Your tone greatly diminishes the value of your arguments (on which I agree, by the way). Could yo try being less personally aggressive, next time?

No. This is the tone I intend to take with all dimwitted or disingenuous climate change deniers on this site.

Transit that uses renewable energy, or zero fossil fuels. Such as walking & cycling. Obviously one can cut beef out of their diet, or go full vegetarian. Stop flying is a bit trickier for people who need to travel around, but high speed trains that run on electricity are a good consideration.

And a lot of travelling can be replaced with video meetings. (Seriously, what is a good term? I was about to write Skype-meetings, but want a general term (in particularly since Skype predictably sucks more and more since MS bought them).)

Video calls, remote meetings, typically how we call it at work. Use it with clients even in the city

Even cutting down on beef while still eating other meat would be a significant help, I believe. That's achievable though I imagine the beef industry would lobby against any push.

I was thinking about more extreme change than that to be honest, a really noticeable change in quality of life. I already try not to fly or drive too much.

But even with what you list, external factors based on other people still happen, like your work wants you to fly somewhere, or public transport sucks because everyone else is still driving.

I disagree that we feel like the exception when we're acting like everyone else. We feel like the exception when we're trying to be better and others aren't.

I used to think this way. Then I realized how many truly greedy and completely selfish people are living among us, and it's more than half. At that point, I gave up and joined the masses. The only way to fix it is to incentivize technology improvements and create government policy structure to assault climate change from the top down. And that won't get major until the problems become so evident that almost nobody can deny it. The future is bleak and it's hard to see where the good real estate of the future will be.

>>That's why governments introduce taxes to discourage bad behaviour, because people are ultimately stupid.

They aren't stupid, they are selfish. At the end of the day it comes down to what's called Tragedy of the Commons: individuals keep doing things they know are bad for the environment because our economic system prioritizes the exploitation of natural resources (which is a zero-sum game by definition) and if they don't exploit it, someone else will. Therefore, everyone continues to do it. That is why we need top-down (read: government) regulation.

It's hard to change unilaterally. For instance, it's easy to say "stop driving everywhere", but the majority of locales do not cater well to non-drivers. It's easy to say "stop flying", but in practice that's almost equivalent to "don't travel any significant distance from home, ever".

People aren't stupid just because they don't drop everything and make one specific goal their highest priority above all else. Many people haven't even thought about that goal, and even for those who have, it may not even objectively be the highest priority goal.

People could for example elect governments that want to build transit or dis-incentivize carbon heavy activities and incentivize their replacements, but they don't.

We're actually quite lucky to have a decent Green Party and a proportional government system here (NZ), where the Green Party can get up to ~15% of the vote. I wish it was more though.

In a world where no party is proposing reforms that will actually do enough, I feel like I basically have a responsibility to vote for the most environmentally conscious not-totally-insane option.

Indeeed. In the UK, no party has an environmental platform worth mentioning. There isn't even an environment position in the cabinet any more - just industry.

Conservatives promise to dig up the country.

Lib dead promise to dig up the country, slowly.

Labour promise to dig up the country, for the people.

And the greens promise not to dig up the country, but will make us all live in grass huts.

Oh stop. I haven't driven to work more than a handful of times in my entire life. I've recycled my recyclables my whole life. I only fly once or twice a year, and I can even cut that out if necessary. I eat meat once a day or less by now (red meat is only a part of that), and not in very large quantities or expensive cuts either. I walk or bike everywhere and take public transit when I can't.

I'm happy to pay higher prices for meat, higher prices for airline flights. I'm happy in general to ration out personal luxuries more thinly than I already do. I really do want to avoid the end of the world.

But at the same time, I want some damned personal security in exchange, and right now I'm not getting any of it. We don't have much personal security if something bad happens in life, and the world is ending anyway.

Carbon tax or bust.

It will require a massive change of mindset. The hard question is how to achieve it in a fair way. There has always been a tension between the freedom of the individual and what's best for society and more broadly all humankind. I don't think people have to give everything up, but there will probably come a time when priorities will have to be re-evaluated and many people will have to live with less in the way of disposable gadgets, mindless entertainment, inefficient transport, over-sized houses etc.. Maybe education is the key, more mindful entertainment, less mindless...

> It will require a massive change of mindset.

...or a dictator?

Kill 90% of humans and our CO2 emissions won't be a concern anymore.

You could do with much less than 90% by targeting the worst offenders.

Sadly I think the only solution to global warming is something like a nuclear holocaust that kills the majority of the planet's inhabitants, and sends the remainder back to the stone ages, walking around rather than flying and driving in fossil fuel vehicles.

Other than that... Things are bad, getting worse, yet there are plenty of deniers, and it doesn't appear we're going to stop screwing up any time soon. We're too stupid and greedy as a species to avoid catastrophe I fear.

No need for a nuclear holocaust, the increasing ineffectiveness of antibiotics will do the job eventually. Nature has a way of getting even.

What's wrong with mindless entertainment, as opposed to mindful entertainment, from an environmental point of view?

it dumbs you down into non-caring whateva state. there is place for both, after very hard brain-day at work for example, but many folks only have the mindless ones.

Or: we move all our shit-producing industries to Moon and Mars, places where there is no ecology to fuck up. Expensive but could be done, especially if we find out that those places have good minerals we can mine and work on right there.

I'm trying to imagine the pollution controls that would make that economical. And the space network that would enable it. I think that even with astronomical fines for pollution on Earth, it would be a difficult value proposition. Consider a planet made of solid gold, and then consider how far away it would need to be to make it uneconomical to retrieve. Moon rocks have been valued at $50,800 per gram based on the cost to retrieve them, which should probably be taken as an upper bound rather than a typical figure, but the current spot price for gold looks like it's around $37 per gram. So if the Moon were made of gold, we would need to reduce our retrieval costs by three orders of magnitude to make it worthwhile. I don't have a remotely rigorous way to estimate from that where our current breakeven point might be, but I think it would be pretty close in.

Your idea is pretty crazy, but not completely crazy. There aren't any other particularly good ideas for making space travel profitable. On the other hand, it's difficult to imagine the advances in technology and the environmental concerns that would make it possible. Barring some absolute prohibition, it seems unlikely that spending millions or billions of dollars to manufacture things on Mars would be easier than improving manufacturing processes here on Earth.

> And it's very hard to change without everyone else changing as well.

Sometimes I wonder if it's just a matter of "if you build it, they will come". As in, if there was a public works style initiative to build green cities from the ground up out in the middle of nowhere, and would enough people reconsider their current situation and trade it for a lifestyle and an environment that is less dependent on energy and other resources?

I've been trying to grasp the basics of 3D modeling and Blender lately, because I have an idea in my head of what sort of 'green city' I'd like to live in. Before I say any more, I should clarify that I understand almost none of the intricacies of city planning, material science, architecture, etc. and I don't want to come off as someone who thinks that learning all that is trivial -- I'm looking at it more as art, I just want to create a pretty model of a city that I can zoom around in from different perspectives.

What I'm envisioning is an dense network of open-air structures separated by wide passageways for walking and biking. The buildings themselves would all be the same height (5 stories maybe?) and the tops of all buildings would be reclaimed as community gardens and interconnected by skyway-like walking bridges. Living units would be minimal and adjustable in size by taking a modular approach [0], with not-so-strict zoning laws that would allow for makeshift small businesses and markets to open up amongst the community. Roads proper might exist once every 10 blocks or so. I'd imagine a city like this would be much cheaper to live in, so that too might be attractive for potential residents.

A lot of what I'm talking about is influenced by living in an extremely population dense area in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I have about 5000 neighbors living in a 100m radius (seriously) and we all get along quite well. Here's a photo from the balcony of my first apartment here looking down our alley:

https://66.media.tumblr.com/23e3cc103960ec568bdc1a0086e71901....

It's amazing to live with everything you need just a few blocks away, but it would be even nicer if we could integrate greenery and vegetation into stairwells, and reclaim the tops of these buildings as open space for the community. This style of living has allowed me to get by comfortably without a car or moto for four years now, so I suppose that's at least a little bit green!

I hope this doesn't sound like the idle ramblings of a crazy person, but maybe if by some stroke of luck I become very rich, then after 10 years of learning I'll at least be capable of enlisting smart people to help me build a city like this. Or maybe Paul Graham wants to give me a billion dollars? That would be nice :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_building

Unfortunately the end of your URL got cut off. :(

Look up Le Corbusier’s Radiant City for something from way back in the early 20th century that sounds a little bit like your idea.

Also don't give up on Blender, it took me a while too but now I wouldn't use anything else. It's all about learning the main keyboard shortcuts really - which is a big barrier to newbies but a bit speed boost once you get used to it.

Oops, I was having trouble editing my post and so I had to delete it and repost it. It got cut off in the process of copy-pasting.

Here's the URL again:

https://66.media.tumblr.com/23e3cc103960ec568bdc1a0086e71901...

The images I'm seeing of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City are so beautiful. I would love to have the ability to create a Blender model of something like that.

This short documentary on architect Vo Trong Nghia also made a large impact on me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgQoVbEX8-A

What kind of green city has gardens on the roofs instead of solar panels? I guess one that is actually green.

: P

Throw in some solar panels too! I have no idea what the balance is, or which route is actually 'greener' in an environmentally-friendly sense, but definitely part of the experience of a green city for me would be to actually have it green-colored and covered in plants. But if you can grow a lot of your food right on top of the building, then at least that cuts down on the need to expend energy transporting it in. And between having lush greenery overhead and building open-air structures with natural ventilation, hopefully it would be cool enough to reduce the need for air conditioning. The building I live in has good natural ventilation and so I actually haven't had AC these four years and I've survived in the blazing Cambodia heat :)

If you look at the graphs that have greater time lines than 100k years, you will see this is a pattern.

No doubt we as humans are speeding up the process and making it worse, but it seems likely that its going to happen regardless of what we do.

For this reason, I'd suggest we are 'gonna change' when the time comes.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs. People have much bigger problems in life that have immediate impact.

The people struggling at the bottom of Maslow's pyramid aren't the ones making the decisions that cause the problem.

You're making the assumption that life only has meaning if our species survives indefinitely, or at least long enough to become interplanetary or interstellar.

I'm not advocating a nihilist approach to life, merely that I don't think the relative meaning (or lack of meaning) of life isn't derived by the life lead by our successors. What meaning we give it now in these moments we have, no matter how absurd, is all that is required to live a life more in harmony with other living things. The great barrier reef and the other natural wonders are worth saving because now, because they're worth experiencing now.

Life does have meaning now - but if we could colonize the galaxy, there would be a billion stars with a billion people for a billion years. If their lives are equally meaningful, then these existential threats to humanity correspond to the greatest threat to mankind's meaning.

I sort of see all this as a natural progression, maybe our purpose at this point is to eliminate ourselves, the earth will be just fine without us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmbkfTiLQ58

notice 02:29

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