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Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

Worth noting: a massive volcanic eruption of sulfur in Siberia ended almost all life on Earth once. It rained sulfuric acid with the pH of lemon juice worldwide and everything died, it took 10 million years for diversity to start building again.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian–Triassic_extinction_...

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Honest question, how far could we live if all human resources were dedicated to create structure, devices and tech for high pH (and low biomass I guess) environment ?

Like Noah, I'd expect there to be much fun made of such an effort and criticism of the resource expenditure. A hypothetical ark builder would probably be better off focusing on a min viable population and pretending the effort had to do with space colony prep or something.

You mean low pH? High pH would be almost impossible to adapt for.

But, we will probably start living (and growing crops) indoor before we fully adapt (require knowing about plastics). We can probably adapt crops in a couple of decades if current science survives.

yeah, high acidity - low pH

Trials of self-contained ecosystems capable of sustaining humans to date have operated for less than one year.

With other external inputs, potentially longer, but the problem is manifestly hard.

Does this includes systems like the ISS?

No. The ISS is not self-contained.

1) What are practical solutions to runaway climate change, if any? 2) How can I prepare myself to survive through the worst-case scenario? 3) Where's the best place to move preemptively? I imagine that the means of food production will be in the hands of a few countries.

You don't have to do anything to prepare. You don't have to move preemptively or worry about food production. Climate change is not a 80 year apocalyptic concern, you will be long gone before the dire consequences are reached.

Have you been paying attention to the Middle East and North Africa? Dire is already here.

>Climate change is not a 80 year apocalyptic concern, you will be long gone before the dire consequences are reached.

Nothing changes until everything changes all at once.

Civilization has a huge, but not unlimited, ability to withstand huge shocks.

Climate change does many things. More intense and frequent storms. More droughts. More floods. More firestorms/forest fires. More hurricanes and tornadoes.

All of these things stress systems.

Which systems can withstand an ever increasing ramp up towards more stress and shock?

Which systems can't? Will the ones that can't take down the others through a chain reaction of refugees and mass humanitarian crises?

It's way more complicated than "don't worry for 80 years".

2) New Zealand would be a decent choice I guess http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/01/technology/peter-thiel-new-z...

But positioning yourself is also a good idea. I can stay unlimited in three continents with the option of a fourth :-)

If a Permian level extinction even occurs New-New Zealand on Mars might be a safer bet ;)

Mars is currently sterile, i.e. it's already in much worse shape that earth would be even in a worst-case scenario. If we can't figure out a way to survive here on earth even in a worst-case scenario, there's no way we're going to be able to survive on Mars.

That's just one of several theories explaining the cause of the extinction.

I think it's going to be a much slower burn this time around. More like boiling a crab very, very slowly. We had a good run but in the end the dinosaurs had the last laugh.

how do dinosaurs laugh?

Nasally, if Jurassic Park 3 is to be believed.

They survived for 300million years... We (modern humans) didn't even reach a 100,000 years of survival.

Hence we are in the dinosaurs land.Earth belong to dinosaurs... Longest survived mamals.

Dinosaurs are reptiles.

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