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Comment by mudil | Hacker News Reader

In his book "The Beginning of Infinity", David Deutch gives a hypothetical example of a technologically advanced space ship arriving to an empty spot in space, a cube the size of the solar system. It is such an inhospitable spot, and yet this civilization can create everything to live there. There are billions of tons of hydrogen atoms in that "empty" space, hence fusion is harvested, new elements created, etc etc. The point that Deutch is making is that problems are inevitable, and they can be solved by use of knowledge. It's not the end of world, people.

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We don't have that level of tech, you may as well have provided a story about merlin or gandalf.

It may well actually be the doom of civilization as we know it, and should be treated as the existential threat it might be. We should be funding science, legislating environmental protection and doing whatever else we can think of until we have magic or know this is safe.

+1. Besides even if we had the tech and knowledge, we need the resources, time, dedication and will to apply the solutions. Not to mention the ability to carry it out, and together no less.

I know that we should be funding that stuff but unfortunately trying to go through tradtional grant-based funding routes is going to be much too slow; what you need to do is start private companies on your own and rapidly grow their value and use that as a starting point for global geo-engineering solutions to global warming

Billions of tons of H2 that take more energy to harvest than you will get out of them...

Resource availability isn't only about the mere presence of a resource, but that it can be extracted and used efficiently. The laws of thermodynamics are a stone cold bitch.

> "It's not the end of world, people."

I have greater hopes for my 11-year-old than conservation of mass.

Your 11 year old is already growing in the most prosperous and safest times ever in the human history.

By the violent crime statistics this is the point in time. But that has no relation to global warming or our (in)ability to deal with it. It might be too late or it might be no problem at all, but the current best research indicates it is going going to be a huge problem.

It is almost as if you are intentionally missing the point.

Well, I intentionally miss all the doom and gloom and doom and gloom.

You make it sound as though wishful thinking and impossible are benefits.

Please don't complicate an already difficult situation this is a place where simple trolling for fun can and does cause real harm. Climate change deniers will point at trolls like you and claim to have more people on their side than really exist.

And past performance guarantees future performance ?

Also, bear in mind that an overwhelming majority of the people who invented all this good stuff (scientists) agree that we're approaching a cliff.

I would not pretend knowing what happened thousands of years ago. We only have glimpse of what happened before the roman empire. Maybe societies were less technologically advanced but happier and wiser ? Hard to tell.

Parochial or primitive societies are not fun places to live in. Stereotypes, superstitions, myths, homophobia, chauvinism and oppression of women, oppression by the church, tribal wars, are all attributes.

Again, that's how we picture them in our head, but we have very few informations of what really happened at that time. Pretending we know from a few remaining artefact's is quite a stretch given that the truth is already very distorted when information from the same day arrive to you in the form of photos, videos and track records.

You've also just described modern times, unfortunately.

Our current era is pretty much that, plus the germ theory of disease, plus near-lightspeed communication technologies and rapid material transit.

If we dropped you off in the middle of interstellar space, what do you suppose your chances would be of solving the inevitable problems?

Nothing is the end of the world, unless it is.

Problems are inevitable and we can solve them by using knowledge.

Douglas adams said it best:

“What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can't move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer.”

Plus you can know everything about how to move a boulder, if your context doesn't let you apply the knowledge, it's game over.

What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can't move, with no hope of rescue.

Cut off your arm, then sell the film rights to it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/127_Hours

Well, at least half of that sentence is true.

No, it's not the end of the world. Just the end of humanity, probably.

I like that, Albert Bartlett, in this excellent video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&feature=list_oth...

says something like:

Well, you have 2 columns. On the left one the nice ways to solve the problem. On the right one the nasty ways. The good news is that nature will always find a way to solve the problem. The bad new is that if we don't use the solutions from the left, nature will use the ones from the right.

This video is amazing and should be mandatory reading before one is allowed to offer their opinion on anything remotely related to exponential growth.

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