James Lovelock at 100: the Gaia saga continues | Hacker News Reader

James Lovelock at 100: the Gaia saga continues

nature.com

49 pointssohkamyung26 comments

His views on nuclear power are interesting. He thinks that nuclear is the only real solution to climate change.

http://www.jameslovelock.org/nuclear-power-is-the-only-green...

James Hansen agrees. In his book Storms of My Grandchildren he advocates two solutions: fee-and-dividend, and advanced nuclear power. Various other climate scientists are on board too.

I agree too, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable holding expertise in climate science up as evidence that one knows best when it comes to such policy decisions.

I'm an expert at automation. That means I have an excellent sense of what tasks can be automated and how soon, and of a lot of the societal consequences of technological progress, but that doesn't automatically qualify me to choose the best public policy to prevent the associated loss of jobs or help the people who get unemployed as a result.

In the book, he said he talked to a lot of people who run power grids, asking how difficult it was to incorporate unpredictable power sources. He also learned a lot about the Integral Fast Reactor project.

In any case, one thing climate scientists know better than anyone is the urgency of the problem. Consequently, they only want to fix the climate, as quickly and directly as possible. A lot of other people seem to use climate as an excuse to push for other goals.

I've always found the xkcd log scale picture very compelling when it comes to nuclear power - https://www.xkcd.com/1162/

that makes me doubt him as he obviously doesn't factor in the enormous difficulty of nuclear waste. nuclear energy is not green at all. EDIT: Also that was in 2004 and things have moved on massively since then

"he obviously doesn't factor in the enormous difficulty of nuclear waste"

Scientist that he is, I very much doubt that he didn't factor it in. (You may disagree with his conclusions).

Nuclear engineer here. What specifically do you consider the enormous difficulty of nuclear waste to actually be? Technical issues? Political? Both?

I see it as a well-understood technical problem with well-reasoned technical solutions. But the politics of "what so we do with the waste?" are basically self-sustaining now.

nuclear waste is tougher to deal with as opposed to green energy where there is no toxic byproducts

That was published 2004, I'd be interested to hear if that's still the case given the 10x cost decrease in photovoltaic panels since then.

Everyone of his generation loves nuclear. It was the hottest thing back then. Makes me wonder what todays generations will be advocating which their children will have to deal with

I dislike being the pessimist but it seems overly optimist to imagine this singularity coming and undoing all of mankind’s harm... and I can imagine how someome at his age would embrace this view that surely, soon, automagically everything will be in order.

How long till we attain singularity? I believe another of his liftime and we’ll still be far away from true self-replicating GAI. I also believe climate change will transform our way of living long before that.

What will be it’s primary purpose? I don’t know, it’s definitely not going to be built to enrich mankind.

I like his view and I hope he is right but I believe the ‘singularity’ will solve how to further enrich its makes long before it solves the planet’s ailments.

yes, i think the singularity would be in mankind's image i.e. post-industrial capitalist consumerist

Singularity is becoming a religion, like the say The Rapture for nerds.

Technology is seldom the bottleneck, that seemingly is down to social acceptance.

Things used to progress by people dying out, however enhanced lifespan makes this even more of a problem.

Emigration to new societies helped, but there’s no where left to go with a clean sheet.

Whilst a fan of space colonies, that looks to be even more complex than when life moved from the sea to land.

So herding rabid cats seems to be the core skill.

The rabid cats herding was a bit glib in my part, consensus is hard to come by, but valuable. With so many different points of contention though it’s almost to get agreement across the board; a statespace explosion.

Several hundred years ago the main question was which crop to grow.

Several hundred years ago the main question was who would make the best king to lead us into the next war, which would probably be next year.

Sorry if I'm being glib, that's incidental to your main points.

They didn’t get to chose the king did they, otherwise it would have been a democracy.

Well, wars of succession were a thing.

There were lots of ways to chose a king. Heredity was just one of them -- which is why not all kings (or roman emperors etc) are from the same family.

In lots of cases, popular support (or lack thereof) played a big role (in some cases, even more directly than in current democracies).

Often popular support of the elements of the landed gentry with largest armed hirds or retinues to call upon.

Not quite the modern sense of popular support.

Replace landed gentry with corporatist class, and "largest armed hireds" with mass media, and you're not very far off.

Or which king to pay allegiance to, the invading or the sitting. Wait, have many parties can you vote for?

> So herding rabid cats seems to be the core skill.

Cat herding only makes sense if you have an idea of what should be done. Herding for the sake of keeping everyone 'on the same page' can be harmful. If you are trying to get a consensus this will squash small ideas before they have had a chance to prove themselves. Sometimes space and non-management is needed for things to sprout.

"The Rapture for nerds" class!

Technologically the singularity has already happened. It's not evenly distributed yet.

We have artificial nitrogen fertilizer. Since it's invention we have been converting oil into human biomass. As a side-effect there has been an acceleration of science and technology.

We have split the atom, we have automated thought, we read and write DNA, our words and images circle the globe in an instant. The singularity has already happened.

We just have to notice and calm down. We actually have all the answers and solutions we need already, the issue is purely psychological or spiritual now.

Intersting how far his position has changed since the romantic Gaia ideas

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/09/james-lovelock-on-voting...

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