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Comment by lubonay | Hacker News Reader

I think humans are generally bad at prevention of and good at reaction to catastrophes.

The next 50 years are going to be interesting... let's hope we leave the world in a manageable state for future generations.

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Yes, pretty much. And the investments we make into long term stability are more fragile than we think, because our will to maintain it is unreliable. Whether it's an independent judicial system, freeways, water reservoirs for drought, public housing projects, bank capital, political alliances or whatever our underestimation of how much trouble we were in before the systems were in place or the desire to appease voters by "saving" their tax money compels us to rather quickly neglect and tear down what was deemed an absolute necessity in times of crisis.

It's the same thing with the planet, I'm afraid. We just don't understand how important a stable climate is for the stability of our civilization and thus we don't really have the will to maintain it. Once the crisis has developed into something that's completely unsustainable for the ones with influence and power a reaction will come.

I've had multiple talks with managers about the need to invest time and resources in our tech infrastructure after long periods of user and feature growth, only to be turned down because it's not as important as more features. Once a nasty situation rolls around time and resources to make sure this never happens again magically pops up.

Yes indeed, it feels like we behave like bacteria in a Petri dish...

Adapting to catastrophes has literally evolved for millions of years. Species that couldn't adapt to change - died. The ones that survived didn't survive because they successfully prevented a catastrophe.

Would you say there has been any other species we know of that was able to cause, perceive, predict, prevent, and react to catastrophes before? We seem to be unique in that we can prevent and react to catastrophes, even ignoring that we can also cause them.

A bird puts strong sticks at the base of its nest to prevent the nest falling out of a tree.

That sounds like preventing a catastrophe.

Sure, but that works through natural selection. All the birds that didn't use strong sticks eventually fell out of the trees and their offspring died.

But natural selection doesn't work for us. We don't have a large sample of earths where it doesn't matter when humans die out on some of them.

I am not sure whether this is true but aren’t people saying that dogs and other animals can sense incoming earthquakes etc. and will get anxious/try to GTFO?

Isn't that simply because they can hear very low sound frequencies which often come shortly before an earthquake? The technology we have now is far superior at predicting such events using geological vibrations and weather data etc (which still gives quite short warning times, but still).

Not sure anything will change. We are frogs in water over a flame it seems.

I wish we were, in reality the frogs do actually jump out.

climate migration is going to be a part of it

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