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Comment by 11235813213455 | Hacker News Reader

They should just offer high-resolution virtual tourism or anything. Is Youtube tourism a thing already?

Tourism or all those non-vital flights are ruining our planet, along with the high consumerism, which is surely correlated to someone who go visit foreign countries

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Tourism should be much harder. Make your way to your destination by bike, yacht, even if it takes a year to get there.

I hope you mean sailing yacht :)

Once we have UBI we might consider year long "vacations", but before that making vacations much harder is unlikely to be a popular opinion.

It's a spectrum. Sitting in a cafe yesterday, I overheard some people talking casually about flying the entire family up to Rarotonga to see a concert.

A wealthy relative recently flew from the Philippines to Tokyo and then returned again - without leaving the airport - so that she could preserve her super ultra sure miles status.

I myself have occasionally flown LHR to SFO to attend a over or two hour meeting.

We cannot continue living like this.

I agree, but people who do things like you listed would be the least affected by making traveling harder.

That depends how we make it harder. Frequent flier + domestic flight levies, for example, can disproportionately affect the behaviours mentioned

>so that she could preserve her super ultra sure miles

Ok that is crazy and that's the airlines fault for creating such a situation.

UBI is not going to be a net win for the environment, not by a long shot. Get ready for another baby boom, here we come UBI.

That very much depends on how and when children are eligible for it. If you have to pay for it out of your own UBI, not so much.

Not to mention that UBI does nothing for the pain of childbirth.

A lot of people want to give up work to look after a baby but can't afford to because they need the income, so they end up not having children. UBI would mean they could afford to give up work and raise children instead. I actually see that as a positive, but if you're concerned about population growth you might see it as a negative.

But would that mean they have more than the replacement rate of children? In the west we're slightly below that already.

It is unlikely that any actual outcome of climate change is going to be popular.

In terms of making choices, though, it is likely that taking vacations in a place that is close enough not to fly there will be more popular than not having heat in winter, not feeding your kids or abandoning the idea of getting medics.

On the other hand, aren't there also benefits of people experiencing more than their backyard?

That's an interesting question. Does traveling to some place helps you to understand and know it better than spending a few hours on Wikipedia and youtube?

That begs that question “what does it mean to visit a place”? I’ve been to a lot of places for both fun and work. I’ve thought a lot about this. Does it count as a visit if you only go to tourist places and hang out with other tourists? Does it count as a visit if you spend your time just at the house of a local speaking with locals but never seeing the sites?

There are. But downsides are greater as they lead to destruction of very places they visit for their beauty.

What if the benefit is that they vote to protect those places when they wouldn't have before?

That is big IF. I can say opposite: what if they do not care anymore as they already saw the place. It has same validity.

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