Comment by ericadu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ericadu | Hacker News Reader

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My friends and I are creating new, bite-sized, interactive ways to visualize the impact we have as a species, and we were shocked by how much of a difference it makes to actually see the data in a concrete, tangible way vs. just reading the numbers. We have three so far:

1) Killed for Food shows you the number of animals killed per second by humans for food. Scroll all the way to the bottom.

2) Mother Earth is a game in the vein of paperclip maximizer and pandemic, where you play as Mother Earth and need to save the humans from mass extinction.

3) Spend that Green is a playful exercise in spending a millennial's personal carbon budget, backed up by horrifyingly real numbers.

We've had a lot of fun building these! Would love feedback.

Fantastic work, subscribed to updates. Few ideas:

- Don't add many more to disperse user attention, keep it focused. Maybe up to 6 activities?

- Conclude each activity with some clear and concrete actions. For example, the "spend that green" could lead to www.tmrow.com for personal tracking. The "killed for food" could link to a friendly guide on how to lower consumption.

- The "mother earth" game is too text-heavy combined with real-time pressure, I would re-think it for better user experience.

> - The "mother earth" game is too text-heavy combined with real-time pressure, I would re-think it for better user experience.

Indeed. Maybe let the year pass in 3, 5 or 10 seconds instead of 1? I could barely keep up reading the text.

.. or maybe it's author's idea to show that we need to scramble very quickly to tackle the climate change crisis, because the point of no return will come very fast?

EDIT: also my take away from that game is this - best strategy to stop climate change ASAP, is to stop procreating [0] in rapid rates globally [2], while adopting best environmental practices.

[0] Game puts this in a shape of natural disasters though.

[1] Global one child policy would save us, but improbable to happen.

“Unfortunately you had to stop the pollutive effects of 0 humans in the process, but their sacrifice is not in vain.“

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