[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation...
We're going to have a hard time dumping enough anything into the atmosphere (or causing some other kind of pollution) to kill ourselves entirely. We'd osculate around an equilibrium where we dump some pollutant into our environment to the point where our population decreases, natural processes remove it and our population increases, wash, rinse, repeat. You can see similar population and resource usage patterns in many ecosystems.
And before anyone tries to twist my words to saying global warming isn't a bad thing, that's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying that humans as a species will likely survive it.
Maybe some other life form could have one after enough time has passed, but we can’t bootstrap ourselves a second time.
(Edit: to be clear, I’m agreeing with you.)
That's probably what someone said in the middle ages when they finished deforesting Scotland.
We still have nuclear. There's an obscene amount of energy in it. It's just not attractive while we still have other "easy" options.
If you know that radioactive isotopes exist, it sounds like steampunk, 1850s, level tech could build a power plant, but perhaps not a bomb.
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/57peek/can_y...
I don’t think it’s that hard to build a vessel full of warm radioactive pebbles to boil water.
Sorting ore by chemical element, and then making a fluid / gas / solution of the fuel element to sort by isotope mass in a centrifuge may or may not be doable for “blacksmith” level technology, though. Hard to say.
My point is that we won't go extinct, we'll bounce back and get another try.
>especially if we've extracted all the easy to extract natural resources making
Would you rather hollow out a mountain to mine minerals or dredge through what used to be a major city? We've concentrated all sorts of useful things on earth's surface. If anything the next civilization will have it easy.
>harder for our ancestors to rev back up, or if large parts of the planet become uninhabitable.
Large parts of the planet were more or less uninhabitable. The few people who lived in the arctic and the deserts mostly just followed food/water sources. They contributed little to civilization's progress (mostly in the field of astronomy because desert nights and polar winters give you plenty of time to look at the starts) because they didn't have the spare resources to engage in those pursuits because they were too busy surviving. Progress has always come from the places that are easy to live in and therefore have resource surpluses.
For us it's not just CO2 pollution that is a problem, there are many other resources that we are over-utilizing in an unsustainable way. And it seems that we are completely incapable of coordinating as a planet when the sacrifices are large. The hope of the techno-optimists is that technology will save us. It's a high-stakes bet that technology will figure it out before it's too late. Maybe the Great Filter is that when this bet is made across the universe the odds are generally in favor of losing.
My own speculation on the Great Filter is that any intelligent alien civilization is almost certainly a race of social predators that evolved - and thus are in competition for resources.
I worry that competition between individuals and individual states necessarily ends in the destruction of the environment on which they depend and quite likely in direct destruction in war with advanced technology.
Us humans need to find some other paradigm under which to move forward, capitalism and competition, which have brought us such amazing results to date could well also be our undoing.