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Comment by throwaway0a5e | Hacker News Reader

Unlikely.

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.

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It's not species extinction that makes life undetectable, it's extinction of the civilization. For a civilization to be detectable it has to be at least at our level, or maybe a century beyond our level. If our civilization collapses it would mean that we were only detectable for a couple of centuries and then it could take millennia for us to get back to our level, especially if we've extracted all the easy to extract natural resources making it harder for our ancestors to rev back up, or if large parts of the planet become uninhabitable.

>it's extinction of the civilization. For a civilization to be detectable it has to be at least at our level,

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.

Separate from the details of the consequences of global warming itself, more generally my hypothesis is that in order for a civilization to become aware that it is consuming too many natural resources requires a level of advanced development that can only be achieved by consuming too many resources. In other words, it might be more likely than not that when a planet produces a civilization that enters an industrial revolution it ends up burning through its natural resources in an unsustainable way and ends up collapsing. The easy access to resource surpluses that ignites the industrial revolution is also what causes them to overshoot their planet's capacity.

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.

This seems like humanity’s last advanced civilization: the easy energy is all tapped out.

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.)

>This seems like humanity’s last advanced civilization: the easy energy is all tapped out.

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 this civilization collapses, how are we going to get to the point where we can build nuclear fission reactors?

Is it that hard to enrich isotopes enough to make a steam engine that runs on radium, thorium or uranium instead of coal?

If you know that radioactive isotopes exist, it sounds like steampunk, 1850s, level tech could build a power plant, but perhaps not a bomb.

I’m not qualified to answer, but there was a bit of discussion about the idea on Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/57peek/can_y...

Interesting.

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.

Controlled cold fusion would be even more neater as it enables you to synthesise arbitrary molecules out of just hydrogens.

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