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Comment by gxon | Hacker News Reader

If not direct human extinction, it could certainly mean complete collapse of advanced civilization.

Even if humans manage to survive for millions of years into the future, we've already burned all the easily accessible fossil fuels. What we're burning now takes a lot of technology to extract. It's not immediately obvious that we'll ever be able to become a space faring civilization without cheap fossil fuels to bootstrap us there. Eventually, we'll go extinct by some asteroid impact or supervolcano.

We should probably assume it's now or never for intelligence to spread off this rock.

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“We gotta go to space!” is an impractical and frustrating response to climate change. Getting the human population off this planet and finding somewhere else for us to live is orders of mangnitude harder than fixing things on the planet for which we’re already perfectly adapted.

Getting to space is absolutely NOT a solution to climate change. We have to solve climate change SO THAT we can continue on our path to become space faring. If we can't manage to survive on an Earth decimated by climate change, then we obviously have no chance in space or any other planet in this solar system.

We 100% will go extinct eventually if we don't expand beyond Earth. And my point is that if climate change destroys our civilization now and we get flung back into a new dark age, I don't think it's likely that we'll ever manage to spread beyond Earth.

Climate change is an existential threat to our species because it threatens our ability to become space faring.

I think the idea is that if we burn our fossil fuels now then if something wipes out 99% of all humans there won't be another industrial revolution after we have rebuilt civilization and therefore no space exploration ever.

If I'm understanding you correctly, your argument is that if we don't become a multi-planetary species, extinction is assured. And we don't stand a chance of going multi-planetary if we don't take advantage of cheap fossil fuels within the next several years.

Why do think we need to leverage fossil fuels to build rockets? My impression was that solar and wind are already out-competing coal in terms of electricity production, and are close to beating natural gas too.

I also don't think fossil fuels are required to build rockets. Hydrogen can easily be generated from electrolysis (although a bit more expensive than from methane), Methane can be produced from plants, and while I haven't heard it tried yet I imagine a fuel similar to RP-1 could also be synthesized from plants, similar to how we make ethanol.

Do you think we won't be able to switch to renewables in time, or is my analysis on how effective renewables are off?

My reading of the comment you were responding to is that they were saying "We needed to leverage fossil fuels to get to the state of development where we can build rockets, and if we didn't have that fuel in the ground, we'd be stuck pre-industrial. Future societies won't have that fuel, so we're the only chance (for millions of years) of becoming multiplanetary"

Exactly this. Before the oil age, we were already rapidly decimating forests for fuel. In a way, the discover of fossil fuels averted that ecological disaster and there are more trees now (in America at least) than 100 years ago [1].

Solar and wind energy generation are great, but don't have a high ERoEI in early development. Oil that's gushing out of the ground has an insanely high ERoEI and we used that to advance our technology very quickly.

Also remember that we probably have only a few hundred million years left before the sun expands and heats the planet to the point were complex life can't exist. There will be no liquid water in 1 billion years.

This is all conjecture. It certainly could be possible that future civilizations can become space faring by a different path than we took, but that's a terrible gamble to make if you think intelligence in the universe is worth preserving and expanding.

1. https://www.treehugger.com/more-trees-than-there-were-years-...

Ah so if your civilization ends but humans ad a spicies survive, the next civilization won't have it so easy. That makes sense, thanks for clarifying.

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