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Comment by cblconfederate | Hacker News Reader

I think we have to accept that this is how the next gen will live. Not random living but unrooting and rerooting frequently. There were a few million nomads pre-covid, now almost everyone is realizing they could be one. Not everyone wants an unrooted life but most people would be positive to a few re-rootings per lifetime. This is hindered by borders and immigrations control at the moment, but at some not too distant point the majority opinion on them will shift.

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I've uprooted once and found it very difficult. When you move to a new city, you basically have to build a new circle of friends from scratch. Making close friends takes time, years, and you face a bootstrapping problem: it's much harder to make new friends when you have no friends. I honestly don't get why some people want to do that multiple times within their life.

Call me cynical, but nomadism like this just seems like another form of consumerism to me. You're consuming living experiences I guess, but you're never really building anything long-term anywhere. As soon as you get close to people, after a few years, you leave it all behind, move on to the next thing? I'd just be afraid of waking up at 50 and realizing I have no close friends anywhere.

And also in most cases, anything remotely similar to a social fabric just vanishes. While I guess that the old tight-knit village is not something we should go back to, it both provided social stability and fulfilled needs.

I think this is still something people will need and while you can supplant relationships with long-distance jet-setting and intimacy with tinder-driven hookups neither of that is really contributing to a stable society but just eroding it currently (people who are just moving away from problems are not solving them and the ecological perspective of GP is just insane!)...

  'Cause everybody hates a tourist
  Especially one who, who thinks it's all such a laugh

-- Pulp, Common People

that's about a class tourist though

You're right but I was hinting to friendship-tourism.

You don't need "friends" (which often are not really friends anyway), just have at least one scene where you find yourself at ease and go to public places or gatherings about it.

For instance, one could go to programming meetups, or conscious dance events, or gay sex clubs, etc.

I anticipate things will go the other way - Less power in passports, stronger border controls for many nations. Climate refugees will prompt this response from nations. IMO we've been living in a golden age for anyone that wants to see the world for the past half a century or so.

And also the other way -- most nomads are actually immigrating TO the warmer countries. Ultimately i don't see this ending up being gatekeeped at the national level but rather at the city-level.

and these nomads in the warmer countries are actively participating in the struggles there to keep them liveable for another century? I doubt it.

Of course not. But humans tend to follow the least action principle, and if it's easier to escape a problem, they will. At some point, trying to force them stay in place en masse will become authoritarian.

great. So what do we do, if there's no more place to escape to?

Silver age, maybe. Zweig pined for the pre-1914 world when passports weren't a thing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23781292

Passports and borders are not the only restriction to travel, though. I would wager that the distance traveled now-a-days for the average person is higher than in most if not all of history.

Just heard something on the radio saying mass tourism in my country started only during the 1930s. Almost a century later, (before the virus) the blue-collar working class was taking at least a week or two of their vacations in places such as Bali or the Maldives. So you're probably right: Zweig was probably speaking from an upper middle-class perspective, not far removed from the roughly 2% of the then-upper class.

"Climate refugees" keeps being repeated ad-cliche as if it were a guaranteed near future event, but I'd love to see the concrete scientific evidence backing up its inevitability. Also, please, show me one single movement of climate refugees to have occurred so far who moved place specifically because of human-caused climate change.

By example: I live in the tropics, and while many people leave this country for assorted reasons of economic opportunity and bad local/national government, nobody has yet left because of global warming.

even if its not the climate, the refugee movement from africa -> europe is very real and will only get more intense throughout the century

If you look at the big picture one things that stands out is regional rural to urban migrations. I put a lot of immigration in that context. 90% of rural to urban migration is internal and 10% spills over.

There are currently huge internal migrations inside of Africa, but some percentage heads to Europe usually following expat family members.

So in a way we already have refugees not from climate change but from industrialized agriculture.

I can't point you to a single study that encompasses everything that forms the basis of my opinion. If you already acknowledge the existence of human-caused climate change to at least the extent accepted by the IPCC (which by all accounts represents a low bar, because of the political reality of the panel's makeup and process), then there should be enough of a basis for a few additional pieces of information to illustrate my line of thinking. I also assume you understand that individual weather events, while caused by climate, cannot be linked with 'concrete scientific evidence' to climate change. Yet when it comes to human displacement, individual weather events are more than enough to trigger mass migrations.

>show me one single movement of climate refugees to have occurred so far who moved place specifically because of human-related climate change.

Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought - CP Kelley (2015)

"worst drought in the instrumental record, causing widespread crop failure and a mass migration of farming families to urban centers"

"Century-long observed trends in precipitation, temperature, and sea-level pressure, supported by climate model results, strongly suggest that anthropogenic forcing has increased the probability of severe and persistent droughts in this region, and made the occurrence of a 3-year drought as severe as that of 2007−2010 2 to 3 times more likely than by natural variability alone."

Regarding future climate migrations, the chain of events that looks set to play out in many places is quite clear. The Maldives, for example. Islanders (~300k) depend heavily (70% of GDP) on the coral reef for their sustenance and livelihood. Ocean warming is destroying the coral, and the life that goes with it. If that's not enough, sea-level rise will swamp the islands; the highest point is only two meters above sea level (100cm of base sea-level rise is anticipated by 2100, and that excludes storm surges). On top of that, intensificiation of extreme weather events will destroy homes, boats, and land infrastructure (what little even exists). Inhabitants will be displaced as their livelihood dies off and their land dissapears under the ocean, assuming they have the means to go anywhere else and that those places will allow them to relocate.

https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2010/04/06/climate...

This scenario or very similar repeats for most small island nations across the pacific (~2M), the carribean (44M), and elsewhere (~17M). Note that it's a distinct scenario from the historical example I linked above, which is a representation of the kind of climate-related displacements to be expected closer to the equater and on major land masses. Those are more representative of the shift expected to the 'habitable zone' of our planet, as it moves further away from the equator.

Examining these and thank you for the elaborate reply. I don't actually deny human-caused climate change mainly because the evidence for its occurrence seems more than overwhelming, but I do mistrust hyperbole and fear ful speculation of possible things that haven't actually occurred, aren't in the process of happening and haven't been backed (to my knowledge) by the same kind of concrete science that demonstrates how temperatures have been rising at an exceptional rate. This does not necessarily equal certain other things, unless a solid connection between them can be made,

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