Comment by lumost | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lumost | Hacker News Reader

While it's difficult to imagine a scenario in which humanity extinguishes itself, it's easy to imagine scenarios which make civilized society difficult, and could preclude future advanced civilizations from ever emerging on Earth, these may constitute a variety of "hidden filters" which make exiting ones own solar system or mustering the energy to make oneself known impractical.

The article makes reference to a million year time horizon, however even earthly nuclear energy reserves may become strained on a thousand year time horizon. As we're all acutely aware, the great biochemical battery of fossil fuels is already operating on diminished capacity. Planet's such as mars lack the hydro-cycle to drive renewables, the organic legacy to support fossil fuels, and potentially the tectonics to enable surface extraction of nuclear fuels.

While a theoretical expansion outside of the confines of earths gravity to acquire resources from asteroids, or produce high concentrations of solar energy is currently achievable on a 20-100 year time horizon, supporting the energy demands of the aerospace supply chain or considering regular space launches may be difficult in 2 centuries. On a thousand year time horizon it's entirely plausible that maintaining a purely renewable economy makes the production of certain materials impractically expensive when considering the concentrated energy demands of blast furnaces or industrial mining.

Similar collapse events have occurred historically due in part to the exhaustion of limited resources such as forests have occurred in the past in both Europe and polynesia. If a similar event occurred in the future it's entirely plausible that a future civilization would be unable to muster the resources to ever "unlock" the next set of energy production capabilities.

Scenarios where humanity extinguishes itself are easy to come by: We are still living under the threat of accidental or intentional launch of a great number of nuclear weapons. The remaining civilizations might be unable to survive or thrive with what's left.

On the other hand speculating about the technological limits of humanity a million years in the future is difficult when we've only come up with nuclear energy a few decades ago, and while progress in some areas has been overdue, generally there seem to be quite a few "research trees" with potential for scifi-tech.

Industrialization would be slower without fossil fuels, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. Small scale wood smelting can eventually make way to hydro powered electric based smelting.

We are used to a very energy extensive economy, but most of the world would be habitual without any home heating or cooling for example. Similarly, a network of street cars need something like 1% of the energy as individual cars for everyone in a city. Historically, rivers, streams, and canals where similarly quite efficient long distance transportation networks we have largely forgotten about.

> We are used to a very energy extensive economy

Like you say, there are enormous amounts of low-hanging fruit when it comes to energy efficiency across all of society.

Take building insulation, for example. Where I'm from, triple glaze windows were made mandatory 30 years ago, every single existing apartment building was forced to retro-fit. Yet when I moved to the US less than ten years ago, apartment ads would regularly highlight "DOUBLE GLAZING" as if that was some incredibly expensive and luxurious feature.

Also where I'm from, I used to own an apartment in a building from the 1940s. But a bit more than ten years ago, new strict energy efficiency requirements went into effect, so my building - and every building like it in the country - had to fix it, often by adding a thick layer of insulation on the outside.

I still own an apartment there, it's newer, but the outside walls are 30cm thick and made of concrete for insulation purposes. And yet, here in the US, I regularly see new housing construction that's essentially just plywood for every single wall, inside and outside.

The US is incredibly behind when it comes to insulation and energy efficiency, because the economics of it doesn't make sense. If energy were to become much more expensive, this would change pretty damn fast.

There's also a US approach to 'grandfathering' in existing structures as building codes are updated. The only time I will ever 'have' to bring something in my house up to date is if I voluntarily do something like open a wall or install a new HVAC unit. And then the only thing impacted is that item, nothing else even gets inspected for safety/compliance.

I understand it to some extent: TONS of people can't afford to just...replace all of their windows, for example.

I live in an early 1800s farmhouse which has had a lot of work done on it over the years--to code--and has had new top-of-the-line windows put in as well. But if the whole house suddenly had to be fully compliant with modern code? You'd probably just need to tear it down and start from scratch. I'm sure that's true on tons of houses, especially in older areas of the country.

As far as I understand it, retrofits were only forced on commercial landlords, co-ops, and condominium buildings. Private home owners weren't forced, but there's incentives and tax relief for improving the energy efficiency of your house instead.

New construction, apartment buildings and single-family homes alike, all have to abide by the same updated rules.

You might be interested in Lstiburek's Perfect Wall.

It's really difficult to "extinguish" all human life. Even in a full nuclear exchange between all major nuclear powers, places such as patagonia, and new zealand will likely be unscathed. Particulate matter does not generally cross the border between the northern and southern hemisphere and the vast majority of weapons will be detonated in the northern hemisphere. This doesn't include the countless habitable islands with the potential to sustain reasonably sized villages.

A similar story exists for bio-weapons and other means. It's definitely possible to end civilization today, but such technologies are unlikely to end humanity - worst case, rehabitation of the main continents takes 1-2 centuries for the worst fallout to decay and enable farming.

While I don't subscribe to the view, there is modest evidence that scientific progress behaves like any other process of discovery - as a series of S curves where early progress is slow but speeding up every year, followed by a spike of progress and ultimately a steady period of diminishing returns.

The US has an interesting problem right now. Wild hogs are wreaking utter havoc and we don't have effective means to control their population. I'm fairly confident that humans will win that battle. But what if we nuked population centers? Most of the hogs would survive, but only a fraction of the humans. Who would win out in the decades to come? Hogs can eat all sorts of roughage, survive out in the elements, etc., humans are much more dependant on their technology. Want crops? Sorry, hogs ate 'em. Wanna eat hogs? They're smart, and after your ammo stores are depleted, you're back to the stone age.

But the question isn't mere survival -- can intelligent life thrive to the point where we can achieve interstellar travel?

I think you’re underestimating Stone Age humans, we used to hunt freaking lions and other big cats with stone tools. We started causing mass extinctions long before industrialization.

I'm not underestimating stone age humans -- I've spent much of my life learning and using stone age skills. Not enough that I can actually live as a stone age human, mind, and there's the rub. In that learning, I've met a very small number of folks (like [1]) who are actually equipped to survive a stone age. Judging by my experience, by watching other "good" students in those classes... with good training by masters, we still fail hard on our first few times out. And we're well-fed, moderately well-equipped, and not suffering from radiation poisoning.

The real question isn't "how badass were stone age humans", it's "can the smartphone generation re-invent stone age technology quickly enough to survive"?

https://www.outsideonline.com/2411125/lynx-vilden-stone-age-...

It would probably incredibly brutal and many would die early on, but as long as enough people survived the initial transition and found some sort of stability, humanity would carry on. Even if conditions were generally terrible, just a few areas where the survivors can grab a toehold could be enough. The prospect of a grim, untimely death for yourself and everyone you love would be rather motivating.

This sounds like a great premise for a novel, and the question could be explored at a quite deep level. Consider that most ecosystems are now codependent on human civilization, and many locales do not have the necessary flora or water availability to support stone age civilization.

There are certainly some ecosystems such as fishing communities north of Vancouver that would do well and be shielded from any nuclear exchange, but the wild deer population in Massachusetts would likely not be sufficient for any significant number of modern stone age men to survive.

I recommend the anime Dr Stone which answer the inverse question: can a smartphone generation, put in a stone age world, re-invent modern technology quickly enough to survive"?

Tribes are how humans survive. What we think of as "survivalism"-- a single person getting by alone in the woods-- wouldn't work in any era with any technology.

There weren't very many humans in the world back in the stone age. With a future catastrophe, there will be so many people that there will be a lot of them way out on the tail of the distribution, whatever is selected for.

Going by the how to make everything series I am 100% confident a million people with a smartphone with an offline copy of wikipedia and a single solar farm to charge them could rebuild human society within a lifetime to 15th century level with some early elements of industrial machinery. The few centuries after that are quite insignificant.

You can very much use solar panels on Mars. There's also a clear advantage that right now, there's nothing on Mars, lots of land to place said solar panels, but IMO, that's not going to be an issue. We will probably master nuclear fission within the next few decades. Lots of progress has been made, and it will solve our energy needs. What if we run out of deuterium or tritium? Not a problem, by that time, in a few centuries, we'll likely be able to build bigger, better reactors that can fuse "normal" hydrogen and maybe even helium.

As for the great filter, I've always thought that the real danger is something that would cause say, one person, to have an outsized destructive power. Imagine if we successfully invent nanobots that can self-replicate, for example, and anyone with the right set of skills could program them. In that scenario, it's within the capability of any individual to create a deadly disease. You just need one unhinged person to trigger a horrible disaster. Nanotech could be much more dangerous than nukes, and if you combine strong AI and nanotech, I could see that being an immense survival risk.

Martian solar energy production has a few "unique" challenges. Including

- Dust - Supply chain - ~40% less watts/square meter

Of these the most unproven is the supply chain problem. The link below summarizes why solar doesn't work in the short-term for mars habitation missions - it's an open question as to whether there are economically extractable deposits of silicon, cadmium, and other materials to build out a solar farm. Bear in mind, terrestrial resource extraction makes extensive use of water.

https://medium.com/swlh/solar-power-is-never-going-to-work-o...

The comparison would be for locally produced solar. We know that making solar panels on Earth is a net positive energy expenditure, from raw materials to recycle/disposal, and just barely so. But the cost of creation of solar panels on Mars is unknown relative to net energy expenditure. I'm fairly certain that it would be many decades, if not centuries, before it became net positive. Sending solar panels to Mars is obviously not a good use of Watts.

I don't think it's that bad. The SpaceX Starship should be able to carry ~125 metric tons to Mars, and there will be cargo-only variants. You could ship ultralight flexible solar panels in each Starship. Even if it's 40% less energy than on earth, I would say that's still not bad. You could easily fit enough panels to get a 100KW array in 10 metric tons of payload. You use the batteries from the ship itself to store the power for night time. If each cargo Starship can bring one such array, then you will pretty quickly have a megawatt of power generation. It's not huge, but if you pay attention to energy efficiency, it's enough to power tools to dig, lighting, heating, rovers, etc.

As for dust, the Mars rovers have shown it's not a real issue, wind removes most of it, and if we actually have people there, we can occasionally clean the arrays too.

Would I rather bring a nuclear reactor to Mars? Sure, but I also think we can make it work with just solar if we have to.

The most proven problem of solar is dust storms: “dust storms which can obscure the sun for weeks at a time, thereby rendering solar panels highly ineffective” without another complementary energy source (wind? energy storage?) see https://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/releases/2001/01_72AR...

> While it's difficult to imagine a scenario in which humanity extinguishes itself

I used to believe this, until the pandemic. Now I think bio weapons are infinitely more dangerous than nukes. Imagine if COVID was a few times more contagious and as deadly as it's close relatives SARS and MERS. Not a big stretch really.

We would be pondering extinction right now. If the power was still working.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has struck hard in some countries, it has not been on a scale which threatens humanity in any form? Excess deaths for 2020 are in the ranges 10-300 per 100k, meaning under 0.3% in the worst case. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking... Not that pandemics cannot be properly devastating. During the bubonic plague up to 50% of the population died in many areas across the world. It was still no threat to humanity though.

A pathogen as deadly as the plague and as mysterious or intractable to medicine as the plague was in the 1200's released into a connected world such as ours would have an astonishing impact.

The threshold that matters isn't extincting humanity, but collapsing modern technological civilization. That's much easier to do.

The current pandemic revealed how fragile our supply chains are, and I still consider it a small miracle that the impact so far was so small. Lots of people are in dire straits, yes, but the world structurally didn't change much.

Very very hard to cause human extinction with a pathogen.

A pathogen could kill fast, in which case some islands would be warned in time to close borders and survive.

Or a pathogen could have a long incubation, in which case it is surely going to be somewhat survivable by some percentage of the population

Making it spread through the atmosphere worldwide, while remaining virulent in sunshine for weeks, would be a hard problem to solve.

Perhaps first deploy a highly contagious virus specific to humans that causes infertility but otherwise no symptoms. That would spread widely before detection. Followed by a highly contagious deadly pathogen that can be transmitted by any mammal: a vector that will kill tribes in remote forests that are out of contact with civilisation.

> even earthly nuclear energy reserves may become strained on a thousand year time horizon

No, they won't. Even if we restrict to just fission power, on a thousand year time horizon we can expect thorium reactors and extraction of uranium from seawater, which multiplies the available energy by a factor of at least a thousand.

Furthermore, on that time horizon we can expect fusion to be available, and deuterium from seawater multiplies the available energy by a factor of about a billion.

Not to mention that on a thousand year time horizon, we should be making full use of the available solar energy in Earth's vicinity by means of orbital power stations, in which case we won't even need any other energy source on that time horizon except for specialized uses like fast spacecraft.

> On a thousand year time horizon it's entirely plausible that maintaining a purely renewable economy makes the production of certain materials impractically expensive

And it also makes it practically certain that any material that's that expensive to produce won't be needed anyway, since cheaper substitutes will be found.

"Limited resources" by itself simply doesn't strike me as a plausible Great Filter.

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