Comment by foerbert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by foerbert | Hacker News Reader

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I find this line of though particularly strange too. Right now you have an extremely optimistic attitude.

I'm not sure why hoping for the best is supposed to be a wise decision when we're talking about basic things like 'survival of the human race' and whatnot.

I'm also rather uncertain how your 'caged bear button' example is relevant here. The only dangerous bear I can see in this context is the overuse of resources. In which case the example seems to be advocating that the best course of action is to expose people to the danger by default, unless people take constant action to keep the danger contained. I'm not sure how this argument is supposed to attack the "keep populations controlled" line of thought.

At any rate, the obvious solution here seems to do both. Figure out how we can reasonably and ethically keep populations in the range we know we can support, while at the same time working to expand that limit. We don't have to pick one or the other. If you believe this to be a real problem, it seems reckless to simply hope we figure it out before the problem becomes too serious.

I don't think I'm being extremely optimistic. We're figuring out how to capture carbon at high rates, we're figuring out safe fission reactors, we're realizing that plastic and many of its uses are bad for the environment, we're about to be a multi-planetary species. There are still lots of problems but it's not like they can't be overcome.

>I'm also rather uncertain how your 'caged bear button' example is relevant here. The only dangerous bear I can see in this context is the overuse of resources. In which case the example seems to be advocating that the best course of action is to expose people to the danger by default, unless people take constant action to keep the danger contained. I'm not sure how this argument is supposed to attack the "keep populations controlled" line of thought.

The dangerous bear in this case is our reproductive capabilities declining. A human that is prevented from coming into existence when it would normally be able to is the same as removing an existing one.

We will solve it, we just need to start and provide incentives for it.

There's breakthroughs in fusion too, and geothermal also a possibility.

And blockchain can allow us to coordinate at hitherto unheard of scales, which opens the door to massive acceleration of economic and technological development.

Dude it's just a data structure..

It's a consensus mechanism that uses a particular data structure.

I'd call that at least fairly optimistic. We're working on technology, but it hasn't materialized yet. Even if it does materialize sooner rather than later, we have no particular guarantee the political will to utilize the technology will exist.

I'm still confused about the bear. How is a human not existing a danger to others? A human not existing is really only dangerous to the human race once it reaches some critical mass that will essentially prevent any new humans from existing. I don't see how this is at all analogous to unleashing a bear in a populated street. Each instance is inherently not dangerous by itself. You can't say that for the bear.

By that reasoning, why should we do anything to reduce green house gas production or any kind of pollution? We'll figure out how to remove it from the environment or make it otherwise non-harmful eventually. May as well go full steam ahead now in that case, right?

I also highly contest the notion that preventing a human from coming into existence is anything like removing an existing one. If you were forced to chose between killing somebody or destroying a viable embryo scheduled for implantation, would you seriously have all that much trouble deciding?

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