Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years
blog.google
blog.google
We think of ourself as special, as having conquered environments, technology and more - and when zoomed out you could explain everything we've built and accomplished as the achievements of a sufficiently robust slime mold simply using available resources to continue growing.
If, on the other hand, you independently decide to stop driving your car because you know the world is getting smothered with carbon dioxide, but see people daily driving modified diesel pickups belching smoke into the sky, you're going to feel a bit like you're pissing in the wind even trying.
I sometimes think that it is a valid mental model to think of us as not much different from ants in a hive who think they possess more control and freedom than they do
I think it is the opposite. We are different from ants, and have a lot of control and freedom, so we know that if others will not make the sacrifice, why should we?
In an ant colony, I imagine the orders are being given top down and they do not think about what others are or are not sacrificing.
I'm not a biologist though and also have no experience in what it's like to be a bee or ant
Although conservation probably has more to do with reality looking different depending on your own local observations, to a Brazilian cattle rancher or Indonesian logger at the frontlines of the biodiversity crisis, things look different. For a consumer of those goods and materials, they likely don’t realize the connection.
Take our main coordination mechanism - the market. For all that's been said and written about it, it's still basically gradient descent. As greedy as it gets - in the technical sense. It's what's been driving the development of humanity ever since we formed societies. It's what controls the behavior of everyone.
We may think we're smart and have principles - and we do. But the reality still is, everyone is spending most of their lives trying to align themselves to exploit the local economic gradient - because that's how individuals get more of what they want, and less of what they don't want. Nobody is strong enough to single-handedly reshape the larger economic gradient. So while individually, we play complex games, at macro scale, we're not all that different from slime molds or fungal growths.
Maybe one day our economy grows so sophisticated it'll gain sentience. But that doesn't necessarily mean things will get better - much like an individual human being sentient doesn't mean their cells are happy.
I think human beings are just a very complicated form of bacteria.
> I'd like to share a revelation I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with their surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to another area, and you multiply, and you multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure.
Anyone studying mathematical biology has also probably come to the same conclusion.
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/b6gsxp/spreading_...
i saw global warming and covid19 as part of the earth's immune system to curb human impact. however, with our technology we are too resilient.
I'd be more interested in what you think it "should" look like for an "advanced" species besides optimal?
Looking at it is disparagingly is weird to me, when the conclusion is maybe humans in aggregate are optimal with regards to finding and using resources to grow.
Not that we're growing unbounded either because that would be bad, we're in population decline across many major nations right now and are working towards a greener future in multiple industries to avoid resource collapse.
The level of doom and gloom and misanthropy is generally unwarranted if you look around at the steps we're taking to better ourselves as a species and every time I read things like this I can't help but think people revel in the supposed helplessness of our potential destruction and inability as some perverted pleasure.
An advanced species would recognize the uniqueness and importance of the natural world, and would fence off huge sections of it to protect it for future generations.
30 by 30.
Or, 30% of the planet’s surface as protected areas by 2030.
The Biden administration adopted it, but it’d be cool to see it as a global goal as well.
You are just projecting what you think on this hypothetical advanced species. They might find, instead, that they don't need or care for any of that and just wipe it out faster.
Yours could be one that retreats into hermetic shelters and plays Call of Duty between themselves all day long.
Your "interpretation" is just making them after your self image, thinking that that is what it means to be "advanced".
You are again just projecting what you/we need on them, like the parent comment.
The biggest threat we face as a species in the foreseeable future is the exhaustion of our natural resources. Ergo, it makes sense to reserve as much as we can for future generations to decide what to do with. Some argue that we should use them as fast as possible in order to blow past some (claimed) barrier to entirely technological reproduction (producing a self-sustaining system on the Moon, for example), but this strikes me as hasty. The difficulties of achieving this might be far more difficult than advocates imagine, and if so we're likely to hit resource exhaustion.
That's before you even deal with the values. We don't have a lot of choice over those, but it's worth pointing out that many of our personal scruples are more compatible with collaborative than combative approaches to growth. The real moral challenge is whether the new frontier of growth (wealth acquisition) hits any wall before it destroys the environment.
We’re another level of the fractal of life, replicating patterns seen in bacterial biofilms, slime molds, circulatory systems, nervous systems, leaves, all manner of multicellular architectures.
It’s certainly a bad thing that we are growing in a sort of zero-sum manner against many original ecosystems though.
We need to learn to restrain our own growth (a tough one that we’re in the process of trying to beat into all of our heads it seems), and also we need to learn how to maximize the potential for biodiversity to exist within the structure of human occupied areas as well. (A good book on this last subject is “Win-win Ecology”).
I also think we shouldn’t attempt to constrain growth but instead constrain footprint upon the Earth.
The human footprint already covers nearly the entirety of the planet. Conservation of systems that are within or directly adjacent to that footprint is actually very important. Extraordinary amounts of biodiversity are contained in these areas and we need to study how to reconcile our land use with the needs of that biodiversity. We shouldn’t ignore it out of a fear that people will get the wrong idea.
Grow food in vats, and the vast majority of the planet can just be like National Parks.
But I do think we can think of smart ways to ensure biodiversity under, say, solar arrays. Solar arrays are (or can be made to be) biologically inert. If they are high enough, they can act as a sort of technological canopy over a biodiverse forest floor. And that would only be a small portion of the planet (the rest would be National Parks). We’d use solar electricity to produce food super efficiently from vats. About 2000-4000W nameplate solar per person (at least in the 30N to 30S latitude that most people live in) should be enough to provide the macronutrients for the average person. At high efficiency, that’s about 10 square meters per person at noon. That’s just 100,000 square kilometers to feed 10 billion people, compared to over 50,000,000 square kilometers used for agriculture today (which is half of the habitable land surface of ~100 million km^2). It can be over the ocean, too. That’s just 0.02% of the Earth’s surface.
Consider this image: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/img/2018...
Notice that for the USA for example, not very much of the land is state or federal parks. The vast majority is used by humans in some way, and the reality is that they’re not about to turn it all into parks.
So, while pushing for the protection of as much land as possible, we should also study conservation on land that’s not already a protected area.
The book I mentioned has a number of examples where good conservation work has actually been done on such lands.
As far as actually farmed land, productivity has increased by an order of magnitude, MUCH faster than population, so we actually farm less land than in the 40s in spite of having a much larger population that eats more. We burn that corn in our cars, for goodness sake. The land area use for ethanol corn in our country is more than enough area to convert the entire nation’s electric production to solar.
Corn yields: https://extension.entm.purdue.edu/newsletters/pestandcrop/wp...
Agreed!
I would emphasize restoration and protection in almost every case.
Just that there’s also ways we can work towards conservation on land that is being utilized too.
You talked about farms but there’s also: managed forests, anywhere anything is grazing, private lands, fisheries, artificial reefs and kelp forests, any area we already use which we can also stack on an incidental conservation benefit ontop of (as you mentioned renewable energy infrastructure will be a big one, the book I mention is full of other surprising examples such as military bases), things like wildlife underpasses, suburban lawns, and so on. This adds up to a lot of land.
I hope we protect half of the land and ocean like Edward O. Wilson and other major biologists recommend, but also I think it’s smart to look at everything and not just protected areas.
I hate mowing the lawn. I actually prefer the typical "weeds" like clover and dandelion over the typical grass. Dumb that we basically mandate weird, chemical and labor-intensive grass monoculture.
I actually think about 90% of the land ought to become basically national parks and/or protected wilderness. Maybe even more. We can live in dense cities in absolute luxury and abundance (with 10,000 square foot condos... why not? multiple stories make it possible) and then those of us who like to can go camping on the weekends. Traveling by electric motorgliders to our weekend campsite. Cars only underground (but everyone has one still).
We're also causing top soil to erode and blow away in much of the corn belt [0]. That productivity has a cost and shouldn't be assumed.
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-say...
edit: I don't think we disagree, much. I'll leave the above for reference.
(Especially part 2 starting around 10m in).
I would like to note though that if we start mining and settling space, our growth would in fact be essentially unbounded.
Combined with the fact that some types of stars are expected to continue radiating energy for trillions of years...
https://www.openculture.com/2015/06/isaac-asimovs-favorite-s...
It's easy to take an outside look and say "well, see, humankind fixed it", but the personal energy and misery that goes into fighting for those fixes is enormous. I wouldn't call it "misanthropy".
Humans establishing self-sufficient communities beyond Earth would prove that humans have the capability to thrive sustainably on Earth. It would silence forever any technological objections to the possibility of human sustainability on Earth.
And a firm idea that humans can never establish self-sustaining communities in space is not that far from the idea that we probably cannot do so on Earth, either.
It really is not a huge step from pessimism about human future (ie in space) to nihilism about sustainability on Earth, and I do wish people would acknowledge this more: people enthusiastic about permanent settlements in space are, in fact, more certain about the possibility of sustainable thriving on Earth than the space-pessimists are.
Once we get depressed and nihilistic and give up, the universe will be forever deprived of the colour and drama human civilization can add to all those bare rocks up there.
I never considered that the implication is we could live here sustainably, but you’re right.
These discussions tend to be heavy on Asimov-inspired scifi-think and weak on just taking a walk in a forest on a nice sunny day in late spring. All this talk about having to colonize space is just rubbish, compared to the wonders of nature that would be worth preserving.
But the audience here is strongly biased. If most of your day is spent in front of a computer and reading scifi novels in the evening, then that's where the discussion moves.
Also, are you saying that forests are nature and space isn’t? Or are you saying that there aren’t any wonders of nature to experience out there?
Setting up nice sunny walk-ready forests in space is something that’ll take centuries, but if we don’t do it we’re doomed. Incidentally, so are the forests.
In a word, sustainable. An advanced civilization should be able to develop in a coordinated and self sustaining way, rather than as a grand experiment in tragedy of the commons. Microbes don’t coordinate their growth, and therefore fall into boom-bust cycles that dominate and exhaust their local environment. Humans can reason about these issues, but we see insufficient ability to collectively coordinate in response to them.
I'm not sure if it's technically a counterexample, but it's fascinating. Society seemed to collapse due to a series of causes, more or less unexplained to this day. (We have hypotheses, but it's still something of a mystery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples)
Update: Upon some brief research, the last Ice Age ended about 12,000 years ago, whereas the Bronze Age Collapse was around 1200 BCE. So totally unrelated.
Like where do you think we are? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
Seems to me like you are expecting too much. Worst part is, if that kind of thinking - do not exploit nature wins out - we might not even get there. Exploitation is key for scientific advancement in capitalism.
In capitalism? You mean, compared to the sustainable and non-exploitive nature of communism, for example?
The universe doesn’t grade on a curve.
> Exploitation is key for scientific advancement in capitalism
What a weird objection. It’s our science that tells us we need to radically reform how we consume resources. I’m not worried we’re going to waste all our resources in scientific endeavors, I’m concerned that we’re destroying the environment on which we depend for frivolous short term gains.
Every man* has his own temperament, value system, -- and so on -- that reason alone begets wildly different what-should-be-dones. That is, unless the achievement of a narrow aim would benefit the many---and therefore all those different reason machines come together to collectively strive towards some end---then we have all sorts of different, many times conflicting, what-should-be-dones (politics is a prime example here).
Perhaps then an authority should be appointed?; someone or some group whose sole purpose is to reason all day and all night, until they come up with a what-should-be-done that benefits their constituency (of course, this assumes they didn't ascend by force, coercion, or some other deviousness).
But now, we get into this dreadful stalemate: the more constituents there are, the more the means and the ends have to be tailored to them, and the more the whole venture becomes watered down, in order to suit some muddied "average." Or perhaps the authority decides to "draw a line in the ground," to create some abstract "core" of acceptable means and ends (as well as people to enlist), and shun out the rest---in order to maintain some semblance of identity and individualism.
Yet, now we have two very inefficient differentiations. On one hand, we have the all-inclusive reasoning-body, that is so held back by trying to please all, that it pleases none. On the other hand, we have the some-exclusive reasoning-body, that -- fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on one's own reasoning -- shuts out the "others," and does nothing to support the advancement of their ends (many times, quite the opposite).
I think it is self-evident that both are inefficient towards the coordination of all humanity. So are there any alternatives?
Perhaps we could simply do away with collective coordination -- or atleast some less rigid approach?
What about some type of individualism?; where each man* decides his own fate. Therein, each member is responsible for his own fate, and therefore---collectively---the fate of all man? Each soul going in his own direction, serving his interests foremost, and pushing the fate of humanity, in his own image, little by little -- like some plant, slowly rooting itself into the most impenetrable places, and overcoming the, otherwise apparent, impossible odds.
On a local level, humanity is ever unsustainable, "booming-and-busting," but on the world level we have survived, and will continue until we lose our survival instincts (impossible, collectively). Each member of the human race will do what he must to survive and improve his own circumstances, even if it leaves others worse off; then, those worse-offs must now improve their circumstances further, and strive for a better life. In the end, each man guarantees the survival (but not thrival) of the human race, by the virtue of his selfishness.
*Are we still doing the "man" is not synonymous with "human" fad? It's more of a stylistic choice, rather than an "only men can use reason." I.e, it flows better than "hu-man."
As a stylistic choice, I also have an aversion to dressing up human decision-making in such abstract and flowery terminology. We've invented lots of cool tools for thinking and doing, but we're still simply advanced primates with lots of baggage.
I think where we differ is in our approach to language. I see it as a medium of art -- like a song or a painting. "Man" is but a certain, evocative hue of brown that I believe fits best into the feelings I'm trying to elicit; and "human" is a lesser, albeit passable substitute.
I think this scientificization, making it more rigorous and "comprehensible," has done the opposite. Words have connotations, denotations, and all sorts of deeper meanings behind them. "Human" is such a sterilized, unnevocative word; and I refuse to use it.
However, certainly you've felt something from its usage -- even if that feeling was not the one I felt (compare it to: human -- which only the most scientifically-obsessed would have their hearts sing from its utterance).
"Human" is a perfectly evocative word that does make people's "hearts sing". You have the "human touch", humanitarianism, treating things humanely. It reflects our highest aspirations for ourselves, and your rejection of it reflects upon you.
"Man" connotes... well, men. It depicts a society where the real movers and shakers are men. No one really hears "man" and thinks "men and women" (or "women and men" - why should men come first?). Notably, they say they do, but this has been shown by experiment to be inaccurate. If you say "man", people can't help but picture one. Indeed I also notice you use gendered language everywhere, not just in the word "man" to mean humanity. You say "men of letters", for instance, and you take care to match the pronouns. Am I really meant to imagine women when you write that? Would "people" not do just as well?
Lastly - far from being a "fad", this debate was active in the 70s, and has been entirely resolved now; nobody uses "man" this way anymore, and it sticks out like a sore thumb when you do. It sounds archaic to the point of comical. Consider if the subtextual message you want to send with your word choices is "I stubbornly refuse to adapt to the times".
Douglas Hofstadter (you may have heard of him!) wrote a lot about this in the 80s and 90s - I challenge anyone to read what he wrote and fail to be convinced: https://leeclarke.com/courses/intro/readings/Hofstadter_Chan...
Frankly, my experience has been that men are the real moves and shakers (and women impelling them to move, shake, and writhe around). It takes a certain amount of ego, and internal and emotional drive to "shake" and "move" (which I must assume you consider to be "good" aspects of humanity) the world -- one that most women do not have, and the ones that do require external resources to maintain that "drive" (mostly food).
I don't understand why you would rally around for this point. Being someone of substance is a worthless affair, compared to being someone of culture. The first comes easily to men, and arduously for women. The last comes easily to women, and arduously for men. It's an atrocity to eschew woman's gifts, to pursue men's. That's how you destroy a nation's culture, tradition, its children, and thereby its society. There must be a duality, with a strict boundary, else you get muddied people that don't know a single thing about what it means to be human. (in this context, it fit just right)
I use man in this way. I don't care what anyone---justifying their schooling and existence---has to say about it. Progress without purpose is wasted breath. Conforming for its own sake is death. Anything Western Intellectuals have written in the past 70 years I believe to be without merit.
...
Yet, I'll admit Hofstadter got a chuckle out of me with that riddle: I thought the surgeon was the male spouse of the deceased father! I yield.
I agree with your take, after it's been shoved in my face, and forced me to self-reflect. However, I'll still use "man" as a more archaic synonym of "human," albeit with a more apt note this time.
You got me. Take your upvote, and let me live in my crotchety, curmudgeon fantasy-land.
https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/16/is-it-too-late-to-prevent-cl...
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/can-we-slow...
Going to need something a little stronger than xkcd here. I'm not a climate scientist but a lot of the names attached to both links seem to be and they're saying if we act decisively in the next 29 years we can avoid the worst effects, which in that second link is defined as < 1.5C change this century
Edit: I also want to make it clear just in case anyone misinterprets my skepticism over the depth of the effects as skepticism in climate change or the urgency of it in general. I agree we need to do what we can to make sure things like this don't come to pass because I happen to like our somewhat diverse ecosystem and that we continue to damage it isn't great.
The second link says we are unlikely to keep global warming in this century below 2.7° Fahrenheit (1.5° Celsius) which has severe consequences for the environment.
I think you’re reading into their optimistic language a bit too much.
Do you watch the news? Have you seen a completely ice-free North Pole earlier in January? The ice in Norway, Russia and Iceland melting completely, permanently damaging the permafrost and releasing huge amounts of methane? Might be hard to notice from your apartment but the weather is going absolutely nuts in most of the world. Insect populations down by up to 90%. These are not “feelings”.
You missed the first part of their sentence.
On the flipside perhaps you're a little too much into doomsday scenarios?
We've quite literally transformed the entire planet and way of living inside of 30 years since personal computation technology took off. I really don't see it as particularly farfetched that we can correct for our negative consumptive habits inside of the same timeframe, considering our rate of advance and change only accelerated within that same timeframe.
I'll live out just the end of this century if I'm lucky so I'll be able to eat my words just fine if I'm wrong, but I'll bet you I'm not.
If we manage to get it started, what if another Trump gets elected and sabotage it from the top?
> Even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, global warming would continue to happen for at least several more decades, if not centuries
or
> In the absence of major action to reduce emissions, global temperature is on track to rise by an average of 6 °C
There is not much major action going on (except for the electrification of vehicles which is being driven by commercial venture) so your hopes are just that, hope. Hope is not a strategy. It is quite far fetched to expect a correction when literally all data points are going the other way.
Your view does not reflect the common scientific consensus. We’re at a stage where changes are irreversible and all we can do is minimize and prepare for them, as seen in the article.
This is not fatalism, much to the contrary: I’m saying corrective action is much, much more urgent than you seem to believe and has to be started immediately. We don’t have another 30 years to sit on it.
You also keep saying scientific consensus and data points but considering I keep finding information to the contrary and you’ve provided nothing I really think you mean your own personal and emotion driven stance. Of which I don’t buy.
Yup climate change is a big issue, we'll probably solve it to a point humanity and the broader earth will be fine in a reasonable time. Just like every other crazy things we've pulled off during the same geological instant.
All it offers is a meaningless “it’s up to us what happens next”. Where is the information to the contrary you see?
Here is an extensive report, from the same source, on the effects of predicted global warming: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2865/a-degree-of-concern-why-g...
Read it carefully, and note that the 1.5C scenario is extremely optimistic and assumes humanity will zero out emissions completely by 2050.
Whenever you read a study saying that 'In complex system X, Y will happen in a decade' breathe easily -- we can't model what the stock market will look like in a day. We can't model what user demand for a sale will be in a week. We can't model most complex things in any large time frame, and believing any conclusions in the XX years for something as complex as climate is bizarre.
Press releases and pop-science articles tend to try to strike a more hopeful tone, because it's extremely tiring and depressing just hearing "we're screwed" all day. I try to stay hopeful, but my faith that enough people will care soon enough is basically gone.
Do you think running out of oil will go smoothly? We already can't stand still for 5 minutes without blowing someone up in a resource war and basically all of our resources are plentiful for now.
Rising sea levels decreasing usable land. Rising temperatures destroying key organisms in the food chain. Mass deforestation is destroying the very things that allow us to breathe.
How much climate change affects you is a function of your wealth and your country's wealth (cost of basic resources as well as required countermeasures are growing). Anyone who's been on the low side of one or both of those variables will tell you that it's already miserable. Imagine, if you even can, what being in a poor country will be like when all the oil is gone, food can't grow the usual way (you need either hydroponics or serious genetic modification), increasingly unstable weather destroys everything you build and everyone else is out to get you to squeeze out every last drop of resources you might have?
What people with no such experience don't realize is that unlike our economic system, which funnels resources upwards, ecosystem collapse doesn't funnel them anywhere. It's just an endless pit and eventually, everyone is poor.
Example: Second world war. You might argue that it was not disaster comparable to climate change, but it did turn entire world upside down, disrupting everything aspect of life of vast majority of world's population. But it also led to incredible advancements in many areas, new discoveries in all sciences, new technologies, massive changes in societies as well.
So I don't see the situation as gloomy, we will survive, because we always do.
Taking an approach that "we will sort it out" ignores that the disaster is already unrolling, just too slow for most of us to notice. The longer we linger, the worse the situation, and the higher the human toll.
I look at the insanity in how the US responds to small movements of people now and despair at the thought of how we’ll deal with simultaneous waves of millions of climate refugees alongside the predictable handful of domestic crises.
Nothing I’ve said disagrees with the scientific consensus, so you could also just Google it rather than whining that someone on the internet isn’t holding your hand.
Can you prove what the scientific consensus is? What if I were claim the scientific consensus is different than what you claim it to be?
To the best of my knowledge, my language (while imprecise) is completely and totally uncontroversial in the scientific community.
"And when will that be?"
"Well, not to beat around the bush, but when the cancer has metastisized and is about to kill you, we will be certain enough of the benefit of surgery now. Yes, this will likely result in your death, but to move before we have solidified all of these variables to a five-sigma measure would be allowing too much emotion into our descision making."
> The near universal consensus of people who study natural systems is that we’re way, way, way behind.
What other advanced civilization is our benchmark for making such an assessment?
The second point isn't dependent on an external comparison.
If the goal/definition is concrete, then we can plan better and understand what is "enough" once we're caught up.
Alternatively, if you're simply putting out a Vision to inspire enthusiasm or incite fear, then "we're behind" is sufficient and doesn't require anything more because at best, it's the "race to the moon" and at worst, it's the "missile gap."
I mean, I guess I am, but really I'm mostly relaying my understanding of the scientific consensus. I didn't make my comment in some sort of vacuum where readers are supposed to understand the last few decades of climate science just from my comment...
In a situation where "we're behind" and "we're ahead" are both accurate statements point to a significant problem in the approach.
You choosing one of them exclusively means you're playing for "your team" instead of looking at reality of the situation which is neither useful nor honest.
I don't think we are. As long as we accept unbounded population growth, nothing is sustainable.
OP I was responding to stated:
"Microbes don’t coordinate their growth, and therefore fall into boom-bust cycles that dominate and exhaust their local environment. Humans can reason about these issues, but we see insufficient ability to collectively coordinate in response to them."
Government is how we collectively coordinate. Microbes exhaust their local environment by reproduction, hence the question.
Lots of things are unsustainable in the short term but sustainable in the long term. Hunter-gathering for instance. If you pick the berries off a bush, they're gone. You can't keep doing that all day every day or the plant will never reproduce and eventually stop producing berries. But if you look at the hunter-gatherer's berry picking habits over a whole year, it may well be sustainable because he's not doing it at the same rate all the time. Similarly, our unsustainable behaviors may be limited to a few centuries of rapid change taking us into a new and different sustainable future that wouldn't have been possible otherwise.
I've also taken an amateur interest in ecology and the natural sciences, and once you actually learn a bit about the species around you, the loss of habitat and biodiversity we're undergoing becomes a staggeringly obvious fact that most people are just completely oblivious to.
There's lots of nuclear power plants out there, shut down for political reasons, that'd be ready to go in weeks if you didn't have all the anti-nuclear protests, for starters.
There's also geo-engineering and such - spraying black stuff in the atmosphere to reduce the amount of incoming sunlight.
The idea that humanity couldn't deal with this situation if it spent anywhere in the ballpark of 100% of its resources on it seems to me frankly laughable.
We've just seen first-hand evidence that millions of people could be dying and some would find it politically expedient to pretend that it wasn't actually occurring.
We absolutely have the resources and capability to solve these problems. We just don't have the will or the policy.
I'm sorry, I don't follow, who do you mean? Colonialism? The Uighurs in China? People in India/Pakistan? Possible victims of global warming? The Holocaust?
>We just don't have the will or the policy.
Right, that's what I mean. The minute things get anywhere near serious, people are gonna figure something out real quick. Restarting the nuclear power plants and closing the coal plants would take weeks, be profitable in economic terms, and hugely reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The fact that nobody's done this means we aren't serious about it.
I mean, if you were really serious, you would just deregulate nuclear power totally. If the estimates of the harms of global warming are true, you could take 1 Chernobyl-scale incident per year and still come out on top. The fact that nobody's done this means we aren't serious about it.
The combination of facts that (1) we aren't serious about this and (2) there's plenty of low-hanging fruit we could reap if we were, leads me to believe this will not really be a problem, as soon as we do get serious about it.
Sure, human technology is super advanced, but we are no play for the elements.
First, we look at the numbers concerning best case scenarios and see that a few degrees of warming is basically inevitable. Then, we ask how likely it is that well make rapid corrections now - personally I see little evidence of that, but I hope I’m wrong.
Next, try to remember that nothing in the world is disconnected. There’s a long scholarship concerning resource conflict and the destabilizing effects of mass migration. We don’t have a good track record of dealing with this, and I see little reason to expect us to become better at it soon.
The geoengineering idea is especially ludicrous to me - what we’re really talking about are emergency uncontrolled experiments to stave off a worse disaster. We’ve organized our entire global economic system around carbon - any geoengineering project has to not only compete with that, but actively remove more carbon from the atmosphere, which is a problem you’re underestimating the difficulty of.
Meanwhile, we need to worry about positive feedback cycles from various sources of methane, and the rest of the related threats to our biosphere (ocean acidification, wildfire, extreme weather).
To close, what has humanity done to convince you that we’ll 100% restructure our society to collaboratively solve this crisis “once it gets bad enough”?
Good riddance. If our technological global civilization results in conditions that make technological global civilization impossible, then so be it. It wasn't fit to exist to begin with. It's a self-regulating problem.
> There’s a long scholarship concerning resource conflict and the destabilizing effects of mass migration. We don’t have a good track record of dealing with this, and I see little reason to expect us to become better at it soon.
I don't know what you mean here - are you suggesting mass migration is inevitable?
> The geoengineering idea is especially ludicrous to me - what we’re really talking about are emergency uncontrolled experiments to stave off a worse disaster. We’ve organized our entire global economic system around carbon - any geoengineering project has to not only compete with that, but actively remove more carbon from the atmosphere, which is a problem you’re underestimating the difficulty of.
No, I mean spraying dust into the atmosphere to make it darker, so less sunlight comes in.
It's not just a matter of economy - people aren't even picking the low-hanging fruit. If any country wanted to severely cut CO2 emissions, there's a simple thing they could do:
1) reopen all the closed nuclear plants 2) deregulate nuclear power plant construction, focus on mass producing cheap power plants with no regard for safety 3) shut down the coal plants 4) throw everyone who protests in prison
Obviously, this isn't done because all of these steps are politically impossible. But it just goes to show - if we were serious about this, we'd have picked the low-hanging fruit already. If we haven't even picked the low-hanging fruit yet, how can you say it's impossible?
> To close, what has humanity done to convince you that we’ll 100% restructure our society to collaboratively solve this crisis “once it gets bad enough”?
It's like people procrastinating their homework until 5 minutes before the deadline. Eventually they'll get it done.
Matter of preference I guess. I like to hope humanity will continue to learn things about and explore the broader universe rather than descent into feudal oppression (or some-such) in the ashes of our former civilization, but whatever.
> I don't know what you mean here - are you suggesting mass migration is inevitable?
At this point, that's the conclusion, yes. Climate impacts cause incredible destabilization for folks who rely more closely on their local environment (subsistence farmers and the global poor generally), and yes - disruption leads to mass migration.
> No, I mean spraying dust into the atmosphere to make it darker, so less sunlight comes in.
.... yes, an emergency uncontrolled experiment to solve some of the symptoms of a global problem. The global economy as it currently exists is geoengineering at an absolutely monumental scale.
Also, your reply is just incredibly baffling and frustrating, to the point that I half think you're not being serious. "Oh, we'll just spray some dust in the air and reflect more sunlight to solve the problem" - it's ludicrous, and nobody serious who studies geoengineering shares your attitude. I do believe we're going to have to engage in geoengineering, but it's not something to be taken lightly (and the experts who study it generally agree). Never mind the fact that even if your "solution" worked, it wouldn't solve things like ocean acidification, and would at best buy us some time... while having potentially unforeseen consequences on cancer rates, crop production, solar efficiency, etc.
> It's like people procrastinating their homework until 5 minutes before the deadline. Eventually they'll get it done.
Talk about unearned optimism. Not everything is a problem you can just go "fix".
Probably fair to say that it's not low hanging fruit then.
I think a lot of time is being spent on finding politically correct solutions, but maybe we'll come full circle back to your solution after wasting a lot of time with fancy solutions that don't have a significant enough effect.
I's not misanthropy to note that we're not so different from other species and that our growth/behavior is in many respects similar to other natural phenomena involving complex systems. Our long term success is correlated with our ability to shift resources away from negative-sum behaviors so as not to exceed the carrying capacity of our environment.
At a macro scale, both fire and life create net entropy. The difference is when you zoom in and see either created order or uniform destruction.
Why would the traditional mathematics of growth make all that less?
This Game of Life video shows what I mean perfectly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8
Yes, there's a ton of complexity in there, but when you zoom out enough, it looks and acts very similar to the lower level.
Man’s natural instinct, in fact, is never toward what is sound and true; it is toward what is specious and false. Let any great nation of modern times be confronted by two conflicting propositions, the one grounded upon the utmost probability and reasonableness and the other upon the most glaring error, and it will almost invariably embrace the latter. It is so in politics, which consists wholly of a succession of unintelligent crazes, many of them so idiotic that they exist only as battle-cries and shibboleths and are not reducible to logical statement at all. It is so in religion, which, like poetry, is simply a concerted effort to deny the most obvious realities. It is so in nearly every field of thought. The ideas that conquer the race most rapidly and arouse the wildest enthusiasm and are held most tenaciously are precisely the ideas that are most insane. This has been true since the first “advanced” gorilla put on underwear, cultivated a frown and began his first lecture tour in the first chautauqua, and it will be so until the high gods, tired of the farce at last, obliterate the race with one great, final blast of fire, mustard gas and streptococci. (Meditation on Meditation, 1922)
It's hard to believe the USA's top newspaper editor once wrote like that! Writing worth paying for. Here's some more:
[The Declaration of Independence is] "a mere string of sonorous phrases, a piece of windy flapdoodle, a rhapsody almost empty of intelligible meaning, and probably composed under the influence of ethyl alcohol. And yet, as I say, it is more powerful than a million swords. It looms larger than the massive fact of Gettysburg. It is worth more than the whole Civil War. The man who loosed it upon posterity has left it a vaster heritage than the man who invented baseball." (Smart Set, 1914)
He said of US politics:
"It was Americans who invented the curious doctrine that there is a body of doctrine in every department of thought that every good citizen is in duty bound to accept and cherish; it was Americans who invented the right-thinker. … In the face of this singular passion for conformity, this dread of novelty and originality, it is obvious that the man of vigorous mind and stout convictions is gradually shouldered out of public life. He may slide into office once or twice, but soon or late he is bound to be held up, examined and incontinently kicked out. This leaves the field to the intellectual jelly-fish and inner tubes." (Baltimore Evening Sun, 1920)
[0] e.g. "OCCIDENT: The part of the world lying west (or east) of the Orient. It is largely inhabited by Christians, a powerful subtribe of the Hypocrites, whose principal industries are murder and cheating, which they are pleased to call war and commerce. These, also, are the principal industries of the Orient."
It covers how similar growth patterns can be identified, from cities, vegetation, motors and human life.
It is a long book, but recommended by none other than gates [1]
"If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9905847
The bacteria within us certainly don't know anything about our consciousness. Yet somehow the sum total of their activity results in a conscious being. If we as humans look and act like bacteria when we zoom out, do we suffer the same myopia of our bacteria friends, unable to recognize the consciousness our collective activity creates? It's fun to think about.
That seems like a slightly peculiar idea of what a conscious being is.
In a real sense we are a joint venture.
Recently I've found myself too stressed to even think about it. Too many stresses in life and I can do without the planet for now.
Totally selfish I know, but I'll get back to it when other things have died down.
I think what we need is something which helps us recognise the issues. Not only that but show us what we can do to help! We have to understand at a micro-level, how we can make an impact in aggregate.
Too much/little X causes outbursts of Y.
The question is, has Earth got a few spots lurking behind the earlobes. Or is there a feature-length episode of Dr Pimple Popper taking place?
Slime mold doesn't have the same ring as "rail network planning AI", but it seems that's what it is.
1: https://outline.com/t8hxKh (original: https://www.wired.com/2010/01/slime-mold-grows-network-just-...)
When you zoom out, the law is the law.
To suggest we are somehow not different is another kind of arrogance. We absolutely are and that gives us a unique level of agency and control. That is brilliant and scary. We are able to turn down the thermostat of an entire planet (reduce co2). That kind of culturally motivated intervention is completely unprecedented and totally different to historic humans and other species.
I think this pattern of exponential growth of human beings is a curse of their intelligence. All other animals end up being controlled by these large ecosystem dynamics because they can't adapt and/or do group work sufficiently. Species with this property are easily influenced/controlled by large scale dynamics.
Maybe, a species with more intelligence than us wouldn't grow so fast and unorderly because they can see the future consequences of their own dynamics more easily. We just happen to not deal with large temporal scales very well.
Yet people breed anyway, for a multitude of selfish reasons. Everyone else is having babies so why shouldn't I, it's my right as a human to reproduce, I want to pass on my genes, I want my life to be fulfilling, I don't want to die alone, the list goes on. It is these lines of thinking that have caused our population to balloon to over 7 billion people with no end in sight.
No one is thinking of the planet.
And let's remember that Agent Smith is itself attempting to take over the world.
In that case, it's presumed it was indeed a massive extinction (but no data to quantify any % over, due to no microbial fossils preserved).
... But for a different reason. It wasn't due to decrease in oxygen levels; contrary to that. At that time, oxygen was being first ever introduced into the atmosphere. This has left a unique geological trace we observe everywhere across the planet: the white sedimentary + red rust striped 2 Ga rocks.
The "microbes" were the first photosynthesisers. The oxygen was a toxic byproduct. Resistance to it had to be learned by evolution, and that learning took ~1e8 years. Many of life didn't manage to and went extinct.
But to me the fascinating part is that we're aware of looking like bacterias. We are matter that became conscious of itself.
Isn't that the weirdest thing?
When microorganisms divide, the children "appear" in the same location. Our species growth dynamics kind of has this same property in that it's easier to build something closer to the already established region than far away.
So, in the end, looking from far away, the growth pattern is the same.
We are mostly lead by greed and not a need of growth. This is ofcourse not the case for all individuals but good enough portion.
Potentially, one of us could even decide to stop being a parasite and scale down, move to the forest and live naked as a result.
My personal theory is that we're nature way of extending beyond earth. Yes we're a funghi, but a clever enough one we can be the earth's tentacle to go spread beyond.
Now can we extrapolate? If we zoom out more do we see the same happening? Does the interaction between all the galaxies create a thought? A slow one perhaps.
Exactly the sort of comment that fits the community here. I hope that gives some clue why this is an upvoted comment.
This is amazing, will this be included in the VR versions of google earth? For those who haven't tried it yet Google Earth is the first thing I show friends who've never tried VR before by giving them a Godzilla's eye view of Tokyo. I've yet to find someone who doesn't ":o"
I've had good times passing the headset around in a room full of people to share places we've been.
It's also cool to look down, as a giant, at paths you've taken irl and get a sense of scale.
I love google earth in VR
Which is PC-only, no Macs.
I'm very happy with it and haven't experienced the tracking issues others complain about.
At work I've previously tried some of the early oculus dev versions, the original Vive, and the PSVR. The Cosmos was the first which felt like a really great product and not just tech with potential if it were a bit better.
I'm wondering if the Timelapse will get added to it.
(Used on a Quest 1 and 2 over Virtual Desktop to a PC)
Yeah, whats up with that? Unless its all under wraps, Google is letting what lead they had whither away. Its silly to think they had working inside out tracking (Tango) in 2014.
Earth VR and Tilt Brush are still around, and as mentioned about, Tilt Brush is even open sourced. They just haven't had as much interest making new stuff. VR didn't pick up the way most hoped it would, and at this point there isn't really much to do until we get another wave of innovation that pushes the boundary forward.
Also Tango was more AR than VR. I don't think they ever had any lead in VR. Cardboard was neat but just that.
As for VR not picking up, it didn't pick up on startup folks timeline but there has been steady growth in the market and it's close to sustainable for many developers. Facebook, Valve, Sony, Microsoft and Apple have been more persistent and came in with realistic expectations. I think this is a case where Google was premature entering the market and also premature exiting. If they re-enter they'll probably look like Microsoft trying to re-enter the mobile or tablet market in the 2010s after not succeeding in the 90s and 2000s. That's not to say that VR will "take over the world" like smartphones, but its on its way to evolving into a sustainable category with a variety of compelling use cases.
Earth VR and Tilt Brush are pretty complete apps, not everything needs to be worked on forever. At some point you get diminishing return and start wasting your time.
They had inside out headsets before Oculus. Check out their partnership with Lenovo and the Mirage Solo headset. Despite working well for 6dof tracking it had the same terrible Daydream controller.
A year later Oculus released the quest with a better industrial design, camera array and 6dof controllers to much more success. The chip was a generation newer but arguably the success came from things that could have happened a year sooner.
I worked on AR/VR at Google and the projects have mostly paused because there's no visible financial benefit. No one in the real world cares enough about VR to justify it as a business. We prototyped hundreds of applications—every idea you can possibly think of—and all of them are either impractical with today's technology, or not useful enough to bother putting a VR headset on your head.
AR/VR is one of those things that feels so magical that you think, "There must be amazing things we can do with it!" but it turns out there's not. At least not yet. The situation is pretty clear because Facebook, Apple, and Google all bet big on AR/VR and all of them have stalled indefinitely.
I'm not surprised when Google walks away from things, but this seems premature and short sighted.
And if the Quest 2 has sold 2-3 million units so far, that's unremarkable. The Apple Watch was considered a failure in its first year and it made 10 million sales. We've already passed Christmas so you're not going to see a further spike in sales.
If Apple enters the market it might reignite the spark. Apple can do that because they deliver extremely high quality products that inspire people. Google can't do that because it's not in the company DNA and Googlers knows it, so it's a waste of time.
I guess I think Google is taking a huge risk here by taking their hat out of the ring so early. Even if others have slowed their investment, Microsoft/Apple/Facebook are under the radar continuing very significant work and it really feels like we could flip over a tipping point and Google might be way behind. This may be more like gcloud than Android and they could find themselves a decade behind other players.
My personal use case is being able to have any number of monitors of any size and shape, eg: [0]. So far its been limited by screen resolution and lack of good hand tracking and dedicated accessories, but these are very close to being solved with the next gen. devices.
[0] https://twitter.com/oculus/status/1286345820699340801/photo/...
If you're on more of a budget the PSVR is quite good if you happen to have a PS4.
But - yeah - with everything switched off it can be at the "intense" end of the spectrum.
The motion sickness factor isn't zero, but its' small.
Does it include buildings? (Could it, if not?) I’ve been dying for this for ages.
Your app looks great. I like the way you visualise twilight/golden hour on your map. There is another project called shadowmap.org you might like.
Later, seeing Google Earth, I was like "Wait I've used this before."
Funny enough I also remember thinking that it was only a matter of time before they changed it to a live feed and we would all have to be more careful about drawing our curtains a little better.
"Does it run on Linux?"
That reminds me, a couple years ago I ran into a guy working for a company that could wirelessly power displays in a contact lens. Not remotely practical and I think it was maybe a couple hundred pixels at most, but definitely more of that living in future vibe.
The practicality of having a total guide to location via search/address/direction far outweighed the appeal of a visual location you can find.
Watching the change of specific suburban areas in the US brings a lot of negative emotions for me. Seeing what used to be green areas slowly transform into more suburban sprawl, I can't help but think of the number of species who experienced their ecosystem's walls closing in on them.
As someone who builds a lot of data visualizations, this would be in my top experiences for the category. It's in a way... an art piece.
I cant wait to see what everyone, including myself can create with this!
EDIT; This should be one of the most important augmenting data tools for Environmental Impact studies.
Take a site that was built at the beginning of this dataset - which had an EIS done, compare the results seen in this tool to the predictions in the EIS... and use that for MANY EIS which had some of the same impact or variables and see how the surroundings compare etc...
I've been in a position where I wanted to search for a website that was popular in 2012 without having the exact name, and having to find an old forum post that linked to it to find it.
Does this help?
foobar before:2012
It's not perfect but quick and easy for what I mostly do which is trying to find older news articles on stories that have changed
Previous discussion from eight months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24005047
There's also the "Historical Imagery" feature in the downloaded version of Google Earth ("Google Earth Pro") which has even more detail. I get that there's some benefit to making it more visible as a feature in the browser version of Google Earth though.
Looking at my home in the UK, it's a blur in 1985, then the next image in 2003 is fairly sharp. The image quality is consistent/slightly improves from 2003 until 2014, and then from 2014 - 2017 it's a blur again. 2018 is the sharpest of all the historical images, better even than 2020.
You can take a look at the source code here if you’re interested: https://github.com/doersino/earthacrosstime
I played around with it a bit. Timelapse seems to only exist at large scales. I can't seem to resolve anything more detailed than a highway. Previously Google had higher resolution historical data. I used this to see how my house, neighborhood, and city changed over decades. There was black and white photography at the far end of the data. This was in the desktop version of Google Earth.
I just downloaded the desktop version of Google Earth and was happy to find out the historical data is still available there. :) Hope that makes it to the web version.
There is a little clock icon above the imagery area with a counter clockwise green arrow you must click to access historical imagery.
Luckily they do release a version of the desktop app that works on linux.
[Download page] https://www.google.com/earth/versions/#download-pro
I don't use it often but I have to say that it's one of the delivered promises of the Internet. It's tech done right.
What an outstanding video.
Would probably break some apps which don’t correctly handle TLD-only domain names though, I suppose.
How on GoogleEarth do I get back the timeline option that I've somehow closed?
I'm probably being an idiot, but I'm not a total idiot, and it's not at all clear to me how I access the timeline now.
The "I'm feeling lucky" icon is WAY too prominent. A misclick there quickly screws whatever it was I was just looking at.
The trick is to click on the Voyager icon and then choose Timelapse in one of the panels that comes up.
Like it or not Google does all this with the ad money they bring in. Imagine if all Google service were subscription based. Will they even have 25% of the capabilities they have now?
I'm conflicted. On one hand you could argue it's like some dictatorship putting on lavish parades while conditions in their regime are generally terrible (I'm not trying to compare the magnitude of the problem, just the idea that having something fancy to show doesn't necessarily cancel out all the harm done)
Or is it a natural positive byproduct of capitalism that the internet has garbage strewn corners filled with listicles and "content" alongside genuinely cool stuff. And trying to clamp down on this would just make everything mediocre.
Anyway, there are definitely lots of good things Google had done, in research, in public availability of tech, and in cool stuff like this. Are we making the right tradeoff against all the bad they have done, I don't know.
There's plenty of shit to throw at Google (Timnit Gebru). Let's not dilute concrete criticisms with bland whatevers like "turned much of the internet into a cesspit".
But I don't think Google turned internet into a cesspit. Yes, Youtube's recommendation algorithms are pretty bad. But there other actors who deserver a bigger share of the blame.
Rainforest everything.
Singapore
And then normalize it against the benefit Google provides with its services and I bet it would be super clear that they are a great use of energy.
https://sustainability.google/commitments
And if you open the PDF at the bottom, I think it has the data you wanted.
I find it surprising that it hasn't been shut off and/or merged into maps years ago
This is outstanding.
https://www.globalforestwatch.org/
https://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/science-2013-global-...
I built an app which visualizes global fire history per year from 2001 to 2020, still working out some kinks but maybe will share here.
The vegetation loss visualizations are too complex for me to tweak properly. I hope there are data science journalists who are using this tool.
One thing that really stands out to me is the change in our land use/environmental changes over time. You can even see the different reservoir levels for various years and can "guesstimate" what year certain droughts were.
I'm sure there's some amazing ideas to use this tool, I'm just excited about it.
https://earth.google.com/static/wasm/9.134.0.0/earthwasm.was...
Google has been a pretty great pioneer on geospatial data science and visualization platforms, especially with Earth Engine (also free to use and allows you to access vast repositories of free geospatial data and use Googles computing resources to do data science with them).
Still zooms into 15th and Kasold in Lawrence on default.
RCJH
https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Coperni...
> I have a higher-than-average carbon footprint, so I’m taking extra steps to do my part. In the book I briefly mention how I’m offsetting my own emissions. I spend about $5 million every year to offset my family’s carbon footprint. As of now, the standard calculation for carbon footprints is based on an estimate of $400 per ton of emissions. But since the way we calculate carbon footprints is still in its infancy, I take our family’s carbon footprint and double it to make sure we are fully covering our footprint and then some.
> I also like to think of my investments in zero-carbon technologies as another kind of offset for my emissions. Investing in companies doesn’t make my carbon footprint smaller. But if I’ve picked any winners, they’ll be responsible for removing much more carbon than I am responsible for creating. I have given more than $1 billion toward innovations and ideas that I hope will help the world get to zero—including affordable and reliable clean energy, low-emissions cement, steel, meat, and more.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/What-you-can-do-to-fight-c...
It's not like this money magically got created. In order for him to have $5 million, someone had to pay it, maybe by creating even more pollution. At least he is aware that he is doing bad thing, but the attitude "I am rich, so I can" is narcissistic and wrong.
Does terrible things happen as a result of moral hazard? Sure. But does anyone who earns a dollar take a dollar from someone else, or the world, to obtain it? No.
And how much carbon does he emit to earn that 5 million. That emission isn't part of his family's emission because it comes from microsoft. It's like tax evasion but for carbon emission.
While their predecessors done exactly the same.
Rich people become gatekeepers. If everyone could be rich, then they wouldn't be so special anymore. That's why they lobby for high taxes (with appropriate loopholes, so they don't pay them, but anyone who starts from 0 won't get rich), excessive regulation (so that poor man's company will never be able to compete) and other measures to keep population "in check".
Europe is actually reforesting, and not by a little bit either:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/...
The answer to side-effects of human progress is not stopping it, it's to accelerating the growth of technology so we can mitigate the issues we create and fix the harms the cause. F*ck Google!
I'm curious to see people search for the growth of the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch". I'm pretty sure most people will be surprised to find that there is nothing to see. But I'll try it out.
four decades of meaningless uncontrolled overpopulation, destruction of pristine nature and its ecosystems, a march of techno-globalism across the planet. Every time I see these timelapses it depresses me quite a bit.
Look at predicted population numbers in Japan for example.
The population in Europe is larger than it has ever been in any point in history.
If you look at the advanced countries, they are often the ones who exploited their resources and grew in size early. Britain, for instance, slashed their forests generations ago to get ahead. The US used to shoot herds of bison from trains. Now Britain and the US wag a finger at less developed countries for consuming the forests and ecosystems in their countries.
Similar with population growth and the concept of 'overpopulation'. If you assert we have overpopulation, you have to assert how you'll address it, and there's no way to do that without saying, "Some group of people doesn't get to have kids." That seems like a really bad thing to say.
I'm incredibly lefty, a self described socialist and eco-socialist, but I believe that we need to think differently than just "those people over there are destroying their environments and having too many babies!" We could start at home, transforming our own economy and society to live less exploitatively. We could reduce our own use of meat and dairy, for instance. We could ensure we had adequate housing for everyone, and medical care for everyone, both of which would lead to less waste. We could strictly limit single use plastics, remove older dams to improve fish stocks, set aside more land for forests, etc.
Of course, like all NIMBY types, their consumption of air and Brazilian hardwoods is just fine.
I am one. I limit my personal carbon footprint. I do not own a car (and hopefully never will). I rarely eat meat. I live in a cheap, inefficient apartment because I'm living on a student income, but I keep the heat low to try to limit my energy consumption.
I probably won't have kids, because it wouldn't be consistent with my concerns about climate change to bring another high-consuming American into the world.
As soon as some nation makes contraceptives economically available, the native population growth goes negative. Do you know many families with three children? Because that seems like a minimal number, no?
Immigrants who (1) come when younger, and further (2) have more children mask this problem a bit, but their supply is limited. (Sorry for my insensitivity, I'm not from The West myself.) The easy contraceptives will get to even poorest countries in a generation or two. There will be a Big Shrink before the narrative of fertility takes hold again.
Most life forms?
p.s. username checks out.
People sitting in traffic complaining about traffic or cancer cells complaining about the devastation caused by cancer sounds a bit silly.