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Comment by crispyporkbites | Hacker News Reader

In 500 years? It has to be 50 or there won’t be any societies to power in 500 years

I think you might be correct.

I wonder what makes so many people - even here on HN - so furiously jam their fingers in their ears and go "Lalalala" whenever you get realistic about the impact of our predatory ecosystem exploitation or about the consequences of population migration because of climate change.

It is so strange.

As bad as climate change is, it’s not going to wipe out human civilization in 50 years.

But will it be extinct in 500/5000/50,000 years?

There's an incredible arrogance in this thread of man's capabilities over natures. People better check themselves.

I don’t think cloning animals is some kind of godlike technological power. It’s clearly something humans are already capable of doing to some extent.

Projected 500-1000-5000 years into the future, it doesn’t seem arrogant to me to assume we will be able to clone extinct animals en masse.

projecting 5000-50,000 years into the future and failing to see humanity's extremely likely extinction based on current trends is the arrogance.

No, it isn’t, it’s being realistic. Human beings aren’t going extinct because of climate change, nuclear weapons, or anything else. Some people would survive and they would inevitably repopulate.

I think the unbounded optimism / arrogance is that life as is will continue indefinitely, or just get better and better.

That might happen, but climate change is one of very few things that will stop it (others being nuclear war, asteroid strikes, volcanic eruptions, solar flares and other disease)

Let me get this straight: climate change models predict conditions likely to lead to the collapse of civilization and you say "the map is not the territory, no need to be alarmed", but your extrapolation of our cloning capability should totally be respected?

I didn’t say there was no need to be alarmed, I said civilization isn’t going to collapse.

These also aren’t the same things. Cloning is a technology that will likely continue to be more and more possible. It’s not really a question of if, but when. Even then it was just a creative suggestion.

Modeling civilizations responses to climate change is basically science fiction. Yes, bad stuff will happen. No, you can’t predict that society will collapse because of it.

No but if we keep polluting at this rate, in 500 years civilisations will crumble. If food supply chains fail we’ll see a bunch of wars break out and a global chain reaction that will destroy massive amounts of progress.

Most likely we’ll land back at the Middle Ages- it’s happened to pretty much every civilisation to date so it’s unlikely ours will be any different.

If anything given our global scale it will be worse.

Actually, climate change is likely to have “major economic consequences” in ~2038, followed by “globally catastrophic events” in ~2067. After that, the economy and civilization as we know it will presumably no longer exist.

https://mk0insideclimats3pe4.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/upload...

(Page 14)

So, this human civilization is on schedule to collapse in about 50 years.

Of course, science in this matter has improved since 1980, but I like that report because it correctly predicted the current state of things 40 years ago. Also, it was written by the big oil companies. It’s difficult to argue they were being intentionally alarmist or had the science wrong.

Science isn’t fortune telling. It doesn’t predict the future.

I’m sorry, but a PDF from 1980 isn’t exactly a reliable source of information about the future. It’s a little scary how people think this is a real possibility.

Of course science can predict the future. Drop a pen off your desk. Newton correctly predicted what speed it would hit the floor at, and he did it back in 1687.

If not science, what do you suggest people use to predict the future?

Anyway, here’s a more modern source. It was peer reviewed, and is considered up to date and also reliable:

https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/

I suggest reading it, but if you scroll halfway down, you can type in a county, and it’ll provide more detailed predictions. I suggest checking it against recent news. You’ll find that the areas it predicts will soon be uninhabitable are already showing signs of ecosystem collapse. (Especially the US southwest)

Observations of computer models are not observations of the natural world. They can be helpful, but the map is not the territory.

Again, civilization is not going to collapse in the 2060s because an academic research paper says so.

Human civilization has collapsed before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse

Like you said, what remains may no longer be as we know it, but then again humanity has gone through so many paradigm shifts (and the shifts are accelerating due to technology) that it would be surprising if civilization was the same 50-100 years from now.

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