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Comment by Niglodonicus | Hacker News Reader

I mean, there's a lot of techno-optimists on this forum diligently huffing the hopium that the eventual (perhaps even imminent) collapse of our current systems will surely be subverted by some great breakthrough. Of course they're going to downvote any view that purports that this is highly unlikely.

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Personally, I been upvoting everyone who makes realistic and valid points, even if I don't like what they have to say, because especially in discussions about this particular topic, we need to entertain a wide variety of viewpoints and be willing to accept that not any one magical solution is gonna fix this.

The reality is that the whole "climate crisis" thing is gonna require humanity in general to gang up on the problem from all angles and each contribution will help the overall situation improve to some degree. The sum of all those contributions is the solution.

The longer we keep looking to corporations, politicians, and scientists to come up with a "magic bullet" for the problem, the worse it's gonna be for everyone and the less likely any amount of human efforts will be able to improve it again.

It's a lot bigger of an issue than merely the climate crisis. Regarding trying to prevent it (and related issues), we would not only needed to have started 50+ years ago (when it was already clear what was happening), but the incentives in our economic system just do not work in such a way to allow for all the capitalist decision makers to all collectively stop turning a profit. The system is somewhat like rolling a boulder up a hill, it must continuously push it up, or the boulder will roll back down, a little, or all the way. Once growth becomes imposssible/infeasible due to resource limitations, this will happen eventually anyway. But if the machine stops churning, it will simply happen sooner.

Regarding the various aspects of the unsustainability of our society and how it is reaching its limits, this wiki subsection is a very good read (and the rest of the wiki page as well, separated into concrete sections, and links to lots of source materials):

https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/wiki/index#wiki_what_would...

> https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/wiki/index#wiki_what_would...

Some good info at that link. Thank you for that.

(Gonna take me a while to read through it all, but at least it gives me something to do with my time besides just storing up survival resources and stress-levels while I wait for it to happen.)

Be careful with collapse Reddit. That’s pretty typical doomer material so be careful going down that rabbit hole. It’s very focused on lots of what-ifs and not so much solutions.

Ya, digging deeper, I discovered a lot of 'em are far more concerned with finger-pointing and playing the blame game than with any sort of planning, solutions, ideas, or anything remotely positive or helpful.

A water shortage is something most of the world has been dealing with forever. The only people who panic about this are just privileged people who grew up with super cheap/unlimited water.

Collapse of ecology is certainly a problem. The Colorado river is not (for residents). A tiny portion of the population who farms consumes more than all of the residential use combined.

We make farmers pay for the fucking water they use and then the problem is solved. This doesn’t even require a technological breakthrough.

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