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Comment by jjoonathan | Hacker News Reader

It always brings me joy to read doomsday prophecies from decades, centuries, and millenia past. They were legion -- so confident, yet so wrong.

I hope your predictions bring similar joy to future readers in the decades, centuries, and millenia to come.

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The thing is, occasionally those predictions have been right and society reverts to a state less advanced than it was for hundreds or thousands of years. A lot of the technology from Ancient Rome, building techniques, steam engine technology, etc. were lost for thousands of years. It’s totally conceivable to me that 500 years from now scientists have access to a wealth of electronic media, but haven’t invented the computer and thus can’t read it.

They're starting to break the code on it, but there are concrete docks that Rome built 2000 years ago that still exist today - we have trouble building salt resistant concrete docks that last ~100 years.

Apparently it has to do with using a certain type of volcanic ash in the concrete...

> we have trouble building salt resistant concrete docks that last ~100 years

Because of failures in technology/ability, or lack of incentive/motivation? It isn't obvious to me that anyone cares to build long-lasting structures..

We've known for a good while how Roman concrete works. The reason that nobody uses it is that the economic incentives aren't there. Roman concrete is more annoying to work with and takes way, way longer to usefully solidify than cheap modern concrete. Yes, it will last longer, but almost nobody these days cares about paying through the nose for a building that will last more than 100 years when you could just force future generations to pay to rebuild it when it collapses.

It's a test of intergenerational commitment, because you are asking the generation that bears the cost of construction to build something that benefits many future generations. But the future generations, even though they enjoy all those beautiful old buildings provided to them by their ancestors, are tempted to go cheap for the building they need to build themselves.

So as people become disconnected from the great chain of being that connects your ancestors to you and you to your descendants, they start to build ugly, disposable buildings.

Perhaps one approach might be to provide lower interest rates to buildings based on the expected life and maintenance cost. So a building that is expected to last 500 years would have a much lower annual interest burden than a building expected to last 70 years. That would require some type of government guarantee for the 500 year bond.

I really wish the Romans had invented apocalyptic fiction, in the modern sense. Would've been interesting to read what their anxieties were in non-poetic, scrutable terms.

That's basically what the Book of Revelation is, although it's referring to Romans rather than being written by them.

Too poetic and inscrutable.

I was very young at the time, but I was absolutely convinced that the world would end at 2020. It didn’t, and that deeply ingrained in me a very substantial amount of skepticism from doomsdaysayers. The only doomsday I believe in now for absolute certainty is the heat death of the universe, but no one reading this will be around for that.

There was quite a lot of doomsday talk during the Cold War, and there has been periodic environmental doomsday predictions since the 60s, starting with overpopulation and chemicals like DDT. Interspersed with that was AI and nanotech apocalyptic concerns. Climate change is the latest. The idea that civilization will manage to avoid the worst case scenarios and find its way through is not as exciting. You probably won't sell as many books or public appearances that way. And it doesn't make for the best Black Mirror episodes. Although there are a couple exceptions.

This is a little bit like the bird who avoids the cat for 3 days in a row using that as evidence that cats can't eat birds. Be careful extrapolating possible futures only by sampling past events. That's why we have physics, because we are notoriously bad at doing that with just our intuition.

Climate change is a pretty simple proposal with pretty simple and direct evidence. Carbon traps light, which means more heat is trapped within the atmosphere. We can measure the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. That atmosphere will obey physics. More heat will be trapped.

> Climate change is a pretty simple proposal with pretty simple and direct evidence. Carbon traps light, which means more heat is trapped within the atmosphere. We can measure the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. That atmosphere will obey physics. More heat will be trapped.

Yes, but that's different from an apocalyptic scenario. Predicting the population increase in the 60s was also scientific. Predicting that we couldn't feed several billion people turned out to be wrong. Increased sea level rise and more extreme weather is one thing, predicting that human civilization ends and we all die is an entirely different matter.

Apcoalytic scenarios make worst case assumptions. That we'll fight a nuclear war which will trigger a nuclear winter, or that population won't peak and there's no green revolution, or that feedback loops will lead to a hothouse Earth scenario. But the likely projections don't show that.

It's funny that there is a set of people who think we can't survive +2 degrees of heat but can easily be an interplanetary species surviving in Mars.

I see no reason to suspect there's much overlap there, and in any case this misrepresents both arguments. Climate change doesn't need to render the planet uninhabitable to all life in order to devastate human civilization; if we are forced to abandon the coasts, it will be the biggest refugee crisis in human history by orders of magnitude, and hundreds of millions will die in the resulting chaos and scramble for resources. Meanwhile, Mars is a barren tomb world, and, at best, living in a colony there will be a physically and psychologically exhausting prospect, and has no chance at exhibiting any real self-sufficiency for hundreds of years at best, let alone anything resembling civilization.

Nobody thinks we can't survive 2 degrees of heat. After all typical climate fluctuations of more than 100 degrees are common in human experience. What you're describing is a strawman argument.

The actual concern is 2 degrees of average heat change and how that will change the web of systems that we rely on for current human civilization. Break enough subsystems in there and the human experience becomes dramatically different.

> There was quite a lot of doomsday talk during the Cold War,

Unfortunately, all the existential risks from the Cold War are still around, plus we have new ones we didn't know about or didn't take seriously back then.

Society as we knew it definitely took a hit in 2020 though.

Collapse is not a singular event at a fixed point in time like the start of a war would be, it's a process.

Which is why some people have taken to using the term crumble rather than collapse, crumbling happens at different rates in different places and can sometimes, at least temporarily, be fixed.

Yeah, that's a good term and a good way of thinking about it. When all the crumbling overlaps for a century, you get Gibson's Jackpot.

Luckily, you are much older and wiser today, a full year later! :)

I am assuming you are thinking of 2000, though, and only mistyped 2020 because... well, that one was weird, but only a year ago.

Haha! Yes, you are correct, I meant 2000. To be fair, had someone predicted the end of the world in 2020 that would have seemed extremely accurate in retrospect.

Unfortunately, this entire thread is about how it's unlikely for future generations to get joy from our ramblings on the web today.

Such a shame!

I hope so, too, but it's not the way to bet.

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