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Comment by cyberpunk | Hacker News Reader

Ah fuck. Fuckity fuck fuck fuck. I mean. Fuck.

What can an individual do these days? I attempted to do my bit, I bought a e-car, I recycle, I try to write efficient code.. But the world my kid is getting is fucked, and while it'll impact me, nothing like what he's in for if I use a bit of imagination....

I sort of hope he doesn't have children, I'm already kinda depressed thinking about the kind of life mine will have, thinking about his, yeeeee. Maybe I'm just too much doom and gloom but..

Fuck, it's looking dark.

Is there really any hope? Can we stop ourselves, as we say in scotland, from "fucking it into a tree" ?

With leaders like Boris, Trump/Biden, Xi and co, Apparently we can't..

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> What can an individual do these days? I attempted to do my bit, I bought a e-car, I recycle, I try to write efficient code.. But the world my kid is getting is fucked, and while it'll impact me, nothing like what he's in for if I use a bit of imagination....

Support legislations to tariffs imports and apply immigration quotas from countries that are not doing their part for the environment (emissions going up instead of down).

Recycling might not be as great as you think. 90%+ of the plastic in the oceans are coming directly from Asian rivers and countries that buy "raw" plastic from western countries in order to "recycle" it.

No one buys plastic from the US anymore. The plastic that's recycled in the US goes to a recycling facility that then pays the landfill to bury it with the other trash.

Plant trees. Specifically trees which bear some kind of crop. I've been focused on chestnuts. Keep planting them every year. Replace the ones that die from heat, cold, pestilence or storm to select for resilience.

Not only are mature trees a beautiful gift to the next generation but the yearly ritual of planting trees is and will be an important one to inculcate for our progeny if we hope for them to stay on this planet.

How many years though? How many years?

I mean, the way we're going now, an end is inevitable, but it always was.

But, are the number of years within the parameters that we, or I expected? Who knows, some of us are more optimistic about the future, and others less so.

Help find the next covid and spread it around as much as possible.

> With leaders like Boris, Trump/Biden, Xi and co, Apparently we can't..

We can at least stop electing them and people like them.

The answer is almost always with collective action. As an individual, our impact or non-impact is very limited. Even if your individual consumption and impact turned to 0, in a world of 7.9 billion other individuals.

It's a big tragedy of the commons; this time, only coordination can save us. A shared responsibility. (practically) Everyone, and specially our leaders, need to be on the same page. Disasters will come all at once... we're depleting most minerals as well, pollution will only get worse, and so on.

For the lack of a better word, this is Nature's ""test"" to see if we have the ability to

1) Think on a global and collective level;

2) Value the future and not just the immediate present.

The default mode of the test is failure, and we seem quite likely to fail anyways. We have to fight very hard. I do believe if we could reach some kind of consensus and mutual enlightenment the technical and social challenge is not that frightening, and maybe we even have a good chance to become a proper space-faring civilization. It's important to be hopeful. A thousand years of a sustainable high technology civilization can achieve what might be approaching the limits of physics of our Universe -- and I'm quite confident colonizing even the galaxy is feasible in such a scenario.

The classic on this topic is Scott Alexander's: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

My personal (idealistic, why not? ;) ) plan, my contribution, is to try to come up with a shared formalization of ethics most cultures/countries would accept (a sort of new version of human rights), which includes obvious stuff like valuing human life experience (and in general consciousness) as a primary target of our civilization. Recognizing we are all conscious individuals and so strict individualism is a silly, destructive paradigm, that truth can be well approximated and we can reason collectively towards a shared goal. I really want to prove it -- prove that significant divergences from such basic ethical systems are catastrophic or absurd -- thus we should all, regardless of other beliefs (or religions, or tastes), accept the basic premises and thus have a chance to not only survive, but to live well, to thrive.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/comments/ramgij/the_nat...

As for what you can do right now? Start shouting at the world the truth, and hope they'll accept the truth for our own good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf5AMfIOqGw

That's how you can do better than 0 emissions: your influence has almost unbounded impact on future emissions. No pressure.

My confidence in America's ability to come together to solve this approaches nil. I mean, we came together after 9/11 but that was primarily because we could bomb people on the other side of the world instead of making any real sacrifice for the greater good. When it came time to wear a piece of cloth on one's face or skip that night out when you've been near someone who tested positive for Covid, we failed because "muh freedoms".

Hopefully some other nation of importance will lead us to water AND make us drink.

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