Programming in the Apocalypse
matduggan.com
matduggan.com
- Although it's looking increasingly unlikely that we can avert climate disaster, we can never give up. For example, 8 degrees of warming would be much worse than 4 degrees of warming, and could mean the difference between human extinction and the mere collapse of our civilization. The lives of billions hang in the balance, and even if some will inevitably suffer and die, we can't just throw up our hands and let everyone die. Climate change mitigation, cutting emissions as quickly and thoroughly as we can, must remain a priority for the rest of our lives, even if we can no longer reach the best/safest scenarios. Every little bit of avoided global heating matters.
- This post, as dire as its predictions are, may underestimate the difficulty of computing in 2050, given current trends. If you are/were living in Ukraine recently, programming is not most people's top priority, they have other problems. Famines, extreme weather events, and resource wars will affect programmers who live in comfortable locations today. It's not just your users/audience who might be computing from a shitty mobile phone in a refugee camp, it could be you. Don't forget that we're not only dealing with climate change, but with the reaction of other people to climate change: they might want to kill you for your water. And heatwaves are predictable in India/Pakistan, but look at the freak heatwaves in Canada recently, nowhere on Earth is safe, the climate crisis is a global problem.
- Why are we programming what we're programming? Shouldn't our activities and their purposes change given the dramatic change in circumstances? Isn't there something wrong with the system that produced this result, the impending destruction of the biosphere that supports us? Fighting valiantly to preserve the functionality that is killing the world may not be a wise or ethical use of your time. (And if you're programming something for a fossil fuel company, now is a good time to reconsider.)
It's true that programming was not a top priority outside of survival, though to many programmers in Ukraine, it was still a major one.
This report (source: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/04/ukrainians-are-built-differe...) from CNBC in March documents this: "Those developers, along with other Ukrainian civilians in the country, are now being forced to defend their homes and cities while sheltering from Russian bombs. But many are still continuing to remotely work for their employers, supporting the local defense effort by day while sending in their deliverables by night.
“Yes our teams are sending deliverables from a f—ing parking garage in Kharkiv under heavy shelling and gunfire in the area. Amazing humans,” Logan Bender, chief financial officer at a San Francisco-based software licensing company, said in a story posted to Instagram on Tuesday by venture capital meme account PrayingforExits. "
I would personally prioritize survival over work at that point, and avoid praising sending deliverables in a warzone as a moral good (over ensuring the safety of your family), but it's evidence that even in extreme conditions, people still want to program as part of their work. As for why there would be a want to program in extreme conditions, some discussions on Reddit and Slashdot in response to the article suggested that programming was a way for these workers to get their minds off their current situation.
Even after I evacuated my family further from the action, we still had missile strikes and air raid warnings. Being away from home, learning about horrible things happening in your country, those things do not help with being productive.
How do you imagine human extinction being an outcome? It seems to me that the worst case scenario is large loss of population which would decrease greenhouse gas output. There would still be some increase in temperature even once we stop emitting, but wouldn't people in colder climates still survive?
It's of course a very urgent issue, but I think exaggerating it until it becomes a threat to "all life on earth" levels is a) dishonest b) does nothing to convince sceptics that it's a real issue, quite the opposite c) is not really all that actionable (at least not in a good way).
The "barren rock" is a bit of a strawman. Very few if any people believe that the elimination of all life on Earth is in the cards. Human life, on the other hand, is certainly possible.
For the vast majority of major extinction events in history it looks like rapid climate change was the major trigger, and at some point small changes lead to a "self-reinforcing climate resonance cascade of unforeseen consequences", and we currently don't know exactly what the limits are.
This is the focus of a huge amount of the work of Peter Ward and he has written plenty both for scientific and a popular audiences.
Now he may, of course, be wrong. But his work is credible enough that you have to at least take into account that the real risk of extinction is possible.
And how many climate scientists actually believe extinction is on the table? I've seen some say collapse of global civilization and mass death is a possibility under the worst case scenarios, but not really anyone claiming all humans would die. Anyway, the latest IPCC report puts the upper range of warming at 3.7°C. Which is bad, but not the apocalyptic hot house Earth scenario. But even with that, some environments will still be livable. People live on mountains, near likes, far inland, way up north and all over the place. Earth isn't going to turn into Venus, and it was a lot hotter when the dinosaurs evolved. Plants and animals still survived after the Permian die off.
Human life today is mostly maintain with infrastructure (water, food, security, health, etc). A cascade of failure due to climate change can destroy all but very local and small infrastructures. With society eventually returning to a pre-industrial conditions. It is not the end of humanity but the pre-industrial world economy can't support food, water safety and health care for 9 billion people. In pre-industrial era world population were less than 1 billion, we might return to these numbers. That means death of the large majority of human. Not extinction but the biggest threat in human history.
Well, hundreds of millios displaced and/or dead would be enough. Doesn't have to "turn earth into a barren rock".
And as for "suddenly", many systems tend to have a breaking point, especially systems, like the environment, which have feedback loops that can easily feed into each other and make things worse fast. Collapse is seldom linear or a nice gradual curve.
Actually, yes it does. The OP specified "human extinction". We're arguing that single point. The fact that thousands/millions/billions might displaced isn't being contended.
If that's not a "threat to all life on earth," I don't know what is. And that's just what I could find with 5 seconds of googling.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeti...
To 'wipe out' life on earth, you have to crash the moon into it or do something similarly ridiculous - remember that a giant asteroid wasn't enough.
Wiping out all human life is possible, but again I don't think that anyone is comforted by the idea that 0.1% of the population might survive in an arctic cave.
Where we seem to fail is in communicating to folks that don't want to spend money to fix the problem today how their life will become miserable tomorrow.
The loss of insects isn’t caused by climate change, it’s too much pesticide use and people trying to have lawns instead of native plants.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/insects-are-dying...
What is the greatest tragedy is how much worry and anxiety climate change causes. The earth is not a thinking thing - “Mother Nature” is not a being. The planet will exist and doesn’t care about humans. A century after the last human lives nature will swallow up almost everything we built. Earth exists for humans because we live here and make it so. We will adapt to whatever climate exists.
It doesn't matter what Earth was like at some point in the distant past. There weren't 8 billion humans living on it. It's not easy or cheap to move cities with populations in the millions because sea level rise puts them below water.
Humans can adapt to climate change but it's very likely to be very painful and very expensive.
Do you expect that several hundred million people who's previous land of habitation is now unable to support human life will just lie down and die peacefully?
> We will adapt to whatever climate exists.
also, air conditioning and the netherlands are ways to deal with existing nature, global warming on the other hand is entirely man-made and compunding
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/world/asia/india-extreme-...
Think of the world population's size and global distribution as hedges against disaster: the fewer people who live, in fewer habitable places, the more likely it is that some disaster will affect everyone remaining and leave no one unaffected. We have fewer rolls of the dice, and there may come a day where they're all snake eyes.
This why many are excited about the idea of "making humanity an interplanetary species", as I once was until I realized how hard it would be to make a working biosphere anywhere else, given how bad we are at maintaining one that already works. If we don't figure out how to save this biosphere, we won't have enough time to make more.
("Without"? Well, nobody today knows how to build a cast-iron plough.)
I don't believe this scenario is likely. For one thing we're not headed for 8C of heating; for another, technological change seems to be coming just in time to head off the very worst outcomes, assuming we struggle hard enough.
One of my "favorites" is the "world without clouds" scenario, which for the record, I consider unlikely, but is horrifying to imagine: https://www.quantamagazine.org/cloud-loss-could-add-8-degree...
What we're dealing with are "unknown unknowns": what tipping points might exist that we don't know about, that might result in more warming faster than expected based on today's science? We shouldn't take those kind of existential risks.
We aren't struggling at all, though. We just eased off the accelerator a little. (Assuming that our accounting is correct, and that methane leakage isn't worse than we think. [1])
[1] It's worse than we think.
I need to retain some optimism, or I get too depressed to keep on. In this case, my optimism is that solar/wind and batteries will drop enough in price that fossil fuels become economically unfeasible.
It seems possible! I just hope it isn't too little, too late.
Society as it stands is much more fragile, but I’m sure we’re more likely to destroy ourselves from within before climate is a really major factor.
Of course I would've thought "aren't you worried your grandchildren will live miserable, dangerous lives struggling to survive" would be a decent argument but I've encountered no Boomer who seems to worry about it as they excitedly tell me about the coming collapse of something or imminent major war in wherever.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/genetic-bottleneck-almost-ki...
Literally nobody is predicting any of those things, except propagandists and doomers. I would urge you to broaden your media intake to more mainstream sources, because it is not mentally healthy to be living a life under such falsehoods.
When the world was 4 degrees COLDER Chicago was under 900 meters of ice. Toronto was under two Kilometers of ice.
Do you think that would cause collapse of civilisation? How are you going to adapt to a glacier covering all the farmland? No technolgy, not even nuclear bombs, can remove the billions of tons of ice that would be covering all the farmland. We could not even protect cities, the moving wall of ice would buldoze every structure we've build and then whoever didn't freese to death would die of famine.
We are headed for a 4 degree change in the OTHER direction. That's what we are headed for by the end of the century
The biggest mistake climate scientists have done is communicated their change in terms of degrees, so people think about their everyday experience with weather, which obviouslty changes much more than that, and think they will just sweat a bit more in the summer.
There are regions of this planet where an average 4 degrees increase will mean that for periods longer then 24 hours, multiple times a year, the wet-bulb temperature will exceed 35 degrees C. That is unsurvivable by human life. Your only options in that environment are to not be in that environment by either escape or technological means.
There are cities built in areas where this is a risk, and if it happens they will just be depopulated: it is not possible for millions of people to escape an urban area under a heat wave. If they're somewhat built up, then they might survive it provided the electrical grid holds out - which, as recent experience globally should show - is questionable. Remember: under these conditions, no repairs to external infrastructure are going to be possible - you would need active refrigeration to move around outside and survive. We are not remotely adapted to that sort of hostile environment.
Most likely we are a decade or two out from a climate-forced mass casualty event, probably in the Indian subcontinent, with more minor (slightly less mass death) occurring in parts of Asia earlier.
We have 28 years left and emissins are still increasing. We have to reduce emissions by like 40% per decade, which is not happenning at present.
We have to replace every car on the road, which takes 20 years. That means in 8 years every new car has to be electric, and that's not happening either.
If you read mainstream publications, then you will gradually form an opinion, which is that there is a climate emergency, but not that humanity will be destroyed.
Climate doomerism has been a catasrophe, because it means many people have "given up", when things can actually be done. The doomer propaganda jumped off the deep end, and the mainstream media should have called them our on their absurd nonsense years ago.
I notice the BBC is starting to fight back:
By the way, BBC is not a reliable source, like other neoliberal propaganda they bet on continuing "business as usual" while coming up with some innovative solutions (so-called "techno-hopium").
Sorry, I don't think rational debate is possible here. Your beliefs are not based on science or rationality.
I'm assuming celsius, not farenheit.
I'm curious why a mere 8 degrees increase leads to human extinction.
Is that "8 degrees evenly over the globe"? If so, that most certainly would leave the majority of land arable and comfortably livable.
Is that "8 degrees average with such a high deviation that no land is left with a year-round range of 0 degrees to 30 degrees"? If that is the case, where can I read/view/see the model that produces such an extreme outcome?
> At one degree - the world we are already living in - vast wildfires scorch California and Australia, while monster hurricanes devastate coastal cities. At two degrees the Arctic ice cap melts away and coral reefs disappear from the tropics. At three, the world begins to run out of food, threatening millions with starvation. At four, large areas of the globe are too hot for human habitation, erasing entire nations and turning billions into climate refugees. At five, the planet is warmer than for 55 million years, while at six degrees a mass extinction of unparalleled proportions sweeps the planet, even raising the threat of the end of all life on Earth.
I'm just not in the mood to devote a lot of time to what sounds (to me) like hyperbole: If the earth stabilised at +8 degrees celcius I find it hard to understand why the entire earth becomes literally uninhabitable.
Here is a well-written article (shared by another HNer here) on one plausible run-away event. But the same way as upon exerting more and more force to a branch it will first have linear changes going on, there will come a point where it will break.
Some possible runaway events include the aforementioned loss of clouds which in turn won’t reflect back that much sunlight (which currently can account for 30-70% of sun light not hitting the ocean water), melting ice will free lots of trapped CO2, changing climates may alter currents and winds causing very large-scale changes to certain areas (and might also affect cloud formation), etc. We are in a big, closed jar and that 8C change may not be a problem locally, it is that much more heat trapped globally.
But one should add that life is unlikely to die out in even the worst predictions (life, finds a way), but you still don’t want to find yourself in the situation where you will have to literally hunt down other humans because they may have food, or try to migrate with 100s of millions of other agitated, hungry people to nations which won’t be friendly to you because they themselves have enough problems to begin with.
If you want to think of a way it could be possible, though, think of those areas that would be habitable, realize that they would be highly contested, are mostly presently permafrost, and consider your own ability to both protect and survive on melted tundra and reproduce there, given you will starve in a single season without food.
I actually did consider that first - that maybe at +8c humans will kill each other, but that's just pure speculation.
And, sure, food is necessary daily and constantly, but the situation you outline isn't an overnight thing. Hell, it isn't even a 100-year change, +8c is a lot longer.
That gives you plenty of time to move, and at +8c, as long as it is stable at +8c, you'd still have enough arable and livable land to ensure that humanity is nowhere close to extinction.
So if it isn't lack of land, and it isn't the temperature range that causes human extinction, what does?
But if you add the fact that antibiotics will be in short supply, novel zoonotic diseases will ramp up, and most knowledge of how to survive in the wild has been lost and probably can’t be reconstituted in a couple of violent generations, I can see how it could come about.
There is also the social and psychological impacts of that scale of loss, and there are some other sort of scary indicators you could lean on (Calhoun rat experiments) to indicate that there are limits to what animal populations will reproduce through.
I’m not worried about it — we seem like a pretty robust system from my perspective. But it is interesting to think about abstractly.
You should review where you got those figures and whether they are representative enough of current scientific consensus regarding the most likely scenarios.
As fas as I know and assuming that current pledges are fulfilled, most plausible estimations tend to be around 2 or at most 3 degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels (we are already well over 1°C).
While it is clear that this increase in temperatures will have severe consequences, I fail to see how it would lead anywhere near the civilization collapse that you seem so confident in predicting.
See for example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04553-z.epdf
("Realization of Paris Agreement pledges may limit warming just below 2 °C", Nature)
The point of the Paris Agreement pledges is to prevent catastrophic global heating, so it would be great, although in my opinion inadequate, if the world community met them. Sadly, we're not heading in that direction right now.
Consider what happens in a war. The people working on drones aren't just hobbyists, they're part of the war effort. Wars are not good for the environment, either.
So my guess is that, if it gets really bad, these jobs will focus more on short-term needs. Are people who are really focused on preparing for heat waves and drought and flooding going to give a hoot about being carbon neutral? An overloaded hospital is going to focus on the patients, not global environmental issues.
Both "it's needed" and "pays well" are the case now - not necessarily the case at that point. So they can't be used as arguments that people "will still write software" (it would be taking for granted what must be proven).
With that in mind, I have some ideas on what programming will look like in 30 years:
1. New frameworks and abstractions for making apps even more disposable while maintaining privacy will come along. New languages will happen. Corporations that just finished moving to the cloud will now be moving to even greater abstractions like Airtable or whatever comes next.
2. Programmer pay will decrease compared to other industries. This is a hunch and I’m only 60% confident of it happening.
3. Satellite internet will be more of a norm for no better reason than it’s the most efficient way to manage infrastructure. More rural communities will need it, and remote trends will continue. The cost of launches are going down and there’s a lot of land.
4. Everything will get more energy efficient, and most intense activity will be pushed to compute farms.
5. VR will once again come around as the next big revolution in computing, but will be ultimately disappointing and won’t see mass adoption.
Beyond these ideas, I think too much plays into our personal optimism or pessimism. I think things will change, but we’re a scrappy species that will fight to preserve its way of life. It will look a lot like our global pandemic response…warts and all. There’s a lot there to be disappointed about, but it’s actually incredible it wasn’t worse.
When these predictions hit I’ll be 70. I hope I’ll live to see it.
That's probably because it was not that great impact wise. If it was more like the Spanish Flu, with a huge death toll across all ages (as opposed to 1/10th the death toll, and mostly focused on older people and co-morbidities) it would have absolutely have looked like "a pandemic film".
It's our response to covid, not covid itself, that taught me a lot of what we're capable of in global crisis. We've come a long way since Spanish Flu.
Everyone worked really hard to make the impact minimal, now people assume that it wasn’t that big a deal.
It's a case of:
-- Why do you spend all these millions putting these plastic scarecrows all across Nebraska?
-- They keep sharks away.
-- But Nebraska doesn't have sharks!
-- Exactly! See how effective it is?
Only in this case you are looking at denials where “propter hoc” actually holds — the second thing really was caused by the first.
There really should be a catchy name for this, since it permeates a lot of political reasoning on topics such as remediation for ozone hole depletion, FDC regulations, environmental regulations, etc. People see that timely action averted a problem, but somehow take that as evidence that there wasn’t a problem in the first place.
Depending on the situation, 2 cases are possible (and have happened):
(a) A thing was indeed about to become a grave problem and timely action prevented it.
(b) A thing was never to become a big issue, and all the action spent preventing it didn't have any significance.
In both cases the outcome is "thing didn't become a big problem".
But in (a) action is what helped with this, and in (b) action was irrelevant and wasted.
Now some people see the outcome (no issue) and think that action was wasted. That's accurate in (a) and wrong in (b).
My point is that whether "timely action averted a problem" or "the problem was oversold to begin with" is something to be argued and proved, not taken for granted.
You can argue that we didn’t need to pump hundreds of millions into it; but it is a fact that there would have been a crisis had it not been actively averted.
The same issue exists now with 2048 and we’re already seeing problems (on things that date far into the future) and we will likely need to expend effort and energy in avoiding this issue: especially on embedded devices.
If you’re denying that there would have been a problem then I’m afraid you’re simply mistaken.
I could give you many citations if I wasn’t on my phone. There was even a documentary about it.
“Was the millennium bug a myth” or something.
Basically a third of our country didn't go through that effort and the country is mostly still chugging along. Were it much deadlier, things would not have turned out okay.
(An interesting question to chew on is: what was the impact of religious sex taboos in pre-modern and early modern era? If monogamous couples were more likely to have healthy offspring and nurse their kids into adulthood, it might explain some of the societal swings towards puritanism in the 16th-19th century, which was a period of endemic syphilis.)
But if I am not mistaken, from a strictly evolutionary perspective there is no pressure towards such a disease — a genetic variation that is more deadly won’t dominate over its less deadly variant and thus deadliness could be a variable that only changes randomly from the initial level (and decreasing if it is actively detrimental to spreading, where I would say that in case of a human population deadliness does correspond with fear).
But IANAE, nor a mathematician.
Not really. The two primary factors controlling how fast a disease spreads is the infectiousness (R0 or other similar measures), and how long victims are infectious before they display symptoms.
The deadliness, the victim living or dying, happens significantly after they've finished their role as spreader of disease and thus does not significantly affect the spread.
Ebola fails to spread, not because it's deadly, but because the symptoms are almost immediate and dramatic.
(I took graduate level course in the mathematics of epidemiology and got an A, which makes me no expert at all, but this is fairly fundamental.)
He is not completely off the ball, though. Our immune systems are rather good, so (with significant exceptions like HIV) if some virus doesn't kill us quickly, we tend to clear it out of the organism or at least get it under control, so it won't kill us at all.
Viruses that are very deadly but take a long time to kill you (thus enhancing the risk of transmission), like HIV, aren't very typical.
If covid had a 1 in 10 chance of killing me I would have made very different decisions over the course of the pandemic. You're saying that people would still behave the same as they did during covid no matter how deadly a given disease is, which seems pretty ridiculous.
Yes, a third of the country didn't go through the effort and a lot of people died in those states also. The country might still be functioning, but not necessarily well, with significant labor shortages, supply chain issues, high inflation, a looming recession, record high gas prices, etc. (not all of that is directly because of the pandemic, granted, but it sure didn't help).
I'm not so sure, given places that did nothing or not much (either out of policy or lack of resources) and still didn't have a toll anywhere comparable to the Spanish Flu (and more or less comparable to places that took "great effort", if not better).
I'm very much for vaccines, but this is just not true at all. Covid was never going to be near as bad as the Spanish flu, even if no measures were taken at all.
I don't think it has taught you much. All things considered, despite all the suffering by unlucky individuals, when you consider humanity as a whole, covid is an insignificant blip. If it's significant at all, it's only because of our response to it.
> Covid looked nothing like a pandemic film, thank god.
Covid was not 1% as bad as any pandemic featured in a film. Humanity has seen way worse, and we could still see way worse in the future.
> Covid was not 1% as bad as any pandemic featured in a film.
I'll be generous and not dwell on this stunning example of this age's inability to get bothered by anything unless it hits harder than film. Look on the bright side I guess, despite how soulless, empty, and glib we have to be do so!
That gives truth to Benjamin Disraeli's (attributed) "Lies, damn lies, and statistics". Very misleading.
It was the concentrated effects.
When bottled oxygen ran out in India.
When you could not get into a hospital in many American cities (my American geography is hazy - South Los Angeles hospital, I think, was crippled for weeks)
Running out of morgue space in New York city - mass graves in central park.
It was really very scary, and I am glad I was not in any of those places badly hit.
You made the assumption the rest of us aren't. You've written a number of emotionally-laden statements about the lack of virtue amongst the rest of us, but I'm "trolling" when I point out you ignore greater loss of life happening yearly.
I'm not going to do all the work for you, because I'm tired and certainly tired of teaching critical thinking to adults, but take a look at _excess_ deaths since the COVID-era started[1].
That is key, just like all the fears of a devastating food shortage on the horizon because Putin needed to get his gun off.
Outside of math class, you can't play "Direct cause of death from COVID" vs. "people starved to death by their own government" or <insert issue you have feel the need to play "well, actually..." tonight>.
At its worst, nihilism throws the baby out with the bath water and you get holocaust deniers. This has been the hardest part of aging for me, because seeing this evolve in real time has left me in despair for our world at times. I have to remind myself that this force has been at work for centuries, and when I was young I didn't think it was all that bad. We'll probably be ok.
I was bummed to not see mine as well, but I (and they) also understood that a shared sacrifice was necessary to make.
Then why do we mount anything at all, death count of all terrorist attacks and shooting combined is insignificant
We should be investing in high ROI life-saving actions, not emotional impulses. Let's put serious money behind defeating aging, which currently has a 100% fatality rate and was highly comorbid with COVID-19.
https://www.alzheimers.net/research-spending-vs-annual-care-...
“Overpopulation” is a meme from the 60s coming from a book (Population Bomb) that was disproved the instant it was published. It is, however, a big reason for single family zoning in California - they literally thought it would encourage people to stop moving there and having kids.
More complicated, but more accurate - and humanity is way past that threshold, even with population crashes.
It's always fun to look back at how wrong people are about the future. It's almost happening in real time these days.
I guess one problem is that nowadays in Western world people often spend their last times in a hospital, rather than at home and their local communities. This doesn't give space for healthy mourning.
With that out, the Covid-19 pandemic, even without any measures at all, was still incredibly mild. Wikipedia says 0.1-0.3% global population lost [0]. It would have been I don't know, perhaps 0.5% without measures? Compare to the other pandemics on that list, you routinely see ones that wipe out 20-50% of the regional population - now that is significantly bad.
SARS-1 and MERS are quite fatal too but we stopped them from spreading.
Yes, of course. And I'm simply adding that Covid-19 would be nowhere as bad as those even if we had no ability to defend ourselves.
Also wikipedia in and of itself is not a high quality source.
The fact that COVID is still out there, infecting and mutating, is irrelevant to most people.
COVID will live with us forever now, a pandemic has a few characteristics which make it so, one of which is capacity to overwhelm healthcare.
As soon as covid couldn’t overwhelm our healthcare systems it was over.
Now people will die every year with it, just like the flu.
Sad reality, but reality nonetheless, the fact we couldn’t handle a lock-down cemented that we would be living with it for the rest of human existence.
But that doesn't make it no longer a pandemic. We know quite well that we can normalize our way into wrong answers as a society. It'll only become clear where we stand after another year or two - either more and more people become disabled after their "mild" case, or it gradually trails off.
So it is with all other coronaviruses, which have been around for millions of years and don't routinely kill older/vulnerable people.
Also, everything will require a network connection (which is where ubiquitous Internet via cable or satellite comes in). No Internet? Pfft, what, do you live without electricity, too?
2. Pay for these kinds of professions (ever increasing complexity, whether necessary or self-made + decently mentally taxing) will only go up. Not everyone can be a programmer, or a lawyer, doctor, video/audio editor, electrician, etc. Barring some catastrophic event or the creation of good enough AI/robots.
4+5. in 30 years, if current development rates continue, VR will be the next revolution. Super compact and efficient devices + a world where you can do almost anything you want will be very popular with the masses facing ever increasing costs, climate problems, joblessness, lack of housing, etc.
Why even put up with all the bs when you can do the bare minimum and use technological opium the rest of your time? I wonder if VR could be banned in the same manner as drugs, actually.
As for the rest...they were in direct response to this article's predictions. My VR prediction is tongue-in-cheek because it's been "just around the corner" for the last thirty years. It's not far-fetched to think it'll still be "just around the corner" in another 30.
If society has to rebuild/replace infrastructure destroyed by more hurricanes, raise ports above new sea levels or build new ports, upgrade the power grid, food takes more resources to grow, etc, all using materials that are being desperately sought by every other nation on earth that's going to take every penny we can find anywhere and that means most salaries will be squeezed.
I'm torn about the high end, but my guess is even they will suffer because money is going to basic needs and even if you can help produce them for efficiently there isn't the kind of surplus we see today to reward you.
The median scientific projection is that every year will still be “better” economically than the one before it, including climate change costs, but that it’ll be about as bad as WW2 happening very slowly in the background.
It is supply and demand for smart people. So far, demand for smart people increased throughout times. If earth will make more smart people or if they will be replaced/augmented with A(G)I, then pay will subside.
Smarter than animal trainers?
Smarter than massage therapists?
Smarter than lawyers, artists, plumbers???
If we took a vote here, well we might be biased!
I'd love to see data behind this question, but yes I believe that there is significant variation in the required intelligence to perform the highly various professions that the human race engages in. And I would claim – in all the humility I can muster speaking as a programmer myself – that the average programming job does inherently have a higher bar for intelligence than the average other profession.
It would be very wrong indeed to extrapolate from this information that one should TREAT individuals differently based on their choice of profession! Even if we knew for certain that the Brick Laying profession only consisted of the 1% most intelligent individuals and Data Entry Specialists the lowest 1%, treating individuals with these professions differently from a policy or cultural perspective would, in my opinion, be a great injustice.
And yes, I suspect theaters will still be a thing unless teenagers find a new excuse to be unsupervised in the dark for a few hours.
At any rate looking at it http://www.salaryexplorer.com/salary-survey.php?loc=73&locty...
http://www.salaryexplorer.com/salary-survey.php?loc=73&locty...
it looks like you're right, the median salary for programmers in Finland (4,830 EUR) is just a bit more than the median salary for everyone (4,320 EUR)
Tech sector: https://teknologiateollisuus.fi/sites/default/files/inline-f...
I make around 2300e before tax, and around 1900e after.
> What is a woman's salary in Finland?
Much less than a man's salary.
But yes, programmers definitely are not overpaid in Finland. It's not unheard for fresh CS grads to be paid just 2500 EUR a month, though at least they have career progression unlike nurses forever stuck with such bad salaries...
RCP8.5 was considered the 'worst-case' scenario and projected 3.3 to 5.7 in 2100, not 2050 as the graphic shows.
There is a cliché which goes: "Expect the best. Prepare for the worst". Articles like this only seem to get the second half of that while clearly violating the first half. A well balanced response to crisis is benefited by both.
I think the author is not actively aware of the importance of expecting the best, both of the world and of their colleagues. I feel their arguments are weak due to this imbalance.
It's all a matter of perspective. But humans are irrationally social creatures susceptible to memetics, so no amount of empirical evidence will alter socially beneficial memeplexes.
This is an insanely extreme claim with very little evidence to back it up, if we watch this unfold at the hands of global leadership please know that it didn’t have to be this way and somebody is taking advantage of all of us for power and control.
> With China and India not even starting the process of coal draw-down yet...
It is fine to assume the Global South is trending towards further coal usage. Maybe the developed world can help them transition to something sustainable like nuclear power.
There has to be an element of truth in Michael Moore's extreme Planet of the Humans.
At least Amazon's Eating our way to Extinction [1] makes a convincing argument against deforestation and meat consumption trends. But the West is continuing to sell the global south a lifestyle (foreign to them) of extreme meat eating, among other unsustainable consumption lifestyle.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Eating-Our-Extinction-Kate-Winslet/dp...
Bill Gates tells us to not eat meat and owns a gigaton of farmland.
He rells us to ride bikes and has the largest fleet of private jets in the world.
Still polluting the skies on their way to Davos
Obama’s recently purchased beachfront property is a testament to this.
The programming languages that will best survive the apocalypse are the ones that can run on chips that best survive the apocalypse! I think that there're be a big turn toward highly-efficient compiled languages: Rust and Go are well-positioned for this, C will still be around, but languages like PHP and Ruby are very poorly suited for this. Anything that can be adapted to run on a microcontroller that you can scavenge from old cars that no longer can get gas will be in high demand.
I also think we'll see a turn toward more local production of semiconductors, which may require moving back in process nodes toward older technology where the supply chain and manufacturing process isn't as complex.
I don't think backwards-compatibility is as important as the author thinks it is. Enough other things are going to break in the economy that people will be willing to make due with software that gives them basic communication & computation abilities even if it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of modern software, particularly if modern software becomes completely unavailable due to infrastructure failures like cable lines coming down and there not being enough power to run datacenters.
Final thoughts: I think distributed technologies like mesh networks, data synchronization algorithms, networking, (proof-of-stake/storage) blockchains, etc. will become significantly more important. I wouldn't count on the cloud surviving: it has a lot of physical infrastructure dependencies, and physical infrastructure is already crumbling. Software that you can run locally on a device and communicate over unreliable networks will become very important.
1.) Communications. Being able to send over plans for a useful tool, or instructions for repair, or a meeting place for the defense of a village becomes critical.
2.) Entertainment/education. Threads shows the post-apocalyptic children watching a VHS video of animals & grammar. If you can preserve even just the PBS Kids catalog on local disk and have a working computer, you'll be in huge demand as the town's babysitter, and it's far easier to do this at scale with video than individually keep dozens of kids occupied.
3.) Local records. It's critical to catch freeriders for any communal endeavors, because if you don't, community breaks down and everybody just worries about their own family. Same goes for financial records: if you can restore some semblance of banking & credit you can operate much more efficient trade than if everything is spot barter.
4.) Knowledge repository. The community where everybody knows how to garden is going to be way better off than the one where two people know how to garden and everybody steals their food. Same with a variety of other skills - repairs, local resources, weapon manufacture, etc.
5.) Industrial control. If communities can get an electricity source back online, it opens up a wide variety of options for local manufacturing and automation. Labor is likely to be in very short supply after an apocalypse, so anything you can do to automate control will be a big help.
What we'd program if we only have microcontrollers available, would be much smaller in scope, maybe a lot of focus on controlling physical infrastructure for agriculture and such.
That may not actually be a problem though, since the current compiler executable is already good enough for almost any project.
Energy cost rules everything. The current deluge of web media and JS-obese apps will one day turn to a careful trickle.
- Dark Forest theory is popular in China, that civilizations should conceal their existence to prevent being destroyed by a more advanced civilization
- Our own high power TV and Radio transmitters will be shutdown soon in favor of fiber optics. Even better communication mechanisms should be no surprise
It takes a great effort to get a coherent radio signal to hit a system many light years away. Leaked radio emissions just don't reach very far. Even high powered radar is extremely narrow beams coming from a spinning planet orbiting a star that itself is flying through space. The odds that beam crosses some system specifically listening for it is extremely low and the odds of a reoccurrence is ridiculously low.
The dark forest just doesn't make sense. A sufficiently large telescope can get spectra from terrestrial planets. If you have some killer space fleet you'll send it off to any planet where you find short-lived industrial emissions (CFCs etc). There's no need to wait for radio emissions from a planet with biomarkers. It also presumes its practical to send a space fleet to go destroy anyone.
It's far more likely the odds of any two technological civilizations existing at the same "time" at detectable ranges is extremely low. Species also don't tend to take over galaxies because it requires unattainable amounts of power and resources much better used to live happily in their own little corner.
I've always had an intuitive feeling that theories like The Great Filter theory was a pretty arrogant simplification of "actual reality" beyond our narrow biological lenses and even narrower western definition of "life" or even spatial dimensions and time.
Just because some western scientist with only 350+ years of somewhat advanced tools, math and imagination can't see "something" doesn't mean something isn't there - we don't even know what "there" is, or who "we" are.
Math and science is an awesome "thing", but the ridiculous existential pop-science extrapolations from simple equations is laughable if not sinister, especially in light of the paradigmatic shifts in science and worldview over just the last couple of centuries.
Our biological lenses make it seem like the complex system we call ”life” is the only similarly complex system that is possible in the entire universe.
fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
Quoting Wikipedia: "Inserting the above minimum numbers into the equation gives a minimum N of 20. Inserting the maximum numbers gives a maximum of 50,000,000. Drake states that given the uncertainties, the original meeting concluded that N ≈ L, and there were probably between 1000 and 100,000,000 planets with civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy."
As I understand it, at the time it was estimated that a civilization would broadcast during its existence, from the time radio communications started until the fall of civilization (thus the Great Filter).
Now, from our sample size of one, it looks like L would rather be on the order of 100 years (in our case, not because we are trying to hide in the Dark Forest, but because we don't want to waste energy beaming Dallas reruns into space for no good reason).
Maybe extra-terrestrials are more like lumberjacks chopping down trees. Except these lumber jacks avoid *any tree with a bird's nest in it*. Then, we should be as visible as possible.
So should we be quiet (ala Dark Forest), or loud? Depends on how you model extra-terrestrials.
I think you could just as logically conclude the opposite: maybe lumberjacks don't need to exterminate to survive, so they do not put as much effort in, since they are just avoiding us altruistically.
But more generally, this is the sort of problem I have with speculation on unknown unknowns: It's fun to do, but I dont recommend changing any of our decisions based on it because we simply do not know.
I... I don't think I'm psychologically prepared for tolerating the fauxptimism of corpospeak under the Slow Motion Apocalypse.
Underwater; didn't read
As an aside, seeing things like this in climate change articles always bothers me. FYI Asheville being minutes from the beach would imply a 650m+ (2000+ft) sea rise in the next 25 years.
This kind of hyperbole makes it easy for people who deny climate change in totality to say it is based on absurd scenarios which will never happen. The real projections implications are significant enough. Why do people feel the need to resort to pure fiction?
In summary: doesn't it make you want to act towards preventing this from ever being close to happening?
We're already struggling against a mountain of industry funded FUD, the last thing we need is people stretching the truth in well meaning yet counterproductive ways.
If it was suddenly 2050 and none of our technology had improved, we’d be fucked. But it’s not a useful perspective to assume that technological progression will stop. Solar panels have dropped in price by literal orders of magnitude. It seems like nuclear is coming back into vogue. Space-based power seems like it might be economically viable in a few decades, even.
I mean the guy may be delusional, but he's right on the climate part.
Even if our tech improves and we cut carbon to zero in a fairytaleish fashion we're still up for a 3 deg temp increase till 2100 which will be rather catastrophic. Of course the developed world will be hit the least due to its location, so we'll likely be fine for the most part but it will be troubling time regardless. It all depends on cascading issues that we can't really predict, like warming causing some fish to go extinct that ate eggs of some insect that will now breed uncontrollably and push out useful pollinators from the ecosystem, leading to crop failure and such.
The rule of thumb (iirc) is that 1C would be business as usual, 4C a Mad Max hell scape, and we'll likely end up somewhere in between. The closer to which side we'll be depends on how well we implement countermeasures... and how much luck we have.
The ONLY techs we should be caring about over the 50-year horizon are the disruptive ones.
Currently we're wasting a lot of time on social media, Netflix, games, etc. There's lots of fat to cut. Also historically bad conditions were when people wrote books and focused on studies. If OS is important - it will develop.
On the other hand x as a service and cloud based stuff will likely die off. Good riddance.
Why is Clojure better then Java when it's a JVM language as well? It uses Java artefacts (Maven) so how is it more tolerant than Java of a spotty internet? Scala, Clojure, Java, Groovy should all rate pretty much the same or am I missing something?
Based on this I felt like some of the big winners in 2050 will be Rust, Clojure and Go.
44 years later, it hasn't happened. I'm skeptical that it will happen in the next 28.
COBOL’s fall from grace was due in no small part to the syntax rather than the semantics, and I expect that trend to continue: I wouldn’t be surprised if the languages of 2050 are similar to the languages of today, just with more expressivity, better communication between compiler and programmer, and an even larger range of optimizations under the hood.
Asking because that seems to be what much of modern IT is angling for and why there's so much money in it.
Wouldn't people in the described apocalyptic scenario want mindless distraction? Anything to keep their minds off the, well, apocalyptic things going on.
The big question isn't really whether we clean it up, it's the timetable.
Cost and availability of energy is a great proxy for transport cost.
Nah. I expect simple UI fashion transitions (e.g. round corners to square corners back to round corners) are likely to claim more of our time and attention over the next 30 years than the "serious" predictions in the article.
We’re in the midst of a mass extinction event. If we lose the eco systems that support us we’ll go into decline as surely as every other species as high on the food chain as we are.
I’m not sure if civilization will collapse but it does seem like something that is probable. Do we have enough people with the expertise to maintain or build computing devices with limited access to fabrication? Can we still cobble together useful stuff from the piles of e-waste?
One easy thing we can do is push for policies that make it easier to access public infrastructure. Low-cost access to the poles, towers, etc.
Interesting times ahead.
I don't see many hands.
I see tons of hands and lots of companies lobbying against them because it wouldn't be as profitable if things changed and people bought less.
I already have given up my car and transitioned to using a bicycle for my commute to work, longer distances i cover with the train. We (my family and i) are on a vegetarian diet and moving to vegan.
So take energy use benchmarks from things like this
https://haslab.github.io/SAFER/scp21.pdf https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks
and cross it with popularity?
We seem to have most of the building blocks already for renewable energy. Just need to focus on it and assemble them together... and decide it's worth giving up fossil fuel related things that are still functional.
People seem to rather fight the sun than capitalism.
Also, China/India are in survival/growth mode, so "sustainability" is least of their concerns right now :( and btw resource consumption per person is higher in first-world countries, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/american-consumpt... . This is a mindset issue and needs to addressed as well.
P.S. I am hopeful!
Spending untold billions to shut down the economy for most of 2 years is something I saw with my own eyes.
Sea level rises, and whatever else, not at all. The dire predictions have been coming for decades (remember Al Gore)? And nothing.. I suspect its just a trick that means we hand over greater control and money to the worst of us (government). And if it were real, I have zero trust in any governance structure to do the right thing as opposed to serving itself and its 'stakeholders' (aka corporations).
And I suppose you think that's it's just a coincidence that we're breaking all-time-high temperature records year over year isn't it?
But do you recollect the climategate scandal? Where historical temperature records were altered?
You can read some bits of the emails here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220517000832/https://www.forbe... - judge for yourself!
What this tells me is that the science is highly politicised, and cannot be trusted. Too many people stand to make money and gain control from the purported threat. Al Gore is one of those. You should watch 'An Inconvenient Truth' from 2006 - it hasn't aged well. Should there be a punishment for people who shout fire in a crowded theatre?
So, I have listened (and once believed) all the alarms over the years - they have not materialised. People talk about wildfires and flooding, but these are better explained by mismanagement, despite the media hype.
So no, I don't trust the politicised science, nor the foghorn media. OTOH, I do see how an excuse of 'climate change' is valuable in handing even greater control to the governance structure, where they can micro-manage your usage of electricity, water, and even have the ability to turn it off. Do you think if they have that power they won't do it?
And yes, despite all the talk of rising water levels, I have not seen it. I have been to beaches from my youth - the water levels are the same. Certainly there have been changes - and climate is not some consistent, clockwork thing - there are probable cycles and mega-cycles in there.
The whole thing about climate changes, seems designed to be play on both our sense of importance (that we can really change the world, as if we were gods) and a self-indulgent saviour complex - we need to save the world from us. Its religious thinking to me, you feel sinful and are seeking atonement. I didn't think science was meant to work like that!
- My government (.au) runs almost entirely on the MS cloud/productivity stack, as do most large businesses. This is the stuff that's going to get resources when there are outages, conflicts, or difficult decisions have to be made. Assuming a degradation over the next decade or two, you could do worse than align your business or personal computing with PCs and MS tech/services - by the time you're facing major outages there are probably bigger problems outside your window. Even in extended collapse downturns there will be some work available to keep this stuff ticking along for many years.
- Intermittent connectivity is to be expected, but also the risk of suddenly losing access to some resource permanently, be that dependencies, documentation, software downloads, or your cloud data. At a minimum all cloud data you care about should have a full offline copy on local disk in a format that is usable. (This seems generally true of both Apple and MS cloud services, if you have a fully synced Mac or Windows PC with the right settings.)
- Development environments with batteries-included standard libraries will offer the most bang-for-buck, which can be installed from offline installers. Being able to build custom GUI apps on demand for whatever hardware your customer has is very helpful. I think .NET MAUI is very interesting here, especially if they end up gaining Linux GUI support. Linux is a great way to bring old laptops into service.
- When advanced technology manufacturing becomes too resource intensive and expensive for many people to buy, larger computers etc. will give way to phones, often crummy ones. Expect lots of Androids and hand-me-downs.
- There will be good trade in second-hand hard drives and batteries that are not too worn. If you can bodge together USB powerpacks from scavenged batteries then certain kinds of USB-powered devices should be able to run for decades. Ultimately I expect old Android devices to be dominant platform because they are numerous, relatively inexpensive, hackable and portable.
- If your value derives from what you have (hardware, stashes of offline data etc.) then expect it to be taken from you. Skills are more helpful - so long as they are actually useful in the computing environment of the time.
I agree, but I'll bet some folks' left eyes started twitching, when they read that...
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/villains/images/6/68/Charl...
IMO, it is likely the Singularity will arrive before 2050 and make practically everything in this article completely moot.
if there are actual famines than surely rents would go ... down?
Come again?
This is likely to reduce the amount of arable land, and the intersection of that and continued human population growth is likely going to put pressure on populations to migrate to more livable zones, and that will create the kinds of tensions like to lead to widespread warfare and possibly even genocidal actions.
Now, can some of this be technologically mitigated? Absolutely. It's entirely possible to run the global economy without fossil fuels. The major sources of replacement energy would be wind/solar/storage, and nuclear in some regions (massive expansion of nuclear is just not feasible, sorry enthusiasts, but that's the reality - there's not that much high-grade uranium ore around, breeder concepts are implausible, fusion is nowhere in sight, and the cost equation favors solar and wind in the vast majority of regions, from the equator descending polewards).
However, that would upend the economic status quo in a remarkable way. All the petrostates that live off oil exports and oil production would have serious readjustments (and this is non-ideological, it's true for the USA, for Saudi Arabia, for Venezuela, for Russia, for Iran, etc.).
Imagine if we got serious about eliminating fossil fuel use globally. Well, one obvious first step would be a ban on the international trade in fossil fuels, right? Who would agree to that? All the fossil fuel corporations I know of are planning on maintaining current levels of output for the next 30 years, as well.
Regardless, we could very plausibly reduce fossil fuel production in the USA by 3% per year if we also increased solar/wind/storage by 3% per year, while maintaining most of the current nuclear fleet. Then, in 30 years, the USA would produce zero fossil fuels. It's entirely doable with existing technlogy, but would require as much investment as say, the military-industrial complex currently gets.
As far as computer tech and programming, I really don't see that being fundamentally impacted; if there's an energy / material crunch then it will just become more expensive to buy a computer or run a datacenter, and it'll be more restricted to key uses (managing energy grids, running factories, etc.). However, running a chip production line off solar power is entirely feasible.
Come on, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering it entered mainstream just recently:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/opinion/climate-change-ge...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/26/planet...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/08/09/615/what-is-geoe...
By now one question should remain: why was the very idea of geoengineering silenced for decades behind sneers and activism and bad press, when we could implement it half a century ago and avert much of the climate change?
So I'm totally unconvinced by this often recited and rarely supported mantra.
Clearing forests has been progress thing until relatively recently, draining swamps was a totally great thing until even more recently, straightening rivers into concrete beds has been considered progress up into my lifetime. All of these things have had lots of bad downstream consequences to the point that lots of places now spend huge sums to undo at least some of these developments. And come to think of it, wildfire management is another geoengineering effort that lots of very dry places totally screwed up (e.g. California, as discussed frequently on this very site) out of the very best intentions, but working with broken models.
Plenty of times species have been introduced overseas to control other species, and it's always been a disaster, to the great surprise of everyone involved, time and again. Dams for hydro power are still considered ultra low ecological footprint power generation by lots of people, even though they form barriers that can completely disrupt river ecosystems to the point of leaving desolate wastelands in the riverbed downstream, disrupt riverside ecosystems downstream that depend on regular floods, allow for excessive water extraction and so on. Hunting predators to extinction is still widely popular, even though ecosystems without predators can't and don't function. I've had conversations with local people who're hellbent on exterminating the few remaining local beavers because they damage trees; but beavers are a keystone species, tons of species depend on beaver-created clearings.
The list doesn't end: Dumping toxic waste into rivers has been considered harmless until toxins accumulated to levels extreme enough to severely hurt people, by which point some of the worst-polluted rivers had been pretty m much sterilized (e.g. the lower Rhine). It's hard do believe this today, but people did honestly think nature would take care of the gunk, filter it out or dilute it or whatever. We pumped lead into the environment by means of leaded gasoline, one of the craziest "accidental" geoengineering adventures to date, until whole forests started dying, and of course some people saw that one coming, but then some people saw the world end when the LHC went online, and good thing we didn't listen to those people. When I grew up, climate change was widely considered a crazy myth; some saw it coming early on, the majority had a good chuckle; yet that's the biggest geohacking fuck-up in all our history, and it took us that long to realize the fact that climate change is real.
Generally speaking, with experiments like this, the true consequences tend to not become visible until way down the line, at which point cleanup may be impossible (e.g. climate change, the current mass extinction) so we need to anticipate such things and get it right the first try. Yet we've historically both failed to build non-rubbish models and then to heed those few warnings we did get. Convenience and progress and growth seem to always trump the naysayers, and often that's just fine – the world didn't end when the LHC went online and we learned a lot about the fundamentals of physics. Good thing we didn't listen to them.
But all this history leaves me personally highly pessimistic when it comes to more planet-scale climate hacking, given that we don't even understand the downstream consequences of our past and current climate hacking and given that our track record of getting this sort of thing right on the first (or any) try is so grotesquely bad.
We're great at problem-solving short-term, everyday issues with near-immediate feedback loops, like by mass-producing crazy good tools; we're bad when things get big, abstract, long-term, with long-ish feedback cycles e.g. when building nuclear reactors that don't malfunction in major ways, because we start making bad compromises and take shortcuts even though we should and do know better, because we socially can't help doing this; and we're sad failures at anything extremely large-scale, extremely long-term, extremely long feedback cycle-ish, like climate change or – planet-scale climate engineering.
Since we are bound to get pretty desperate and since climate hacking does offer an enticingly quick way out, I'm confident we'll try it at some point. When we do, I very much hope I'll find my pessimism proven wrong.
Edit: fixed formatting
The most convincing argument to me is that we're already facing a vast problem that would require a great deal of geoengineering to counter. If polluters realized they could geoengineer the problem away, they would stop trying to reduce emissions, and the geoengineering problem would become even larger and more unmanageable.
Due to how entropy works, it's always more efficient to simply not spill milk on the floor than to mop it up. Deciding that you should just have a milk bottle fight because you have a mop in the house is... strange? It will never be more efficient to scrub greenhouse gases from the air than to avoid emitting them in the first place.
Does not fix the root causes and I don’t see how it can work long-term.
The thinking goes that, if only we could become pure and stop partaking in the evils of consumer capitalism, we might appease a hidden power and be saved from a myriad of bogeyman such as climate change.
This mindset fails to reasonably consider the certainty and enormity of the threat. Organized civilization is likely to end. Billions will die and we might very well become extinct.
The problem must be attacked with the full force of human intellect. It's so damn obvious that "wait for everyone to become super duper conscientious" is a fool's plan.
> a startup isn't going to fix everything and capture all the carbon
Won't that significantly reduce the photosynthetic potential of Earth, and significantly reduce the carrying capacity of the Earth for life?
There are plenty of planets and moons that are cooler because they receive less sunlight. None of them host any life that we can detect.
Isn't there a real risk that geoengineering would just end up turning the Earth into something resembling Mars, irreversibly?
The Earth has supported abundant life with an atmosphere with a higher concentration of C02 than it has now. Has it ever supported abundant life with the solar energy being reduced to the extent required to reduce climate change?
Why wait all the time until global warming destabilizes every ecosystem on Earth? You can have it today, just by spraying the upper atmosphere!
People do take geoengineering quite seriously. People do talk seriously about carbon capture, about ecosystem husbandry, about forced forestation, even about ocean seeding (there have been enough research about this one to conclude we are not desperate enough yet). It's only global shading that isn't serious.
It's always boom then bust, everywhere in space and time.
That said i still hope we'll manage in some obscure way because we have no other choice!
It's quite irrelevant who he is, it's what he has to say that's important and whether his facts are correct (which they are).
> Mobile will be the only computing people have access to and they'll need to be more aware of data pricing.
For the vast majority of the planet, mobile is already the only computing they ever use.
> There's no reason to think telecoms won't take advantage of their position to increase data prices under the guise of maintenance for the towers.
This, though, is straight up wrong, since in any competitive market data prices becomes a commodity. In India you can get a 1 GB data plan for 15 rupees (~US$0.20) per month. Emphasis on the "competitive" bit there though: as usual, Canadians will be screwed.