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Comment by cercatrova | Hacker News Reader

One reason not to go back to India: climate change and heat. People are basically burning alive there and due to the high population, many people will starve in the coming decades as droughts cause crop failures. This will cause food and water wars as rising instability of the subcontinent means many people will need asylum. The area will not be geopolitically, financially, or otherwise stable in such a time. If I were a betting person, I'd move as close to the poles as possible in the coming future.

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Not to forget the air pollution. The PM 2.5 levels are morbidly high. Millions of deaths are linked to air pollution. People in their 40s,50s are increasingly dying of cardiac arrest, more and more kids have asthama and other lung diseases. Delhi is literally a gas chamber, even Bangalore air is mostly at unhealthy level. Given the population density and increasing industrialization, this problem is only going to increase in the next 10-15 years.

This is the thing for me. You couldn't pay me a million dollars a year to live/work in Gurgaon (Ok, maybe a million for a year or two, but then I'd be out). It is the place that comes closest to Blade Runner in my mind. Every time I went outside I felt like the air was trying to kill me. All of the giant hulking new offices and extremely little green space are like right out of some post apocalyptic nightmare.

> People are basically burning alive there and due to the high population

This is only true for poor people. It might sound bad, but average Indian live much worse life than someone who could afford/have skills to visit US.

In Delhi this year, I had my ACs running practically 24x7. I could stomach the power bills but the quality of life is atrocious. I basically couldn’t work outdoors or even go for a simple walk to the neighbourhood otherwise I’d be drenched in sweat.

Modern Indian apartments in major cities are also atrociously designed with little care for ventilation and materials.

You can fight the elements, but then you’re just locked inside a concrete and glass box all day long. No fun in that.

Yes, however due to there being significantly more poor people than rich people, especially tech workers, there will be antagonizing behavior in the future. There will be country-wide instability, and even if you're rich, a comparatively rich country like in Europe or the US will be substantially more stable than one with a higher degree of income inequality.

US has higher income inequality than India[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#/media/File:M...

It is not only income inequality one needs to look at, it is the amount of the baseline population which is well fed and taken care of, as generally, those that are will not wage war against the rich, while those that aren't are much more likely to.

If 90% of the population is starving and makes 10 dollars a day (hypothetical numbers), and 10% are rich and make 100 a day, the poor will be much more likely to revolt than in a scenario where 90% make 100 a day and can afford food, shelter, education etc, and the 10% make 1 million per day. It is not the level of inequality, it's the baseline.

Put differently: https://speakola.com/political/margaret-thatcher-on-socialis...

>If I were a betting person, I'd move as close to the poles as possible in the coming future.

The north pole has no ground below it, so I'm sure there are limits to this strategy.

Why not just simply go to North India instead of traveling halfway across the world?

Jaipur is 75 degrees right now. Cooler than Houston.

It is still not safe in North India either. Eventually the entire subcontinent will heat up past humans' wet bulb temperatures.

And then the sea levels will rise to where Mount Everest will become beachfront property. No one is safe anywhere, climate change will destroy everything.

Impact Lab has a pretty cool map of temperature projections.[0] I don't think see level rise will impact humanity as a whole that much. - The dutch for example have been successfully fighting the tides for centuries. It is certainly a problem in this context that the majority of the world lives in coastal cities, but generally there will be time to either build dams or evacuate. Extreme weather events are much harder to deal with though, and they are going to ramp up greatly with 2022 giving us a good first taste of what is about to come. Note also that while I filtered the map for the high emissions scenario, there are little understood feedback loops that might make things much worse than we currently can predict with certainty. The effect on permafrost, rainforests and the oceans from extreme heat is too complex for us to currently simulate adequately.

[0] https://impactlab.org/map/#usmeas=absolute&usyear=1981-2010&...

Fighting the tides is one thing when sea levels have been stable for millennia. Now we're heading towards meters of difference in average levels by the end of the century. I fully expect most of the Netherlands and most coastal metropolises to be underwater by late 21st century.

Me, too, I predict a lot of jobs for Dutch dam-engineers though, we need to be building more Dams in the rest of Europe.

So will the US though.

You came to the right place then! /s

https://youtu.be/RjsThobgq7Q?t=862

The same thing is happening to the US in the Midwest and California, two zones of high agricultural significance.

the thing you have been talking is of crop failure but just ask your stepdad google they would better tell you that even you all will die of hunger if india won't produce and export in the countries and hope this you hate was also there at the time begging for vaccines from India. better mind the buisness you can get into your control.

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