Well... no. They're prepping to move to compounds in New Zealand. Even a global warming (and nuclear war, let's throw that on the pile!) ravaged Earth is vastly easier to live on than, say, Mars. Trying to escape that way would be a frying-pan-into-the-fire plan.
> and when the mass migrations really start and mid income countries start becoming failed states on their path, I hope you are in a place that can hold you safe for the remainder of your time here.
But yeah, that's basically the reason why, I reckon. Somewhere sufficiently stable and liberal that's also really, really hard to reach without a ship or airplane. Avoiding the various climate refugee crises and wars we're likely to see in the coming decades probably is their motivation. New Zealand's a clear front-runner in that race.
Depends. Yeah, much harder to grow food or breathe on Mars, but probably a lot fewer angry mobs trying to eat you, too.
The earth won't "care", it'll just be another of the many boom-bust cycles in the history of nature. We're part of it.
It's not going to be pleasant for the humans and animals that live through it, though!
While we have enough individual intelligence to see this is coming, and wish to avoid it, I don't think we collectively have the intelligence to do so. A crowd of humans has its own dynamics and kind of thought, and so far, these crowds are very short-sighted and prone to all sorts of irrationalities and hysterias.
There's also the problem of surface radiation. Given that we can't figure out how to build subterranean cities at scale on earth, I'm not sure what the plan is for dealing with that.
Honestly, a self sustaining space station seems easier to achieve than a self sustaining Mars base:
You can spin the space station up to 1 G, park it behind a celestial body that acts as a radiation shield and power it with nuclear, or beamed solar power.
Maybe I'm missing something obvious about the relative difficulty of the two problems.
It seems wrong even to compare those two tasks. They are so different that they don't seem to have a common metric. An analogy: is is easier to stop two spouses from quarreling or to write a SHA-256 implementation from scratch? How would that even be measured?
The rich killed Rome too and they still ended up with no society.
Can't we, or there just isn't any economic case for it?
Cold War militaries were certainly capable of building massive buried structures when needed:
Some ideas and napkin calculations: https://marshallbrain.com/mars
Our only datapoints for long-term human activity are "Earth gravity" and "complete freefall". This is one of the things I hope we can answer in the near-term with manned lunar missions.
> Given that we can't figure out how to build subterranean cities at scale on earth
We know perfectly well how to build subterranean cities at scale on Earth. We don't, because it's expensive and because people tend to like having windows for natural light and fresh air. It'd be cheaper on a smaller planet like Mars (less gravity to fight against), and it ain't like there'd be a possibility of natural light or fresh air anyway given the radiation and unbreathable atmosphere.
> Honestly, a self sustaining space station seems easier to achieve than a self sustaining Mars base
You'd have the same radiation problem if not worse (and no "underground" to shield you from it; "park it behind a celestial body" doesn't really work, either, when you have cosmic rays coming from all directions - said cosmic rays being the dominant form of space radiation), but other than that, yes, space stations are more practical - and you can build 'em anywhere, not just Mars.
You could also build such a spinning structure on an airless body like the Moon or Ceres. Ceres is in fact pretty close to ideal as far as human colonization goes: low gravity (so it's easy to build there and easy to leave for other destinations), close proximity to the rest of the asteroid belt (so lots of opportunities for space mining), and it's pretty much a giant ball of water ice and hydrocarbons so we'd have everything we need (at least on a fundamental chemical level) for air, food, and water alike.
Musk, on the other hand, seems to be obsessed by the Mars project.
The author writes on his experience with a group of elites who were seeking ways to protect their positions in the face of collapse (societal / ecological / etc.). Salvation will not come from the top.
original: https://onezero.medium.com/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0...
I'm not saying "this is your fault". But I think that these elites you want to blame are as clueless and selfish as every other person you know.
If everyone, in the developed world, made similar personal choices, to the two of us, things would be better, but it would still be insignificant compared to US policy decisions like the massive US military perpetually deployed across the world. And, if the entire world's population was able to share in hot and cold running water, heat in the winter, electric lighting, refrigeration, etc., much of those gains from personal choices of westerners would be negated.
I don't know the answer. Yes, a lot of people need to reduce their waste, and share with the rest of humanity and non-human life. But, it will not be enough-- somehow we must change governmental and corporate policies.
As things currently stand, the average American has near zero impact on policy decisions[1]. While our rich and powerful elites are driving us off a cliff. The change we need will not be led by them, but in the current climate, a revolution, in the US, is highly unlikely, and if it were to happen would likely result in an extreme far-right authoritarian/theocratic regime even more extreme than the individual enrichment at any cost, "drill baby drill," right to far-right regime that currently rules. And, the US currently controls much of the world (see all western nations observing US illegal sanctions against 1/4-1/3 of the worlds population and also providing support for recent US illegal wars of aggression). Maybe the rise of China will save us, if the US elites do not lash out in desperation to maintain power and e.g., cause a nuclear holocaust. But, pinning hopes of halting environmental destruction on China is a slim hope.
It is difficult to not lose hope.
Because none of what they do as individuals has any significant bearing on the current trajectory of Earth's biosphere. None of it. These are systemic problems, and trying to pin the blame for systemic problems on individual participants in that system - as you're doing right now - is not just ineffective, but is deliberately ineffective: a narrative crafted by those very same elites (and the corporations they own) to deflect blame from the system they themselves architected and continue to enforce.
> I think that these elites you want to blame are as clueless and selfish as every other person you know.
Well yeah, obviously. But that brings into question why they're elites in the first place, and the answer is that they shouldn't be elites in the first place, not that they're somehow of equal blame (let alone less) as their subjects.
Immediately start restoring mowed lawns with native plants. Ban the use of chemical fertilizers.
It could be done, but we won't. Salvation is at our fingertips, but we close our fists.
Are you proposing that any life will eventually discover technology (namely the ability to access and manipulate stored energy and also computation)? If so, it's possible that life is accounting for it in ways we don't understand yet.
By the way, I think you're in a tiny minority if you believe there is no distinction between things that evolve and things that are designed.
I get what you're saying and agree in spirit, but I think it is zooming out a little too far to say that technological development is just another natural process. Yes, it is in a way, but things like computation are truly different beasts. No, humans are not special in terms of our importance, language, meaning, or even intelligence, but my thoughts are that technology is a separate process from natural processes. It is distinct from evolutionary processes.
If you have some interesting reading, I'd love to know it. I haven't necessarily considered the question of technological processes being an extension of natural processes.
I think it's okay to accept something is true in an "ultimate sense", but not in a practical sense. e.g. that all technology is a natural process since the causal chain that led to it happened or rather was allowed by physics. To wit, plastics really are natural because humans evolved to be able to make plastics. If you argue against plastics being natural, then you might argue that anything "made" by an individual organism is artificial, which is clearly absurd.
No super interested in finding a resolution here, since I don't think the common meanings are problematic.
If we ban synthetic fertilizers (and more importantly herbicides/pesticides) abruptly before having established organic methods at scale, that will most likely cause food insecurity like it did in Sri Lanka.
Slowly phasing them out to a level that is not killing us in the long run seems more sensible to me.
Comparatively, "the great dying" was a much more profound event, and quite beyond our capability.
Even pushing our planet out of the current icehouse will likely require much, much more co2.
That is blatantly false and stands in denial of mountains of evidence.
I don't believe that we could end 81% of marine species, even with the worst that we could do.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_ext...
Even in your link to the Permian–Triassic extinction event, one of the most probable causes of loss of marine life was hypercapnia. Several of our modern-day coastal waters are highly hypoxic, enough to cause drastic changes in macro behavior of fish and even whales, and the hypoxic waters are directly caused by human actions.
Humans, in the last century alone, caused half of the total forest loss in the past 10,000 years, and we were directly responsible for a large portion of the other half.
This could go on and on.
https://www.epa.gov/nutrient-policy-data/documented-hypoxia-...
https://ourworldindata.org/world-lost-one-third-forests
It is simply incorrect and downright antagonistic to say that humans "humans are not particularly destructive to the planet".
Our current levels are well under 500 ppm.
Humanity will have to work very hard to force the planet out of its current icehouse.
We are definitely having an impact, and could well drive ourselves extinct, but I still see us as unable to implement drastic change, especially as some extinction events have required thousands of years to come to pass.
Would taxing/banning plastic actually reduce waste/pollution? or would the shift to more expensive replacements (paper/wood/etc) actually increase pollution and waste?
Banning chemical fertilisers would almost immediately cause a massive famine, enormous drops in agricultural productivity, etc. People consuming "organic" foods that don't use fertiliser can only do so from the position of privilege wherin chemically-fertilised crops are feeding 95%+ of the population. We even have a real example of the consequences! See Sri Lanka recently :(.
It's times like this I can't help but see why some people are so keen to keep the government away from things.
Plastics are a nightmare and there is no going back from them. We have inundated ourselves and our environments with micro plastics, and they will not just go away. Paper and wood do not have this problem on the disposal side unless they've been treated with chemicals. I'm not sure where paper and wood come into a discussion with plastics and fertilizers, but I would also support using less wood.
Do you have any ideas?
I don’t see an issue with chemical fertilisers, personally - I don’t think non commercial users of them are significant enough to be worth any consideration compared ro conventional agriculture.
I can’t say how consequential microplastics are - however banning them for use as packaging etc can have huge negative consequences because they are a very cheap (both in price and energy) packaging compared to most alternatives. I think that if microplastics are a concern, car tires and clothing are much more significant than “single use” instances as good packaging (which I would guess is actually usually disposed of properly most of the time).
I brought up paper because it’s a common substitute packaging (eg cardboard and the like), but is significantly pricier than plastics and more energy intensive to produce.
It’s not an easy Robles to solve, the more so because we use these things because they work so well. I just took exception to singling these things out because they are either critical to modern civilisation (fertiliser) or extremely useful (plastic packaging)
Its actually difficult for me to believe that any elite would be stupid enough to think they could survive an earth environmental catastrophe in space.
I'm pretty sure at least some of them are dumb enough to think they can survive it on earth, though. And they might be right!
Earth before humans died with the rise of civilization, and especially global trade. We transformed large swathes of land into farmland and urban areas. We enabled the transfer of invasive species throughout the world. We redirected and sucked rivers dry for our own purposes. We dumped our garbage and literal shit in waterways. We destroyed the majority of natural habitats.
And this all happened hundreds or thousands of years ago.