> There is no technology, survey, or program in operation today to monitor all the potential threats to Earth.
Because it's much easier to prepare to go live on Mars, apparently. /s
Because it's much easier to prepare to go live on Mars, apparently. /s
This is one big issue I have with the hysterical end of the climate change debate, there are 100 other threats to humanity, yet we don’t really care about them, probably because the media doesn’t care as much.
Covid is a pretty good example also, it’s killed way more people than the climate has for a long long time. A pandemic is a much bigger threat to both humanity and the economy. But somehow we’ve latched on to some event that might happen based on computer models in 50-200 years, as the biggest threat. At least according to the media. In reality even the IPCC doesn’t predict any fall in GDP due to climate change, just a slow in growth. Covid actually decreased worldwide gdp. An asteroid definitely would too.
My point is, we spend resources on a lot of things as humans. Lots of stupid things sometimes. I don’t see how one man’s goal to get to mars isn’t on the more positive side of things, and the technologies that will be developed for it will be definite positives for everyone, just look at reusable rockets.
This said, I think you kind of miss a few points regarding climate change. First, it hasn't happened yet, it's just starting. We are living a mass extinction right now, and that's not a computer model or some prediction; that's a fact: we can count how many trees, mammals and insects have already disappeared (something like 75%). That's not the climate change problem, it's the biodiversity problem. If we magically removed the excess of CO2 from the atmosphere today, we would still be living a mass extinction. Just because of habitat loss (for other species obviously), which is due to how we live. We are destroying the planet, that's a fact, and that's before taking into account climate change. The solution to that? Produce less, consume less. There is no serious technological solution, because technology is the problem.
Then there is the energy problem: fossil fuels are going down (we passed conventional peak oil in 2008, general peak oil is about now, LNG is close) and we don't have serious alternatives. That will threaten our whole society. Solution? Prepare to do with less energy, meaning that we won't be able to produce as much, meaning that it actually helps the climate change problem -> that's fortunate.
Finally, for both of those existential problems, they exist because of how we actively behave (as opposed to a potential asteroid that doesn't care about our actions). So of course it seems like we should do something. But it's much harder than the asteroid: for the asteroid, we should actually spend money building a solution. For the biodiversity/climate, we should generally produce less, which is not compatible with growth.
Somehow we do the opposite of what we should: we don't do anything about asteroids, but we should. We do a lot of stuff that is destroying the planet, and we should not. Because we are short-sighted and looking for profit, not long-term (mid-term, at this point?) survival.
I agree with you. The state of our oceans is a much more current and verifiable problem than the actual EFFECTS climate change will have in the future. I’m not denying it exists.
But there’s a lot of conflating the mass extinction with climate change, but they’re not the same thing. And climate change gets all the money right now. Because it’s fashionable. Not because it’s necessarily optimal spending wise.
Once things get bad enough, you start to have population migrations and political instability. Add in hunger and thirst and that leads to societal collapse and war.
Climate change gets attention because it has such wide ranging effects, both primary and secondary. Yes, there are other risks. Some, like asteroids and diseases do have people watching for them though we could always do more.
1950 human population 2.5 billion, 1977 human population 4 billion, 2023 human population 8+ billion
so in 20 / 30 years 16 billion?