science might just save humanity
We tend to act without consideration and have confidence we can just engineer ourselves out of our mistakes.
I think she was right. While I never try to underestimate humanity's enginuity, there's some arrogance there that we may create problems we can't simply engineer around.
I think this is survivorship bias. There have been several civilizations which have basically completely died out in human history, who weren’t able to engineer themselves out of whatever killed them.
The technology we have is bigger now, and so we're also making bigger problems.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Do we gain much by requiring innovators of the future to spend their innovation power on solutions to the side-effects of past innovations, instead of brand new innovations?
* Chernobyl is still unsafe to visit. The amount of radiation we've leaked into the atmosphere and oceans has a measurable negative impact on global health, and often a horrendous impact on local environments.
* Air quality/light pollution/noise pollution is significantly worse than pre-industrial revolution levels. These have measurable negative health impacts.
* We've directly and indirectly caused an uncountable number of extinctions.
* Glaciers are melting at an incredible rate.
Atmospheric fallout -> "Because all people in the United States who were alive since 1951 received some radiation exposure from fallout, some people may have an increased risk of cancer from this exposure, in particular, thyroid cancer. " https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/fallout/RF-GWT_home.htm
A perfect vacation resort. Just don't touch anything or disturb the soil.
My go to "oopsie" is the radioactive plume crawling towards the Columbia River. Once that breeches, all settlements downstream will be uninhabitable. Bye bye Portlandia.
2) It's entirely unclear whether we can engineer ourselves out of climate change. We've never experienced anything at this scale before, or from something (fossil fuels) we rely on so much.
The solution to climate change may have to be political rather than engineering, and it may be impossible politically.
And again, as I said earlier, this is in the context of humanity. Although I don’t want to undermine the death of someone, their death won’t stop the progress of humanity unless so many people die it resets our species. Even if we’ve never faced a particular problem as big as anything we experienced today, we’ve also never been so advanced and rich as a civilization.
We face an ongoing "vulture crisis" in India due to the tremendous use of antibiotics on livestock.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_vulture_crisis
See the book "Their Fate is Our Fate" for more examples of ecological problems affecting humans, for which birds provide early warnings.
Speaking of anti-biotics, we've been so successful in our development and manufacture of these medicines that anti-biotic resistance is a significant and growing problem.
Stepping away from medicine, consider the ongoing water crisis in the Colorado River basin. We engineered our way into vast cities and agricultural projects in the desert (e.g. California's central valley) and there is now no clear path to sustaining all of these projects.
Or the people acting without consideration are not impacted by the mistakes and will not be held responsible for engineering their way around them.
The actions from the Right that are more directly disingenuous are where they try to deny scientific conclusions and the damage already done. They'll post on twitter (implicit denials of sea level rise by) showing 150 year old pictures of seaside landmarks beside today's version with similar sea levels. Yet where are are counter-arguments for why the arctic sea ice/ice shelf is in such worse shape than it was just 30 years ago?
Why haven't we seen all the amazing properties of graphene commercialized yet? like super capacitors made from graphene that replace batteries and can insta-charge?