Everyone is wringing their hands about climate change steadily boiling the earth when a comet could wipe us out like it supposedly wiped out dinosaurs.
I actually sort of find this amusing, fwiw.
I actually sort of find this amusing, fwiw.
Humans don't seem to be very good at symbolic reasoning though.
What an interesting wiki article. It’s incredible this is proposed as a sliding scale effect, where the tunable parameters on that scale are the fundamental physical constants of the universe itself.
("nearby today" relatively, of course.)
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edit to add: wow you sure touched a nerve, eh? I dunno what nerve exactly, but I agree with your sib comment about how it would be great if your meatier comments got such engagement.
FWIW in my personal estimation doing something (or not) about asteroid detection and mitigation (if possible) is one of the measures of the maturity of a civilization (that lives on the congealed scum on the surface of a blob of magma orbiting a puddle of hydrogen in a region of space filled with rocks!)
It's wild that just a couple of centuries ago (less!) the very idea of rocks falling out of the sky was unthinkable (like UFOs or bigfoot.)
Of course, if some genius gets the population of the Earth to somehow stop wanting the things that emit carbon (transportation, hot water, hot food, modern infrastructure), while maintaining / growing the population, then humanity will have a front-row seat for collapse of society due to resource depletion, rapid species collapse of animals, microplastics-infused water pollution poisoning all that remains.
The only thing, aside from mass genocide, to slow all of that down is for every human to use less. Every CEO has to pledge to sell less each year. Every consumer must pledge to use less every year. The societal controls put in place to enforce this will eventually result in the overthrow of governments that attempt to impose this on their citizens.
We are humans, and what you see happening to the world is simply what humans do. If you want to see less climate change, less resource depletion, less toxic waste, then we need fewer people if we want to make this planet survivable for longer.
It's good to make our activities more green, use renewable resources, recycle, etc., but the reality is that most of those things will only delay the inevitable. Delay is good, pushing the timeline out for the consequences of our actions is something humans are good at.
Even with some miracle 'spread this powder in your backyard to remove your years-worth of carbon footprint' magic material that keeps the CO2 levels steady... humanity is poisoning almost everything else - just not at a 'kill our selves in 100 years' rate.
Though I agree that we are also poisoning our planet and should stop it. <-- expect another histrionic pile on by people who think climate change will definitely kill us all but want to dismiss concerns about how toxic our world is.
Sigh.
I wish we would do more passive solar design and walkable development.
Not this comet, though. The reason it's in The Guardian is because it's on its closest approach to Earth; it's 0.85AU distant.
What's really funny is this flies in the face of typical human patterns of behavior where we obsess about longshot disasters we can't control, like catastrophic plane wrecks, and go "meh" about things that are much more likely that we can control, like the much higher risk of dying or being maimed in a car wreck.
I don't known about you but I look both ways when crossing streets. I have never bothered to try and protect myself from crashes during flights.
I think the point was more that it makes sense to worry about something of our own creation which we have, at least in theory, some control over and power to change, than about something that comes from outside with more force than we can handle.
Wait, you seriously think a comet impact in the next 100 years is much more likely than mass extinction from warming planet? Comet impact IS the longshot disaster we can't control, and you are the one obsessing about it. Fossil fuels, and all the reasons why we don't just stop digging them up today, are totally in our control, and the time is ticking.
It would be pretty sweet if by learning to deflect asteroids, we also find a way to collect valuable resources from them: move small amounts of material into orbits that come close to earth.
So we just have to achieve world peace, to make that work.
I find it deeply concerning that your issue with climate change is what you address as "hand wringing".
I'm some random internet stranger. Why would you have deep feelings about anything I say here at all without knowing anything about me?
It's not a more rational stance to deflect things like concerns, and especially not to act so flippant in the face of such grand risks.
So odds are high there's a misunderstanding here somewhere.
I don't think being concerned and doing stuff to help are mutually exclusive, but your reaction seems to frame them as such.
But now that you clarified your stance, it's clear you weren't doing such a thing and I fully appreciate your first message too now. It was well written, another phrasing would have been too bad. It's just that here on HN it totally could have been written by some technophile not caring about climate change, or even a climate sceptic / denier, and personally, I'm fed up with this.
You were right about there being a misunderstanding. Everyone involved in this discussion should read it again with a calm mind.
I'm not in any way suggesting we shouldn't be taking climate change seriously. I'm suggesting people emote a great deal about it and then avoid taking serious action because it's too emotionally burdensome to face.
I don't handwring about it precisely because I'm doing what is within my power to do, so I feel at peace.
Again. I saw language that concerned me, and addressed it publicly because at this instance I am participating in a forum and language and voicing opinions matter.
Catering to prejudices as if they are reality does not serve to educate anyone. So it's not something I'm inclined to do.
B. Perhaps you've heard of World War II? Or the Cold War? Both were threats to the survival of mankind at least as much as climate change, perhaps more so.
They invented the atom bomb during WW2 and dropped it on two cities in Japan to get Japan to give up its stubborn refusal to surrender. Some Japanese soldiers hid in caves and devotedly didn't surrender for decades afterwards.
> Some Japanese soldiers hid in caves and devotedly didn't surrender for decades afterwards.
Yes, and they killed several innocent citizens in Phillipines. It was a tragic. In the meanwhile Japan's economics blossomed and average Japanese people enjoyed much better life quality than pre-WWII under a militarism government.
If you take a look at the history of China's population, you can hardly tell when WWII happened[1]. Hope this put things in perspective.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_China#/m...
B. Can you stay on topic please? That is the second topic you bring up without anyone asking.
Funny enough, you downplayed climate change again.
What's extremely "funny" in some sense of that word is that elsewhere on HN I am discussing climate change and environmental issues in earnest and it hasn't gotten one tenth the attention this has gotten, which is proof positive of my point: people have big feels about the topic and vent a lot about it but don't want to really engage constructively with it anywhere near as much.
FYI, I'm a woman. It's my policy to generally not correct people who misgender me on HN, but in this case I will note it and suggest that perhaps your powers of observation aren't the best.
Someone mentioned existential dread, which also really has nothing to do with anything "on topic." I commented on that about finding it sort of funny. Lots of people felt some need to reply to my comment when most of my comments get very little engagement.
I wish my more serious comments got more meaty engagement. This whole thing strikes me as a ridiculous overeaction.
You initial comment wasn't serious? You are somewhat confusing to talk to. Let's end this and agree to disagree.
It's just not anything that merits some giant pile-on of pushback from HN that makes it sound like I'm some extremely famous and influential environmental activist who just pulled a William Shatner and laughed in the face of my core audience on SNL and told them to "get lives" and "worry about something more important."
To me, this is like "Woah, dude. HN is histrionic here. Wow."
> If you don't like a tangent, you don't have to engage with it.
I will engage with anybody trying to downplay climate change. Thanks. The Whataboutism part wasn't part of the discussion until the second topic was brought up.