Hacker News Reader

Comment by MeImCounting | Hacker News Reader

I am totally unconvinced by this whole "technology is a great filter" argument. First of all I have my doubts that, even at the height of the cold war, nuclear war would've extinctic all of humanity and nowadays with much less ordinance definitely not.

Equally climate change is very unlikely to extinct all humans and dont even get me started on all the other "extinction risks" such as rogue AI or bioweapon because they are merely sci-fi and again would almost certainly not get everyone.

We definitely dont have a convincing solution to the fermi paradox and if we did it would certainly not be so trite and silly of an idea as "technology kills"

View on HN

It doesn't have to kill everyone, just destroy the technological society and that would solve Fermi's paradox. Think about the things our technological society consumes, particularly petroleum. There's no way there is enough of it to last a thousand years (a blip on a cosmological time scale). We have no way of feeding our current population without fossil fuels for fertilizer. Maybe that ends in a technological transition to something else, or a social transition to something sustainable. Maybe. There aren't a lot of data points.

I was hoping someone would bring up the technological aspect of a collapse of modern society and then regrowth. There are two major issues with humans post-collapse being able to create a technological society and these are lack of fossil fuels and surface deposits of metals being used up. Both of these work together to make an industrial evolution type event very difficult and perhaps impossible.

I would wager that there is a different type of technological path requiring less fossil fuels and less surface metals. I dont have any data to support this belief obviously but I do believe that given enough time a human society could develop technology to enable space colonization without the jumpstart of an industrial revolution. This would look like slow generational iteration as opposed to explosive revolution and therefore would be more sustainable IMO.

Metals wouldn’t be a problem. The metals we already mined will be all over the place in the form of abandoned junk from before the collapse

Iron is arguably the most important, and also degrades - past, as I understand it, the point at which it can be recovered by low-tech processes. The longer it takes to bootstrap a second industrial revolution the harder it would become.

Yeah this is the issue with metals and likely the largest barrier to a post collapse society. Likely ironworking would end up looking like pre-industrial japan where iron was very extremely valuable and of relatively low quality compared to the west due to the problems with smelting it from iron sands.

This is why I propose long term technological advancement without a second industrial revolution.

Surely any post-collapse society could just mine the cities for metals. And presumably with a much reduced population there would be plenty of arable land for growing oil bearing crops obviating the need for most fossil fuels.

It's disputed whether even modern ethanol production is energy-positive. But trying to start an entire biofuels production chain from scratch would certainly not be net positive, as you would need to already have mechanized agriculture and a petrochemical industry to get that efficiency.

Coal liquefaction would probably be superior to biofuels, as it seems we will give up using it before it is depleted.

Green fertiliser can be produced at ~3x the cost of petroleum-based fertilizers.

Nobody does it because it's uneconomical as long as oil is cheap.

Climate change will ruin food production, not global fertilizer shortages.

I agree that civilizations (including humans) are unlikely to completely wipe themselves out, but it is not at all certain that we could recover to our present technology after a cataclysmic event.

Once we mine out all easily accessible fossil fuels, we'll cross a certain point of no return. After that point, a 19th century type industrial revolution will no longer be (easily) possible. Let's say a truly cataclysmic war happens and we just lose access to modern technology. Would we be able to regain it at some point? Could we rebuild a modern civilization without having access to the most energy dense and convenient fuel known to us even today?

Sure, we wouldn't go extinct, but if we are no longer able to travel beyond our own planet, we may as well have filtered ourselves out from the galactic stage.

As I have said elsewhere in this thread, I do believe there is a technological path requiring less fossil fuels and less easily accessible surface metals that would allow humans to achieve high technology and do the whole space colonization thing without an industrial revolution. It would take an order of magnitude or two longer and would be iterative and generational as opposed to explosive and revolutionary and might be more sustainable for it. Obviously I have no data to support this but its my intuition that its possible and perhaps even common for other life in the galaxy

A full scale nuclear war and the resulting fallout would be unimagineably devastating. Whether that kills 100% of humans or only 99.99% doesn't really matter. The natural world we rely on would be obliterated along with us. There would be no remaining governments or modern technology. Rebuilding an advanced society in a post apocalyptic wasteland would take an incredibly long time, if it's even possible.

Even then, the question would be "Should we?". If our current society ends by violently destroying virtually all life on the planet it will have been the biggest failure of a culture in history by a huge margin. Any survivors might very well develop some incredibly strong prohibitions against unchecked technological change.

Yes nuclear war is very scary. Yes it would be catastrophic to the ecosphere and human society. It is also incredibly unlikely that it would result in the extinction of humans. Also the idea that a post-collapse society would have some taboo against technology is possible but even if true would not hold for long or be particularly widespread. Any group who abandoned that taboo would quickly become more powerful than those who didnt.

Heres some good reading on post collapse society and extinction talked about more in depth. Long story short theres been lots of exaggeration and fear mongering about nuclear war. Clearly its apocalyptic and we dont need to exaggerate anything about it to make it scary. Its already scary. It would be better to have realistic conversations about this.

https://web.archive.org/web/20221016195507/https://forum.eff...

While I also think that this is unrelated to the Fermi paradox, the global threat and real impact of a nuclear exchange wouldn't be direct impact, but the ecological crisis of a nuclear winter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com