Earth Could Be Alien to Humans by 2500 (2021)
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
Seriously though, we were supposed to decrease emissions by 40% by 2030 to keep things under control. I recently saw in the news that we are on track to just make it to 2% drop. It's not looking good.
On economic, I hear talk about looking for 2 trillion in cuts; that's likely to cause economic stagnation all by itself as previously observed in e.g. UK austerity measures since the financial crisis in the late 00s.
Even on a smaller scale, any given cut is hard to forecast as a good/bad idea for the organisation itself (in the case the government) even for the guy at the top: for example consider that Musk cut what he thought of as pointless waste in each of his businesses, which works great in Tesla and SpaceX, has been a disaster for Twitter.
Also, China is close to a peer, and deploying renewables and battery vehicles as fast as possible — and yes also coal last I heard.
Then there's the talk of Musk being brought in despite the obvious conflict of interest. Wonder how that's going to play out, but given a substantial part of his wealth comes from electric vehicles, it's worth noting.
On the other hand he wants thousands of Starship launches and has yet to demonstrate the Sabatier machines that would be necessary for (1) Mars and (2) making this carbon neutral on Earth.
For just how much is made there, and on a per capita basis, China isn't doing too badly - neither is the UK, the US on the other hand has had super cheap energy for a long time, and a whole lot is predicated on it, so it's going to be tougher (even tougher now).
My tip: If you read fantastic news, google the location and look on it from space. Any game changer should be visible and viable from orbit. And it is but often enough..no powerlines or tramsformers. Planned economies, they reach their goals, to promote bureaucrats , reality be damed.
Neither Musk nor Thiel understand the structural differences between being a CEO and running a successful country.
China does understand them. It is in many ways a terrible place, but China has made insanely successful investments in education, engineering, and infrastructure, and is far better at planning for and building the future.
The US has gone in the opposite direction. Make high quality education increasingly unavailable and/or unaffordable, cultivate a popular culture of superstition, narcissism, and irrationality, and impoverish the population so talented individuals are either trapped in cultish, increasingly directionless corporate bureaucracies, or on the verge of homelessness.
And tech in the US only exists because of immigrants. If it becomes hostile to immigrants the smart people will go elsewhere - and that will be that.
While both Trump and Musk clearly demonstrate (the popular conception of) narcissistic injury when being told they're wrong, Musk also demonstrates that there are conditions where he doesn't respond so poorly — rockets.
I have no idea if that's going to make a difference.
> Neither Musk nor Thiel understand the structural differences between being a CEO and running a successful country.
I have no option about Thiel in this regard, despite him generally giving Bond Villain vibes. Musk I agree; if I was cryogenically frozen tomorrow and woken in 50 years to the news that Musk built his Mars colony but it failed catastrophically, I'd guess Musk's lack of understanding about governance was why.
Why does a totalitarian propagandaposter, that publicly does not get is shit together on demographics until its to late be trustworthy when it comes to green energy ?
As for trust, trust simply isn't how anything is done on the international stage, so nobody in the US needs to trust China any more than anyone in China needs to trust the US (or indeed any other pair of nations): we know China has surpassed the USA as the biggest combined source of greenhouse gases, and monitoring stations showed Chinese factories were to blame for surprise increased in banned ozone depleting gasses; what makes the rest of us believe the statements about their renewables is audits and satellite imagery, which also tell us the limits of those roll-outs.
Then again, maybe I‘m too clueless on this topic + naive.
My strongest data point is that the Chinese government is heavily pushing renewables, and I‘m pretty sure they don’t to this due to the selfless goodness of their hearts.
Their struggle is built in to the inflationary currency they use. If they were to use a less inflationary currency (1%/yr), e.g. gold backed, they would struggle less, but the oligarchy won't allow it.
Because it is the core factor. The inflation rate has vastly exceeded 1% for many years, and I consider this ideal target to be tolerable in the long-term. Even the Fed's target of 2% is an abomination when compounded, as it exceeds gold's mining rate. The moneyprinting that has occurred has benefited the rich at the expense of everyone else.
As for Bitcoin, it isn't really a sustainable technology as a currency. It will have major problems in the years ahead as its mining rate dwindles, with transactions becoming too expensive. Once it has been fully mined, its transaction cost then has no bounds. As this progress, its miners could slowly start to choose to discontinue transaction-affirming operations that are no longer worth the hassle.
The rich aren't really subject to inflation, as they have stock market ETF holdings that appreciate well. The poor are subject to it strongly because their incomes don't scale with inflation. The middle class are also subject to it for the same reason, but also because their meager savings dwindle in purchasing power.
I wonder what technologies we will have at our disposal in 500 years.
If a person from 1500 saw us today, he'd recognize we are human but every aspect of our lives -- electricity, screens, driving, etc -- would make no sense. But the rate of change from 1500 to 2000 is very low compared to what we can expect 2000 to 2500.
And I think that eventually we will ends up with massive shade between Earth and Sun, because it will be solution with least capital expenditure to achieve stable climate while not requiring great changes in our lives, as that seems to be issue with common folk and their general resistance to green solutions.
This achievement will then unlock ability to terraform Venus, because shading it is first step to cool it down.