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Comment by bayarearefugee | Hacker News Reader

I think that not seeing how the story ends will be a blessing in disguise.

(I do not share his optimism that we fix this, the forces of Line Must Go Up are going to win... at least until we all rapidly lose)

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I interpreted his "optimism that we will fix this" as the continuation of his lifelong practice of science communication in service of ecosystem preservation. I believe he grasps that people are far more motivated by having a positive vision to run towards than by a negative one to flee.

In that, I think he's being incredibly strategic with his voice in what he knows are his final years. He could leave us saying "everything is fucked, you absolute idiots", but what is there for us to do then besides lie down in the mud?

Instead he's signing off with "We have come so far, I wish I could witness the spectacular recovery you're all about to usher into being!"

Gentle parenting the apocalypse. What a legend.

"Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet, nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine; the people are fucked! Difference! The planet is fine! Compared to the people, The planet is doing great: been here four and a half billion years! Do you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We’ve been here what? 100,000? Maybe 200,000? And we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over 200 years. 200 years versus four and a half billion. And we have the conceit to think that somehow, we’re a threat?"

-George Carlin

If we wanted to, we could set back biodiversity 50 million years, in the sense that it would take 50 million years to get back animals as diverse as there are today. Knowing that earth has 200 million good years left, yes we are pretty damn big threat.

A large enough object coming close enough to our planet could also do that.

Humans have and will continue to destroy lots of living and non-living material. Unless some huge global awareness or higher sentience will reduce that immensly very quickly, humanity as we know it, will end on this planet. With the rising CO2 levels i doubt our intelligence will get any better.

And the planet will quietly do its dance around its star..

It's glib and funny but also hilariously wrong.

In 1800 the US population was 5.3 million (give or take). Non-industrialized. In 2025 it was 340 million (give or take a bit more). Fully industrialized.

In 1800 even if you put every able bodied potential logger to work logging you couldn't make that much of a dent in the forests in the short term. Crews had to cut the trees by hand, move them via river or animal power, etc. In 2025 a single person in a machine can exceed the output of entire crews from 1800. A parcel of land that would take a year to log in 1800 can be clear-cut in three days in 2025.

340 million people need far more lumber per year and fully industrialized are capable of cutting down far more trees.

In 2025 if we wanted to do it we could cut down every single tree in the entire USA within a handful of years. That was not even remotely possible in 1800.

Scale matters.

Will life survive? Sure. Will geologic events eventually clean up the land? Yes. But I don't think saying we can only be as bad as one of the great extinction events is the zinger George Carlin thinks it is.

And just to be clear: I think reasoned acceptance of some extinction may be necessary to make humanity a multi-planetary and eventually multi-solar system species. In the long long run every single species on earth is a dead end. The sun will die and all life with it. As the only intelligent life with the capability I consider it our moral duty to make life resilient to such things, taking as many species with us as we can. But what are doing now is basically lighting our inheritance on fire to fuel executive bonuses and nothing more. That's just stupid.

My theory: The forces of Line Must Go Up are going to keep winning. Mitigating the impact of climate change will be part of Line Goes Up. Whether it will be cheaper or more expensive than avoiding it in the first place will remain to be seen (but won't really matter in the end), but we will be facing whatever impacts we will be facing, and we will face them, and we will deal with them.

If you have any doubt, look at how the Netherlands dealt with storm surge.

- “Yes, the patient might die, but we’re confident that given enough resources, we’ll bring him back to life.”

Well, to be fair, it’s basically what’s happening with LLMs atm. So, maybe feathering up Mammon and aiming for the sun will be the tech industry’s most lasting legacy.

Entire companies have been wrecked by "line must go up" thinking. I see no reason why it should preserve the planet when it can't even preserve its own livelihood. Never underestimate the complete destructive nihilism some are willing to engage just to earn some status and/or dollars. The feedback mechanism from climate change is far too slow. This kind of "ah it'll be grand like" attitude is completely naïve.

Relying on market forces to mitigate/address the impact of climate change will require us to collectively impose actual market pressure (i.e. regulation, constraints) to do so. Not seeing much sign of that among the major contributors of emissions right at the moment.

That's because very few people are being meaningfully affected right now. For most, climate change exists as an abstract idea and not an immediate, physical problem. It doesn't help that claims like those made by Al Gore about the polar ice caps being gone by 2016 turned out to be untrue.

I wouldn't expect society to transform itself if told that an asteroid may impact Earth in eighty years, for similar reasons.

Heck, faced with a rapidly spreading virus that can kill in 2 weeks (for the general public at a very low percentage, for our elderly neighbors a lot higher), a large majority of humans turned to angry denials and conspiracy theories to justify to themselves that "it's not that dangerous!".

We are so fucking dead.

When somebody says something isn't that dangerous it always comes with an unstated post-text of 'for an average person of average health.' Each year the flu kills hundreds of thousands of people. As the population ages, and thus has more individuals in senescence where your body is basically just breaking down, that will increase into the millions. But yet it's still not unreasonable to say that the flu isn't that dangerous.

And you might think I'm being disingenuous with these facts and perhaps e.g. all those deaths from the flu are just in Africa or wherever. Whereas in reality it's the exact opposite! Places like the US have a substantially higher than average mortality rate from the flu. Globally deaths are around 700k and in the US it's around 50k. We have 4% of the world's population, but 7% of the world's flu deaths. The reason is because it's not about healthcare, vaccines, or whatever else. It's about the amount of people in senescence.

At a certain age, and the subsequent state of health it entails, lots of things that indeed 'aren't that dangerous' turn into life-ending threats. For some contrast that most aren't aware of, the average age of mortality of the Spanish Flu was 28 - which made it a completely terrifying freak outlier in terms of viruses, which generally affect the very young and very old most severely. Nobody would be saying that the Spanish Flu is not that dangerous in modern times.

Well, maybe search for the keyword "long COVID" and see how it has caused a lot of suffering even among young and otherwise healthy individuals.

Also, people seem to forget that exponentials go up very fast, so an "average person of average health" would be very selfish to not make the necessary precautions to limit the spread of the virus as much as feasible.

You vaccinate yourself to protect yourself. People who are vaccinated for a disease can and do spread said disease. It's this way for literally everything. The claims that you cannot spread COVID if you're vaccinated were simply false. Vaccination can have a mitigating effect of course, but we were never going to be able to eliminate COVID with something like herd immunity.

The only virus completely eliminated by vaccines is small pox, and that was largely because of a number of ideal factors. The top two are probably that that no animals carried smallpox, only humans. And the second is that infection or vaccination provided lifetime immunity of effectively 100%. This dramatically reduced its potential for mutation and meant that getting rid of it in humans would get rid of it - period.

Coronaviruses, by contrast, are transmissible between humans and animals. This means even if you fully eliminated it in humans, it could, and probably would, come back. This is why flus are basically impossible to get rid of. If you believe CDC numbers then US flu deaths in 2020 were essentially 0, yet now it's back like nothing ever happened. Even the Spanish Flu is still with us as a variant of the common flu. But fortunately most viruses trend towards less lethal mutations over time. Probably natural selection in play - killing your host is not a great path to survival and reproduction.

As for long COVID. I'd rather defer that conversation for a few years. Research on exactly what it is and exactly what causes it is ongoing, and so debating it at this point is just going to be speculation.

But it's quite trivial to see that vaccination will heavily decrease the possibility of transmission - it's like continuously coughing up millions upon millions of viruses vs only re-transmitting a few.

And you are right that in the long term Covid will probably become just like the regular flu, as it mutates to more infectious, but less and less dangerous - but I don't see how it's relevant. At the height of the pandemic not the weakened strains were at play, and you surely know that a^n will either very quickly die out, or very quickly explode depending on the given 'a' - masks, vaccination, and staying home absolutely helped decreasing the possible reach of the disease.

I don't see how you can say these things absolutely helped when at this point in time I wouldn't ask you if you've ever caught COVID, but rather how many times have you caught it. It doesn't matter how many shots you've injected, how many masks you've worn, or whatever else - you've almost certainly gotten COVID, and probably multiple times. Even Antarctica managed to end up with multiple outbreaks.

And furthermore, if you look at a graph of the typical cycle of a flu-like epidemic they all look extremely similar, including the COVID graphs. For instance here [1] is one for the Spanish Flu. Scroll down a bit here [2] to see the US death graph for COVID. It's essentially identical. With COVID there was a narrative attached to each of the waves, but in reality it was a lot like financial analysts. They can explain everything when they know the results, down to why the market moved 0.7% yesterday. But their analysis of what will happen to the markets tomorrow is somehow no better than you'd get from a palm reader.

[1] - https://static01.nyt.com/images/2009/04/30/health/0430-nat-1...

[2] - https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

How do you explain then the differences between countries? Of course, different measurements/demographics aside.

There's a nice visual here [1] that shows excess mortality instead of relying on COVID numbers. This helps control for different standards in measurement/demographics, to some degree. After all was said and done the difference between countries was pretty small. The US had a relatively poor outcome for COVID and ended up with excess deaths of 434 per 100k. Australia had one of the best (amongst advanced economies), and ended up with 163. There were large relative differences, but the absolute differences were small - those values are (per 100k) 99.72% the same.

And behaviors were not really predictive of outcomes. Gibraltar, for instance, was the first 'country' (they put the micro in micronation) to achieve complete vaccination coverage. The media ran tons of stories on them being a window into a post-COVID future because cases there plummeted. Then the next COVID wave hit and cases skyrocketed there, just like everywhere else. After all was said and done they ended up closer to the US than Australia with excess mortality of 300.

[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus

The reality is that COVID caused lockdowns never had anything to do with the lethality rate. It had everything to do with hospital pressure - there's a limited number of ICU beds and COVID was the annoying combination of spreading easiliy and if it went bad, you'd occupy a bed in the ICU since you needed very active monitoring. If ICU capacity is exceeded, you get into the really ugly business of having to triage who can get necessary first aid. Governments and hospitals both would really do anything else than have to decide whether or not you leave the weak and elderly to die of diseases because you lack the space to handle them. (Not to mention the personnel shortage; a lot of other medical procedures got delayed because of ICU pressure. Even if they did have enough beds, that wouldn't necessarily translate to enough people to care for patients, and you'd end up having to triage non-COVID procedures too.)

That is what caused the lockdowns. It's also why after the first two vaccine waves, the pressure on hospitals was heavily relieved, leading to most countries lifting their lockdowns. Even just being vaccinated once gives you enough immunity against COVID to usually not need a hospital visit. The disadvantages of a lockdown even on just a healthcare level outweigh the benefits when you don't have a dangerous superspreader on your hands.

Mental problems were up massively during the lockdown period since humans are social creatures; physically there also were major spikes in seasonal diseases for the next year since they never stopped evolving, while we stopped getting them, meaning our bodies didn't have the time to adapt to them... So we got all the seasonal diseases thrown at us at once.

ICU and first aid are on opposite ends of the spectrum of care. ICU saturation would not prevent the administration of first aid.

Which virus turned "a large majority of humans to angry denials"?

COVID

> That's because very few people are being meaningfully affected right now.

Once we're all at the edge of extinction, the markets will provide?

If that's your point, your idea of capitalism is a cargo cult.

Market pressure is required to avoid climate change by keeping companies from externalizing climate impacts.

Market pressure is not required for a city to decide that having the city flooded is bad, and start a tender for building a sea wall. This makes the line go up for the sea wall companies.

For the Netherlands, the entity that pays the cost is the same that benefits from preparedness. For climate change, the plastic doohickey plant in misc country who would have to pay the cost of losing their asset, is entirely divorced from the entities who will benefit from CO2 reduction: everyone in the world. It's a prisoner's dilemma played at every level from the individual to the corporation to the region, and country. I'm not optimistic about our ability to coordinate the entire species to all suddenly start spending a bunch of money on each other instead of our own groups. Especially when basically every existing business in the world will fight it tooth and nail. We got lucky with solar that its naturally cheaper than coal power, but there's no law that has to be the case with anything else.

> I'm not optimistic about our ability to coordinate the entire species to all suddenly start spending a bunch of money on each other instead of our own groups

The opposite needs to happen. Less consumption needed, overall. Less spending. It kind of already is, via lower and lower total fertility rates. Might not be declining quickly enough to cause sufficient decline in consumption.

I'm not talking about CO2 reduction, I'm talking about living with the result that the emissions have caused. And for that, the entity that pays the cost and benefits will again be the same.

Exactly, we cannot expect to bring individual responsibility to a global problem. There will always be individual entities not puling their weight. The train of climate agreements and collective effort has left the station, the climate accords were aiming for under 1,5C and we are very much into 2,5-3C territory.

This is not what's going to happen planetwide.

What's going to happen instead is that the rich will mitigate the effects only for themselves.

They will spend a small percentage of their wealth to protect themselves and their property from all the ill effects of climate change.

I agree. I reflect on this from time to time when I consider that my mom, having died a few years back, would not be enjoying much of anything going on in the world right now. (Further, that she was born at the close of WWII in the U.S., she may have been lucky enough to have lived in the best part of recent history here.)

“No one cares about the bomb that didn’t go off.” - Tenet

Preventing “bombs” from going off is not rewarded. And indeed the Line Must Go Up Crowd is reliant upon someone else fixing the problem while they get theirs. But when the majority think that way we’re f**ed.

The bombs not dropped here today remain available to be dropped elsewhere tomorrow, so perhaps we shouldn't pat ourselves on the back just yet.

It’s a good comparison especially in the context of mutually assured destruction, whether administered directly or indirectly, the same grim pragmatic political truth of wedge issues remains:

why solve today what can be put off til tomorrow?

> The bombs not dropped here today remain available to be dropped elsewhere tomorrow

Yeah but humans on the whole are terrible at handling long-term consequences even when they are reasonably certain those consequences a) exist and b) are terrible for them personally.

Ironic is it not? Vaccination campaigns have been so successful anti-vax idiots who have never had to watch their child die of a preventable disease think vaccines are a scam.

Ever build something? You will get an earful about code and how stupid the regulations are. Nevermind that half the buildings in a city may survive an earthquake because of those rules. People often just don't connect the dots and they sure don't want to pay extra to make the building stronger.

Why are so many roofs in Texas ruined by hail? We have the technology to make a roof hail-proof for all but the absolute worst storms. But we don't. Too expensive. I'm still surprised Florida actually improved construction standards after Andrew which - shocking - has helped in the recent storms.

Or why isn't it required to make homes in fire-prone areas defensible and fire-resistant in California? Local control, too expensive, haven't had a massive fire until this year except ... oops Oakland Hills fires in 1991 that gave us a preview of the LA fires! Did we prepare? LOL.

And hey - what do you know. The USA's whole "pandemic preparedness" program was torn down because we haven't had one since 1917 and what a waste of money. Just in time for COVID.

The human population is set to crash quite hard in the next 100 years. It's backed into the cake.

Not all human population is going to crash. Africa population in 1950 was 228.7 million, in 2025 is 1549 million. Fertility rate in 2025 is 4.05.

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/afr/afr...

Africa's fertility rate is dropping fast: 40 years it was above 6, 20 years ago it was above 5, and it dropped by 0.6 in the last ten years.

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/afr/afr...

most projections expect Africa's population to peak around 2070, which is less than the timeframe GP considered.

Could you share these projections that say Africa's population is going to peak around 2070. I cannot find any.

actually I may have mis-remembered this, sorry. Possibly I was thinking of population change peaking, but I can't say for sure.

https://population.un.org/wpp/graphs?loc=903&type=Probabilis...

If we keep at it like we have been maybe there's light at the end of the tunnel for Earth, ecologically. In say 100k or 1M years, after we're long gone and things have started to repair themselves.

This is where I find hope: ten million years from now we'll all be gone, and the earth will be a beautiful, thriving place once again.

The short term doesn't look so good, but at least I will only have to watch a few more decades of it.

This is a very macabre position! Your life and other people's lives are a joyous blessing.

Was it part of beautiful nature when an asteroid strike killed most life on earth?

What does it matter if a bunch of non-sentient animals keep on trucking here on earth? Some disaster will eventually kill most of them just like it has repeatedly over the eons.

Then the sun will die and all life on earth with it permanently. In fact the sun's red giant phase will erase even the traces that life ever existed here. Is there some value in that abstract notion of everything being melted into slag and disappearing?

It is entirely possible we are the last chance life on earth has of becoming inter-planetary. Of surviving in the long term.

As for the heat death of the universe who knows. That's far enough into the future some future generation can deal with that problem. We don't know enough to say if that's what will happen or if there is any way to avoid it (like escaping into another universe).

Not that I think a planet full of non-sentient life is worth very much. It is no different than a huge factory of machines left on automatic. A bunch of biological machines fussing around accomplishing nothing and having no purpose. The concept of beauty only exists while there is an intelligence around to enjoy or contemplate it.

At least the asteroid didn’t know better and wreck it anyway?

There's a lot of sentient life on Earth besides humans.

If I had been around at the time of the Chicxulub meteor strike, I don't suppose I would have been any happier about its after-effects than I am about the similarly devastating impact humanity has had - and continues having, knowingly, intentionally - on a world that was once beautiful.

I do not care whether humans become inter-planetary. We certainly will not survive in the long term, and that's okay.

> A bunch of biological machines fussing around accomplishing nothing and having no purpose.

We are no exception. Meaning is a fantasy we create for ourselves - or don't! - as it suits us.

> The concept of beauty only exists while there is an intelligence around to enjoy or contemplate it.

I think you under-estimate the intelligence of non-human life, and likely over-estimate our own.

In any case, there is no joy in the wanton destruction of beautiful things.

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