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Comment by ifwinterco | Hacker News Reader

I believe in climate change but in terms of a great filter candidate it doesn't seem significant - even in a worst case scenario with a lot of warming there will be large parts of the planet that are perfectly habitable.

On the other hand: nuclear war, genetic engineering, or just plain bad luck (carrington event, asteroid impact) seem much more likely to actually wipe out modern society

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Aside from just plain bad luck, the things you list don't happen in isolation. Humans have fought bloody wars over land for as long as we've stood upright. Do you think we'll all neatly organize into the remaining habitable land?

I agree climate change could cause wars but I don't agree with the narrative that it will somehow cause 'worse' wars because... worse than what? We've managed to have terrible wars than wipe out whole peoples, and great power competition that almost destroyed civilisation in the 1960s without any climate change required. It's hard to see how things can really get much worse on that front

I think it's most likely a symptom, not an end result of our stupidity. It's the short-sightedness that lets us keep doing this, that is the same idiocy that will lead us to nuclear or chemical warfare which reduces us back to a pre-industrialized society. Only this time we won't have readily available hydrocarbons we can use to dig ourselves out of it again. We'll be stuck burning wood to make coal.

Interestingly in the UK the industrial revolution actually started with water power, not steam engines. It just so happens that the UK, especially England is actually fairly bad for hydropower potential (too flat).

We'll never know the counterfactual, but I think if coal didn't exist what you would have seen is an increased focus on hydropower instead. That would have meant industrialisation would have been slower and distributed completely differently geographically, but would still have happened in my opinion

Oh cool! Sometimes taking away the easy toys enables us to innovate in completely different directions. Maybe there's hope yet (saying this as a guy who lives at the base of some pretty tall mountains too).

You were downvoted for some reason I can't fathom, but I agree with you.

It's not an extinction level event (not for humans anyway, it may well be for many other species.) It's not a candidate for the great filter.

There will be migration, but over centuries, not a sudden exodus. There may be wars, but what's new.

The great filter isn't about extinction necessarily, but about not being able to transcend to a space-faring species. I don't think our ignorance of climate change will extinct us, but I do think the way we handle climate change is a symptom of the short-sightedness and willful ignorance that ensures we won't make it past Type I on the Kardashev scale.

I see your point, but to qualify for the great filter it has to prevent not only us, but most civilizations from continuing as technological civilizations.

I don't see it. Maybe at worst it's a temporary setback, not a permanent one.

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