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Comment by timnetworks | Hacker News Reader

The planet started out a ball of molten stardust, completely inhospitable to life as we know it. But then there was not only life, but life detached from the ground too. Then K-T event wiped out almost all of it. But the planet kept going! It can be argued it got better and more diverse.

Are people in trouble? Perhaps. If we stop technological achievement in the name of a few degrees centigrade, then definitely.

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Technological advancement needs to advance towards being sustainable or else it's a joke.

With the depletion of the coal and oil deposits the industrial revolution relied on the first time around, it is now locked in that this century is human civilization's only shot at reaching some kind of abstract technology escape velocity.

Crash now and there will never be a second chance, just iron age stuff in a harsher environment for however many tens of millennia it takes to have some random pandemic that wipes the descendants out occur.

Are we in prison? What is it we're hoping to escape from when we achieve technological escape velocity?

Present day scarcities of food, water, energy, useful land, etc

I think the idea is that, the current trajectory of technology is just making problems worse. More and more powerful, capable of pulling us further and further from a healthy equilibrium as we see with global warming etc.

Theoretically, if we can crack fusion or some other source of abundant, cheap energy, we could build many of the bandaid solutions proposed today that are not feasible due to energy constraints, while transitioning society to a more sustainable path. Tilt the curve as it were.

Our psyches unfortunately aren't built for the globalized world we live in, and unless we figure out some sort of collective awakening to transcend our egos... Our best hope is likely solutions that allow the march of progress, while slowing, stopping, and eventually undoing a bunch of damage humans have done to the biosphere over our history. Definitely a moon shot, but hopefully we can figure something out.

how can you know whether a particular technological advancement will be sustainable or not?

specifically, can you identify a technological advancement that you question the sustainability of?

If burning dead organic matter is modern technology, then I guess the pinnacle of science was in the stone age when we learned to make fire.

Only a Sith deals in absolutes ^_^

Absolutely.. but, sith are property of abcdisney. People are property of the Earth, until such a time we prove otherwise. We are less the landlords and more the squatters, with all sorts of events trying to evict us.[1][2][3]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter_of_536

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