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Comment by Varkiil | Hacker News Reader

I don't see humanity surviving this long and if it does I think it would be pretty close to what we have today or even older

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I beg to differ but slightly : humanity will probably still exist in 100 years but probably less numerous and less technological than now.

At one point natural resources depletion and the effect of climate change will reduce human population to a fraction of what it is now. The remaining ones will have to make do with less technology and more manual work.

I'd encourage every HN reader to read the Archdruid Report, eye opening.

Shrugs, people have been saying this for the last 400 years, if you say human civilization will go backwards for long enough you will eventually be right.

Since it's impossible to know one way or the other I chose to think that our descendants will be sat somewhere in space watching the Sun go nova.

Fundamentally as a species we have two problems, energy and resources and both of those are for the taking in the solar system, We just need to stop screwing about and go get them.

The historical trajectory is for energy to get cleaner and cheaper/more available. This is more likely to continue than not (wind, solar and nuclear power are all abundant and not particularly expensive using present day technology (and I think many opponents of nuclear would still prefer it to not having magic holes in the wall)).

The historical trajectory is for energy to get cleaner and cheaper/more available.

I beg to differ. At least for heating, which is necessary for a lot of climates, and also often for cooking, wood is actually arguably the cleanest, easiest to establish, most universally available and most sustainable.[1] The historical trajectory is that it has been becoming impossible to obtain for most people because they are being progressively squeezed in to some sort of megacity of apartment boxes designed for worker drones, cars and mass-consumption. Some of them have never even seen a forest.

[1] http://woodheat.org/why-heat-with-wood.html

Wood has some carbon cycle advantages, but it absolutely isn't clean (especially in the stoves available historically, modern stoves do better), and it obviously isn't sustainable for human civilization as we know it (prior to the widespread use of coal, forests were shrinking).

(I say as we know it because some civilization that hasn't existed might tend to slow growth prior to achieving a high standard of living)

Yes, it's not perfect, but it's a lot better than anything else from virtually any angle for local heating, at least. Cooking too, in most cases.

Basically, wood is a huge win because it doesn't rely on having a vehicle, a credit card, a petrochemical distribution system, a bank, electricity and bureaucracy to manage all that, etc. Once you tally up the pervasive bullshit (transport, regulation, real state of reserves, enabling technology, overheads for the above) around most energy sources, you realize they're a hell of a lot more expensive and less long-term reliable than wood.

One axe, some land, a bit of time: sorted.

You are romanticizing the axe something powerful.

Have you ever cooked and heated for an extended period of time using wood that you fell with an axe? I haven't, but the little bit of axe work and wood splitting I've done is enough to dissuade me from being excited about it.

Heated, yes. Cooked, no. It's not that hard.

Anyway the points I was arguing were 'get cheaper' - clearly not the case when discussing a transition from free (grows on trees) to paid (to a private utility, often a monopoly, and one upon which you are dependent) - and 'get cleaner', not the case when moving from wood to other-system-plus-transmission-and-bureaucracy-overheads.

I agree with 'more available', though we've paid dearly for that in environmental damage.

PS. To thread originator, thanks for thearchdruidreport meme, I was skeptical but there are some really interesting thoughts there.

Human beings always overvalue their importance. Every generation thinks of the previous as a bad one, of itself as the last one. Truth is, we are not at the tip of any curve, no unique snowflakes, we are each just one of billions that already were and billions that are to be.

This little-known factoid might change your mind: an all out nuclear war has less than 1 in 10,000 chance of wiping out mankind[0].

[0] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/11/nuclear-winter-and-hum...

I did not specially talked about nuclear warfare, many other known events can wipe out humankind but what I wanted to point out is that future discoveries and major science advancement will be our downfall

I didn't assume you were talking about nuclear warfare. Sorry for not being clear.

I was point out how difficult it is to wipe out ~7 billion people, even with extremely advanced technology. Nuclear winter is just a convenient benchmark of that. The same resilience mankind has against nuclear winter is also applicable against genetic engineering, climate change, and nano-tech disasters.

nuclear war may not wipe out mankind, but superintelligent AI intent on wiping out mankind can probably do it.

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