25,457 karma · joined January 14, 2015
So the sugar industry started importing African slaves, who actually had some malaria immunity.
This worked pretty well, and the transatlantic slave trade went on for centuries.
No one on either side had any real clue what was going on, and most probably thought it was a cruel punishment from the God(s).
Often the disease travelled faster than people, and when Europeans arrived, the natives were long since gone.
Because it just doesn't scale! It can feed 50-100 million people at most.
Maybe we need to empty the oceans of wild fish before we make that transition for seafood, but I hope it can happen a bit more quickly.
The stratospheric injections of SO₂ can bring temperatures down to healthy levels. This fixes most of the negative effects of high CO₂, and can go on for centuries if need be...
... but I'd prefer to get that CO₂ out once and for all. Solar powered machines that extracts it from the air and pumps it down to eternal underground cavities should be able to do that once we have much better tech. If it takes decades or centuries doesn't matter too much.
That will lower the warming!
While it remained, northern hemisphere temperatures lowered by ~0.5°C.
USGS report: https://pubs.usgs.gov/pinatubo/self/
Since the stratosphere is far above the rain cycle, it's very hard to imagine a mechanism whereby this could produce acid rain, and even if it did, acid rain is a much smaller problem than global warming.
They way I think/hope we can fix this is two parts:
1. The only way I think you can get rid of the excess CO₂ at scale is to permanently sequester it underground. The oil/gas industry can cheaply deposit huge amounts of gas there. The unsolved problem is extracting enough CO₂ from the atmosphere at reasonable cost. People are working on that, but it will probably be decades before it's is approaching practicality.
Which is why we need to do this in the meantime:
2. Spray the stratosphere with SO₂. This reflects some some sunlight and cools the planet. It sounds scary, but is actually safe: https://makesunsets.com/pages/new-faq
Easier said than done, of course. Sinking millions of trees to the bottom of the ocean might be the most practical way.
Yeah, other emit more, but the rank stupidity of this environmental vandalism deserves the scorn it gets!
Burn the debris every 10-20 years rather than let it accumulate and become unstoppable disaster fires once a century.
This tends to be very hard hard to do in a democratic system though. People really don't like their forests burning.
Thanks for teaching me something new. That doesn't happen every day!
From what I hear, they kill any outsider within spear range.
The dirt may not be piling up, but it's far from clean.
That doesn't mean scribbling in your own book is wrong.
That's really the by far most important aspect!
In the industrialized world, old professions disappear all the time, and are replaced with new ones. I saw somewhere that it's about 2% per year.
I think that qualifies as "very valuable" in any context.
AIs do things no human has done before millions of times a day.
According to an AI I asked, about 50% of that value is Starlink, with space launches and AI making up about 25% each.
The Starlink business depends on their cheap space launch tech, so using these rough numbers capability I'd say it is worth 75% of the company, or $1400B.
Starlink satellites have low orbits and only reflect sunlight around sunrise and sunset.