[HN Gopher] Programming in the Apocalypse
___________________________________________________________________
Programming in the Apocalypse
Author : drewbug01
Score : 216 points
Date : 2022-05-30 15:16 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (matduggan.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (matduggan.com)
| mav88 wrote:
| Lol. We're heading for a mini Ice Age which will peak around
| 2035. Get a wood stove if you live in the Northern Hemisphere.
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| Not according to NASA https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-
| climate/2953/there-is-no-i...
| kristjank wrote:
| 'Bit sad innit, but what can I do about it except globally
| irrelevant feel-goods that we're conditioned into doing on the
| individual basis? Cheap, clean energy solves a lot of the
| problems described, and until we get people to understand that
| the only energy that can be produced on a low budget, with little
| impact to the environment is either hydro or atomic, we are going
| to be a long way from a long-term solution or even remediation.
| Wind and solar are also extremely promising, but the load put on
| network balancing, storage and conversion makes me sceptical of
| their performance under unreliable conditions.
| peterweyand0 wrote:
| Raise your hand if you would be willing to lower your standard of
| living, voluntarily, in order to stave off global warming. Sell
| your car. Stop buying anything made with plastic. Stop using
| electricity.
|
| I don't see many hands.
| keiferski wrote:
| I think a lot of people would actually be willing to do some of
| this if, and only if, it came with a basic income.
| vikinghckr wrote:
| Never. I'm not changing any part of my lifestyle to prevent any
| climate disaster. I'm all for technological solution to climate
| change. In case that's not enough, I'm happy to face the
| consequences. But I'm still not changing my lifestyle.
| mtinkerhess wrote:
| I would be more than happy to give up almost everything if it
| would stop climate change, but unfortunately even if I make all
| those changes, everybody else will continue driving cars, so it
| seems my personal choices have nothing to do with whether
| global warming happens or not. The way around this is
| collective (government) action to guarantee everyone will
| participate, but for a variety of reasons we don't have the
| political will to make that happen. Besides, I'm not convinced
| individuals' actions are to blame for the majority of climate
| change -- I'm not an expert but I'm under the impression that
| corporate / industrial energy usage is the majority of the
| problem.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Lots of people have tried to promote biking, urban zoning
| reform, denser cities, mixed living and working areas,
| reduction of urban cars and the overall need for cars,
| increased availability of public transport, remote working,
| less work to more time off ratio, reduction in use of plastic,
| companies have switched from oil based plastics to alternative
| plastics, people have switched to solar or wind generated
| electricity, triple-glazed their houses to save on heating
| bills, paid for a more efficient washing machine or lower power
| TV or fridge.
|
| I see tons of hands and lots of companies lobbying against them
| because it wouldn't be as profitable if things changed and
| people bought less.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| This was a meandering rant that went on so long I never even got
| to the point of the article before bailing.
| [deleted]
| derbOac wrote:
| I think the basic idea is to cross energy use of a language with
| ubiquity of existing deployments.
|
| So take energy use benchmarks from things like this
|
| https://haslab.github.io/SAFER/scp21.pdf
| https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks
|
| and cross it with popularity?
|
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages/
| reggieband wrote:
| I have fear that the cathartic pessimism we sometimes enjoy
| ironically is turning into a chronic fatalism. It's like a habit
| that has become an addiction. I think the author was in a
| discussion that started as a fun catharsis for all involved and
| then devolved into an addictive argument that the author felt
| they needed to win.
|
| There is a cliche which goes: "Expect the best. Prepare for the
| worst". Articles like this only seem to get the second half of
| that while clearly violating the first half. A well balanced
| response to crisis is benefited by both.
|
| I think the author is not actively aware of the importance of
| expecting the best, both of the world and of their colleagues. I
| feel their arguments are weak due to this imbalance.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| You want to provide a reason based in reality for that level of
| optimism at the present time? It seems like pessimism is
| currently warranted absent major upheavals that would change
| the political situation worldwide, which would bring their own
| issues.
| krona wrote:
| 2.5%[0] of the world GDP just doesn't sound very apocalyptic
| to most people. Especially when you factor in GDP growth
| projections over the next century.
|
| [0] https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/
| thoms_a wrote:
| Life on Earth has survived much, much worse than the burning
| of fossil fuels. For example, the K-Pg extinction event.
|
| It's all a matter of perspective. But humans are irrationally
| social creatures susceptible to memetics, so no amount of
| empirical evidence will alter socially beneficial memeplexes.
| paganel wrote:
| sodality2 wrote:
| Have you done any research about the impacts of climate change?
| Complaining about the urgency of warnings only works if you're
| _certain_ the urgency is unwarranted.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Personally, I'm not against the planet or humanity, I'm
| against disingenously poor quality arguments designed as a
| chaff countermeasure to befog public discourse and facilitate
| a worlwide distration theft via technocratic policies and
| economic centralization.
| madrox wrote:
| The pandemic taught me a lot about apocalypse. While people are a
| lot slower to buy into collective action and changing their way
| of life than I thought, society is far more robust than I
| expected. Covid looked nothing like a pandemic film, thank god.
|
| With that in mind, I have some ideas on what programming will
| look like in 30 years:
|
| 1. New frameworks and abstractions for making apps even more
| disposable while maintaining privacy will come along. New
| languages will happen. Corporations that just finished moving to
| the cloud will now be moving to even greater abstractions like
| Airtable or whatever comes next.
|
| 2. Programmer pay will decrease compared to other industries.
| This is a hunch and I'm only 60% confident of it happening.
|
| 3. Satellite internet will be more of a norm for no better reason
| than it's the most efficient way to manage infrastructure. More
| rural communities will need it, and remote trends will continue.
| The cost of launches are going down and there's a lot of land.
|
| 4. Everything will get more energy efficient, and most intense
| activity will be pushed to compute farms.
|
| 5. VR will once again come around as the next big revolution in
| computing, but will be ultimately disappointing and won't see
| mass adoption.
|
| Beyond these ideas, I think too much plays into our personal
| optimism or pessimism. I think things will change, but we're a
| scrappy species that will fight to preserve its way of life. It
| will look a lot like our global pandemic response...warts and
| all. There's a lot there to be disappointed about, but it's
| actually incredible it wasn't worse.
|
| When these predictions hit I'll be 70. I hope I'll live to see
| it.
| cassepipe wrote:
| I feel the same about 5. Do 3d movies still exist by the way ?
| Or IMax movies ?
| madrox wrote:
| Probably in the same way that VR does...it comes in waves. 3D
| has been around for a while, and every now and then it
| resurges. It has more to do with marketing forces to excite
| people about going to the theater than anything.
|
| And yes, I suspect theaters will still be a thing unless
| teenagers find a new excuse to be unsupervised in the dark
| for a few hours.
| tasuki wrote:
| > The pandemic taught me a lot about apocalypse.
|
| I don't think it has taught you much. All things considered,
| despite all the suffering by unlucky individuals, when you
| consider humanity as a whole, covid is an insignificant blip.
| If it's significant at all, it's only because of our response
| to it.
|
| > Covid looked nothing like a pandemic film, thank god.
|
| Covid was not 1% as bad as any pandemic featured in a film.
| Humanity has seen way worse, and we could still see way worse
| in the future.
| madrox wrote:
| I'd argue the opposite. If it's insignificant at all, it's
| only because of our response to it. Lots of people worked
| very, very hard for us to sit here typing "it wasn't that
| bad" unless you believe that our global covid response did
| very little to change the outcome. If you do believe that,
| though, there's probably little point in continuing this
| thread.
| boringg wrote:
| Our response was actually what made it a much more
| insignificant blip (thanks public health + vaccines), and
| technically we aren't through it yet.
| pc86 wrote:
| I'd argue that we are through it in the public health,
| government mandate, change how you live day-to-day sense of
| things. Everyone who is willing to get vaccinated is
| probably vaccinated at this point. There is very little
| support for more government intervention even as cases rise
| in various areas, regardless of political persuasion (at
| least in the US, maybe it's different in the UK and EU?)
|
| The fact that COVID is still out there, infecting and
| mutating, is irrelevant to most people.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| https://also.kottke.org/22/04/the-mass-delusion-of-the-
| pande...
| dijit wrote:
| We have a widely deployed vaccine.
|
| COVID will live with us forever now, a pandemic has a few
| characteristics which make it so, one of which is capacity
| to overwhelm healthcare.
|
| As soon as covid couldn't overwhelm our healthcare systems
| it was over.
|
| Now people will die every year with it, just like the flu.
|
| Sad reality, but reality nonetheless, the fact we couldn't
| handle a lock-down cemented that we would be living with it
| for the rest of human existence.
| whatshisface wrote:
| The vaccine only lasts six months. I am not sure how
| "widely deployed" it is anymore.
| krona wrote:
| Children today, and their children, will gain immunity
| over an entire lifetime through repeated exposure.
|
| So it is with all other coronaviruses, which have been
| around for millions of years and don't routinely kill
| older/vulnerable people.
| titzer wrote:
| What COVID taught me is that the human ability to not give a
| fuck is apparently infinite. I have trouble processing the
| fact that a million people died (in the USA) and there is no
| mourning, no shared sense of tragedy or loss, no looking more
| kindly on other people, just a madder, faster dash on cash
| and even more finger-pointing.
|
| > Covid was not 1% as bad as any pandemic featured in a film.
|
| I'll be generous and not dwell on this stunning example of
| this age's inability to get bothered by anything unless it
| hits harder than film. Look on the bright side I guess,
| despite how soulless, empty, and glib we have to be do so!
| [deleted]
| coryrc wrote:
| Something like 5 million people die every year, should we
| be in permanent mourning?
| titzer wrote:
| I know you're trolling, but I'll respond. Part of growing
| up and moving from just a mere legally-licensed adult is
| being able to hold heavy things. They never stop getting
| heavier. They just keep unfolding, and if you are willing
| to grow just a little deeper--not bigger, but deeper,
| like the roots of you being able to _feel_ things, then
| maybe all that learning to deal with loss, tragedies,
| loved ones dying, aging, your parents and uncles and
| cousins and friends dying--and yet not letting it destroy
| you, might be worth something. Though, for a moment, you
| can be devastated on the inside and hold yourself up
| without breaking. You don 't need to cry your eyes out
| every day, but man, what the hell if we can't reflect on
| such a grievous time that has befallen us--all of us--
| over the past two years, without clawing someone else's
| face off or storming off in a huff. But if you need to
| feel not bothered at all, go ahead, you aren't the
| subject of this one.
| madrox wrote:
| Lately, I've been thinking about the role of nihilism as
| a natural force in society and its use as a tool of
| renewal. At its best, it's a power to take only that
| which strengthens so that we don't take on the collective
| emotional debt of past generations. It's why we're
| finding new ways to do old things all the time and why we
| aren't living in guilt over the deeds of past
| generations.
|
| At its worst, nihilism throws the baby out with the bath
| water and you get holocaust deniers. This has been the
| hardest part of aging for me, because seeing this evolve
| in real time has left me in despair for our world at
| times. I have to remind myself that this force has been
| at work for centuries, and when I was young I didn't
| think it was all that bad. We'll probably be ok.
| jotm wrote:
| 1. Well, d'uh.
|
| Also, everything will require a network connection (which is
| where ubiquitous Internet via cable or satellite comes in). No
| Internet? Pfft, what, do you live without electricity, too?
|
| 2. Pay for these kinds of professions (ever increasing
| complexity, whether necessary or self-made + decently mentally
| taxing) will only go up. Not everyone can be a programmer, or a
| lawyer, doctor, video/audio editor, electrician, etc. Barring
| some catastrophic event or the creation of good enough
| AI/robots.
|
| 4+5. in 30 years, if current development rates continue, VR
| will be the next revolution. Super compact and efficient
| devices + a world where you can do almost anything you want
| will be very popular with the masses facing ever increasing
| costs, climate problems, joblessness, lack of housing, etc.
|
| Why even put up with all the bs when you can do the bare
| minimum and use technological opium the rest of your time? I
| wonder if VR could be banned in the same manner as drugs,
| actually.
| madrox wrote:
| The reason I'm low confidence on pay is because I think there
| will be even more disparity among programmer salaries and the
| median will be far lower. Will it be possible to make a
| million a year as an engineer in 30 years (forget inflation
| for a moment)? Sure. However, I think there will be a lot
| more engineers making five figures. We're lowering the bar to
| do simple work all the time. Much like the other professions
| you mentioned, some make millions...others are far more
| middle-class.
|
| As for the rest...they were in direct response to this
| article's predictions. My VR prediction is tongue-in-cheek
| because it's been "just around the corner" for the last
| thirty years. It's not far-fetched to think it'll still be
| "just around the corner" in another 30.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Covid looked nothing like a pandemic film, thank god._
|
| That's probably because it was not that great impact wise. If
| it was more like the Spanish Flu, with a huge death toll across
| all ages (as opposed to 1/10th the death toll, and mostly
| focused on older people and co-morbidities) it would have
| absolutely have looked like "a pandemic film".
| madrox wrote:
| I think there's a fallacy here in that "because covid's
| impact wasn't great, covid wasn't that bad." Any time we have
| to mobilize a lot of effort to head off the worst outcome,
| there's a tendency to say "well nothing really bad happened,
| so why did we go through all that effort?" Let's not
| trivialize the global effort necessary to bring us to 1/10th
| the death toll. It absolutely could've been worse.
|
| It's our response to covid, not covid itself, that taught me
| a lot of what we're capable of in global crisis. We've come a
| long way since Spanish Flu.
| kinleyd wrote:
| Well said. I think if the vaccines hadn't come out at all,
| it could well have been as bad as the Spanish Flu.
| coryrc wrote:
| > there's a tendency to say "well nothing really bad
| happened, so why did we go through all that effort?
|
| Basically a third of our country didn't go through that
| effort and the country is mostly still chugging along. Were
| it much deadlier, things would not have turned out okay.
| Grim-444 wrote:
| This is a weird argument to make. The rational thing is
| to make different decisions in different scenarios. The
| choices I would make for how/whether to participate in
| society, whether to take a vaccine, etc., would vary
| greatly depending on whether a given disease has a 1 in
| 50,000 chance of killing me vs if it's like something out
| of the movie Contagion that would have a 1 in 10 chance
| of killing me.
|
| If covid had a 1 in 10 chance of killing me I would have
| made very different decisions over the course of the
| pandemic. You're saying that people would still behave
| the same as they did during covid no matter how deadly a
| given disease is, which seems pretty ridiculous.
| dijit wrote:
| Reminds me of the millennium bug.
|
| Everyone worked really hard to make the impact minimal, now
| people assume that it wasn't that big a deal.
| warvair wrote:
| Maybe it's time to start putting the "Cloud" in orbit.
| paulsutter wrote:
| There are two better explanations than the Great Filter:
|
| - Dark Forest theory is popular in China, that civilizations
| should conceal their existence to prevent being destroyed by a
| more advanced civilization
|
| - Our own high power TV and Radio transmitters will be shutdown
| soon in favor of fiber optics. Even better communication
| mechanisms should be no surprise
| giantrobot wrote:
| The glossed over Great Filter is space is fucking huge and
| physics is mean.
|
| It takes a great effort to get a coherent radio signal to hit a
| system many light years away. Leaked radio emissions just don't
| reach very far. Even high powered radar is extremely narrow
| beams coming from a spinning planet orbiting a star that itself
| is flying through space. The odds that beam crosses some system
| specifically listening for it is extremely low and the odds of
| a reoccurrence is ridiculously low.
|
| The dark forest just doesn't make sense. A sufficiently large
| telescope can get spectra from terrestrial planets. If you have
| some killer space fleet you'll send it off to any planet where
| you find short-lived industrial emissions (CFCs etc). There's
| no need to wait for radio emissions from a planet with
| biomarkers. It also presumes its practical to send a space
| fleet to go destroy anyone.
|
| It's far more likely the odds of any two technological
| civilizations existing at the same "time" at detectable ranges
| is extremely low. Species also don't tend to take over galaxies
| because it requires unattainable amounts of power and resources
| much better used to live happily in their own little corner.
| ouid wrote:
| the density of intelligent life cannot be bounded from below
| with only the one point of data that we have.
| Gunax wrote:
| When dealing with _unknown unknowns_ any theory can be logical.
|
| Maybe extra-terrestrials are more like lumberjacks chopping
| down trees. Except these lumber jacks avoid *any tree with a
| bird's nest in it*. Then, we should be as visible as possible.
|
| So should we be quiet (ala Dark Forest), or loud? Depends on
| how you model extra-terrestrials.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Isn't some sort of game theory going to suggest we be quiet
| then? Because if they exterminate birds nests, we want to be
| quiet, and if they intentionally avoid bird's nests, they
| probably will look for them closer before chopping us down.
| Gunax wrote:
| Hmm, so I am not sure I see why that would be more likely.
| It sounds like you're saying that exterminators are less
| effective at detection than lumberjacks--whether by effort
| or some other reason.
|
| I think you could just as logically conclude the opposite:
| maybe lumberjacks don't need to exterminate to survive, so
| they do not put as much effort in, since they are just
| avoiding us altruistically.
|
| But more generally, this is the sort of problem I have with
| speculation on unknown unknowns: It's fun to do, but I dont
| recommend changing any of our decisions based on it because
| we simply _do not know_.
| Zababa wrote:
| I don't think any explanation is "better" or "worse" than the
| great filter, as we only have our example. There's nothing
| suggesting that we are alone in the universe, but also nothing
| suggesting that we aren't alone. We can formulate whatever
| hypothesis we want but it won't change reality. Either there's
| something out there or there isn't. Lots of people thinking the
| great filter or Drake's equation is real won't affect what is
| or isn't out there. We just don't know, and it's mostly a waste
| of time to think about it.
| kossTKR wrote:
| Interesting!
|
| I've always had an intuitive feeling that theories like The
| Great Filter theory was a pretty arrogant simplification of
| "actual reality" beyond our narrow biological lenses and even
| narrower western definition of "life" or even spatial
| dimensions and time.
|
| Just because some western scientist with only 350+ years of
| somewhat advanced tools, math and imagination can't see
| "something" doesn't mean something isn't there - we don't even
| know what "there" is, or who "we" are.
|
| Math and science is an awesome "thing", but the ridiculous
| existential pop-science extrapolations from simple equations is
| laughable if not sinister, especially in light of the
| paradigmatic shifts in science and worldview over just the last
| couple of centuries.
| satokausi wrote:
| Agreed. The Great Filter theory has weak assumptions that a)
| all "living" systems evolve in a similar way as the
| biological systems on earth, and b) that this evolution
| "advances" somehow towards space expansion.
|
| Our biological lenses make it seem like the complex system we
| call "life" is the only similarly complex system that is
| possible in the _entire universe_.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| I tend to agree, I don't think we have a good grasp on what
| life will be like in 50 years let alone 1000 or 10,000. My
| personal guesses are that we will continue to make
| improvements in efficiency and so will produce very little
| leakage of communications or even heat making us nearly
| invisible over vast distances. Sociologically, I think we'll
| be very different; population growth may approach 0 while
| lifespan increases dramatically so we'll continue to explore
| the universe but will do so remotely since we just won't have
| the numbers to physically colonize other star systems. Even
| the timescale on which we live may change drastically,
| perception of time isn't even fixed when it comes to biology
| there are other species that have much faster or slower
| perception of time and once we being to modify our biology
| and augment it by integrating with digital systems we'll be
| able to control that sense. Who can predict what other
| technological advances are on the horizon, for all we know
| alien probes or other technology could be as small as
| bacteria and might just be distributed through space as vast
| networks of dust clouds that harvest ambient chemical and
| solar energy and have transmission ranges measured in
| micrometers. How would we even detect such technology without
| physically going there and examining it up close?
| snikeris wrote:
| The Drake equation handles that case:
|
| fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology
| that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
| poulpy123 wrote:
| The drake equation handle nothing, because all parameters
| are pure speculation
| yesbabyyes wrote:
| Right; the parameter that would be of interest is rather
| _L_ = the length of time for which such civilizations
| release detectable signals into space.
|
| Quoting Wikipedia: "Inserting the above minimum numbers
| into the equation gives a minimum N of 20. Inserting the
| maximum numbers gives a maximum of 50,000,000. Drake states
| that given the uncertainties, the original meeting
| concluded that N [?] L, and there were probably between
| 1000 and 100,000,000 planets with civilizations in the
| Milky Way Galaxy."
|
| As I understand it, at the time it was estimated that a
| civilization would broadcast during its existence, from the
| time radio communications started until the fall of
| civilization (thus the Great Filter).
|
| Now, from our sample size of one, it looks like L would
| rather be on the order of 100 years (in our case, not
| because we are trying to hide in the Dark Forest, but
| because we don't want to waste energy beaming Dallas reruns
| into space for no good reason).
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| I feel like the second is the most likely. Combine that with
| challenging the proposition that intelligent life would ever
| choose to colonize the galaxy to the extent that it would be
| blatantly obvious and I think you have a pretty solid position
| from which to argue that it won't be easy to detect other
| civilizations.
| skyfaller wrote:
| I agree that we need to plan for climate adaptation (preparing
| for predictable problems) and resilience (preparing for
| unpredictable problems), but I have a few kneejerk responses:
|
| - Although it's looking increasingly unlikely that we can avert
| climate disaster, we can never give up. For example, 8 degrees of
| warming would be much worse than 4 degrees of warming, and could
| mean the difference between human extinction and the mere
| collapse of our civilization. The lives of billions hang in the
| balance, and even if some will inevitably suffer and die, we
| can't just throw up our hands and let everyone die. Climate
| change mitigation, cutting emissions as quickly and thoroughly as
| we can, must remain a priority for the rest of our lives, even if
| we can no longer reach the best/safest scenarios. Every little
| bit of avoided global heating matters.
|
| - This post, as dire as its predictions are, may underestimate
| the difficulty of computing in 2050, given current trends. If you
| are/were living in Ukraine recently, programming is not most
| people's top priority, they have other problems. Famines, extreme
| weather events, and resource wars will affect programmers who
| live in comfortable locations today. It's not just your
| users/audience who might be computing from a shitty mobile phone
| in a refugee camp, it could be you. Don't forget that we're not
| only dealing with climate change, but with the reaction of other
| people to climate change: they might want to kill you for your
| water. And heatwaves are predictable in India/Pakistan, but look
| at the freak heatwaves in Canada recently, nowhere on Earth is
| safe, the climate crisis is a global problem.
|
| - Why are we programming what we're programming? Shouldn't our
| activities and their purposes change given the dramatic change in
| circumstances? Isn't there something wrong with the system that
| produced this result, the impending destruction of the biosphere
| that supports us? Fighting valiantly to preserve the
| functionality that is killing the world may not be a wise or
| ethical use of your time. (And if you're programming something
| for a fossil fuel company, now is a good time to reconsider.)
| lelanthran wrote:
| > For example, 8 degrees of warming would be much worse than 4
| degrees of warming, and could mean the difference between human
| extinction and the mere collapse of our civilization.
|
| I'm assuming celsius, not farenheit.
|
| I'm curious why a mere 8 degrees increase leads to human
| extinction.
|
| Is that "8 degrees evenly over the globe"? If so, that most
| certainly would leave the majority of land arable and
| comfortably livable.
|
| Is that "8 degrees average with such a high deviation that no
| land is left with a year-round range of 0 degrees to 30
| degrees"? If that is the case, where can I read/view/see the
| model that produces such an extreme outcome?
| wiredearp wrote:
| This guy Mark Lynas studied the models and wrote a book about
| it, but then he wrote it again based on newer models, so make
| sure to find the latest one called "Our Final Warning: Six
| Degrees of Climate Emergency" for a grizzly drilldown into
| the centigrades towards extinction. Few models deal with
| warming beyond three degress, in itself a point of some
| consideration, but the references are all there and here's
| the synopsis for the book.
|
| > At one degree - the world we are already living in - vast
| wildfires scorch California and Australia, while monster
| hurricanes devastate coastal cities. At two degrees the
| Arctic ice cap melts away and coral reefs disappear from the
| tropics. At three, the world begins to run out of food,
| threatening millions with starvation. At four, large areas of
| the globe are too hot for human habitation, erasing entire
| nations and turning billions into climate refugees. At five,
| the planet is warmer than for 55 million years, while at six
| degrees a mass extinction of unparalleled proportions sweeps
| the planet, even raising the threat of the end of all life on
| Earth.
| lelanthran wrote:
| Actually I was kinda hoping for just a model or some peer
| reviewed conclusions.
|
| I'm just not in the mood to devote a lot of time to what
| sounds (to me) like hyperbole: If the earth stabilised at
| +8 degrees celcius I find it hard to understand why the
| entire earth becomes _literally_ uninhabitable.
| svnt wrote:
| It doesn't. It's an extrapolation based on the limited
| insights of a PhD who by any reasonable definition spends
| too much time with simulations.
|
| If you want to think of a way it could be possible,
| though, think of those areas that would be habitable,
| realize that they would be highly contested, are mostly
| presently permafrost, and consider your own ability to
| both protect and survive on melted tundra and reproduce
| there, given you will starve in a single season without
| food.
| skybrian wrote:
| I expect that people will still write software because it
| needed and pays well. However, the jobs that people get paid to
| do could become rather different.
|
| Consider what happens in a war. The people working on drones
| aren't just hobbyists, they're part of the war effort. Wars are
| not good for the environment, either.
|
| So my guess is that, if it gets really bad, these jobs will
| focus more on short-term needs. Are people who are really
| focused on preparing for heat waves and drought and flooding
| going to give a hoot about being carbon neutral? An overloaded
| hospital is going to focus on the patients, not global
| environmental issues.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _I expect that people will still write software because it
| needed and pays well._
|
| Both "it's needed" and "pays well" are the case now - not
| necessarily the case at that point. So they can't be used as
| arguments that people "will still write software" (it would
| be taking for granted what must be proven).
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Then again, demand for fossil fuels is also part of the
| equation. You get a remote programming job, demand to travel by
| car potentially goes down. So there's potentially a net
| reduction in emissions.
| mcculley wrote:
| > human extinction and the mere collapse of our civilization
|
| How do you imagine human extinction being an outcome? It seems
| to me that the worst case scenario is large loss of population
| which would decrease greenhouse gas output. There would still
| be some increase in temperature even once we stop emitting, but
| wouldn't people in colder climates still survive?
| kpmah wrote:
| Even if it doesn't directly cause extinction, it could do
| things like destabilise nuclear powers.
| skyfaller wrote:
| There are a large number of things that could kill everyone,
| but I think the top threat will always be ourselves. It's
| very easy to imagine some resource war degenerating into a
| nuclear war. A few self-induced crises like that on top of
| the climate crisis would be enough to finish the survivors
| (who might have made it if the only danger were the
| environment).
|
| Think of the world population's size and global distribution
| as hedges against disaster: the fewer people who live, in
| fewer habitable places, the more likely it is that some
| disaster will affect everyone remaining and leave no one
| unaffected. We have fewer rolls of the dice, and there may
| come a day where they're all snake eyes.
|
| This why many are excited about the idea of "making humanity
| an interplanetary species", as I once was until I realized
| how hard it would be to make a working biosphere anywhere
| else, given how bad we are at maintaining one that already
| works. If we don't figure out how to save this biosphere, we
| won't have enough time to make more.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| There's some fairly absurd doomerism going on in the "climate
| catastrophe tomorrow" camp where climate change will
| (somehow) turn earth into a barren rock and we're inches away
| from triggering a self-reinforcing climate resonance cascade
| of unforeseen consequences.
|
| It's of course a very urgent issue, but I think exaggerating
| it until it becomes a threat to "all life on earth" levels is
| a) dishonest b) does nothing to convince sceptics that it's a
| real issue, quite the opposite c) is not really all that
| actionable (at least not in a good way).
| thoms_a wrote:
| I'm amazed that this level of skepticism is still possible
| on HN. Bravo to you for asking these basic questions.
|
| For those who are convinced that life on earth will be
| radically altered due to climate change in this century,
| which conveniently means that we must totally sacrifice all
| of our individual freedoms to the whims of unelected global
| elites, do you make sure to constantly test your empirical
| models?
|
| For example, the K-Pg extinction event which [1] wiped out
| the vast majority of life on earth still didn't result in a
| positive feedback loop that scorched the atmosphere, and
| thus failed to render the Earth uninhabitable. Yet, we are
| told that the burning of fossil fuels will have an impact
| far more catastrophic than this recorded geological
| doomsday event.
|
| I've just read too much history to fall for fear porn
| promulgated by powerful entities seeking control over the
| masses. It's the oldest trick in the book, and it'll keep
| working as long as people keep falling for it.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleoge
| ne_e...
| coldtea wrote:
| > _will (somehow) turn earth into a barren rock_
|
| Well, hundreds of millios displaced and/or dead would be
| enough. Doesn't have to "turn earth into a barren rock".
|
| And as for "suddenly", many systems tend to have a breaking
| point, especially systems, like the environment, which have
| feedback loops that can easily feed into each other and
| make things worse fast. Collapse is seldom linear or a nice
| gradual curve.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Well, hundreds of millios displaced and/or dead would
| be enough. Doesn't have to "turn earth into a barren
| rock".
|
| Actually, yes it does. The OP specified "human
| extinction". We're arguing that single point. The fact
| that thousands/millions/billions might displaced isn't
| being contended.
| seibelj wrote:
| The temperature and co2 levels have been much higher in the
| past. The earth has been much more tropical as well as an
| ice world. Humans can adapt to change quite effectively -
| we did invent air conditioning, as well as the land of The
| Netherlands which is reclaimed and existing beneath sea
| level.
|
| What is the greatest tragedy is how much worry and anxiety
| climate change causes. The earth is not a thinking thing -
| "Mother Nature" is not a being. The planet will exist and
| doesn't care about humans. A century after the last human
| lives nature will swallow up almost everything we built.
| Earth exists for humans because we live here and make it
| so. We will adapt to whatever climate exists.
| thisismyusrname wrote:
| Positive feedback loops causing runaway warming is one way
| Filligree wrote:
| True human extinction doesn't seem plausible, but in a worst-
| case scenario we can imagine a > 99% drop in population,
| roughly to what is sustainable without technology, in a
| dramatically harsher world.
|
| ("Without"? Well, nobody today knows how to build a cast-iron
| plough.)
|
| I don't believe this scenario is likely. For one thing we're
| not headed for 8C of heating; for another, technological
| change seems to be coming just in time to head off the _very_
| worst outcomes, assuming we struggle hard enough.
| vkou wrote:
| > assuming we struggle hard enough.
|
| We aren't struggling at all, though. We just eased off the
| accelerator a little. (Assuming that our accounting is
| correct, and that methane leakage isn't worse than we
| think. [1])
|
| [1] It's worse than we think.
| skyfaller wrote:
| We _probably_ aren 't headed for 8 degrees of heating,
| _based on what we know today_. There are a lot of "out
| there" scenarios that don't make it into sober,
| conservative scientific reports from the IPCC, because they
| recognize how important it is that people take their
| warnings seriously, and they don't want to mention anything
| they don't have very clear evidence for already.
|
| One of my "favorites" is the "world without clouds"
| scenario, which for the record, I consider unlikely, but is
| horrifying to imagine:
| https://www.quantamagazine.org/cloud-loss-could-
| add-8-degree...
|
| What we're dealing with are "unknown unknowns": what
| tipping points might exist that we don't know about, that
| might result in more warming faster than expected based on
| today's science? We shouldn't take those kind of
| existential risks.
| openknot wrote:
| >"- This post, as dire as its predictions are, may
| underestimate the difficulty of computing in 2050, given
| current trends. If you are/were living in Ukraine recently,
| programming is not most people's top priority, they have other
| problems. Famines, extreme weather events, and resource wars
| will affect programmers who live in comfortable locations
| today."
|
| It's true that programming was not a top priority outside of
| survival, though to many programmers in Ukraine, it was still a
| major one.
|
| This report (source:
| https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/04/ukrainians-are-built-
| differe...) from CNBC in March documents this: "Those
| developers, along with other Ukrainian civilians in the
| country, are now being forced to defend their homes and cities
| while sheltering from Russian bombs. But many are still
| continuing to remotely work for their employers, supporting the
| local defense effort by day while sending in their deliverables
| by night.
|
| "Yes our teams are sending deliverables from a f--ing parking
| garage in Kharkiv under heavy shelling and gunfire in the area.
| Amazing humans," Logan Bender, chief financial officer at a San
| Francisco-based software licensing company, said in a story
| posted to Instagram on Tuesday by venture capital meme account
| PrayingforExits. "
|
| I would personally prioritize survival over work at that point,
| and avoid praising sending deliverables in a warzone as a moral
| good (over ensuring the safety of your family), but it's
| evidence that even in extreme conditions, people still want to
| program as part of their work. As for why there would be a want
| to program in extreme conditions, some discussions on Reddit
| and Slashdot in response to the article suggested that
| programming was a way for these workers to get their minds off
| their current situation.
| edgedetector wrote:
| I recall being stuck in a closet for hours during tornado
| warnings multiple times throughout my life. It gets boring.
| Programming is a good way to pass the time.
| FargaColora wrote:
| "the difference between human extinction and the mere collapse
| of our civilization"
|
| Literally nobody is predicting any of those things, except
| propagandists and doomers. I would urge you to broaden your
| media intake to more mainstream sources, because it is not
| mentally healthy to be living a life under such falsehoods.
| krastanov wrote:
| You misread their statement. They said "8 degrees". With 8 C
| increase in temperature, what they described could very much
| happen. We expect 4 C worst case, which is why we do not need
| to worry about extinction. I think they are saying that we do
| not need to worry about more than 4 C increase exactly
| because people in the past fought for the cause, and if they
| stopped fighting the same way today some people feel
| resignation and want to stop fighting, even 4 C would have
| been too optimistic. The fact that people in the past did not
| resign themselves to the status quo is why we do not need to
| worry about an 8 C increase.
| ivm wrote:
| This is not true, for example, "Humans Are Doomed to Go
| Extinct" was published in Scientific American last year:
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-are-
| doomed...
| FargaColora wrote:
| That's... one man's opinion and at the absolute extreme end
| of accepted science. You will find a person willing to have
| a view on anything if you look hard enough.
|
| If you read mainstream publications, then you will
| gradually form an opinion, which is that there is a climate
| emergency, but not that humanity will be destroyed.
|
| Climate doomerism has been a catasrophe, because it means
| many people have "given up", when things can actually be
| done. The doomer propaganda jumped off the deep end, and
| the mainstream media should have called them our on their
| absurd nonsense years ago.
|
| I notice the BBC is starting to fight back:
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-61495035
| ivm wrote:
| Humanity probably will not be wiped out, but the current
| global civilization will collapse like it happened to
| many other civilizations before because they reached the
| ecological overshoot. I also thought that something
| "could be done" on a large scale, but after studying the
| problem in depth (starting with the IPCC report), I began
| to prepare on the community level for the impact in the
| next 10-20 years. That's the only area where something
| _can_ be done.
|
| By the way, BBC is not a reliable source, like other
| neoliberal propaganda they bet on continuing "business as
| usual" while coming up with some innovative solutions
| (so-called "techno-hopium").
| FargaColora wrote:
| "I began to prepare on the community level for the impact
| in the next 10-20 years"
|
| Sorry, I don't think rational debate is possible here.
| Your beliefs are not based on science or rationality.
| ivm wrote:
| ...said the person who conveniently ignored the
| mainstream scientific forecasts. Well, with time you'll
| see.
| bordercases wrote:
| formvoltron wrote:
| At some point, we'll have to put a fine dust in the upper
| atmosphere.
|
| We seem to have most of the building blocks already for renewable
| energy. Just need to focus on it and assemble them together...
| and decide it's worth giving up fossil fuel related things that
| are still functional.
| k0k0r0 wrote:
| As someone else put it nicely:
|
| People seem to rather fight the sun than capitalism.
| mellavora wrote:
| "But we do know it was us that scorched the sky."
| digitalsushi wrote:
| We need some sort of a dust to touch up the oceans a bit, too.
| Maybe one that can tidy up the plastic and the acid.
| mmcgaha wrote:
| Dust in the upper atmosphere? That is a solved problem; we can
| just burn more coal. Of course the world will be dirty and it
| will get cold everywhere, but hey at least we will be back to
| where we were in the early 20th century. I have a better idea
| how about we consume less and not spew crap into our
| environment.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I don't really agree with 'collapse of human civilization;
| apocalyptic predictions due to fossil-fueled global warming, more
| like a rapid degradation in living standards for the vast
| majority of people on the planet, do to the known list of
| climate-related issues: decreases in agricultural production
| largely related to heat waves and drought, and infrastructure
| damage due to flooding and fires and extreme weather.
|
| This is likely to reduce the amount of arable land, and the
| intersection of that and continued human population growth is
| likely going to put pressure on populations to migrate to more
| livable zones, and that will create the kinds of tensions like to
| lead to widespread warfare and possibly even genocidal actions.
|
| Now, can some of this be technologically mitigated? Absolutely.
| It's entirely possible to run the global economy without fossil
| fuels. The major sources of replacement energy would be
| wind/solar/storage, and nuclear in some regions (massive
| expansion of nuclear is just not feasible, sorry enthusiasts, but
| that's the reality - there's not that much high-grade uranium ore
| around, breeder concepts are implausible, fusion is nowhere in
| sight, and the cost equation favors solar and wind in the vast
| majority of regions, from the equator descending polewards).
|
| However, that would upend the economic status quo in a remarkable
| way. All the petrostates that live off oil exports and oil
| production would have serious readjustments (and this is non-
| ideological, it's true for the USA, for Saudi Arabia, for
| Venezuela, for Russia, for Iran, etc.).
|
| Imagine if we got serious about eliminating fossil fuel use
| globally. Well, one obvious first step would be a ban on the
| international trade in fossil fuels, right? Who would agree to
| that? All the fossil fuel corporations I know of are planning on
| maintaining current levels of output for the next 30 years, as
| well.
|
| Regardless, we could very plausibly reduce fossil fuel production
| in the USA by 3% per year if we also increased solar/wind/storage
| by 3% per year, while maintaining most of the current nuclear
| fleet. Then, in 30 years, the USA would produce zero fossil
| fuels. It's entirely doable with existing technlogy, but would
| require as much investment as say, the military-industrial
| complex currently gets.
|
| As far as computer tech and programming, I really don't see that
| being fundamentally impacted; if there's an energy / material
| crunch then it will just become more expensive to buy a computer
| or run a datacenter, and it'll be more restricted to key uses
| (managing energy grids, running factories, etc.). However,
| running a chip production line off solar power is entirely
| feasible.
| agentultra wrote:
| Consider also the support systems in place for agrarian
| production that enable programmers to do what we do.
|
| We're in the midst of a mass extinction event. If we lose the eco
| systems that support us we'll go into decline as surely as every
| other species as high on the food chain as we are.
|
| I'm not sure if civilization will collapse but it does seem like
| something that is probable. Do we have enough people with the
| expertise to maintain or build computing devices with limited
| access to fabrication? Can we still cobble together useful stuff
| from the piles of e-waste?
|
| One easy thing we can do is push for policies that make it easier
| to access public infrastructure. Low-cost access to the poles,
| towers, etc.
|
| Interesting times ahead.
| giamma wrote:
| "Based on this I felt like some of the big winners in 2050 will
| be Rust, Clojure and Go. They mostly nail these criteria and are
| well-designed for not relying on containers or other similar
| technology for basic testing and feature implementation. They are
| also (reasonably) tolerant of spotty internet presuming the
| environment has been set up ahead of time."
|
| Why is Clojure better then Java when it's a JVM language as well?
| It uses Java artefacts (Maven) so how is it more tolerant than
| Java of a spotty internet? Scala, Clojure, Java, Groovy should
| all rate pretty much the same or am I missing something?
| dixego wrote:
| > Just wanted to follow up on my note from a few days ago in case
| it got buried under all of those e-mails about the flood. I'm
| concerned about how the Eastern Seaboard being swallowed by the
| Atlantic Ocean is going to affect our Q4 numbers, so I'd like to
| get your eyes on the latest earnings figures ASAP. On the bright
| side, the Asheville branch is just a five-minute drive from the
| beach now, so the all-hands meeting should be a lot more fun this
| year. Silver linings!
|
| I... I don't think I'm psychologically prepared for tolerating
| the fauxptimism of corpospeak under the Slow Motion Apocalypse.
| notpachet wrote:
| UW;DR
|
| Underwater; didn't read
| gred wrote:
| > Due to heat and power issues, it is likely that disruptions to
| home and office internet will be a much more common occurrence.
| As flooding and sea level rise disrupts commuting, working
| asynchronously is going to be the new norm.
|
| Nah. I expect simple UI fashion transitions (e.g. round corners
| to square corners back to round corners) are likely to claim more
| of our time and attention over the next 30 years than the
| "serious" predictions in the article.
| kingcharles wrote:
| This article doesn't take into account any of the myriad advances
| in AI, which appears to be starting up an exponential curve of
| improvement.
|
| IMO, it is likely the Singularity will arrive before 2050 and
| make practically everything in this article completely moot.
| waynecochran wrote:
| Based on this I felt like some of the big winners in 2050 will be
| Rust, Clojure and Go.
|
| These will be less than we think of Cobol today. The paradigms
| will be completely different by then. Declarative languages have
| the best shot at surviving since they are the least tied to
| today's paradigms. We have to figure a may to program for fine
| and coarse grain parallel machines -- and not von Neumann fetch-
| decode-execute style machines.
| rectang wrote:
| "Can programming be liberated from the von Neumann style?" --
| John Backus, 1978
|
| 44 years later, it hasn't happened. I'm skeptical that it will
| happen in the next 28.
| [deleted]
| waynecochran wrote:
| Probably not a complete break. But there needs to be
| paradigms that can allow for exacale computing. Instead of
| 20000 independent threads (e.g., SIMD / CUDA style) we will
| have trillions of threads that work in interleaved harmony.
| The von Neumann model break downs at that level.
| edgedetector wrote:
| We've made a ton of progress. They didn't have decentralized
| computing at all in 1978. Now most things run on remote
| machines. Also, there has been a move away from the
| imperative style that makes parallelism so difficult.
| wolfgang42 wrote:
| This isn't nearly so clear-cut as you make it out to be--
| compilers today often treat "imperative" languages as
| declarative, and CPUs are a lot more sophisticated than "fetch-
| decode-execute" implies. (Yesterday I was looking at some code
| where GCC took a fairly complicated for-loop and turned it into
| about four assembly instructions, all with incomprehensible
| acronyms.)
|
| COBOL's fall from grace was due in no small part to the syntax
| rather than the semantics, and I expect that trend to continue:
| I wouldn't be surprised if the languages of 2050 are similar to
| the languages of today, just with more expressivity, better
| communication between compiler and programmer, and an even
| larger range of optimizations under the hood.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| "we have to accept immense hits to the global economy and the
| resulting poverty, suffering and impact. The scope of the change
| required is staggering. We've never done something like this"
|
| This is an insanely extreme claim with very little evidence to
| back it up, if we watch this unfold at the hands of global
| leadership please know that it didn't have to be this way and
| somebody is taking advantage of all of us for power and control.
| boppo1 wrote:
| Yeah this narrative is troubling. I've read stuff from IPCC
| contributors who compare climate change to Covid, especially in
| the case of people living in the first world. Things will get
| harder and the shape of our lives will change, but
| "civilizational collapse" is a term from people gleefully
| imagining the end of the world like they would a zombie
| apocalypse.
| balaji1 wrote:
| this article has bought into a lot of narratives of
| doomsaying and the "real" causes of it. It complains about
| coal consumption in India and China, conveniently linked to a
| reuters article.
|
| > With China and India not even starting the process of coal
| draw-down yet...
|
| It is fine to assume the Global South is trending towards
| further coal usage. Maybe the developed world can help them
| transition to something sustainable like nuclear power.
|
| There has to be an element of truth in Michael Moore's
| extreme Planet of the Humans.
|
| At least Amazon's Eating our way to Extinction [1] makes a
| convincing argument against deforestation and meat
| consumption trends. But the West is continuing to sell the
| global south a lifestyle (foreign to them) of extreme meat
| eating, among other unsustainable consumption lifestyle.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Eating-Our-Extinction-Kate-
| Winslet/dp...
| yanderekko wrote:
| I don't think they're gleeful, they just deeply believe that
| we need to reject capitalism and/or embrace some sort of
| global technocratic governance, and see the threat of climate
| catastrophe as the most-plausible mechanism that such a
| change would come about.
| boppo1 wrote:
| That's an interesting take I hadn't thought of. At first I
| read it dismissively, but it's surprisingly plausible given
| the role software engineers have taken over the last 15
| years.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Notice those who have the most information, policy makers and
| the rich in control have not changed their jet set lifestyle by
| one iota.
|
| Still polluting the skies on their way to Davos
| soco wrote:
| Because they don't need to care about consequences. No matter
| how high the sea level rises, enough money gets you a higher
| place to stay.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| No, it shows they don't believe it.
|
| Obama's recently purchased beachfront property is a
| testament to this.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| How is it insanely extreme ? Except if we are lucky and there
| is a Deus ex machina that saves us (which by definition is
| unpredictable), this is the current trajectory
| kzzzznot wrote:
| Can you provide something to back up your apocalyptic claim?
| ivm wrote:
| The newest IPCC report (Aug 2021) is rather apocalyptic
| even in the best-case scenarios that are not happening
| currently. And their worst-case scenarios do not include
| possible feedback loops.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Slowing down the global economy wouldn't benefit the elites.
| Still though they might have their liferafts planned that none
| of us are going to be welcome onto.
| npc12345 wrote:
| You will own nothing and be happy.
|
| Bill Gates tells us to not eat meat and owns a gigaton of
| farmland.
|
| He rells us to ride bikes and has the largest fleet of private
| jets in the world.
| sinenomine wrote:
| Ctrl+F geoengineering: 0 hits
|
| Come on, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering it
| entered mainstream just recently:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/opinion/climate-change-ge...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/26/planet...
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/08/09/615/what-is-geoe...
|
| By now one question should remain: why was the very idea of
| geoengineering silenced for decades behind sneers and activism
| and bad press, when we could implement it half a century ago and
| avert much of the climate change?
| realo wrote:
| Well... IMHO trying to solve our climate change issues with
| geoengineering seems similar to the USA trying solve their gun
| issues by putting even more guns in circulation.
|
| Does not fix the root causes and I don't see how it can work
| long-term.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| And that's an entirely reasonable stance that as far as I can
| tell is the consensus among climate researchers. But it
| logically implies that the narrative of climate apocalypse is
| not true - that nature is capable of self-balancing within
| the parameters industrial civilization throws at it, and that
| our current climate trajectory is mild enough that it's not
| worth pursuing some potential solutions if their side effects
| look too serious.
| bee_rider wrote:
| This person is assuming the problem will occur, and thinking
| about what their type of work will look like under those
| conditions. So, it is less interesting of an article if you
| want to hear about attempts to innovate around the whole
| problem.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| Anthropic global warming is by definition geoengineering. We
| are not controlling it, what makes you think that we can
| control other geoengineerings techniques ?
| jcoq wrote:
| Climate change has turned into a sort of quasi-religious moral
| issue that blends with other issues of our day.
|
| The thinking goes that, if only we could become pure and stop
| partaking in the evils of consumer capitalism, we might appease
| a hidden power and be saved from a myriad of bogeyman such as
| climate change.
|
| This mindset fails to reasonably consider the certainty and
| enormity of the threat. Organized civilization is likely to
| end. Billions will die and we might very well become extinct.
|
| The problem must be attacked with the full force of human
| intellect. It's so damn obvious that "wait for everyone to
| become super duper conscientious" is a fool's plan.
| skyfaller wrote:
| I think this is a decent and brief response to why
| geoengineering is a bad idea:
| https://www.geoengineeringmonitor.org/reasons-to-oppose/
|
| The most convincing argument to me is that we're already facing
| a vast problem that would require a great deal of
| geoengineering to counter. If polluters realized they could
| geoengineer the problem away, they would stop trying to reduce
| emissions, and the geoengineering problem would become even
| larger and more unmanageable.
|
| Due to how entropy works, it's always more efficient to simply
| not spill milk on the floor than to mop it up. Deciding that
| you should just have a milk bottle fight because you have a mop
| in the house is... strange? It will never be more efficient to
| scrub greenhouse gases from the air than to avoid emitting them
| in the first place.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| I agree that geoengineering is a bad idea but they use the
| "white men" bogeyman, that's really stupid. And also they
| don't really talk about to price to pay for degrowth
| paulbaumgart wrote:
| For a more balanced view, I highly recommend this talk from
| one of the leading minds in the field:
| https://hmnh.harvard.edu/file/1039929
| jcoq wrote:
| That argument is totally unconvincing... like saying not to
| treat some lung cancer because the patient will just smoke
| more.
| CM30 wrote:
| Agreed. It also makes me feel like some people want there
| to be no 'easy' solutions to problems, because they despise
| how society is going and wish it would be forced to change.
| I suspect they'd still be unhappy even if there was a magic
| wand you could wave that would instantly fix climate change
| (or make it impossible to occur).
| warning26 wrote:
| OP sort of addresses this in the end:
|
| _> a startup isn 't going to fix everything and capture all
| the carbon_
| legutierr wrote:
| By geoengineering, you mean blocking out the light of the sun?
|
| Won't that significantly reduce the photosynthetic potential of
| Earth, and significantly reduce the carrying capacity of the
| Earth for life?
|
| There are plenty of planets and moons that are cooler because
| they receive less sunlight. None of them host any life that we
| can detect.
|
| Isn't there a real risk that geoengineering would just end up
| turning the Earth into something resembling Mars, irreversibly?
|
| The Earth has supported abundant life with an atmosphere with a
| higher concentration of C02 than it has now. Has it ever
| supported abundant life with the solar energy being reduced to
| the extent required to reduce climate change?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| It's not an exact measurement of incoming solar energy, but
| the Earth has supported abundant life through a much wider
| range of climate variation than anything we're facing today.
| I don't know of any evidence that we're in a climate "sweet
| spot" where we'd need to worry about something like that.
| (https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-
| hotte...)
| slavboj wrote:
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Because "solar geoengineering" is a joke.
|
| Why _wait_ all the time until global warming destabilizes every
| ecosystem on Earth? You can have it today, just by spraying the
| upper atmosphere!
|
| People do take geoengineering quite seriously. People do talk
| seriously about carbon capture, about ecosystem husbandry,
| about forced forestation, even about ocean seeding (there have
| been enough research about this one to conclude we are not
| desperate enough yet). It's only global shading that isn't
| serious.
| [deleted]
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| I think the general consensus is that we've proven to be
| complete and absolute rubbish when it comes to predicting how
| vast complex real-world systems that we can't read worth a damn
| behave when we put them under major stresses, and the vast
| majority of attempts to hack ecosystems have been disasters,
| meaning that we're just as likely to make things even worse if
| we try to apply our crude means and models to make planet-scale
| modifications to climate and biosphere.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I think that was the basis for _Snowpiercer_.
| cyber_kinetist wrote:
| We _are_ already putting major stress to the environment, so
| we might need to experiment a bit with different methods to
| better understand and control climate. The problem is that
| changing the earth's climate can only be done at a global
| scale, so this is a project where every country needs to
| cooperate and requires incredible amounts of trust on each
| other... (which I don't think will happen soon enough)
| jcoq wrote:
| Nearly all of the disastrous things we've done to the planet
| were understood to have negative environmental consequences
| and yet we did them anyhow. Meanwhile, a great deal of our
| environmental interventions have been incredibly successful.
|
| So I'm totally unconvinced by this often recited and rarely
| supported mantra.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| _Some_ people may have understood, or rather suspected.
| They weren 't in the majority though, or lots of misguided
| geoengineering wouldn't have been done the way it was.
|
| Clearing forests has been progress thing until relatively
| recently, draining swamps was a totally great thing until
| even more recently, straightening rivers into concrete beds
| has been considered progress up into my lifetime. All of
| these things have had lots of bad downstream consequences
| to the point that lots of places now spend huge sums to
| undo at least some of these developments. And come to think
| of it, wildfire management is another geoengineering effort
| that lots of very dry places totally screwed up (e.g.
| California, as discussed frequently on this very site) out
| of the very best intentions, but working with broken
| models.
|
| Plenty of times species have been introduced overseas to
| control other species, and it's always been a disaster, to
| the great surprise of everyone involved, time and again.
| Dams for hydro power are still considered ultra low
| ecological footprint power generation by lots of people,
| even though they form barriers that can completely disrupt
| river ecosystems to the point of leaving desolate
| wastelands in the riverbed downstream, disrupt riverside
| ecosystems downstream that depend on regular floods, allow
| for excessive water extraction and so on. Hunting predators
| to extinction is still widely popular, even though
| ecosystems without predators can't and don't function. I've
| had conversations with local people who're hellbent on
| exterminating the few remaining local beavers because they
| damage trees; but beavers are a keystone species, tons of
| species depend on beaver-created clearings.
|
| The list doesn't end: Dumping toxic waste into rivers has
| been considered harmless until toxins accumulated to levels
| extreme enough to severely hurt people, by which point some
| of the worst-polluted rivers had been pretty m much
| sterilized (e.g. the lower Rhine). It's hard do believe
| this today, but people did honestly think nature would take
| care of the gunk, filter it out or dilute it or whatever.
| We pumped lead into the environment by means of leaded
| gasoline, one of the craziest "accidental" geoengineering
| adventures to date, until whole forests started dying, and
| of course _some_ people saw that one coming, but then
| _some_ people saw the world end when the LHC went online,
| and good thing we didn 't listen to _those_ people. When I
| grew up, climate change was widely considered a crazy myth;
| some saw it coming early on, the majority had a good
| chuckle; yet that 's the biggest geohacking fuck-up in all
| our history, and it took us that long to realize the fact
| that climate change is _real_.
|
| Generally speaking, with experiments like this, the true
| consequences tend to not become visible until way down the
| line, at which point cleanup may be impossible (e.g.
| climate change, the current mass extinction) so we need to
| anticipate such things and get it right the first try. Yet
| we've historically both failed to build non-rubbish models
| and then to heed those few warnings we did get. Convenience
| and progress and growth seem to always trump the naysayers,
| and often that's just fine - the world didn't end when the
| LHC went online and we learned a lot about the fundamentals
| of physics. Good thing we didn't listen to _them_.
|
| But all this history leaves me personally highly
| pessimistic when it comes to more planet-scale climate
| hacking, given that we don't even understand the downstream
| consequences of our past and current climate hacking and
| given that our track record of getting this sort of thing
| right on the first (or any) try is so grotesquely bad.
|
| We're great at problem-solving short-term, everyday issues
| with near-immediate feedback loops, like by mass-producing
| crazy good tools; we're bad when things get big, abstract,
| long-term, with long-ish feedback cycles e.g. when building
| nuclear reactors that don't malfunction in major ways,
| because we start making bad compromises and take shortcuts
| even though we should and do know better, because we
| socially can't help doing this; and we're sad failures at
| anything extremely large-scale, extremely long-term,
| extremely long feedback cycle-ish, like climate change or -
| planet-scale climate engineering.
|
| Since we are bound to get pretty desperate and since
| climate hacking does offer an enticingly quick way out, I'm
| confident we'll try it at some point. When we do, I very
| much hope I'll find my pessimism proven wrong.
|
| Edit: fixed formatting
| kossTKR wrote:
| There's no profit incentive to geoengineer or clean up anything
| so nothing will get fixed - at least not if the future will be
| a continuation of how capitalism, industry and geopolitics have
| worked literally forever - probably also biological and even
| physical systems if we extrapolate.
|
| It's always boom then bust, everywhere in space and time.
|
| That said i still hope we'll manage in some obscure way because
| we have no other choice!
| paulbaumgart wrote:
| This is probably true at the level of corporations, but not
| clearly the case at the level of countries. An interesting
| paper on the economics of geoengineering, if you're curious:
| https://www.nber.org/papers/w18622
| nynx wrote:
| It's nice to submit to call of civilizational collapse every once
| in a while, but it's not a realistic view. Yes, climate change is
| going to affect billions of people, but from what I can tell,
| things are moving in the right direction and we're on track to
| avoid the worst even with barely any political action.
|
| If it was suddenly 2050 and none of our technology had improved,
| we'd be fucked. But it's not a useful perspective to assume that
| technological progression will stop. Solar panels have dropped in
| price by literal orders of magnitude. It seems like nuclear is
| coming back into vogue. Space-based power seems like it might be
| economically viable in a few decades, even.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > "Based on this I felt like some of the big winners in 2050
| will be Rust, Clojure and Go."
|
| I mean the guy may be delusional, but he's right on the climate
| part.
|
| Even if our tech improves and we cut carbon to zero in a
| fairytaleish fashion we're still up for a 3 deg temp increase
| till 2100 which will be rather catastrophic. Of course the
| developed world will be hit the least due to its location, so
| we'll likely be fine for the most part but it will be troubling
| time regardless. It all depends on cascading issues that we
| can't really predict, like warming causing some fish to go
| extinct that ate eggs of some insect that will now breed
| uncontrollably and push out useful pollinators from the
| ecosystem, leading to crop failure and such.
| nynx wrote:
| From the literature I've read, that doesn't seem right. If we
| cut all emissions to zero by 2050, total temperature rise
| would be more like 2C afaik.
| moffkalast wrote:
| I mean that's in the ballpark, few people agree on the
| exact numbers given that it depends on so many unknown
| factors. There's the oceans outgassing the CO2 they've
| absorbed so far, ice melting resulting in permanent greater
| sunlight absorption, clathrate gun, etc.
|
| The rule of thumb (iirc) is that 1C would be business as
| usual, 4C a Mad Max hell scape, and we'll likely end up
| somewhere in between. The closer to which side we'll be
| depends on how well we implement countermeasures... and how
| much luck we have.
| paulbaumgart wrote:
| Yep. For anyone curious to learn more, here's a good summary of
| this energy technology transition:
| https://www.tsungxu.com/clean-energy-transition-guide/
| krona wrote:
| The article seems to be using an _inaccurate_ visualisation of a
| model (RCP8.5) which is now 'no longer plausible'[0].
|
| RCP8.5 was considered the 'worst-case' scenario and projected 3.3
| to 5.7 in 2100, not 2050 as the graphic shows.
|
| [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-51281986
| nixlim wrote:
| Assuming all of the assumptions in that article come to pass, why
| ignore Elixir/Erlang as a viable option for language &
| infrastructure?
| joshgev wrote:
| I don't understand. In this article we are imaging widespread and
| frequent failure of critical infrastructure and we are supposed
| to further imagine that we're still interested in working on our
| relatively unimportant software? I suppose there are critical
| software systems out there, but they're already written so we
| don't really need to think about what languages they'll be work
| on with.
| verisimi wrote:
| If there is an apocalypse, it looks entirely contrived to me.
|
| Spending untold billions to shut down the economy for most of 2
| years is something I saw with my own eyes.
|
| Sea level rises, and whatever else, not at all. The dire
| predictions have been coming for decades (remember Al Gore)? And
| nothing.. I suspect its just a trick that means we hand over
| greater control and money to the worst of us (government). And if
| it were real, I have zero trust in any governance structure to do
| the right thing as opposed to serving itself and its
| 'stakeholders' (aka corporations).
| koshergweilo wrote:
| > dire predictions have been coming for decades (remember Al
| Gore)? And nothing.
|
| And I suppose you think that's it's just a coincidence that
| we're breaking all-time-high temperature records year over year
| isn't it?
| verisimi wrote:
| So we are told. If anything, the temperature seems cooler to
| me.
|
| But do you recollect the climategate scandal? Where
| historical temperature records were altered?
| nostrademons wrote:
| For me, the big story is going to be supply-chain breakup and de-
| globalization. The author touches on this a bit, but completely
| misses the implication.
|
| The programming languages that will best survive the apocalypse
| are the ones that can run on chips that best survive the
| apocalypse! I think that there're be a big turn toward highly-
| efficient compiled languages: Rust and Go are well-positioned for
| this, C will still be around, but languages like PHP and Ruby are
| very poorly suited for this. Anything that can be adapted to run
| on a microcontroller that you can scavenge from old cars that no
| longer can get gas will be in high demand.
|
| I also think we'll see a turn toward more local production of
| semiconductors, which may require moving back in process nodes
| toward older technology where the supply chain and manufacturing
| process isn't as complex.
|
| I don't think backwards-compatibility is as important as the
| author thinks it is. Enough other things are going to break in
| the economy that people will be willing to make due with software
| that gives them basic communication & computation abilities even
| if it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of modern software,
| particularly if modern software becomes completely unavailable
| due to infrastructure failures like cable lines coming down and
| there not being enough power to run datacenters.
|
| Final thoughts: I think distributed technologies like mesh
| networks, data synchronization algorithms, networking, (proof-of-
| stake/storage) blockchains, etc. will become significantly more
| important. I wouldn't count on the cloud surviving: it has a lot
| of physical infrastructure dependencies, and physical
| infrastructure is already crumbling. Software that you can run
| locally on a device and communicate over unreliable networks will
| become very important.
| alcover wrote:
| I fully agree with you. The writing's on the wall for wasteful
| computing, not just for the obvious SUVs, suburbia or mass-
| tourism.
|
| Energy cost rules everything. The current deluge of web media
| and JS-obese apps will one day turn to a careful trickle.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| I could not imagine running rustc on a Rust program, let alone
| building a 200-crate dependency graph or all of rustc, on a
| 2000s car entertainment system microcontroller.
| m3talsmith wrote:
| Exactly. Rust is actually a loser in this due to the lack of
| a fleshed out stdlib.
| capableweb wrote:
| What you are programming would change, just like what you're
| programming with would change. The projects who use
| 200-something crates are building desktop applications or
| something like that.
|
| What we'd program if we only have microcontrollers available,
| would be much smaller in scope, maybe a lot of focus on
| controlling physical infrastructure for agriculture and such.
| dvh wrote:
| One should first ask what is the actually useful task for
| computers. Right now it is often things like powering ad
| networks, tracking engagements, running tax code for millions,
| calculating sha 256 hashes. Would any of this be useful in
| apocalypse? If not what would be?
| nostrademons wrote:
| There's tons of stuff that would be useful in an apocalypse.
| Things like:
|
| 1.) Communications. Being able to send over plans for a
| useful tool, or instructions for repair, or a meeting place
| for the defense of a village becomes critical.
|
| 2.) Entertainment/education. _Threads_ shows the post-
| apocalyptic children watching a VHS video of animals &
| grammar. If you can preserve even just the PBS Kids catalog
| on local disk and have a working computer, you'll be in huge
| demand as the town's babysitter, and it's far easier to do
| this at scale with video than individually keep dozens of
| kids occupied.
|
| 3.) Local records. It's critical to catch freeriders for any
| communal endeavors, because if you don't, community breaks
| down and everybody just worries about their own family. Same
| goes for financial records: if you can restore some semblance
| of banking & credit you can operate much more efficient trade
| than if everything is spot barter.
|
| 4.) Knowledge repository. The community where _everybody_
| knows how to garden is going to be way better off than the
| one where two people know how to garden and everybody steals
| their food. Same with a variety of other skills - repairs,
| local resources, weapon manufacture, etc.
|
| 5.) Industrial control. If communities can get an electricity
| source back online, it opens up a wide variety of options for
| local manufacturing and automation. Labor is likely to be in
| very short supply after an apocalypse, so anything you can do
| to automate control will be a big help.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> with all of us agreeing that C, C#, PHP were likely to survive
| in 2050_
|
| I agree, but I'll bet some folks' left eyes started twitching,
| when they read that...
|
| https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/villains/images/6/68/Charl...
| sb057 wrote:
| Relevant: the history of Warajevo, a ZX Spectrum emulator
| developed amidst the Siege of Sarajevo:
|
| https://worldofspectrum.net/warajevo/Story.html
| grej wrote:
| >>> "On the bright side, the Asheville branch is just a five-
| minute drive from the beach now, so the all-hands meeting should
| be a lot more fun this year." <<<
|
| As an aside, seeing things like this in climate change articles
| always bothers me. FYI Asheville being minutes from the beach
| would imply a 650m+ (2000+ft) sea rise in the next 25 years.
|
| This kind of hyperbole makes it easy for people who deny climate
| change in totality to say it is based on absurd scenarios which
| will never happen. The real projections implications are
| significant enough. Why do people feel the need to resort to pure
| fiction?
| dixego wrote:
| Fiction is a tool used by humans to elicit, experience and
| process feelings under (mostly) safe circumstances. The details
| (such as how much the sea level would have to rise for this to
| be accurate) are not quite relevant; the point is to make the
| reader think about how they would feel if this sort of concern
| _was_ just a commonplace consideration in their daily life. Is
| it not shocking? Uncomfortable? Sorta nihilism-inducing?
|
| In summary: doesn't it make you want to _act_ towards
| preventing this from ever being close to happening?
| cmdli wrote:
| It only makes you want to act in the short term. In the long
| term, it either promotes denial (from those who think that
| its all hyperbole) or doomerism (from those who think that
| none of it is hyperbole). Hyperbole does not promote hope,
| which is the primary motivating factor to solving problems
| like this.
| switchbak wrote:
| I agree with the person above, too much hyperbole makes it
| easy to dismiss an argument.
|
| We're already struggling against a mountain of industry
| funded FUD, the last thing we need is people stretching the
| truth in well meaning yet counterproductive ways.
| 5d8767c68926 wrote:
| NeutralForest wrote:
| I feel like this is impossible to mention the end of times(tm)
| without reading a bit about {100
| rabbits}(https://100r.co/site/home.html) and their journey on a
| boat with small ecological impact in mind. A closely related read
| is of course {CollapseOS}(http://collapseos.org/), the OS written
| in Forth.
| ajuc wrote:
| I doubt global warming will negatively affect amount of time
| spent on open source/programming language design.
|
| Currently we're wasting a lot of time on social media, Netflix,
| games, etc. There's lots of fat to cut. Also historically bad
| conditions were when people wrote books and focused on studies.
| If OS is important - it will develop.
|
| On the other hand x as a service and cloud based stuff will
| likely die off. Good riddance.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| Economical collapse will affect how much free time people can
| donate to open source. Paying open source (like Linux kernel)
| will not be more impacted that closed source but the rest yes
| LoveGracePeace wrote:
| The word Apocalypse only appears once on that page, in the title.
| The page is pointless either way since the Apocolypse isn't here
| yet. People will know when it's here and there will still be a
| subset of people who will deny it. Like that cartoon of the dog
| casually sitting at the table while the house burns down around
| him, saying "This is fine.".
| black_puppydog wrote:
| So... anyone else having doubts that with all the apocalyptic
| things going on around the world people will keep their appetite
| for mindless distraction _and_ will still be able /willing to
| one-click buy random stuff on a whim? When they might have to
| expect waiting weeks for the delivery, and/or pay humongous
| transport fees?
|
| Asking because that seems to be what much of modern IT is angling
| for and why there's so much money in it.
| warning26 wrote:
| _> else having doubts that with all the apocalyptic things
| going on around the world people will keep their appetite for
| mindless distraction and will still be able /willing to one-
| click buy random stuff on a whim_
|
| Wouldn't people in the described apocalyptic scenario _want_
| mindless distraction? Anything to keep their minds off the,
| well, apocalyptic things going on.
| k0k0r0 wrote:
| That's true until people are suddenly hungry odr thirsty.
| Hunger or thrist will force them to act. And not necesserily
| nicely.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Exactly, mindless distraction is only an option when you
| are comfortable. Try not eating for a day + turning off
| your heating/cooling and see how interesting Twitter is
| then.
| m3talsmith wrote:
| Mindless distraction is exactly what you turn to when
| your efforts to better your life become too monumental to
| bear: lifespans shorten because destitution drives people
| to apathy or an open desire for suicide.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Sounds like we're talking about two different things.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| I can't even go and browse message boards as a distraction
| any more, sigh.
| jpindar wrote:
| Both movies and cheap novels have historicaly been popular
| during wartime.
| [deleted]
| maxerickson wrote:
| Energy is on track to stay the same price or get cheaper as it
| gets cleaner.
|
| The big question isn't really whether we clean it up, it's the
| timetable.
|
| Cost and availability of energy is a great proxy for transport
| cost.
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