I keep wondering: If someone had managed to conquer or unify all of earth under a single empowered government before 1950, would we have been able to enact a universal carbon quota and averted civilizational collapse or worse?
I don’t see how we can do this divided. It’s hard enough to do it united on a planetary scale…
Our only hope, barring a technological miracle, is maybe deflecting enough sunlight to make up for the greenhouse gases…on average. I assume mass emissions of shiny particulates in the upper atmosphere, Pinatubo volcano-style is going to be the way we try it.
Scrubbers have always sounded like a very long shot to me.
We have nature’s scrubbers to compete with. All chlorophyll-using organisms that capture CO2 to make biomass. Grass, trees, algae, plankton, etc.
They have evolved over many, many millions of years to be as efficient as possible. Are we really going to be able to produce something that is significantly better? Enough to save us?
If international collaboration isn’t achieved in addressing the sixth mass extinction, scarce resources such as freshwater, arable land, and critical raw materials may spark “Green Wars” in the near future. Without proactive diplomacy and sustainable policies, societies risk descending into a future defined by resource-driven conflicts and humanitarian crises. Scrub, or be scrubbed.
Sure. I mean we can produce more power than an electric eel. We can get plenty of power from solar panels, more than chlorophyll. Birds have been flying for 100 million years but we can go supersonic and to the moon.
I can see solar powered scrubbers cleaning co2 all day long in sunny areas.
Humanity emits ~40 gigatonnes of CO2 per year. Right now were running very close to 1/2000th of the atmosphere being CO2.
If we had machinery that could remove 100% of the CO2 from a parcel of air fed into it, that machine would need to process 20 teratonnes of air per year to scrub out that year’s current production. And would need to process even more than that to make progress against the CO2 we’ve already pumped into the air that we now wish was not there.
That’s a very, very big machine or a vast, as in millions, collection of smaller machines. Gonna cost huge amounts of money that only taxpayers can provide since there’s no profit in it.
Maybe some sort of genetically-engineered super-algae, which absorbs CO2 ten times as fast? Sure, there will be plenty of hilarious unintentional consequences when the oceans get clogged up with the stuff, but at least it’ll be good for the atmosphere.
@drdeth I am not convinced by those examples. The metric is not necessarily going to be something like how fast a plane flies but how efficiently it does so, and if you measure it as kg per mile instead of raw speed, birds are at least an order of magnitude more efficient than even the largest, most efficient planes we have.
Insects are at least a couple of orders of magnitude better than any micro-drones we have today.
Another less fancy example are humanoid robots. We’ve imagined them for 75+ years, we’ve been trying to make them for 50+ years and the state of the art we have today is trash compared to muscles, bones and joints. It is Way less efficient than humans, cannot self-heal, etc.
It gets bleaker. For half of my life, computer chips kept getting faster at an exponential pace. Transistors kept shrinking at an exponential pace. Moore’s law was a thing. Every 12, then 18 months you got a new product that gave u double the power for the same cost, cutting costs in half for all existing tech at the same time.
But now, not only is getting double the power a year later, or even two years later, not possible at all. We are not even close. It now takes us over 7 years or so to get there and slowing down.
It is very hard to understate how bad that is. There is a reason the latest nVidia GPU costs $2000 officially instead of $500 like it used to. There is a reason it unofficially resells for $5000. Limited production capacity. Expensive manufacturing. Dead Moore law.
We hit the silicon brick wall a while back, a few companies broke it, then only a couple broke the concrete wall, and now we’re bashing our heads against the granite wall with only Taiwan’s TSMC still in the race and mightily struggling.
So there goes our biggest tool: The exponential improvement of our artificial brains.
Yes we can still make some progress with better designed human algorithms and increasing production but those are very much linear improvements as we cannot manufacture software geniuses and chip fabs are incredibly expensive.
Still, we have more educated human brains than ever before, more scientists and engineers than ever before, probably twice as many as we did 50 years ago. And the raw compute available to them is more than ever before, even if it is growing slowly.
20 teratonnes per year. And to build those scrubbers, more emissions would have to be made, making the job bigger and harder, as if it weren’t impossible enough already.
Perhaps we could bury them at sea and create artificial islands to reclaim some of the lost land area. A shallow sea like the North Sea, Baltic or parts of the Mediterranean could hold a lot of artificial land area. Eventually the submerged biomass would oxidise back into carbon dioxide, or preferably be converted into peat and eventually become part of the crust.
People who think technological breakthroughs are going to save the planet are as deluded as those who think prayer will. Maybe even more so, because prayer can change your heart towards charity, clarity, and sacrificing for others, and nerdy ideas are just boys playing with cool toys while the house burns down.
There are actions that will save us, but they are not technological in nature, and they involve sacrifice and pain, something that no one will volunteer to do unless everyone else is doing it, for a great cause. That is exactly and precisely why we are doomed.
Because we’ve sinned, and deserve to suffer? Is this some sort of Catholic thing?
Be honest with me: how disappointed would you be if we figure out a solution that doesn’t involve sacrifice and pain, and humanity isn’t punished for what it’s done?
Honestly? It has nothing whatsoever to do with what you imagine. It has to do with my lifetime of watching human beings destroy everything they touch. It has to do with seeing how every technological “advance” also destroys something beautiful and irreplaceable.
My horrible gift is the ability to see what others do not want to. I’ve had it all my life, and have gradually learned that no one wants to know, no one wants to see, and no one wants to change, if it means giving up anything they have now or desire for the future. Not even if it means that the the only option left will be surviving in a hellscape of our own making, with no escape. In fact people don’t want to even give up a fucking opinion, much less hamburgers.
Technology won’t save us, if hearts do not change. It’s a modern fantasy. As the saying goes, 'stupidity got us into this mess, why can’t it get us out?" Just substitute the word technology.
“every” technological advance? Surely vaccines did not destroy something beautiful and irreplaceable? Let’s assume you meant “most”.
That is how I feel these days. I always thought I was “normal” but now I keep thinking of myself as a bird of ill omen. I keep pointing things out in conversations; mainly about declining birthrate and global warming / ocean acidification / tipping points / carbon debt.
Like the other day I was telling a baby clothes shop owner that the birthrate in her country is already only 1.9 and declining. Did she really want me to tell her that her store is doomed in the future? No, no she did not. But that’s what came to my mind.
That’s a great quote. Very accurate, sadly.
No need to substitute the word technology. The word “stupidity” is the correct one here.
Scapegoating instead of confronting our problems is peak human foolishness.
It would be many smaller machines. It will not be, nor can it ever be, getting all the nations of the world to cut back.
Right. People in rich nations could accept a modest tax increase for cleaner air, like they do now. People are not gonna accept not burning wood or any fossil fuels.
You know what those seemingly unmitigated health advances did? They covered the world with human beings. We exploded in numbers like lemmings, eating and burning everything we could find. The reason we are facing the Great Anthropocene Extinction is almost entirely because there are so many of us. About 7 billion more than the earth could possible sustain for long, at our rates of consumption of resources. That happened because of technology, more than anything else. Infant mortality has plummeted, and each new person, cherished in itself, becomes part of the locust swarm.
That’s the big picture that technology geeks won’t see, because they are enraptured by dreams of machines. Doesn’t make it go away.
Technology without any willingness to make a choice based how much environmental, cultural, or spiritual harm it is likely to cause, is stupidity magnified to monstrousness.
You and I are a cherished part of that locust swarm, so we are not going to root for never having been born, or blame our parents for having us, are we? It wouldn’t make any sense.
Agreed. We should still blame humans, and not technology. Crows and monkeys use technology just fine without destroying the planet. Humans have used technology just fine without destroying the planet for 99.9999% of their existence.